The writer explains the accents in the podcast. He talks about how they tried our Russian accents, but it became more comical and harder to actually focus on the seriousness/impact of the actual story, so they just had the actors use their natural accents.
Chernobyl
- Thread starter shagcarpetjesus
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The writer explains the accents in the podcast. He talks about how they tried our Russian accents, but it became more comical and harder to actually focus on the seriousness/impact of the actual story, so they just had the actors use their natural accents.
For the record, the show's implied number of deaths are exaggerated. Depending on your sources (this did happen in the USSR, after all) the number of immediate deaths is 31 to 54. To put this in context, the Bhopal chemical plant explosion's immediate death toll is 2,259.
Long term, the number varies widely because it's difficult to separate the impacts of the accident from other factors, especially in the region during the same time frame (dissolution of the USSR, the 90s economic crisis in the same region, the let's say lax attitude towards occupational safety, etc.)
This isn't to say I'm not enjoying the show; my wife is tired of me telling the nuclear physicists why their reactor exploded. The RBMK has some rather...unique reactivity properties, and they'd put themselves in a really strange position with regards to poison isotopes. I'm really curious how far down that rabbit hole the show is going to go, the reasons why the accident happened are pretty technical.
Long term, the number varies widely because it's difficult to separate the impacts of the accident from other factors, especially in the region during the same time frame (dissolution of the USSR, the 90s economic crisis in the same region, the let's say lax attitude towards occupational safety, etc.)
This isn't to say I'm not enjoying the show; my wife is tired of me telling the nuclear physicists why their reactor exploded. The RBMK has some rather...unique reactivity properties, and they'd put themselves in a really strange position with regards to poison isotopes. I'm really curious how far down that rabbit hole the show is going to go, the reasons why the accident happened are pretty technical.
From what they said originally they were testing to see what would happen if they shut down the cooling part and bring it back online. Except they let it get away from them and could not get it cooled back down. Which, I don't know much about nuclear plants. I do know that if you don't keep the water cool it will melt down. So I am not sure how anyone though it would be a good idea to shut it down without backups in place.
That was a little sarcasm.
I did some theater in college and we had discussions about this. When it is supposed to be a person speaking in their native tongue but the dialogue is in English (essentially translated for the audience), it is a convention (admittedly not always followed) to use no accent. But when it is a character who is speaking English as a second language, then an accent is appropriate.
Again, this convention is not always followed.
Always a call they need to make. Fake accents that mess up the acting or just go with the actors "acting" accent. I say "acting" accent to differentiate between some Brit actors real casual voices and their acting vocals...hearing some of them chatting on talk shows can be a little eye opening.
The post makes me think of two movies (1) Hunt for Red October that opened with Connery speaking Russian for one scene. Was at the movie with an ex and she had a a degree in Russian language and literature. Still remember her comment on how awful his Russian was! (2) Joyeux Noel where the WWI soldiers all speak their native language (English, French, German) and it's subtitles.
Another movie where dialects were notable was the Robin Hood movie with Kevin Costner. He was so bad they decided to abandon any English dialect altogether for him.
I am continually impressed on how the opposite is true for Brit and Aussie actors doing "American".
So you're right, (most) reactors require coolant to be actively injected after shutdown to deal with residual heat in the reactor plus the decay heat of various fission daughter products. To cope with this, most plants are simply hooked into the electrical grid and use that to drive pumps to keep water moving through the reactor. In case there's a coincident reactor shutdown and loss of the electrical grid, plants have two redundant backup generators that can run the pumps (plus a few other key systems) for 24 hours (in the US at least), plus an 8-hour battery backup in case both generators fail to start.
Decay heat is highest right after shutdown, it falls off in an exponential fashion such that the danger of meltdown passes after a certain amount of time (hard to say exactly what that is, depends on how spent the fuel is, what the cladding materials are, etc.). Residual heat is also highest right after shutdown (residual heat is the result of the reactor operating at rated power, the materials in the core are at a higher temperature when making power than they are otherwise).
The experiment at Chernobyl was an attempt to use the decay and residual heats to keep making steam after shutdown, presumably to see how long they could keep their coolant injection pumps running in case of a loss of the electrical grid and their backup generators failing to start. It's not a bad idea. Had it worked, it would've given the facility a fair amount of additional flexibility post-shutdown.
Due to some circumstances beyond their control, the facility operators had their reactor in a difficult reactivity condition (I can explain this too, if people are curious) that, when combined some of the unfortunate reactivity features of that particular reactor type, caused the excursion that destroyed the reactor. They'd also disabled some safety systems as well, which was a poor decision, to say the least.
I understand what you are saying but I find those numbers (31 to 54) to be very misleading. To say that radiation wasn't a major cause of numerous other deaths is very disingenuous to those who died from it. And quite frankly just propaganda.
Yeah, I was shocked to learn after watching Band of Brothers and Life that Damian Lewis is a Brit.
EDIT: Damian Lewis on getting down the New York accent.
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That's why I talked about the long term being difficult to asses. That number varies anywhere from about 4,000 to over 100,000, depending on who you want to believe.
I think in terms of the exaggerated deaths - my guess is that the characters in the show will also learn that their estimates are too high. That's one of the good aspects of the show - even the "hero" can be wrong because this has never happened before and they are kind of making things up as they go. Legasov says thousands will die during the cleanup, but he doesn't really know he's just giving his best estimate. In reality at least so far as we know there were relatively few people who died in the near term after the liquidation although I'm sure there were a lot who died later because of the radiation exposure.
This might get a little long.
So the whole jist of how fission works is that a uranium atom absorbs a neutron which causes it to split into two big pieces, plus an additional number of neutrons, plus energy. The chain reaction that makes using this for power possible involves one of those produced neutrons going on to be absorbed by another uranium atom, which then fissions, and so on.
The two big pieces that the uranium split into can be a bunch of different isotopes of different chemical elements (an interesting thing about this is that the distribution of isotopes produced is generally bimodal; uranium doesn't split evenly in half, it generally makes one "big" isotope, and one "small" isotope). One of the isotopes produced is a particular isotope of xenon that *really* likes absorbing neutrons, which in the jargon is called a neutron poison (you're taking neutrons away from chain reaction).
This poisoning effect goes away in one of two ways. First, this xenon isotope is unstable, so it decays away (it has a half life of about 4 hours). Second, when a uranium fissions it doesn't just give off a single neutron, it gives an average of a little more than two (since there's a bunch of different possible fission fragments, the number of neutrons given off varies depending on which way the uranium breaks). Most of the time, one of these surplus neutrons gets absorbed by the xenon isotope as it's created, transforming it to a different isotope with a much smaller affinity for neutrons (this is called "burning off" the xenon).
Among other things, the Chernobyl reactor had been holding at a relatively low power level for an extended amount of time (they'd actually rescheduled the test to the back shift when demand for power by the grid is much lower), which allowed fission to happen, but didn't allow enough of it to happen to "burn off" the building-up xenon. Presumably, they'd been moving control rods (which act as a really heavy neutron poison) to make up for the loss of reactivity caused by increasing xenon concentrations.
The number of deaths is still contentious but even under the most horrific guesses they can only find a few thousand deaths tied to the aftermath via thyroid cancers. But the ground is still hot as is the ecosystem so this might just take a few generations to be able to quantify.
Yeah let's listen to the "theater guy" about a nuclear disaster...
I'M PLAYING!!!!!!!!!
My tangent - I was an Air Force intel guy flying out of Eielson AFB (near Fairbanks) with targets on the Kamchatka and Kola penninsulas (RC-135s and I was a back-ender which is just funny by itself)... I didn't fly this particular mission but one of our Kola flights came back and was told to taxi to the furthest reaches of the base where it was met by haz mat guys and water trucks. We had potentially flown through the plume (although I don't recall if there was anything detected) and they wanted to de-tox the plane. Which is a great idea since those missions were over 24 hours and the residual fart particles would make your face peel.
I also knew the person who did the original collection of the Korean 007 shoot-down over the Kamchatka made infamous by "the target is destroyed" blurb.
I ALSO saw Debra Winger riding a SeaTac tram in a VERY disheveled way. Thinky drinky at the very least. Sadly that last item is probably the most interesting thing about me.
I also knew the person who did the original collection of the Korean 007 shoot-down over the Kamchatka made infamous by "the target is destroyed" blurb.
I ALSO saw Debra Winger riding a SeaTac tram in a VERY disheveled way. Thinky drinky at the very least. Sadly that last item is probably the most interesting thing about me.
