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Story from TV ShowsADVERTISEMENTThe Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Was Devastating — & It Could've Been So Much WorseElena NicolaouMay 6, 2019, 7:50 PM Photo: Courtesy of HBO.On the surface, the expansive HBO mini-series Chernobyl, premiering May 6, does exactly what the title indicates: Unspool the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant over the course of five nail-biting episodes.But creator Craig Mazin thinks Chernobyl also tells an urgent story about the idea of truth. After the Chernobyl plant went into meltdown, the Soviet government covered up the extent of the disaster and later, its cause.“You can pretend that the truth is malleable. But the truth doesn't care. The truth will do what it does,” Mazin told Refinery29. “The nuclear reactor in Chernobyl didn’t care that the Soviets insisted it was flawless. It just did what it did. I want people to come to grips to that. We have to learn how to think critically and allow ourselves to change our minds to incorporate the truth.”AdvertisementADVERTISEMENTFor Mazin, this concept applies as much to the Chernobyl incident as it does to today’s pressing issues, like politics and climate change.So, what is the truth of what happened in Chernobyl? Most of us can probably recite the event in broad strokes: It was the worst nuclear disaster in history, and it affected much of Europe. Chernobyl the show illuminates just how devastating the event really was — and how much worse it could’ve been, were it not for the efforts of scientists and Soviet citizens who risked their lives in the clean-up.Let’s go over the details.What happened at Chernobyl? Long story short: A bungled safety test performed during the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 caused reactor number four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant to overheat, blow off the reactor's 1,000-ton steel top, and generate an explosion the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs.What resulted was the worst nuclear disaster in history. Pripyat, Ukraine, where the plant was located, is now one of the most contaminated place on the planet, and will likely be unfit for human life for at least 3,000 years.But it’s a longer story than that, and the Chernobyl unspools said story in granular detail.How much nuclear engineering do you need to know to watch Chernobyl? There is a lot of frantic talk about “graphite” and “hot fuel particles” and “power surfaces” in the show. The scientists in the show explain everything adequately. The takeaway, essentially, is that the accident poses both immediate and existential threats.AdvertisementADVERTISEMENTWhat actually caused the accident at Chernobyl?Ah, the question that drives all of Valery Lagosov (Jared Harris), Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), and Ulana Khomyuk's (Emily Watson) efforts in Chernobyl. They know how the accident happened – but they don’t know why.In reality, it would take years before the truth about the accident’s cause emerged. The disaster was made worse by a design flaw, of which officials in Moscow were long aware. So, the plant's operators that began the disastrous sequence weren’t entirely to blame. Still, six of Chernobyl's officials were sentenced to 10 years in labor camps. Photo: Courtesy of HBO.According to the World Nuclear Association, the accident was also the “direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture.”What was the human cost of the disaster? The 1986 accident's effects were felt for years. But first-responders, like firefighters and workers at the plant, felt the effects of Chernobyl first. In the direct aftermath of the explosion, two people died at the scene, 29 workers and firefighters died of Acute Radiation Exposure (ARS), and four more people died in a helicopter disaster.Many more people were exposed to radiation when Chernobyl's cloud of radioactive waste spread throughout Belarus, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation and well into Europe, stretching as far as Britain. Yet it took three days for the Soviet Union to even admit that any accident had occurred.In the ensuing years, thousands of children in the region developed thyroid cancer (with highly effective treatment). After the explosion, about 600,000 citizens called "liquidators" were shipped in to help with the fire-fighting and clean-up operations, and were also exposed t...