by Michele M. Mason and Hester Baer
I think that what I forget and have to remind myself all the time is, the word “Chernobyl” means a million things to us all in an instant. But right before it blew up, it meant nothing. That nuclear reactor, and, in fact, no nuclear reactor had ever been thought to be capable of exploding. And, so I try to integrate that into my understanding of the denial.
-Craig Mazin
Envisioning nuclear fallout in HBO’s “Chernobyl”
The HBO series Chernobyl offers a stunning visual representation of a tragedy whose dangers are largely invisible to the eye. There is much to praise about this ambitious project. Created, written, and produced by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renek, Chernobyl provides numerous superbly shot and arresting scenes that leave viewers with indelible memories. Heightening our sense of the danger of nuclear fallout is the tranquil and hypnotic night scene of fascinated spectators on a bridge gazing at the inferno while ashes swirl in the wind and particles are caught in the lights. Underscoring the scale and futility of the situation is the closeup of a tiny bottle of iodine left next to the enormous typewriter of the secretary of an uncooperative and petty bureaucrat. Highlighting the complicated power relations is the amusing yet heavy depiction of the fierce miners slapping their filthy hands on the birds-egg blue suit of a soviet apparatchik. Forcing us to simultaneously process grief and the uncanniness of the tragedy is the pathos-laden shot of cement slowly engulfing the lead coffins of liquidators in a deep pit while a wife weeps, holding her husband’s finest pair of shoes. Additionally, the sites, buildings, décor, and costuming are meticulously researched and dutifully yet delicately portrayed without fetishizing the Soviet heritage narrative. As a whole, the mini-series is a powerful portrayal of the personal and environmental costs of humanity’s preposterous gamble on nuclear power.
Miners confirming their agreement to volunteer at Chernobyl
Chernobyl highlights the role of the authoritarian structure of the Soviet Union in perpetuating a system of finely-crafted fictions. The storyline focuses on Valery Legasov, the scientist who was appointed chief investigator of the disaster. Opening with Legasov taping his reflections on the dangers of distorting the truth two years after the catastrophe, he ponders: “What’s the cost of lies? It’s not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then?” Later that day, he hangs himself.
The Chernobyl Podcast—wherein Peter Segal (host of NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!) interviews Mazin—reinforces this key thread. In the first episode, Mazin emphasizes the power of stories, noting their double-edged nature: “stories are sometimes very good ways of conveying interesting truths and facts but just as simply stories can be weaponized to teach us and tell us anything.”
Poster for HBO’s “Chernobyl”
This is a worthy topic that reverberates strongly with today’s political situation. Still, there is another adjoining issue that Chernobyl inadvertently underscores, one that functions much like dangerous atomic isotopes—ever present yet challenging to perceive: namely, the failure of human imagination. This failure is exemplified in the first episode of Chernobyl, titled “1:23:45,” the precise time of the explosion that caused the meltdown. When a panic-stricken worker reports that an explosion has taken place in the reactor’s core, the supervising engineer, Anatoly Dyatlov, immediately dismisses his claim. “It can’t blow up,” he shouts. Dyatlov, and many others in the plant, cannot conceive such an outcome precisely because no one has attempted to imagine this possibility. After checking the Geiger counters, Dyatlov assumes they are faulty. He and other scientists in charge know that the small hand-held units immediately available to them have quite limited detection thresholds. And still, they cannot allow themselves to imagine—even entertain the possibility— that these devices are not remotely capable of capturing the full horror of their reality, since the level of radioactivity caused by the meltdown actually exceeded the scale they were designed to measure.
In conducting his research, Mazin was particularly confounded by “a series of borderline inexplicable decisions,” which he attributes to denial. This deeply human inclination is deftly depicted in Chernobyl. In the podcast, Segal lays out the conundrum of one character who is ordered to go and look down into the reactor: “…there does seem to be this aspect of these guys saying the reason we can’t believe the worst happened is because if the worst happened, we’re all dead now. And so that seems to be just a human thing. I’m not going to believe that I am already dead.”
Given this clarity of understanding, Mazin’s naïve speculation about how the U.S. might have reacted if Three Mile Island had been as severe as Chernobyl and his insistence that the series is not meant to address nuclear energy more broadly is surprising. The hurdle to having a sober discussion about nuclear power is not something restricted to a scientifically less sophisticated era or to the Soviet Union. Mazin’s prefatory remarks to the bonus podcast episode explicitly report on the recent Nyonoska nuclear explosion in Russia (August 8, 2019). To this he appeals that “people finally demand that their governments tell them the truth.” And he is right.
For as often as the refrains “unimaginable,” “inconceivable,” or “unthinkable” are applied to Chernobyl, and more recently Fukushima, these catastrophic disasters are infinitely imaginable.
However, power plant administrators and the regulatory industry are not motivated (for financial reasons, among others) to imagine the truth of nuclear disasters–as the failure of the Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Plant’s “state-of-the-art” computer simulations to anticipate the confluence of events causing the meltdown underscores [1]. And here we can apply Eric Schlosser’s conclusion to his superbly documented book Command and Control: “The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible” [2]. This is a gamble we cannot take with nuclear power.
Explosion at Fukushima Dai’ichi in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami
Notably, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and artists have produced aptly disturbing and moving works that help us envision the many unsettling truths about nuclear issues. Chernobyl’s powerful portrayal of human hubris and tragedy builds on a long history of inventive artistic visions. Early on Walter M. Miller’s Hugo-Award-winnng “Canticle for Leibowitz” (1959) offered a sweeping chronicle spanning 1,000 years after a nuclear holocaust and, in the height of nuclear anxiety, Russell Hoban conceived a new language (a “dialect” of English) for his characters who struggle to make sense of their post-apocalyptic world in Riddley Walker (1983). Tawada Yōko’s Emissary (2014), a superb work of speculative fiction, devises a storyline wherein Japan’s elderly are plagued with the curse of immortality while youngsters are destined to die early from a whole spectrum of contamination-related and congenital abnormalities. Each of these works, and many more, with their provocative and playful narratives, calls on us to be nimble in our thinking and to imagine the very real plausibility of catastrophe so that we can envision other possibilities.
[1] David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman, Susan Q. Stranahan, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, editors, Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster, The New Press, 2014, 263.
[2] Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Penguin, 2013, 461.