• colonial@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Off the top of my head, for those that are curious:

    • The show depicts radiation as similar to a contagion. In real life, once you strip and wash someone exposed to radioactive contaminants, they pose no danger to others.
    • The reactor was never in danger of turning into a nuke or rendering huge swathes of Europe uninhabitable. Nuclear explosions only happen under tightly engineered conditions. A big pile of molten reactor slag, while certainly dangerous, can’t turn into a bomb.

    However, the utter incompetence of the USSR is very accurate.

    • trafficnab@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      The reactor was never in danger of turning into a nuke or rendering huge swathes of Europe uninhabitable. Nuclear explosions only happen under tightly engineered conditions. A big pile of molten reactor slag, while certainly dangerous, can’t turn into a bomb.

      The danger wasn’t that it would cause a nuclear explosion, it was that it would melt its way into a large reservoir of water underneath the reactor, instantly turning it all into steam, causing a massive explosion that would fling radioactive material over a much wider area

      I don’t know if there was a risk of that happening in reality, but that’s how it was portrayed and explained in the show