I think you genuinely believe that. Which is a sad indictment of the TV industry, and an excellent reason why you shouldn't try to use TV shows to learn facts.
Where to start?
Let's take your example: There was never any risk of a second steam explosion doing any further damage; Any such event would have been minuscule in comparison to the major steam explosion that destroyed the reactor, and would have just tossed rubble around. No containment still existed that could have allowed sufficient over pressure for a steam explosion.
That's far from the only major factual error, but it is more than enough on its own to eliminate any claims of being a documentary.
Clearly you didn't.
That's see if I got this straight.
In reality, the authorities led by a top nuclear scientist were worried about another steam explosion and therefore sent men on a dangerous mission.
In the dramatization, the authorities led by a top nuclear scientist were worried about another steam explosion and therefore sent men on a dangerous mission.
And you use this as evidence of the sad state of TV. Is that about right?
I don't know whether we should accept Professor Bilby's verdict on the possible explosion as better than that of the Chernobyl authorities or Wikipedia editors, but this seems irrelevant to the sub-debate.
There are two separate questions here. "Was there fear of a further steam explosion?" (quite possibly, though it wasn't justified fear). And "would such an explosion have made the disaster worse?", which was the question under consideration before we went off pointlessly chasing the other question.
Even if we accept ad argumentum that a second steam explosion was a certainty had no action been taken to prevent it, how would that have made things worse?
The brave people who fought the fires and undertook the deadly work of trying to deal with the disaster largely failed. By the time the fire was contained and the remains of the reactor were sealed away in the 'sarcophagus', most of the radioactive material from the reactor had been spread widely across the environment. Adding a bit more would have made little or no difference to the people affected.
My original point remains unchallenged (despite the goalpost shifting ITT); There's no way that the Chernobyl disaster could have been significantly worse than it was. 31 people died in the immediate term, and another 19 died due to medium to long term effects unequivocally linked to the disaster. Had the authorities simply evacuated a large area and waited until the whole thing burned itself out, the total number of fatalities would likely have been significantly lower. Certainly there's no way they could have been an order of magnitude higher.
Of course, such a strategy would have been unthinkable, for the harm it would have done to the already badly battered image of the USSR.
But the big lesson of Chernobyl is that a worst case, zero containment, explosive destruction of a nuclear reactor at the point in its fuel cycle where radioactive fission products are at their highest level, and those are then spread by an intense fire across a wide area, kills about fifty people and makes perhaps another five hundred sufficiently unwell as to require medical treatment. An area up to about a 100km radius becomes sufficently contaminated as to be unwise to live in for about three decades, although people living there don't suffer measurable health impacts. After that time, radiation levels are below the highest natural background radiation levels at which people habitually live, and only a small number of hotspots require to be isolated or cleaned up.
In short, nuclear accidents of the worst possible kind are medium sized industrial accidents, of the scale that we have tolerated on a once or twice a decade basis since the 1850s; And their main point of difference from other industrial accidents is that they are both less common, and (at worst) less damaging.
Before Chernobyl, nobody knew what the worst case would look like, and imaginations ran wild. Anti-nuclear campaigners said things like "sure, there might only be one accident in ten thousand reactor years of operation, but that accident could render half the planet uninhabitable for thousands of years, and could kill millions!" But we now know that fatal accidents occur once in more than 20,000 reactor years, and render a small area unusable for a few decades, having killed fewer than 100 people.
That's a lower risk level than any other way of making electricity; And lower than any other industrial activity.
If nuclear power is too dangerous to use, then electricity is too dangerous to use, and industry is too dangerous to engage in.
Just in the 1980s, the Bhopal disaster in 1984 killed seventy five times as many people as Chernobyl, and contaminated a wider area. The Piper Alpha disaster in 1988 was at the time the most expensive industrial disaster in history. Chernobyl wasn't particularly worthy of more attention than either (then or now), and only gets more attention because nuclear disasters are so abnormal (in much the same way that airliner crashes get more attention than car crashes).
I confirmed the relevant facts with Wikipedia and/or the sources it cites.
