Last thing watched on netflix / Amazon..................

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MITHC reminds me of the Americans, very slow story line but also if you miss something you are totally lost in what's going on. It took me getting to the end of Season 1 to get interested in it.

 
hopefully the last season of TWD will be out soon on Netflix, cause then I am going to cancel again, there just really isn't much on it these days..

 
Also forgot the last season of OITNB.  I started watching the first couple episodes and kinda forgot about it.  I'll finish it up since I've watched it up to now, but so far...meh.

 
That whole show ran out of steam after the 2nd season IMO.. I may just watch the last one to see how they close it down..

 
I really liked Season 2 of Mindhunter, until the last episode.  I know its based on a true story, but a season's worth of build-up for nothing, ugh.

 
Finally watching Chernobyl - paying for it on Prime (I don't want an HBO subscription).  3 episodes in and it is very strong. The visual effects guys did an amazing job. The whole thing looks real as hell.  Scary as hell, too. The end of episode 2 was quite frightening.  Looking forward to the close-out. 

I'm not a nuke like @Supe or @RBHeadge PE, but I did flag some suspicious numbers (3 to 4 megaton thermal blast????) and was happy to go back and read your earlier posts correcting this to the kiloton range. 

Was the figure Legasov quoted of radiation being released by the fire correct?  (something like 20 Hiroshimas per day?)

 
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Finally watching Chernobyl - paying for it on Prime (I don't want an HBO subscription).  3 episodes in and it is very strong. The visual effects guys did an amazing job. The whole thing looks real as hell.  Scary as hell, too. The end of episode 2 was quite frightening.  Looking forward to the close-out. 

I'm not a nuke like @Supe or @RBHeadge PE, but I did flag some suspicious numbers (3 to 4 megaton thermal blast????) and was happy to go back and read your earlier posts correcting this to the kiloton range. 

Was the figure Legasov quoted of radiation being released by the fire correct?  (something like 20 Hiroshimas per day?)
The bolded part is why I refuse to watch the show.  I've seen several documentaries on the Chernobyl disaster and I've watched some reviews of the HBO show from some pretty smart, science-types.  Between the two, I believe it impossible for a nuclear meltdown at a power plant to cause a thermo-nuclear blast.  The percentage of U235 is too low in power-grade fuel to produce the fast chain reaction necessary to form a nuclear explosion.  The only risks from power plant meltdowns is fallout, direct exposure during cleanup, and ground contamination.  There are often explosions during meltdown, but they are caused by ignition of hydrogen accumulated in the reactor vessel.  Those types of explosions usually don't even make it to the kiloton level of damage, but it can release more fallout and expand the area of ground contamination.

 
I wouldn't refuse to watch the show over that. It's an impressive recreation of the disaster, and knowing the true figures doesn't take away all that much from the story.  

 
Was the figure Legasov quoted of radiation being released by the fire correct?  (something like 20 Hiroshimas per day?)
There is no accurate frame of reference for this, but I have seen numbers like 400X tossed around (based on volume of material put into the atmosphere, but then you've got to factor in what those materials/half lives were, etc.), so I'm sure you could find at least a handful of professional arguments that would say its not outlandish considering the reactor fires lasted 10 days.  Unsurprisingly, reports from Russia err on the low side, and those from Japan quite the contrary...

 
I've seen several documentaries on the Chernobyl disaster and I've watched some reviews of the HBO show from some pretty smart, science-types.  Between the two, I believe it impossible for a nuclear meltdown at a power plant to cause a thermo-nuclear blast.
Not a nuke guy and it's been a while since I watched it, so I'm trying to go from a spotty memory, but was the blast they were talking about a nuclear blast or an explosion that would have happened if the core melted down into the cooling water and it flashed to steam?

 
Not a nuke guy and it's been a while since I watched it, so I'm trying to go from a spotty memory, but was the blast they were talking about a nuclear blast or an explosion that would have happened if the core melted down into the cooling water and it flashed to steam?
The quote in the HBO series was an adaptation of a quote from a Soviet physicist (Vasili Nesterenko) in a documentary glorifying the Russians that risked their lives in the cleanup effort immediately following the Chernobyl meltdown.  The quote is widely discredited, and it is believed he used it as hyperbole to inflate the importance of the cleanup crew (i.e., they prevented an explosion that would have leveled half of Ukraine).  He was just referencing a steam explosion, but his estimate of the magnitude of the blast was off by a couple orders of magnitude.

 
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