Chernobyl – The TV drama that (very nearly) missed an important point.

I never thought I would write this on LinkedIN - warning, spoiler alert!

So the fantastic Chernobyl TV series finished this week to huge critical acclaim. It was, for this engineer and former nuclear submariner, ‘a good dit’ – because it was indeed entertaining, harrowing and brought back personal memories of reactor operations on both a sedate critical plant and within the contrived, stressfully catastrophic world of the Manoeuvring Room Simulator. 

The acting was marvellous (I feel qualified to make this assessment from the hundreds of film dramas I have watched during long operational submarine patrols) and the set design and special effects were technically accurate. Even throw away scenes of the devastated reactor were correct. As a nuclear engineer I was very impressed and sometimes left scratching my head as to whether or not they had actually filmed the series in a real life nuclear instillation, rather than a cardboard set on a Pinewood soundstage somewhere in the Buckinghamshire countryside. In actual fact, they had filmed it in a RBMK reactor in Lithuania, so for nuclear nerds such as I, it was an extra treat. The scientific descriptions, although dumbed down for TV, were spot on and the trial scenes which described the design flaws and operational mistakes which led to the prompt criticality accident were a masterful piece of simple explanation, ideal for a largely non-technical audience.  Atypically for TV, the main heroes were the scientists and engineers - as were the main villains.  I really am hopeful that it increases an interest in STEM with the young people who will have watched it. 

But I was disappointed too. Many of TV critics have commented about the western mentality being superimposed onto the Cold War era Soviets, when in reality as the disaster unfolded, they just cracked on with their job quietly accepting their fate for the motherland. To the average Liquidator (the men and women who ‘liquidated’ and mitigated the accident site) Chernobyl was the latest test of national willpower which they, their parents and their grandparents had been facing since the time of the Tsars.  I know this to be true because some years ago I helped raise some funds for a Liquidator charity and was privileged enough to speak to some of those brave people. Their indifference to the danger and the unfairness of the situation they were put in was striking. It is a kind of courage that you do not often see in modern day Western culture.

However, since the series concluded the thing which has left me with a depressing feeling of apprehension is that the biggest lesson from Chernobyl, for modern day Western audiences at least, was glossed over. The nuclear industry in the UK (and other western nations) is inherently safe; not inherently unsafe like the Soviet era nuclear industry. Western reactor designs simply cannot replicate a Chernobyl-like catastrophic failure.  It is mandatory for our pressurised water reactor (PWR) plants to have nuclear containment buildings which ensure fission products cannot escape to the atmosphere in the highly unlikely event of a ruptured primary circuit or reactor pressure vessel. We build in a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity in our light water cores so that a loss of coolant actually shuts the reaction down, stopping it from running away unlike what happened in the Ukraine. Our regulatory licensing system is the most robust regulation in industry, meaning that our operators are highly trained and experienced, our tests are conducted very carefully and considered by experts before being permissioned by our regulator, and we work in an exclusive culture of Nuclear Safety. But this was only briefly nodded to in the final episode when the main character merely stated that the Soviets did not employ any of the safe nuclear design or operational practices of the West because of cost. If you went out to make a cup of tea at that point in the episode, you will have missed this small, oversimplified but very important one-liner.

At this time when the threat of climate change is real, the fact that self-sustaining fusion energy is still decades away and the problematic load capacity issues with renewable energy is unresolved, we need to urgently maximise our fission power capability. I fear the raw anti-nuclear message by the producers and script writers will only harden public attitudes against nuclear power in the West. The popularity of this TV show will no doubt spawn yet more unhelpful and misleading cultural memes hostile to nuclear power at a time in human history when we should be embracing it. The tragedy and danger of Chernobyl is actually part of the underpinning case which proves Western nuclear power generation is inherently safe. The challenge for advocates of nuclear power is to now use this influential cultural work of art (for that is what it is) as a foundation in that argument.