Also really, REALLY tangential but it's spooking me in hindsight that Stellan Skarsgard got cast as the young Father Merrin in that awful Exorcist prequel back in 200something because he looks almost EXACTLY like middle-aged Max Von Sydow NOW
saying that a reactor exploded, at the time, it would be like. walking up to someone and trying to say that spontaneous human combustion is a thing and you deffo saw it happen
it's absurd to us that dyatlov and to a lesser degree the other men in the room would be like "i mean no that's not possible it's gotta be the hydrogen"
and then we have our government try to tell us that nuclear power is safe, only for them to cut corners like all governments always do and allow three mile island to happen
but the average american in the eighties could probably tell you that "nuclear power can be dangerous" and "radiation is extremely dangerous" and "nuclear power operates using radiation or something"
like the soviets covered up kyshtym, they told their people nuclear power was safe, but they still saw hiroshima and nagasaki the same as the rest of the world
so...how did it come to be that soviet people didn't associate nuclear power with nuclear bombs? how did the "radiation bad" mentality not come into play?
was it just sheer propaganda? like, even in america, even us who dropped the bombs, we had photographs of what had happened, the average person could be like "oh yeah, hiroshima, that was horrible" with assorted arguments about whether it was necessary or whatever
It's titled "Evacuation" for some reason but it's the soundtrack from when Sitnikov gets frogmarched onto the roof and then it cuts from his thousand-yard stare to Dyatlov seeing the actual scope of what happened while being dragged to an ambulance
Combined with the spaghetti of bent fuel channels and control rods it really, really does a great job of actually capturing a cosmic horror type feel visually
Grigorii Khmel, the driver of one of the fire engines, later described what happened:
“We arrived there at 10 or 15 minutes to two in the morning…. We saw graphite scattered about. Misha asked: “Is that graphite?” I kicked it away. But one of the fighters on the other truck picked it up."
i remember asking my dad about it one time and i can't remember his explanation but i remember understanding that it was like a fire alarm. where if you hear it go off, you get out of the house
fucking good
I'm still WAITING for someone to do a red card/blue card meme re: What Happened To Game of Thronesit's So Much
but when it does go wrong it goes wrong
you know
actual death toll
“We arrived there at 10 or 15 minutes to two in the morning…. We saw graphite scattered about. Misha asked: “Is that graphite?” I kicked it away. But one of the fighters on the other truck picked it up."