Henry Fountain is a science writer on the Climate desk of The New York Times. He toured the Chernobyl plant and the exclusion zone around it in 2014. The first thing to understand about the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” which concludes its five-part run on Monday, is that a lot of it is made up. But here’s the second, and more important, thing: It doesn’t really matter. The explosion and fire at Chernobyl’s Unit 4 reactor on April 26, 1986, was an extraordinarily messy and grim event, a radioactive “dirty” bomb on a scale that no one — certainly not anyone in the Soviet Union — was prepared for.

Source: New York Times June 02, 2019 16:22 UTC