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Watch Chernobyl Inside The Meltdown () free Season 1 Episode 1 online in HD on Dailymotion (2026).
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00:11I was working at the nuclear power station at Forsmark in Sweden.
00:21If you want to go into the controlled area, you had to put yourself in a monitor that checked if
00:27you had any radioactive contamination on you.
00:33This was just a normal procedure, but this morning the alarm went off.
00:40No one could get through because the alarm went off all the time.
00:45I didn't think it was really real.
00:50So I asked one of the guys who stood in the queue to borrow a shoe and started an analysis
00:57of it.
00:59The rate by which the peaks rise tells you about the radioactivity, and this time it
01:04was just .
01:08It was terrifying.
01:11The alarm went off to evacuate the station.
01:16At first, the Swedes thought that they had had a nuclear accident.
01:21Later, Swedish scientists determined the origin was somewhere in the Soviet Union.
01:36On the right, the central room of block number four.
01:43Details are emerging this morning of the serious accident at a Soviet nuclear plant in the Ukraine.
01:54it's being called the worst nuclear accident in history a giant reactor has suffered what
01:59experts tonight believe to have been a core meltdown radiation of course is the big fear
02:05tonight it is the silent killer and apparently it continues to pour forth from Chernobyl
02:11it can cause immediate sickness and death there is a dramatic hike in a deadly form
02:17of thyroid cancer among children exposed to that radioactive fallout the longer you live eating
02:23and drinking in contaminated regions the more radiation builds up in your body
02:33president reagan was out of the country but then vice president george bush asked me how bad the
02:40reactor accident was and i said sir in my opinion as a nuclear engineer this is the worst possible
02:44accident i can imagine
02:54there were incredible acts of bravery and heroism sacrifice and extreme patriotism
03:09so many young people died how do we actually understand what has happened if the soviets
03:17won't tell us this was a global disaster hundreds of millions of people wanted to know am i in danger
03:25is the food safe to eat and the soviets were quiet
03:33this was an unchecked nuclear core meltdown
03:56over the course of the last 40 years i've never had an opportunity to speak about this
03:59in public before as a cia officer we're not generally dealing with the media
04:07in 1986 i had been a nuclear analyst for the central intelligence agency
04:11i was 27 years old i've been working for the cia for four years
04:18i remember coming back from lunch on the monday april 28th and the soviets finally did acknowledge
04:25that there was a problem they put out a statement saying there had been an accident at the chernobyl
04:34nuclear power plant and that was a bit ominous because chernobyl was a lot further away than
04:39the ones we initially suspected
04:43both the swedish and danish embassies sent envoys to the soviet foreign ministry today
04:47asking the soviets to be more forthcoming wyatt andrews cbs news moscow
04:53the entire diplomatic community and reporting community was bombarding the the soviet authorities
05:00for answers
05:07we set out immediately to start tasking the resources that we had to learn more about it
05:13of course we tasked the overhead reconnaissance satellites which was not nearly as ubiquitous
05:19as they are today so we had to go out and provide a justification to get the satellite picture
05:25we kind of sold the idea as that well we might see emergency response crews and that sort of thing
05:31the next morning our senior nuclear power analyst got an excited call from the photo interpreters and
05:36said the reactor's blown up just like you said and our reaction was no we lied about that we
05:42we were we couldn't have done that that doesn't happen to reactors
05:50the images showed that the building was completely destroyed as a nuclear engineer i was astounded
05:56that the thing would have exploded in that manner and you would have this vast destruction
06:02that kind of nuclear core explosion had never happened before that emission of radiation had never
06:09happened before that was horrifying
06:25soviet propaganda had spent years insisting that the ussr's nuclear technology led the world
06:34construction began on the chernobyl power plant in 1970 by 1986 there were four reactors online
06:45one of the unique things was their extremely large physical size much larger than similar reactors in the west
06:53each of the reactors produced a thousand megawatts of electricity
06:57which was enough to provide power to around a million modern homes
07:04the plant was located to the northwest of kiev
07:09around 800 miles from foschmark in sweden where radiation from the accident was first detected in the west
07:19you have enormous plume of radioactive material is coming across europe so we knew that because of the
07:25great distances and the amount being received at those distances this must be a very large release
07:33it's hard to quantify the effect that these radioactive isotopes might have
07:38on your body and on your health
07:42even at lower levels it can cause long-term effects like cancer that may show up years later
07:52i remember seeing from the bus when i came back from foschmark to upsala i saw some children playing i
08:00wanted to stop the bus and go out and ask them don't play here
08:06but it was not possible to stop that kind of bus
08:13no one knew what that level of radiation spewing into the air would do to the atmosphere and how far
08:20the contamination would spread and how dangerous that might be
08:24so
08:28at foschmark we spoke a lot everybody in the control room the the main thought was
08:37what was it like to be in chernobyl
08:44in a power plant that had suffered such a fate.
09:14In the night of the accident, I worked with the senior engineer of the turbine engine 4th block.
09:21I was 28 years old.
09:37Why did you wait for almost 40 years?
09:42I left in another life and did not want to talk about the past.
10:12We went to work for about 30 minutes until the beginning of the operation.
10:18My place was right.
10:19Two bulletins of the turbine.
10:27We started to do an experiment.
10:30We started to do an experiment.
10:33Reactor number 4 was scheduled to be shut down for routine maintenance.
10:38And the operators were taking the opportunity to conduct a long-delayed safety test.
10:47Ironically, the experiment was intended to allow them to have better reactor safety in the event of a loss of
10:54power.
10:57They had begun this experiment a day before the accident occurred.
11:04Unfortunately, the experiment was interrupted by the grid controller, who needed more electricity, so that the shutdown was prolonged.
11:15The delay meant that the test had to be conducted by the midnight shift.
11:38Alongside Igor Kirchenbaum, the two members of the shift, directly responsible for enacting the test, were Alexander Akimov, the head
11:47of the shift, and Lenny.
11:48And Leonid Toktenov controlling the reactor directly.
11:54The reactor was infamously unstable during the process of shutdown.
12:03Toktenov was not very experienced.
12:05He would be overseeing the shutdown of a nuclear reactor for the first time in his career.
12:30They were tired, and they were trying to get it done, because opportunities to do this kind of thing didn't
12:35occur very often.
12:38The most senior man in the room was Anatoly Dyatlov, who was deputy chief engineer for operations for the entire
12:44plant.
12:46There had been several disagreements about the test protocol, and the test had been delayed so long that part of
12:55the crew were threatening to leave.
12:59Dyatlov, who was never a good tempered individual, had been awake for almost 24 hours.
13:07The last thing that Dyatlov said to Akimov before the test began was, what are you waiting for?
13:39For the final step of the test, Toktenov pressed the AZ-5 scram button to shut the reactor.
13:44to die.
14:20In 1986, it was 29 years old.
14:27It turned out that we were already in the evening,
14:29we started to patrol around the atom station.
14:36We had a water heater at the time.
14:39In 2017, we saw two barconers,
14:44which were put in the seats.
14:48We had to take these two barconers from the water.
14:56It was about 400 meters from the reactor.
15:02We took these two people.
15:04We took them out.
15:06We heard a whistle on the back.
15:09It turned around.
15:11Almost all turned around.
15:14Well, literally, the second whistle on the back.
15:22When the wind was crashing down the wall,
15:28the wind, snow, the wind, which is coming from the ceiling.
15:34The light was shining.
15:38There was a light out of the air.
15:40It was in the air.
15:42It was in the air.
15:51At that moment the radiation warning lamps on the wall of the control room turned from green to red.
16:02We passed 200 meters and were standing against the 4th energy block.
16:09I said, oh my God, who left out of the building?
16:13It took half of it, cut it off.
16:24It took half of it.
16:42All the messages were sent to Parinova.
16:48It was Shashinok.
16:51Vladimir Shashinok, who was monitoring the turbines, was engulfed in radioactive steam.
16:59He was all wet and stoned.
17:03They took him.
17:05Then he died.
17:16There was no doubt, complete confusion in the control room.
17:20All they knew that something was wrong, but they didn't know what it was.
17:26They certainly didn't believe that the reactor could have been destroyed.
17:32The Chernobyl power plant was laid out around a long central corridor.
17:38The four reactors in a line.
17:42Each of the reactors had its own separate control room.
17:45And each of the control rooms was separated from the reactor hall by many thick concrete walls.
17:54Reactor four had been obliterated, taking with it all of the sensors and equipment that was supposed to communicate to
18:01them what was happening inside the reactor core.
18:05So they were completely in the dark.
18:11That was theoming attack which came on now?
18:13Abbot What was that incident zmирange?
18:15The debris, the reactor, of the радиcentered work…
18:17On Earth, of 34, of 34…
18:19The 힘든 assault, of 34, of 34.
18:19Now have people to collect?
18:20Yeah.
18:22The reiterated body without massiveסчики and complete
18:24Admiral V.
18:25And then I look up...
18:30As I look...
18:50for these firefighters this was something like they'd never seen before this strange glow coming
18:57from the reactor core meltdown those firefighters put their lives on the line very much like the the
19:25firefighters at the World Trade Center 911 I mean they knew what they were getting into and they
19:29went and did it anyway
19:56там питон лежит там орехвит лежит вот такое значит пламя такое
20:07трудности трошки было в нас что не могли овладеть обстановкой
20:12и между не знали сколько на мне радиации
20:24radiation as an intangible odorless potentially lethal force is the invisible enemy
20:35the most frightening and lethal form of radiation is gamma rays which will pass straight through the
20:40body like a fusillade of machine gun bullets tearing apart the body the cellular level damaging DNA as
20:48it goes those can cause fatal injuries even from a very great distance and cannot be stopped by
20:56anything short of thick sheets of lead or massive concrete blocks in the immediate aftermath of the
21:05accident pieces of the reactor itself were emitting fields of radiation of thousands of ronjan an hour
21:11enough to cause a fatal dose to anyone who stood nearby for a matter of minutes
21:20there is no mask here before we had no mask no one enough to have a pressure on us all
21:26so so
21:26it was a shit that made sure any costume of me a ballade of ничего
21:38It's all a station. It's all four blocks.
21:44We sent 30-40 people to the whole zone.
21:51We saw so many pieces of smoke.
21:54I went to the top of the hill.
21:58I see it on the top of the hill.
22:01It's been here and it's like a horror.
22:05They were there armed with water and foam,
22:08which is what you would bring to an industrial fire.
22:12There was smoke.
22:15The fire, the eyes of the fire.
22:17They were broken.
22:19The boys were broken.
22:21There's nothing to talk about and look at who and what.
22:26It was scary, can you tell me?
22:27Oh, it's scary.
22:28You look at the fire.
22:32There's another one.
22:34They shout out, where the gloves?
22:37It's not scary.
22:38Let the gloves, let the water.
22:40What's the scary?
22:42It's scary, because the fight was already.
22:59The fields of radiation on the roofs of the reactor buildings were so intense that almost
23:05immediately some members of the fire crews came down with symptoms of acute radiation
23:09syndrome and were taken from the scene already vomiting people in the control room still didn't
23:30really fully understand exactly what had happened even hours after the explosion taken place
23:39the cattle from the other side of the vehicle well and it was a calmness and he told me that
23:46all the
23:46other things you want to leave then he came to the table and he saw me again I asked all
23:55the other things to
23:55leave the building and then 20 minutes came the main engineer of the station and he needed to
24:09The reactor was not receiving any cooling water.
24:12That would cause a reactor meltdown.
24:15So they became fixated at that point on getting water into the reactor.
24:21But the gate valves on the cooling system had to be turned manually.
24:29Akimov and Toptunov left the control room and went out
24:32to try to open valves and establish new ways of cooling the reactor.
24:40And they spent a long time there in enormous fields of gamma radiation.
24:45What they didn't realize was that opening the valves was a complete waste of time.
24:52Unfortunately, the reactor was already destroyed
24:54and there was nothing they could have done that would have helped.
25:00Akimov and Toptunov both received lethal doses of radiation.
25:06They died a few weeks later.
25:11They gave their lives in the effort to try to do what they could.
25:14Akimov and Toptunov went to the fire.
25:18I think, if Diatlav did not send me off,
25:22it would have been a ultimate failure.
25:26That's why I can say that Diatlav did not save my life.
25:36on the morning of april 26 the fire in the roof of the reactor building had been extinguished
25:44the firefighters saved reactor building three and the rest of the complex and i have nothing
25:50but admiration for these firefighters many of whom died in the days and weeks to come
26:08when 7 hours in the morning there was already a fire
26:14and all of them went down from the roof and then
26:19And then it fell down, and then it fell down.
26:43Among the firefighters who went to the roof of Unit 3,
26:47several received lethal doses of radiation.
27:24The reactor top shield was 2 or 3 meters thick, and it weighed more than 2,000 tons.
27:30That whole thing got blown into the air like 100 meters.
27:362,000 tons.
27:37So, you know, the amount of energy released was quite impressive.
27:46186 firemen managed to extinguish everything that they found burning on the roofs of the reactor building
27:52and in the grounds.
27:56But something still remained on fire.
28:02The fire in the reactor core was not out.
28:06And that was a much, much hotter fire and much more difficult to deal with.
28:11All this radioactive material is coming up in the plumes of smoke
28:16where it can be transported around the site
28:18and ultimately to other countries and other places around the world.
28:23You're talking about an unprecedented release of radiation straight up into the air.
28:31Every minute, every hour, it was still raining down huge amounts of radioactive particles.
28:41The closest town was Pripyat, three kilometers from the Chernobyl power plant itself.
28:48There were no official announcements that morning
28:51notifying anybody that an accident had taken place.
28:55People went about their business in Pripyat just as they always would on a fine spring morning.
29:03No one was telling them that they were in mortal danger.
29:11Our apartment was two kilometers from the power plant, so it was very close.
29:20In 1986, I was eight years old.
29:29Pripyat was built to serve the power plant.
29:34It was a happy city, I would say.
29:38Many children, many flowers.
29:44They planted lots of roses.
29:47I was photographed in front of them for the town brochure.
29:57By the time of the crash, I worked as the major architect of the city in Pripyat.
30:04I was working as the major architect of the city in Pripyat.
30:10The main purpose of the city as the main architect of the city is to look into the future.
30:18In general, the residents of the city were young people.
30:23Our average age was 27 years old.
30:28And from here, what is young people?
30:32It means love, it means many children.
30:50We woke up as normal, and as usual, we went to school.
30:57Soviet schools were open on Saturday mornings,
30:59so everybody who was present was exposed to radioactive contamination.
31:07Before the accident, we never talked about safety measures.
31:12The power plant was perceived as the safest thing.
31:17No one would ever consider that something dangerous may happen.
31:29At school, there was no panic or anything.
31:33The teachers gave us iodine pills.
31:37They said that we have to take it.
31:40There was not a proper explanation for what and why.
31:47We went to the toilet, and we actually threw it away,
31:50because why would we need to take pills?
31:53It's not fun.
31:55We were released earlier, but with strict rules to go home.
32:01It's spring, the weather is nice, and we were happy.
32:05Like, wow, no school anymore.
32:22At around nine o'clock on Saturday morning,
32:26officials from the local government were summoned to a meeting,
32:29at which it was explained that everybody should go about their business as normal,
32:34and above all, no one should panic.
33:01The radiation readings were being taken by Soviet troops,
33:05who spread out around the city.
33:08They said,
33:09Well, they said,
33:10I was like,
33:10I'm like, what are the levels?
33:13They said,
33:15I'm like,
33:15I'm like,
33:15I'm like,
33:15I'm like,
33:17I'm like,
33:20I'm like,
33:21I'm like,
33:22I'm like,
33:22You can help them.
33:23On 26 and 27 April,
33:24bears bright white flashes
33:26that appear to be the result of radiation striking the film.
33:31I know,iiiii…
33:54The Soviet authorities wanted to keep everything that happened at Chernobyl as secret as possible.
34:02They placed police roadblocks around the city of Pripyat
34:05and quite quickly the KGB cut off the telephone lines so that nobody could even phone out.
34:13The Soviet response to any kind of problem was to try to cover it up until they could figure out
34:18something to do.
34:23As the scale of the disaster became increasingly apparent,
34:28responsibility for dealing with the accident was escalated to Moscow.
34:36The Central Committee in Moscow was meeting non-stop.
34:42They commissioned a government commission.
34:48The Soviet Union was a senior government minister who answered directly to the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
35:12It was part of the first wave of senior government officials sent to the plant to find out exactly what
35:18had happened
35:19and clean up the consequences.
35:23I was on all meetings of the committee, except for that.
35:28In Pripyat, I met my head of the minister.
35:34We went to the 4th block.
35:56If you take yourself to 2 o'clock, it's unbelievable what the Soviet high command knew.
36:02They knew the nuclear corps was emitted by the international military.
36:05getting phenomenal amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.
36:09They knew the town of Pripyat was being bombarded with that radiation
36:15and did not tell the people of the region anything.
36:46I was still on the street. I was affected by her.
36:54I was affected by her.
36:58That's the same time I proposed to her to meet her.
37:03Well, that's why the second day was planned.
37:11And it was the last evening in Pripyat.
37:30On the afternoon of the 26th, the members of the Government Commission arrived completely unprepared for what they found there.
38:02There was this communication between what was going on in Moscow and what was going on in the scene.
38:08There was not a lot of honesty and there was a lot of friction in the system.
38:11And so I think that hampered the response initially.
38:14We saw this in terms of the delay in evacuating the towns.
38:21The members of the Government Commission were arguing about whether or not they should evacuate the population in Pripyat.
38:27This is principally driven by the need for secrecy.
38:30Because they didn't want word of what had happened to leak out along with members of the population leaving the
38:36area.
38:39There was no evidence that there was such a serious accident.
38:44There was absolutely nothing.
38:46There was absolutely normal life.
38:52There was nothing.
39:06We became a husband, a husband and a wife.
39:39The radiation situation in Pripyat grew gradually worse as the day wore on.
39:43So by the evening there were extremely high radiation readings being taken.
39:52Word was beginning to reach people in the town that something had happened.
39:58But the scale of the accident was not apparent really to anyone.
40:06And we went to this house, exhausted, but happy.
40:15This is my bucket, which was my triads.
40:19They were all so wet and just as they were burning.
40:35By the end of Saturday, the Pripyat council themselves began making preparations in case an evacuation became necessary.
41:03They sent out for every bus they could find on very little notice. You have to see that in hindsight
41:11as impressive.
41:23By the end of Saturday evening, the head of the government commission still refused to sanction an evacuation or inform
41:30the population about what was happening.
41:32Even as hundreds of buses were summoned, the majority of the population remained at home waiting for news of what
41:40would happen next.
41:52I remember there was an unusual view on the power plant. And I said, Mom, is it on fire? She
42:01was a little bit rough saying, like, shut up.
42:06And I understood, like, oh, something really is going on. But we just went to bed like it was a
42:13normal Saturday night.
42:21The Soviets expected to be able to contain the story, even though they had a core nuclear meltdown.
42:29The Soviets were dealing with a nuclear disaster of unprecedented proportions. It had to be dealt with.
42:37Thousands of workers were brought in and informed, you're going to be heroes of the Soviet Union, get to work.
42:44Radioactive material was melting through and could make its way to the groundwater.
42:49That would have ruined farming and agriculture for decades.
42:56We saw all kinds of desperate measures. Coal miners were brought in to dig a tunnel under the reactor.
43:03They were asking the helicopter pilots to drive right into blasts of radiation and try to contain the effects of
43:13this explosion.
43:16With the fire in the core still burning, plumes of smoke laden with radioactive material are going into the atmosphere.
43:23This was a threat to the entire planet.
43:27Mario connected.
43:27Mario connected.
43:30Mario connected.
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