Disaster at Chernobyl Documentary

A few years ago I remember watching a documentary on Chernobyl that was focused on the clean up of the site. One of the things that was evident throughout the film was how little help was given to victims and the clean up effort by other countries when Russian and eventually the Ukraine were clearly handling the situation inhumanely. Every account I have seen of this disaster describes suicide clean up crews and prolonged releases of radiation because they were not remotely prepared for such a situation. Many of these account also describe surrounding countries and even the U.S. as having better intelligence about the disaster and subsequent clean up operation than those at the site or in the Russian government. At some point I find it hard to believe that nothing could be done to provide proper equipment and intelligence to an area that had obviously been hit by something comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One thing that a lot of the documentaries explain better than the book we read is how the politics of the engineers in the control room can be associated with the disaster as well as the building of the reactor itself. Other surrounding world politics such as the bombing of a nuclear reactor in Iraq also come into play.

The videos unfortunately don’t describe the victims, social climate, and economy in the aftermath of the disaster. I was relieved to find that Petyna does a wonderful job of picking out average individuals and describing how their world was affected and how they feel about it.

A couple of online documentaries I found:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Disaster-at-Chernobyl-Documentary