9 Things Shown In 'Chernobyl' That Were Factually Wrong About The Worst Ever Nuclear Disaster!

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was worst ever man made disaster of all times. Many of us hadn¡¯t even heard about it until we watched the HBO show based on the incident.

But was everything that we saw on the show true? It dramatised some of the incidents and had a few minor discrepancies with historical accounts. Here are some of the things that weren't true IRL.

#1 Not black smoke but thin trails white vapours erupted out of the power plant.

#2 Anatoly Dyatlov wasn¡¯t really a villain as seen in the show.

bradfordzone.co.uk

Former Chernobyl worker Oleksiy Breus says three characters were distorted and misinterpreted as villains, and they were -- Plant director Viktor Bryukhanov, chief engineer Nikolai Fomin and deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov.

¡°Their characters are distorted and misrepresented, as if they were villains. They were nothing like that. Possibly, Anatoly Dyatlov became the main anti-hero in the show because that was how he was perceived by the power plant's workers, his subordinates and top-management, in the beginning. Later this perception changed," he said.

#3 Remember Vasily one of the fire-fighters who died leaving behind a pregnant wife? Her baby didn¡¯t die because of radiation, she says.

Lyudmilla was warned by the doctors to not go ahead with the birth because of her exposure to Vasily in hospital. ¡°The doctor was trying to get the message through that his central nervous system was 100 per cent affected by radiation, along with all of his bone marrow. But I was 22, madly in love with my husband. With every cell of my body I wanted to believe this was fume poisoning,¡± she told Ukrainian TV, according to this report.

But she still went ahead and had a baby girl four months later. She died because of heart problems. The show, however, showed that the child saved Lyudmilla by absorbing the radiation in the womb and died in just four days.

#4 Also, the ¡®Suicide Divers¡¯ didn¡¯t die from radiation exposure. Two of them are still alive.

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In order to prevent the steam explosion, three men dubbed as Suicide Divers volunteered to clamour into the radioactive water to shut off the valves in the show.

It now turns out, that all of them didn¡¯t die. Two of them - Valeri Bespalov and Alexei Ananenko, are still alive. Boris Baranov died of a heart attack in 2005. Also, Alexei Ananenko didn¡¯t volunteer but since he was on duty and was the only man on the shift who knew the location of the valves, his superior assigned him the mission, according to this report.

Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of 2016 book Chernobyl 01:23:40, revealed that this could be a mix-up with an employee with the same surname who did succumb to ARS.

#5 Zharkov, played by Game of Thrones fame Donald Sumpter, was reportedly a fictional character.

#6 The harrowing helicopter crash was real but not as and when it was shown in the series.

There was a helicopter crash but it happened in October months after they were done fighting the fire and not in April.

#7 Ulana Khomyuk is a fictional character.

It is said that Ulana Khomyuk represented ¡°dozens of scientists who helped investigate the crisis as it unfolded.¡±

#8 The miners never worked naked.

yimg.com

It is said that some of them might have gone naked but not all of them stripped off all their clothes while mining, Major General Nikolai Tarakanov, who headed the real ¡®liquidators¡¯ in 1986 revealed.

¡°I did not see them naked. I'd say the showrunners took it a bit too far. In fact, this entire operation ¨C it was Academician Velikhov's idea ¨C was unnecessary, but still. They thought that the bottom of the reactor was still extremely hot, because the graphite continued burning, and it burns at 800 degrees... That¡¯s why they had to dig a tunnel underneath and place a concrete slab under the reactor. The idea was to use liquid nitrogen to create a cooling effect, like in a fridge. The concept itself was good, and of course it helped. But it was already September by then,¡± he was quoted as saying.

#9 Valery Legasav wasn¡¯t a reactor expert but he specialised in radio chemistry.

Furthermore, it¡¯s right that Valery Legasav committed suicide by hanging himself two years after the explosion and he did dictate a letter on the liquidation effort he spearheaded. But in his message, he never asked, ¡°What is the cost of lies," which is also the tagline of the show. Nor did he ask questions about the meaning of truth. ¡°The real danger is that if we hear enough lies then we no longer recognize the truth at all.¡± However, he did have real grievances about the handling of Chernobyl.