Paladinus posted:

Her first child died because of severe pathologies caused by radiation. Your post is garbage. You literally don't know the first thing about anything related to the catastrophe. Shut the gently caress up. Thanks in advance.

font color sea posted:

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

I can simplify things for you.

The baby in the Chernobyl series didn’t actually die of radiation poisoning in reality.

The writer, Craig Mazin, was going for a bullet motif:

“Every atom of U-235 is like a bullet, traveling at nearly the speed of light, penetrating nearly everything in its path: woods, metal, concrete, flesh. Every gram of U-235 holds over a billion trillion of these bullets. ... That’s three million billion trillion bullets in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. Most of these bullets will not stop firing for 100 years.”

This bullet motif is why all the characters are constantly, ahistorically, threatening to shoot eachother.

The notion of “three million billion trillion bullets” is deployed so that the radiation unleashed at Chernobyl can serve as a metaphor for the USSR’s entire violent history, and a general societal pressure / malaise. (The old cow woman treats Stalin, Lenin, the Czars, Gorbachev, and the exploded reactor as completely interchangeable because they all killed people with ‘bullets’. Guns are bad.)

Sometimes the radiation/bullet/history metaphor is very effective, as when the soldiers exterminate housepets while ruminating over the failed invasion of Afghanistan. But in some cases, like the magic radiation baby, it’s pretty weak.

Mazin is going for the idea (directly stated by the Emily Morton character, who often serves as Mazin’s self-insert) that the innocent baby heroically jumped in front of a million billion bullets and saved its mother - just like the miners, right?

But radiation doesn’t actually work that way at all. The baby’s death in reality was just an unfortunate coincidence. So you have the Emily Morton character endorsing a comfortable falsehood over the painful truth that the baby didn’t die a hero.

And there are two complementary issues here: Morton is ostensibly a composite of dozens of real-life hero scientists, so the false baby story is falsely attributed to them. And, at the same time, the basic decision to create a composite character generates a standard Hollywood narrative where the rebellious free-thinking individual faces off against the mass of sheeple. The real scientists didn’t strongarm their way through government checkpoints and so-on. They were working for the government.

It’s not a very minor quibble, since the Morton character literally gets threatened with the gulag/death over the radioactive baby, then gives a couple speeches about it. It’s a key part of her characterization.

Moridin920 posted:

She def didn't get irradiated from the firefighter. You separate people with rad poisoning because their immune system is shot not because they're going to irradiate others.

Dave Concepcion posted:

eh, half true, if the source was strictly external then yes, you pose no risk to others, but if you ingest/inhale the source, you pose some risk


People with thyroid cancer drink orange juice mixed with I-131 and are isolated afterwards, the radiation they emit is reasonably high for a short while

Moridin920 posted:

Yes, but that didn't happen in Chernobyl. The point is the rads don't work like that. Yes if you ingest radioactive materials then that will still be radioactive inside of you but it otherwise doesn't stick onto you like a virus that then infects other people. An irradiated person isn't in of themselves generating more radiation.

The only case I can think of was in Brazil where people dismantled some abandoned medical equipment and accidentally ingested the caesium chloride.

Moridin920 posted:

Citation needed, while you're raging out. The baby had congenital heart issues which is a common birth defect. No evidence that radiation caused it and she wasn't getting rads from her husband.

Moridin920 posted:

You don't remember when the nurse told them to remove the clothes and wash them down? The Soviets knew how to decontaminate people.

Paladinus posted:

The child was born with liver cirrhosis and damaged lungs. Source: Ignatenko herself in a 2000 interview.

https://fakty.ua/106083-quot-posled...go-rebenka-quot

quote:

Some nurse brought an orange to Vasily - a big, beautiful one. “Take, eat, I left you, you love,” he nodded to his wife in the direction of the nightstand where the orange lay. Under the influence of drugs, he took a nap, and Lyudmila went to the store. When she returned, the orange was gone. “Who took it, go find it, I left it to you,” Vasya startled. And the nurse standing in the door just shook her head. She deliberately picked it up so that Luda, God forbid, did not eat it - a small orange ball, having lain next to Ignatenko a couple of hours, was already full of deadly radiation

quote:

Dave Concepcion posted:

she was a doctor I think, but the point about the contaminated clothes was that if they were that radioactive, it would be because of deposited radioactive dust that they would also have inhaled making them radioactive too (to what degree can be debated, but to some degree most certainly)

Moridin920 posted:

Look I don't want to be a douche or anything but


Is just literally impossible because of physics.

Dave Concepcion posted:

yeah that orange story is straight up retarded nonsense

Opferwurst posted:

What orange, comrade? Oh, that old thing? Yeah that was radiated. I had to throw it away. *breaths orangly*

Paladinus posted:

What does something a nurse did out of extra caution have to do with the fact that medics measured 68 R on Lidmila Ignatenko?

Paladinus posted:

Her second child also has problems with lungs because of radiation's effects on the mother's organism.

Lyudmilla Ignatanko posted:

I gave birth to a boy, Andrei. Andreika. My friends tried to stop me. "You can't have a baby." And the doctors tried to scare me: "Your body won't be able to handle it." Then, later - later they told me that he'd be missing an arm. His right arm. The instrument showed it. "Well, so what?" I thought. "I'll teach him to write with his left hand." But he came out fine. A beautiful boy. He's in school now, he gets good grades."

Moridin920 posted:

Cool that's literally not how radiation works.

She def didn't get irradiated from the firefighter. You separate people with rad poisoning because their immune system is shot not because they're going to irradiate others.

Phanatic posted:

Okay, look.

Oral histories are very important when it comes to understanding people’s’ perceptions and subjective understanding of events. They are awful for determining objective truth.

According to Voices of Chernobyl, the baby was born with cirrhosis and congenital heart defects and died and this was because of the radiation. And “her liver had 28 roentgen.”

How does the mother know this? Was an autopsy done? And then they told her the results? It’s all very questionable, and then decades later this really very dubious story is reported as absolutely factual. Assuming that the child did die of cirrhosis and congenital heart disease, those aren’t typically radiation-induced illnesses; it’s far more likely to be the result of a hepatitis infection.

Be very cautious with oral histories. They’re important and significant but can easily lead you astray.

Phanatic posted:

Okay, look.

Oral histories are very important when it comes to understanding people’s’ perceptions and subjective understanding of events. They are awful for determining objective truth.

According to Voices of Chernobyl, the baby was born with cirrhosis and congenital heart defects and died and this was because of the radiation. And “her liver had 28 roentgen.”

How does the mother know this? Was an autopsy done? And then they told her the results? It’s all very questionable, and then decades later this really very dubious story is reported as absolutely factual. Assuming that the child did die of cirrhosis and congenital heart disease, those aren’t typically radiation-induced illnesses; it’s far more likely to be the result of a hepatitis infection.

Be very cautious with oral histories. They’re important and significant but can easily lead you astray.

Lyudmilla Ignatanko posted:

I gave birth to a boy, Andrei. Andreika. My friends tried to stop me. "You can't have a baby." And the doctors tried to scare me: "Your body won't be able to handle it." Then, later - later they told me that he'd be missing an arm. His right arm. The instrument showed it. "Well, so what?" I thought. "I'll teach him to write with his left hand." But he came out fine. A beautiful boy. He's in school now, he gets good grades."

part 2 posted:

Another error was to portray the victims as being dangerously radioactive. Most radiation contamination was superficial and relatively easily managed by routine procedures. This is entirely different than the Goiania accident, where the victims ate 137-cesium and we had to isolate them from most medical personnel.

Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that, because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital room. First, as discussed, none of the victims were radioactive—their exposures were almost exclusively external, not internal. More importantly, risk to a fetus from an exposure like this is infinitesimally small.

For example, amongst the several hundred pregnant women exposed to high-dose radiation from the A-bombs, there were only 29 children with attributable developmental defects. All were exposed in the second trimester, when cells are migrating to the brain from the neural crest.

sweet thursday posted:

We can still save this thread, comrades

*uselessly spins valves and passes out*

ElGroucho posted:

Can one of you tell me what the deal was with these dudes? it seems like they did something important, but they are never mentioned again.

ElGroucho posted:

Can one of you tell me what the deal was with these dudes? it seems like they did something important, but they are never mentioned again.

Facebook Aunt posted:

Hmm. A few years ago my cat had hypothyroidism and one of the options was to treat him with radioactive iodine. Unfortunately this involves a 10 day stay with the vet, because apparently the poop is radioactive? Maybe she touched the poop?!?

OTOH when humans get a similar treatment they aren't quarantined for 10 days and are allowed to poop right in the toilet with everyone else.

Paladinus posted:

There is no evidence contradicting these oral histories, though.

quote:

But in this particular situation, there is very little reason to doubt Liudmila's account of her own lived experiences.


This, ironically, is something that Aleksievich got wrong for whatever reason. Liudmila's son is called Anatoly, and he had severe health issues as a child. Ignatenko talks about it in the interview I linked.

sweet thursday posted:

When systems fail with feed water there are usually bypass valves you can use. At the very least if you open up a clear path manually you can even rely on head pressure from its feed tank or any residual pressure in the system.

Unfortunately for them all the piping was hosed anyway and the water they were standing in was the water that was meant to be manipulated by those valves. They kept telling themselves they did nothing wrong, and by the book they were right, but they knew they hosed up badly and were delusional


Also they're shown melting later. Well one of them was. I don't think the other dude had a face

Phanatic posted:

See? You've just completely pegged on the reason that oral histories are *inherently dubious*. Those were Lyudmilla's own words, there was very little reason to doubt that account...but then subsequently it turned out to be completely wrong?

Saying that "Well, we should take it as gospel truth in the absence of contradictory evidence" is not how epistemology works.

Chernobyl Prayer posted:

He gets ill often, too. He'd be in school for a fortnight, and another fortnight he would spend with doctors. And that's how we live.

Dave Concepcion posted:

eh, that's not really how radiation works

I mean, like you could theoretically set it up, but you'd need to get a proton beam to have it's a bragg peak inside the fetus, absorbing almost all the dose and saving the mother, but it would require expensive machinery and very precise calculations and positioning

Not saying the child wasn't or couldn't have been harmed by radiation, but it didn't save the mother

Mao Zedong Thot posted:

my god i cant believe teh firefighters widow could mix up such basic sciennce what a LYING PIECE OF poo poo RUINING MY IMMERSION

Wild Bill posted:

I got this [paratrooper] tattoo after D-Day. Me and Johnny Martin got a pass for London. When you go on a pass overseas in England you hitchhike. All the trucks are going your way, they take you, then you get off and another truck picks you up. We wound up at an Air Force base, a U.S. Air Force base. We got something to eat and a couple of pilots come over to us and started talking to us and they said "You want to come to Scotland?" "You gotta be kidding!" they were fighter pilots, they had these jets, so Johnny got in one and I got in the other one. It took about twelve minutes, we got to Edinburgh Scottland. That's when we got the tattoos. Drunk as a skunk. If I was sober I never would have gotten it, but I was drunk. We had a good time up there. Edinburgh, 1944. Right after D-Day. Drunk. I would never get tattoos sober.

Phanatic posted:

Nobody's saying they're lying.

Here's an example from one of the milhist threads. This is Bill Guarnere, the dude from Band of Brothers who got his leg blown off in Bastogne, telling about how he got his tattoos when a friend of mine interviewed him for a photo book of veterans and their tats:


2-seater US jets in England in 1944 fast enough to get from London to Edinburgh in 12 minutes. Didn't happen. At least not that way. It probably wasn't a jet, maybe it was just a P-51 or a Spit. And it wasn't 12 minutes, but it was fast enough for a paratrooper used to flying in C-47s to seem really fast. Is Bill lying? No, he's not, but you can't take what he's saying as the literal truth, either.