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The crew on a nuclear-powered Russian military submarine prevented a “planetary catastrophe,” according to a top naval officer who spoke at the funeral for the 14 sailors who died during a fire on the vessel. Captain Sergei Pavlov, an aide to the commander of Russia’s navy, said Sunday the sailors “saved the lives of their colleagues, saved the vessel and prevented a planetary catastrophe.” Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said there were no signs the incident could have caused a larger catastrophe. “As for the reactor, there are no problems with that,” he said. After days of secrecy about the...

Russian President Vladimir Putin disclosed on Thursday for the first time that a secret military submarine hit by a fatal fire three days ago was nuclear-powered, prompting Russia's defense minister to assure him its reactor had been safely contained. Russian officials have faced accusations of trying to cover up the full details of the accident that killed 14 sailors as they were carrying out what the defense ministry called a survey of the sea floor near the Arctic. Moscow's slow release of information about the incident has drawn comparisons with the opaque way the Soviet Union handled the 1986 Chernobyl...

I just finished watching the amazing HBO miniseries "Chernobyl." It's one of the finest series ever produced. The biggest takeaway is how socialists and communists lie. It's in their DNA. They lie about everything. And those lies are often so absurd they get themselves in trouble. When it came to Chernobyl, the Soviet communist propaganda machine lied about everything. Officials denied there was any problem in the first place. Then they denied it was a complete meltdown. They denied nearby towns had to be evacuated. They denied the KGB knew there was a potential problem long before it happened but...

My brother told me that the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl” was very good and worth watching.I haven’t seen it yet so this is not a review (although Gerard once told me I’d be a pretty poor journalist if I couldn’t write a review of a Sundance film without seeing it first) but a review of the reviews I’ve read. Most are positive, that indicate it is a well-made, compelling historical documentary that gets a few things wrong but most things about the disaster right. A good number of the reviews however are quick to point out that Chernobyl is not an...

Belarus's Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich rolled her eyes when the creators of Chernobyl approached her for permission to use material from her book "Voices From Chernobyl" for the hit HBO miniseries. "I told my agent, 'Galya, they're going to make another film...' I was far from convinced. The only thing that convinced me, maybe, was the fee..." However..."It really impressed me. It is a very strong film. There is something there in the aesthetics that touches the modern consciousness. There is a dose of fear. There is reasoning. There is beauty. That is something that has always worried me about...

Furious at the breakout success of the HBO series Chernobyl, Russia is planning to make its own series portraying the nuclear disaster as the work of an American CIA operative. Russian television broadcaster NTV announced that it had commissioned the series, and principal photography has already begun in Belarus under director Alexei Muradov. In response to the HBO series' depiction of Soviet bureaucrats bungling the response both during and after the 1986 nuclear accident in the Ukrainian SSR, the Russian version plans to tell the tale of a heroic KGB agent trying to thwart a supposed CIA sabotage plot.

Chernobyl, site of the world's deadliest nuclear accident, is now a surprisingly popular tourist destination. Ukrainian officials opened the area to tourists nearly a decade ago, declaring that visits were safe, though tours would be strictly regulated. When the Chernobyl reactor exploded, it released deadly levels of radiation, but radioactive fallout wasn't distributed evenly across the surrounding area, due to weather conditions and changing winds. Locations that were farther away from the reactor became radioactive hotspots, "and there were villages that were reasonably close to the plant that didn't get much contamination," … Even within villages, radiation was unequally distributed...

Chernobyl shows what happens when authority and appearance are more important than science and truth. “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. When the truth offends, we lie and we lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth and sooner or later, that debt is paid.” - Valery Legasov (1936 - 1988)

Furious at the breakout success of the HBO series Chernobyl, Russia is planning to make its own series portraying the nuclear disaster as the work of an American CIA operative. Russian television broadcaster NTV announced that it had commissioned the series, and principal photography has already begun in Belarus under director Alexei Muradov. In response to the HBO series' depiction of Soviet bureaucrats bungling the response both during and after the 1986 nuclear accident in the Ukrainian SSR, the Russian version plans to tell the tale of a heroic KGB agent trying to thwart a supposed CIA sabotage plot. 'One...

“Chernobyl,” the HBO mini-series that ends Monday in the U.S., isn’t easy to watch as someone who lived in the Soviet Union in 1986 and who has since visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone. But, like many of my compatriots, I’m watching it — and thinking it should have been made in Russia, Ukraine or Belarus, not by an American entertainment channel. There are two reasons for this. One is authenticity — despite a valiant attempt at it, the series falls short. But the other, more important reason is that this kind of harsh sermon on the importance of listening to...

It seems every major Russian media outlet had to chime in about the “Chernobyl” TV series by HBO. Although the foreign program airs only online to paying viewers, the show has become something of a national sensation in Russia where the pro-Kremlin media have launched a mini-crusade against it. Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP), Russia’s most popular newspaper, raised suspicions that competitors of state-atomic center Rosatom were using the series to tarnish this country’s image as a nuclear power. Argumenty i Fakty...dismissed the show as “a caricature and not the truth.” “The only things missing are the bears and accordions!” quipped Stanislav...

Conservative commentator Dan Bongino schooled producer Craig Mazin on the “failure of socialism” Thursday after the creator and writer of HBO’s “Chernobyl” praised a tweet by horror icon Stephen King that compared the Soviet-era disaster to Donald Trump’s presidency. The feud started early Thursday after Mr. King wrote that it’s “impossible” for him to watch “Chernobyl” without thinking of the current president. Stephen King @StephenKing: "It's impossible to watch HBO's CHERNOBYL without thinking of Donald Trump; like those in charge of the doomed Russian reactor, he's a man of mediocre intelligence in charge of great power--economic, global--that he does not...

In the second episode of "Chernobyl," ...A large fire rages in the ruins of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. ... Deadly radioactive dust has drifted all the way out of the Soviet Union and into Sweden. The air above the reactor literally glows where the uranium core has become exposed. And the people leading the disaster response decide to dump thousands of tons of sand and boron on the core. But why did first responders use sand and boron? And if a similar nuclear disaster were to occur in 2019, is this what firefighters would...

The first incident actually occurred two weeks before World War I, May 12, 1914, in the village of Hrushiv. Twenty-two people, who were moving fields near the local church of the Holy Trinity, all witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary. She said to them, There will be a war. Russia will become a godless country. The Ukraine, as a nation, will suffer terriby for eighty years - and will have to live through the world wars, but it will be free afterwards."

19 stunning photos show what the radioactive area inside the Chernobyl nuclear plant looks like 32 years after the explosionThe Chernobyl nuclear power plant was the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. As many as 150,000 people in the area were permanently relocated, and an estimated 4,000 clean-up workers got radiation poisoning. Experts say that more than 70,000 people experienced severe poisoning from the accident on April 26, 1986.On April 26, 1986, a radioactive release many times as large as the that of the Hiroshima bomb occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet...

At the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, work is almost finished on a huge new solar plant that's set to provide one megawatt of renewable power for the local electricity grid. The new plant sits just a hundred metres (328 feet) from the Object Shelter, nicknamed the "sarcophagus", a sealed metal dome designed to prevent further radiation leakage from the remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The blast that occurred on 26 April 1986 remains one of two most disastrous nuclear accidents in history alongside Fukushima, but the installation of these solar panels offers hope that...

During the night of 12-13 October it had rained throughout, soaking the ground and the pilgrims who make their way to Fátima from all directions by the thousands. By foot, by cart and even by car they came, entering the bowl of the Cova from the Fátima-Leiria road, which today still passes in front of the large square of the Basilica. From there they made their way down the gently slope to the place where a trestle had been erected over the little holm oak of the apparitions. Today on the site is the modern glass and steel Capelhina (little...

Energy independence, especially if you don’t particularly like the country you currently depend on, is a very strong motivator for the adoption of renewable energy. Ukraine has recently become a great case in point, after the announcement that it planned to turn part of the uninhabitable zone around the Chernobyl power plant into a large-scale solar farm. Chernobyl, the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in the history of the world, cannot be used for much: farming is impossible, as are most other productive human activities. But there is a lot of sunshine in the area, which can...

Telling the story of Chernobyl in numbers 30 years later involves dauntingly large figures and others that are even more vexing because they're still unknown. A look at numbers that hint at the scope of the world's worst nuclear accident, the explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986: — More than 2 billion euros ($2.25 billion): The amount of money being spent by an internationally funded project to build a long-term shelter over the building containing Chernobyl's exploded reactor. Once the structure is in place, work will begin to remove the reactor and the...

On the edge of Belarus' Chernobyl exclusion zone, down the road from the signs warning "Stop! Radiation," a dairy farmer offers his visitors a glass of freshly drawn milk. Associated Press reporters politely decline the drink but pass on a bottled sample to a laboratory, which confirms it contains levels of a radioactive isotope at levels 10 times higher than the nation's food safety limits.