An American Chernobyl... (And the Week in Review)

Call it what it is...

Dear Fellow Expat:

In the HBO award-winning show Chernobyl, Emily Watson portrayed a confrontational Belarusian scientist trying to cut through the Soviet bureaucracy to stop a nuclear fallout that could have killed the entire European continent.

She was just one scientist on the show.

Still, she represented an amalgam of hundreds of nuclear scientists disturbed by the Soviet government's incompetence and initial efforts to deny the extent of the Chernobyl explosion. These scientists worked tirelessly to prevent an even worse crisis from happening and to ensure the safety of everyone in the world.

At the onset of the event, Watson’s character arrives at an office to meet with a Russian bureaucrat. She defiantly enters, stating that she knows that the nuclear plant’s core was exposed.

She deduced this after measuring radiation in the air and failing to reach the power plant over the phone. She warns of what would happen if they didn’t act quickly…