https://jalopnik.com/chernobyl-s-cars-paint-a-fascinating-and-grim-picture-o-1835134720

The attention to authentic detail in this show is amazing.

It's too bad my friend Andrei wasn't still around, as he was not only very familiar with Soviet lyfe, but was actually at Chernobyl in the depicted timeframe. He would have loved this series.

I keep hearing this series is excellent.

I love it!

Great article!

The thing about radiation is that if a car goes near radioactive material then the car becomes radioactive and everything it passes also becomes radioactive. Helicopters are the worst for this, it takes over a billion years to decontaminate metal that is radioactive. If it is plutonium then it takes 52 Trillion zeros in years to decontaminate radiation from it completely. Everything that is radioactive has to be placed at one location and buried there in order to stop it spreading across a country.

My droog Andrei flew Mi-8s in the Chernobyl area, he wasn't tasked with trying to dump on the core but he was often close to the reactor area just the same.

He died of extremely aggressive cancer a few year ago.



^
Not his pic, although he did have some that were similar.

Before Chernobyl he was in Afghanistan, which wasn't a lot of fun either.

I rate it 15000 roentgen out of 3.6, must watch.

Thanks for sharing that story and I'm sorry to hear about your friend who passed away. His ordeal reminded me of what happened to the cast of the infamous "Conqueror" film with John Wayne where several of the cast members ended up dying premature deaths from cancer due to being exposed to radioactivity from the atomic bomb testing that was being done at the time.

I had to look up droog. The definition appears to be "a young man belonging to a street gang.". How does one acquire one of these?

Not too interested in the vehicles left behind myself (if that's even what this is about).

But it reminded me of a documentary I saw some years ago about the wildlife in the exclusion zone. So I googled it but cannot really tell which one it was. I think it was this one

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1832311/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl

As it was around the time that Stalker had recently come out and I was in to the whole thing, I found it very fascinating. The animals were thriving with no people around. What I saw was about as far from what I might have expected to see as I could imagine. What I took from it is that people are worse for our planet than even a nuclear meltdown. Off topic, but sort of related. The documentary was really fascinating and worth a look.

droog = drug = друг = friend

I have been watching the you tube videos of this mini-series. It does look very good. The scene were the one character is in the advanced stages of radiation poisoning is terrifying.

Having gone thru radiation therapy myself, I can't imagine any of us can comprehend the agonizing pain involved. I do believe you would be begging for the bullet.

Thanks.



"Droog" is Russian for friend, and the OP link is about vehicles used in the HBO Chernobyl miniseries, not the remaining rusting hulks in the present day exclusion zone.

Speaking of the exclusion zone and HBO series, apparently tourism to the zone has surged and also at least some in Russia were unhappy with the Western depiction of events and plan to create their own series.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/chernobyl-tourism-spikes-40-hbo-135152216.html

Thanks Crane, droog makes much more sense now