The HBO miniseries Chernobyl presents an indulging tale of drama and horror. The first episode (of five in total) especially gripped me with its consistently building tension. The episodes were well paced, the acting phenomenal and the cinematography stunning. So overall I can only recommend it to everyone. It was long since I enjoyed watching a series as much as I liked watching Chernobyl. And it led me to investigate more about the accident and its fallout.

Doing so however led me to discover that the miniseries, in retrospect, has a huge amount of fearmongering in it. This reaches from exaggerations to blatant misinformation about the situation. Now normally if a show is not as accurate, it wouldn't be a big deal. A short version of history that also wants to be compelling is bound to bend the truth at least a little here and there. You know, the cost of truthfulness have to be paid in order to have a narratively cohesive work of art that tries to capture people and not bore them to death. Normally everyone understands that, I think, however the HBO's miniseries Chernobyl has such a high production value and paid a lot of attention to detail many people believe that the miniseries presents a well-informed unbiased view of the events, which in fact it does not. There are many things wrong in this series which all seem to go into the direction of making the disaster and nuclear energy look worse (so it doesnt just randomly gets things wrong here or there but it seems more deliberate), which lead to people being misinformed about radiation and Chernobyl, which consequently can lead to many people making bad decisions for their lives and others.

These claims are for example: misreporting the actual death counts, stating unverified stories as fact (the bridge of death), stating physically impossible speculation as fact (the molten core thermos nuclear explosion), exaggerating the effects radiation has on the human body, misinformation about ARS( these kinds of untruths of unborn babies getting "infected" actually led to approx. 1 million unnecessary abortion in Europe after the Chernobyl accident and many children without parents suffering from ARS were rejected by society because people believed that they could "spread" their illness), not actually understanding how the nuclear reactor of Chernobyl works (their whole demonstration with the control rods and the reason they think the control rods are designed like that is utterly uninformed) and basically not giving any perspective of the situation but only focusing on the individuals that suffers (would you have guessed that 106 out of 134 first responders who got acute radiation sickness (ARS) survived it and some are still living to this day?).

As you can see, some of the believes that the HBO miniseries teaches can be quite harmful and are solely based on unscientific fear about radiation and nuclear power. Not to mention that the rejection of nuclear power today (which is one of the cleanest, safest, cheapest and best energy sources) and the consequent use of coal and gas, prolongs the reduction of carbon gases and will lead to a larger fallout of global warming, which is part due to propaganda pieces such as this.

So in conclusion the HBO Chernobyl series is a masterpiece of film but a horrifying propaganda piece which probably leads to opinions and believes that hurt people much more than the actually Chernobyl disaster ever could.