Surviving Disaster

Legasov:
This is no longer the denial of the guilty. Their delusion is falling away with their blistered skin. No, this is the men above them. They are now the blind ones. To them, the truth is a greater threat than the invisible murderer that they know is on the loose.

Boris Scherbina:
What's that light?

Legasov:
It - it - it's the reactor. We're - we're looking in - into the reactor. We have to - we have to move. Go! Move us away! Just go!

Boris Scherbina:
Panic is worse than radiation.

Legasov:
It seems there's almost no-one in this room who understands what this means. It's on fire. The graphite moderator, which in itself is just - unbelievably radioactive, and what's left of the fuel core, are on fire. Now, that's about two and a half thousand tons of carbon, which, burning at one ton an hour will burn roughly for 3 months. And every day that it burns it will send into the atmosphere more radiation than has ever been released in - in all the nuclear accidents that have ever happened anywhere in the world all put together. Every day! For 3 months! You have my word that people that are asleep in their beds in this town tonight have effectively died today. As I speak, radiation is entering the bodies of everybody in this room, everybody outside for hundreds of miles. We can no longer pretend. It's criminal. And - and it's got to stop. And you [pointing at Boris Scherbina] have got to stop it.

Genaddy Shasharin:
The control room instruments are frozen. They began the test with only 18 control rods in the reactor.

Legasov:
18? What the hell were they playing at?

Genaddy Shasharin:
They're insisting that the AZ button was pressed, by the shift leader, Alex Akimov. But if that's the case then all the rods should be down in the reactor and they're not.

Legasov:
None of the rods are in at all?

Genaddy Shasharin:
Just the tips.

Legasov:
Oh sh*t. Ignalina.

Genaddy Shasharin:
Do you think this lot knew about Ignalina?

Legasov:
No, they couldn't have done. It was classified. We didn't tell them.