Open Wide, O Earth

Chernobyl 1×3

Valery Legasov: Forgive me. Maybe I've just spent too much time in my lab. Or maybe I'm just stupid. Is this really the way it all works? An uninformed, arbitrary decision that will cost who knows how many lives made by some apparatchik, some career party man?
Boris Shcherbina: I'm a career party man.

Pikalov: But the temperature is rising. And, uh... There's a spike in zirconium-95.
Valery Legasov: It's from the cladding on the fuel rods.
Boris Shcherbina: Meaning what?
Valery Legasov: The meltdown has begun.

Boris Shcherbina: And in order to do that, I'm told that we will need... all of the liquid nitrogen in the Soviet Union.
Michail Gorbatchev: Oh... All right.
Boris Shcherbina: Yeah, and of course, we'll also need--
Michail Gorbatchev: Whatever you need, you have it. That should be clear by now.

Valery Legasov: General Secretary. Um, Premier Ryzhkov has determined that--
Michail Gorbatchev: If he determined, then he determined. Look, Professor Legasov, you are there for one reason only. Do you understand? To make this stop. I don't want questions. I want to know when this will be over.
Valery Legasov: If you mean when will Chernobyl be completely safe, the half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,000 years. So perhaps we should just say, "Not within our lifetimes."

Ulana Khomyuk: I've worked the numbers over and over, presuming the worst possible conditions in an RBMK reactor. And I always get the same answer.
Valery Legasov: Which is?
Ulana Khomyuk: It's not possible.
Valery Legasov: And yet...

Valery Legasov: I'm not good at this, Boris. The lying.
Boris Shcherbina: Have you ever spent time with miners?
Valery Legasov: No.
Boris Shcherbina: My advice: tell the truth. These men work in the dark. They see everything.

Valery Legasov: Are they all like that?
Boris Shcherbina: They're all like that.

Boris Shcherbina: No, that went surprisingly well. You came off like a naive idiot. And naive idiots are not a threat.

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