Please Remain Calm

Chernobyl 1×2

Ulana Khomyuk: Iodine 131... It's not military. It's uranium decay, U-235.

Ulana Khomyuk: Who's the next closest?
Vasily Ignatenko: It's Chernobyl, but that's not possible. They're 400 kilometers away.
Ulana Khomyuk: That's too far for eight milliroentgen. They'd have to be split open.

Boris Shcherbina: And as for the radiation—
Valery Legasov: Yes, 3.6 roentgen, which, by the way, is not the equivalent of one chest X-ray, but rather 400 chest X-rays. That number's been bothering me for a different reason, though. It's also the maximum reading on low-limit dosimeters. They gave us the number they had. I think the true number is much, much higher. If I'm right, this fireman was holding the equivalent of four million chest X-rays in his hand.

Valery Legasov: Um... An RBMK reactor uses uranium 235 as fuel. Every atom of U-235 is like a bullet traveling at nearly the speed of light, penetrating everything in its path: woods, metal, concrete, flesh. Every gram of U-235 holds over a billion trillion of these bullets. That's in one gram. Now, Chernobyl holds over three million grams, and right now, it is on fire.

---

Valery Legasov: That's three million billion trillion bullets in the... in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. Most of these bullets will not stop firing for 100 years. Some of them, not for 50,000 years.

Boris Shcherbina: How does a nuclear reactor work?
Valery Legasov: What?
Boris Shcherbina: It's a simple question.
Valery Legasov: It's hardly a simple answer.
Boris Shcherbina: Of course, you presume I'm too stupid to understand. So I'll restate: Tell me how a nuclear reactor works, or I'll have one of these soldiers throw you out of the helicopter.

General Pikalov: It's not three roentgen. It's 15,000. ...
Boris Shcherbina: What does that number mean?
Valery Legasov: It means the core is open. It means the fire we're watching with our own eyes is giving off nearly twice the radiation released by the bomb in Hiroshima. And that's every single hour. Hour after hour, 20 hours since the explosion, so 40 bombs worth by now. Forty-eight more tomorrow. And it will not stop. Not in a week, not in a month. It will burn and spread its poison until the entire continent is dead.

Boris Shcherbina: How do we put it out?
Valery Legasov: ... You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before.

Michail Gorbatchev: I have ten minutes, then I'm back on the phone apologizing to our friends, apologizing to our enemies... Our power comes from the perception of our power. Do you understand the damage this has done? Do you understand what's at stake?!

--
++ Quotes on the IMDb
+ Soundtracks