Firefighters are staying put to fight the fire. If they'd ran away from the disaster as fast as they could, they would have received less radiation exposure, and would have had greater chance of survival.

There is some limited public imagery of radiation injuries sustained by the firefighters. Its no where near the pepperoni pizza shown in the show but if you got it badly enough it is a three dimensional sunburn that kills you from the inside and waits for your body to catch up. I don't think there is any publicly available photography of the way acute radiation affects the skin but the phenomenon has been written about.

In true Soviet fashion some libraries had all material on radiation removed after the accident.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident (famous story which has become something of a creepypasta but does contain)

If you drink the FSB tea, I'd suggest finding a tall building.

This is publicly available, report of the nuclear incident in Georgia done by IAEA:

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81...

Basically, 3 lumberjacks went into the woods, found a strange metallic thing that was warm to the touch, slept next to it. The report has incredibly graphic images of how their skin looked due to radiation exposure, don't scroll down to that section if you cannot look at gore. But essentially - the issue wasn't the initial damage, the issue was that the affected areas just wouldn't heal no matter how many skin transplants were done, literally rotting away while alive.

If they had a basic understanding of radioactivity, they would have realised the object was likely radioactive (any strangely warm or glowing object probably is), stayed away from it, and they would have been in a far better place. Their injuries were from choosing to expose themselves to it for hours on end (as a heat source), as opposed to the brief initial exposure of discovery.

When I was a kid my dad told me a story about people finding glowing objects and taking them home and giving their whole family radiation poisoning. (In hindsight, I think he was probably describing the Goiânia accident in Brazil in 1987, which would have been recently in the media at the time he warned me). Like most people, I never found any glowing object but if I ever did I would have known to leave it be, get the hell out of there, and then call the authorities.

Yeah it's crazy since it happened "recently" - only in 2001. I'm guessing that if they were growing up in Georgia in 60-70s, they received very little to no education. Still, it's mind boggling that someone would find a randomly hot object in the woods and not think it's at least a little bit dangerous. There's nothing in normal life that behaves like this, it should ring that self preservation alarm bell.

>In true Soviet fashion

In true American fashion they paid a bit of money, and said come back in 5 year's everything will be totally normal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll

In the cold war, both sides where just disgusting, in fact the US was most of the time the aggressor and the soviets had to be on the defense side (because near absence of money flow)

I wasn't making any comparison in particular I just think that not allowing doctors to access the material needed to help their patients in order to suppress the flow of information is a good microcosm of soviet society.

The US was no saint during the Cold War but the Soviet Union was so much worse. Trivial Example: Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen are still alive, but the people they betrayed were executed in the basement of the Lubyanka - without trial.

>because near absence of money flow

Communism giveth, communism taketh away.

>Communism giveth, communism taketh away

See that's the problem, extreme capitalism is absolutely the same..talking about supporting the UAE, attacking Irak (because OIL...not Human rights) the US is the example of a absolute extreme money and might centrist Kingdom (with a better marketing than the soviets)

PS: Please ask the Vietnamese people if the US the French or the Soviets are the worst

PPS: And the US eats his children (witch are good ones) alive...what a shitty society you made, russia is just a tick worse nowadays. You as a nation had the chance to make this planet a better place, but no you spit out billionaires like a assembly line.

MANY victims of Hiroshima died like those firefighters died. Not all were vaporized instantly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...

(I know the premise you were responding to was standing right next to ground zero, where you would have been vaporized, but I think it's worth mentioning that not all of the people killed died like that.)

Since it's pedantic HN nuclear day again, actually it was an airburst.

Well since we're being pedantic, I didn't say anything about groundbursts. "Ground zero" in the context of Hiroshima refers to the hypocenter.

> In the case of an explosion above the ground, ground zero is the point on the ground directly below the nuclear detonation and is sometimes called the hypocenter (from Greek ὑπο- "under-" and center).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_zero