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Hello, I'm Matthew Price and this is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4,

a place where we ask one big question about one big story.

Today, how do we split fact from fiction when it comes to Chernobyl?

It's dramatic. It's new. It's scary. a drama on Sky Atlantic about the Chernobyl catastrophe.

And every atom of uranium is like a bullet,

penetrating everything in its path,

metal, concrete, flash.

Now Chernobyl holds over 3 trillion of these bullets.

But when Chernobyl happened 33 years ago, it was scary for real.

But first that explosion at a nuclear plant in the Soviet Union,

what caused it and how many people did it hurt.

We knew hardly anything about it in the days after.

Scanty information has come so far from the Soviets, but here's Peter Snow to help fill

out the gaps. It does now seem likely that sometime in the last couple of days there's been perhaps the worst accident in the short history of the world's nuclear power industry.

There had been an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in the Soviet Union,

and the Soviets were keeping it quiet.

But the fact that they've had to reveal it and admit that there are casualties suggest they're deeply worried about the scale of it.

So all we really did know was that radiation levels were rising in Western Europe.

When reports began coming in from other parts of Scandinavia,

increased levels of radioactivity,

Sweden began to suspect that the leak had occurred

...