Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself,

associate editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Hi, I'm Toby Young, one of Quilet's London-based editors.

The HBO series, Chernobyl, about the nuclear accident in the Soviet Union in 1986 is now the top rated show of

all time on the IMDb and has been lavished with praise. No piece of dramatized

non-fiction has ever felt this authentic, gushed the TV critic of the Irish independent.

But according to nuclear expert and Colette contributor Michael Schellenberger,

Schoenberger, Schenobel plays fast and loose with the facts, even by the standards of the dachudrama genre.

The series gives the impression that tens of thousands of people died, radiation poisoning is contagious and the

pregnant wife of a firefighter only survived exposure to her infected husband

because her unborn baby absorbed the radiation acting as her human shield.

None of these things are true.

I spoke to Michael, a Time magazine Hero of the Environment for the Colette Podcast.

Michael, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to Colette.

I read your piece in Forbes about Chernobyl and I think

it's fair to say that you weren't a huge fan of the series. Do you want to tell

...