Cautionary lessons reiterated in riveting ‘Chernobyl’

Before Chernobyl became the ghost town that it is today, it was a beautiful, bustling city in the Kiev region just 16 kilometers away from Soviet-era Ukraine’s shared border with Belarus. It had 14,000 residents in those days, but the catastrophic nuclear disaster that occurred on April 25-26, 1986, in the now disestablished urban haven and the once-gorgeous towns around it left a trail of death and destruction in its wake. Considered the most devastating nuclear power plant accident in history, the so-called Chernobyl disaster is one of only two nuclear-energy accidents (the other being the Fukushima tragedy in 2011) given the maximum level-7 classification on the International Nuclear Event Scale. “Chernobyl,” the riveting five-episode HBO series that began its telecast yesterday, delivers an astutely paced race-against-time dramatization of one of the world’s worst man-made disasters. It wears its ugly scars on its sleeve like warnings that demand to be heeded and reiterated. The show’s theme is binge-wort