- Valery creates a detailed plan to decontaminate Chernobyl; Lyudmilla ignores warnings about her firefighter husband's contamination.
- Professor Valery Legasov realizes the situation is not getting under control, as the nomenclature and military seem to assume. At the part summit, he gets the green light from Gorbachov in person to do everything necessary, requisitioning all required means, to stop the open reactor contaminating not only the surrounding area (wide evacuation is still denied) but also the drinking water in the vast Dnjepr basin with 50 million residents. He encourages the Belorussian scientist to continue questions terminal survivors while they can talk to reconstruct how the disaster happened, yielding an assumed impossibility having occurred. When she's arrested by the KGB, Legasov gets her released on his responsibility. Meanwhile coals miners are assigned to dig a tunnel straight under the reactor, by hand despite scorching heat, so they go naked 'the ancestral way', assuming protective gear won't really give them a survival change.—KGF Vissers
- The basement is successfully drained of radioactive water and the three men sent to drain the basement have emerged alive and seemingly unharmed from the bowels of the plant. However, a nuclear meltdown has begun, threatening to contaminate local groundwater. The concrete padding under the reactors will hold for 6-8 weeks, but The nuclear fuel is hot enough to burn through it. After that the meltdown will breach the pads and reach the groundwater, which will contaminate the rivers, water supply for more than 50 million Soviet citizens. Shcherbina and Legasov convince Gorbachev that a heat exchanger is needed under the plant (which will require all of the liquid nitrogen in Soviet Union to work), for which the Soviet Union's Minister of Coal, Mikhail Shchadov (Michael Colgan) travels to Tula to recruit coal miners, led by Glukhov (Alex Ferns) (Mining crew chief), to excavate a tunnel in extremely adverse conditions. The miners are very untrusting of Shchadov but eventually agree. As they pass by him to board trucks taking them to Chernobyl, they pat Shchadov's suit, dirtying it with coal dust.
Glukhov arrives with his 100 men and is told by Legasov to excavate a 150 meter cavern 12 meters below the surface underneath the reactor core to install the heat exchanger. Glukhov is told the truth about radiation and agrees to dig the chamber. His men work without any protective gear or masks as Glukhov knows they are useless, since Shcherbina and Legasov are also not wearing them.
Meanwhile, Shcherbina warns Legasov that they are under KGB surveillance. Legasov sends Khomyuk to a Moscow hospital, where she finds Dyatlov uncooperative (who blames those above and below him for the accident) but learns from dying Toptunov (Robert Emms) and Akimov that the reactor exploded after Akimov initiated an emergency shutdown with the AZ-5 button, a scenario thought impossible since the belief is an RBMK reactor cannot explode after an emergency shutdown has been initiated. Toptunov, who is in a state of advanced physical decay, insists with his last words that the reactor simply exploded when the AZ-5 button was pressed. Akimov, also weakened and physically deteriorating, corroborates his partner's story.
Lyudmilla reaches Moscow in search of Vasily. Bribing her way into the hospital and lying about her pregnancy, Lyudmilla is allowed to visit Vasily but disobeys orders by hugging her husband and staying with him longer than instructed. His condition worsens; he becomes extremely weak, his skin becomes blotched with dark patches and eventually the painkillers he receives cease to work due to the deterioration of his nerve cells. As he suffers, a plastic curtain is placed around his bed to reduce any radioactivity he might be emitting. In direct defiance of the nurse's orders, Lyudmilla walks past the curtain and holds his hand, telling him he's going to be a father. She is later reprimanded by the nurse. Lyudmilla retorts, saying that nobody has come to see her husband for a prolonged period of time. The nurse counters, saying that her husband isn't the only patient the staff are dealing with and several are in even worse shape.
During Khomyuk's visit to the hospital, she sees Lyudmilla in very close proximity to Vasily, holding his hand to her stomach. Realizing Lyudmilla is pregnant, Khomyuk threatens to report everything to the committee and is arrested by KGB agents. She is jailed, but Legasov arranges her release by speaking directly to the head of the KGB, telling him that Khomyuk's expertise is valuable to the investigation. Legasov asks Khomyuk to continue pursuing the angle of why the reactor exploded after the emergency shutdown was initiated.
As Shcherbina and Legasov report to the Central Executive Committee their decontamination plans requiring the mass mobilization of liquidators. Legasov outlines the plan that an area of 2600 square kilometers around Chernobyl will have to be evacuated. An area of 100 sq km around the plant will have to be sanitized (animals shot, forests cut down and buried and the entire top soil ripped up and buried underneath the ground), and a containment structure will need to be built around the plant to prevent further leak of radiation. This all will require 750,000 men and result in tens of thousands of more casualties, including many deaths.
In a field Lyudmilla stands among relatives of other deceased acute radiation sickness victims as Vasily and his fellow firefighters are sealed in lead caskets and buried in a mass grave covered with concrete.
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