The 1986 Chernobyl disaster has gone down as one of the biggest tragedies in history, with the effects still being felt to this day.

In this five-part drama, Chernobyl delves into the lives involved in the disaster, what caused it, and the first responders who risked their lives to save who they could.

Based in the Soviet Union, the story is based on the book Voices of Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, a Nobel laureate who collated the tales of Chernobyl locals and their experience of the disaster.

Here’s the full episode guide to the mini-series and how it plays out.

Chernobyl is available to watch now.

Sky is the UK’s exclusive home of Chernobyl, so it is not available on any other service.

The show is available on HBO in the US.

You can watch the series on Sky Atlantic, on demand via Sky Go, or by streaming on NOW.

The following stars appear in the mini-series:

• Jessie Buckley (Wicked Little Letters, Fargo) as Lyudmilla Ignatenko
• Jared Harris (The Crown, Mad Men) as Valery Legasov
• Stellan Skarsgård (Good Will Hunting, Nymphomaniac) as Boris Shcherbina
• Emily Watson (Gosford Park, Red Dragon) as Ulana Khomyuk
• Paul Ritter (Friday Night Dinner, Quantum of Solace) as Anatoly Dyatlov
• Adam Nagaitis (The Terror, The Commuter) as Vasily Ignatenko
• Con O'Neill (Our Flag Means Death, Happy Valley) as Viktor Bryukhanov
• Adrian Rawlins (Breaking the Waves, Mary and George) as Nikolai Fomin
• Sam Troughton (The Lazarus Project, Litvinenko) as Aleksandr Akimov
• Robert Emms (Andor, His Dark Materials) as Leonid Toptunov
• Karl Davies (Happy Valley, The Tower) as Viktor Proskuryakov
• Alex Ferns (The Batman, EastEnders) as Andrei Glukhov
• Ralph Ineson (The Jetty, The Witch) as Nikolai Tarakanov
• Barry Keoghan (Banshees of Inisherin, Saltburn) as Pavel Gremov
• Michael McElhatton (Game of Thrones, The Long Shadow) as Andrei Stepashin

Chernobyl is a mini-series and tells its story throughout five episodes, each running between 60 to 70 minutes.

It tracks life before, during, and after the disaster, with the series starting with Soviet Chemist Valery Legasov recording his life story before dying by suicide at his home.

On April 26, 1986, at 1:23 a.m., a reactor at Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant explodes. At the plant’s control room, Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov ignores fears that the core is exposed, which could be catastrophic, instead opting to have the core doused with water and the reactor’s fire extinguished by emergency services. In doing so, everyone responding to the explosion—including onlookers who have gathered to witness what’s happened—is exposed to lethal radiation.

In response, the city of Pripyat is put into lockdown, with connections to the outside world, including phone lines, also being cut off in a bid to suppress misinformation and stop a nationwide panic.

As responders begin to suffer from the effects of acute radiation poisoning (ARS), a young Valery Legasov is brought to the Kremlin to meet with USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev to discuss a plan of action.

In the hours after the explosion, Ulana Khomyuk, a nuclear physicist, detects a radiation spike in Minsk some 213 miles away and believes it’s connected to the Chernobyl explosion.

At a Pripyat hospital, a pregnant Lyudmilla Ignatenko discovers her husband, first responder Vasily Ignatenko, is being taken to hospital in Moscow after contracting ARS.

At the Kremlin, President Gorbachev meets with Soviet Central Committee and Deputy Chairman Boris Shcherbina, who continues to deny the core is exposed, as per Dyatlov’s original claims. However, Legasov is not convinced and urges Gorbachev to allow him to investigate.

While he is initially criticized for his claims, they are later proved true, but Legasov chooses to lie to civilians that the region is safe anyway, knowing the residents are going to die from their radiation exposure.

Shcherbina opts to evacuate Pripyat on learning the truth, before going with Legasov to smother the core fire with sand, unaware that the water reservoirs underneath are full and could cause a huge steam explosion due to the sand heating up.

Plant workers are sent to drain the reservoirs but are left in darkness when the radiation interferes with their lights.

Trapped in darkness, the three workers get to work using manual torchlights to drain the reservoirs.

Gorbachev authorizes a team of miners to further excavate beneath the core in order to install a heat exchanger, which if successful could prevent nuclear devastation and leaks into the area’s water.

Shcherbina informs Legasov they are being monitored by the KGB as he starts his own investigation into the cause of the explosion.

Lyudmilla arrives in Moscow to see her husband, with Vasily seemingly in better health—only to then be informed his body will soon effectively begin to melt from the inside as a result of his exposure, giving him just weeks to live.

Khomyuk discovers through her investigation and interviews with two men also suffering from ARS that the explosion was triggered by an emergency shutdown system known as Button AZ-5. This was meant to be impossible.

Following Vasily’s death, a devastated Lyudmilla is forced to watch as her husband is buried in a mass grave in a zinc casket and covered in concrete to prevent radiation spread.

Legasov demands the expansion of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone—a territorial area created for safety—be expanded, with the forests and wildlife needing to be decontaminated. All pets had to be put down.

Legasov and Shcherbina get to work with a German robot to try and clear nuclear graphite from the rooftop, but it is immediately unusable due to the radiation. As a result, thousands of men are enlisted to clear the debris by hand, working in 90-second shifts in an attempt to avoid poisoning.

Legasov also discovers the Kremlin was warned 10 years before the accident that Button AZ-5 causes a spike in nuclear reactivity, but this had been shielded by the Kremlin.

Khomyuk urges Legasov to expose this secret to international authorities, but he’s warned that he could be in danger for exposing State secrets, with Shcherbina telling him to make a deal with the KGB so the reactors can be fixed secretly.

Just 12 hours before the Chernobyl disaster, Bryukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov are seen choosing to delay a planned safety test, rather than scrap it as instructed.

They hoped the completion of the test would earn them promotions, but now they are considered the “fall guys” for one of the world’s biggest disasters.

Ahead of their trial, the KGB awards Legasov for hiding Button AZ-5’s design flaws from the International Atomic Energy Agency at a conference in Vienna. However, they tell him that design reforms need to wait until after the trio’s trial.

At trial, Legasov blames Bryukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov’s poor management for pushing the nuclear reactor to a near-meltdown. Untrusting of the KGB’s intentions, he then admits his testimony at the Vienna conference was a lie and that the trio were made to believe Button AZ-5 was a fail-safe due to omitted information by the Soviet State.

Legasov is stripped of all his titles and accolades as a result of his betrayal of the state, ultimately resulting in his suicide.