The Nuclear Heroes

On the evening of 19 October 1989, an explosion in the turbine hall of the Vandellòs I nuclear power plant, in Catalonia, triggered a fire that sent the reactor core temperature climbing toward catastrophe. With Chernobyl only three years in the past, the stakes were understood by everyone on site. A group of ordinary workers chose to stay.

This three-part documentary series reconstructs the events of that night through the firsthand testimonies of the men and women who lived them, many speaking publicly for the first time. Drawing on never-before-seen archive footage and cinematic reconstructions, director Álvaro Sanz, himself the son of a Vandellòs I worker and a resident of the plant's close-knit company village, recovers a story that has remained largely untold.

The series moves between the control room crisis and the tightly bound community of Hifrensa, a workers' village built around the plant, where the personal and the industrial were inseparable. The accident that was narrowly averted also ended that world. The Spanish government ordered the plant's permanent shutdown, and the village dissolved with it.

A story of professional courage and collective loss, rooted in a specific time and place, with consequences that reached far beyond either.