Midnight In Chernobyl

It was interesting to read Midnight In Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbotham, during this time of pandemic, because of the same things happening. In April of 1986, the worst nuclear disaster in human history occurred, but there were those in the Soviet Union's chain of command that wanted to downplay the seriousness of it, and were reluctant to evacuate the citizens of the nearby city of Pripyat. It sounds familiar--government officials, mostly to save their own hide, react slowly and ignorantly.

Midnight In Chernobyl reads like a thriller. Higginbotham starts with the construction of the plant, and notes how shoddy Soviet infrastructure was: "the construction of the reactors also suffered from the shoddy workmanship that plagued Soviet industry." Several characters are introduced, and it is at times hard to know the players without a scorecard, as the Russian names can be difficult to process. Here is one paragraph that shows it: "Perevozchenko, Proskuryakov, and Kudryavtsev remained on the ledge for only as long as Yuvchenko held the door: a minute at most. But even that was too long. All three received a fatal dose of radiation in a matter of seconds."

However, there are parts of this book that are incredibly lucid for the nontechnical person. Higginbotham patiently explains how nuclear reactors work, and later, much more hideously, the effects of radiation sickness. And after a while, some of the names start becoming familiar. Viktor Bryukhanov was the manager of the plant at the time, awakened by a call in the wee hours, his life never the same. He was jailed for his purported negligence, and accepted his fate meekly. Anatoly Dyatlov, on the other hand, was a suffer-no-fools chief engineer who bitterly fought his prosecution and incarceration. There are dozens of others who pass through the tale, all the way up to Mikhail Gorbachev, who would later opine that the Chernobyl disaster would be nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union.

The plant is in what is today the Ukraine. While I would be hard pressed to relate exactly what happened, the accident basically stemmed for a test that went wrong. The crux of the investigation following was whether the fault was with the operators or the design, but given the system of government, the operators took the blame. The design of the plant was a unique design to the Soviet Union: "If the report acknowledged the design flaws of the RBMK reactor, responsibility for the accident could be traced all the way up to the chief designer and the chairman of the Academy of Sciences. In a society where the cult of science had supplanted religion, the nuclear chiefs were among its most sanctified icons—pillars of the Soviet state. To permit them to be pulled down would undermine the integrity of the entire system on which the USSR was built. They could not be found guilty."

So, what did happen? There was a huge explosion in Unit 4 of the reactor, which allowed all sorts of radioactive material to escape. "At 1:24 a.m., there was a tremendous roar, probably caused as a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen that had formed inside the reactor space suddenly ignited. The entire building shuddered as Reactor Number Four was torn apart by a catastrophic explosion, equivalent to as much as sixty tonnes of TNT. The blast caromed off the walls of the reactor vessel, tore open the hundreds of pipes of the steam and water circuit, and tossed the upper biological shield into the air like a flipped coin; it swatted away the 350-tonne refueling machine, wrenched the high-bay bridge crane from its overhead rails, demolished the upper walls of the reactor hall, and smashed open the concrete roof, revealing the night sky beyond." When fallout was measured as far away as Sweden, the Soviets finally had to acknowledge that something happened, but downplayed it, saying everything was under control.

After the accident the attempts to stop the effects are documented. Basically, the area was entombed, and became known as the "sarcophagus." There were worries about the "China syndrome," that is, that the radioactive materials would burn its way through to the center of the Earth. "Reactor Number Four was gone. In its place was a simmering volcano of uranium fuel and graphite—a radioactive blaze that would prove all but impossible to extinguish."

Eventually the severity of the accident was understood, and the city of Pripyat was evacuated, for good as it turns out. Just how many people died because of the accident is unknown, but officially the Soviets recorded 31 deaths, including one man who was buried in rubble and whose remains are still there. The site, which has been reclaimed by nature, is now a tourist attraction.

As with many catastrophic events, the good and bad emerge. Many fireman rushed in, certainly not aware of what they were getting into, and died horrible deaths from radiation exposure. There was also mass panic by the citizenry, that echoes today: "Lines outside liquor stores quadrupled in length as people sought protection from radioactivity with red wine and vodka, forcing the Ukrainian deputy minister of health to announce, “There is no truth to the rumor that alcohol is useful against radiation.”" It appears no one suggested bleach as a deterrent.

Nuclear power was seriously curtailed after Chernobyl, but is still being used today. Higginbotham notes the problems at the Japanese plant Fukushima after the tsunami, but in comparison to fossil fuels, nuclear energy is a better alternative. The problem is that when things go wrong, they really go wrong. The other problem is that human beings seem to be very reluctant to learn from past mistakes.

This is certainly the definitive study of the accident, and is a terrific read. Scary, but terrific.