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Started reading
July 10, 2024
More than eighty years later, Curie’s laboratory notes remain so radioactive that they are kept in a lead-lined box.
The day after the Leningrad meltdown, the Soviet Union’s Council of Ministers gave its final approval to construct a second pair of RBMK-1000 units in Chernobyl, expanding the station’s projected output to an impressive 4,000 megawatts.
In 1980 NIKIET completed a confidential study that listed nine major design failings and thermohydraulic instabilities which undermined the safety of the RBMK reactor. The report made it clear that accidents were not merely possible under rare and improbable conditions but also likely in the course of everyday operation. Yet they took no action to redesign the reactor or even to warn plant personnel of its potential hazards.
The temperature inside the reactor rose to 4,650 degrees centigrade—not quite as hot as the surface of the sun.
They heard the dispatcher shout that there was a fire at the nuclear plant and looked over just in time to see a giant mushroom-shaped cloud blossoming into the sky above Units Three and Four, less than five hundred meters away—two minutes by road.
“Tolik, what is it?” one of the men asked. “Lads, it’s the guts of the reactor,” he said. “If we survive until the morning, we’ll live forever.”
A fatal dose of radiation is estimated at around 500 rem—roentgen equivalent man—or the amount absorbed by the average human body when exposed to a field of 500 roentgen per hour for sixty minutes. In some places on the roof of Unit Three, lumps of uranium fuel and graphite were emitting gamma and neutron radiation at a rate of 3,000 roentgen an hour. In others, levels may have reached more than 8,000 roentgen an hour: there, a man would absorb a lethal dose in less than four minutes.
