Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

At 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a fission weapon containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein’s equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second. Some seventy-eight thousand people died instantly, or immediately afterward—vaporized,

Adding to or removing neutrons from the nucleus of a stable atom results in an unstable isotope. But any unstable isotope will try to regain its equilibrium, throwing off parts of its nucleus in a quest for stability—producing either another isotope or sometimes a different element altogether. For example, plutonium 239 sheds two protons and two neutrons from its nucleus to become uranium 235. This dynamic process of nuclear decay is radioactivity; the energy it releases, as atoms shed neutrons in the form of waves or particles, is radiation.

A biological shield, a shallow stainless steel drum seventeen meters across and three meters deep, known as Structure E—or, more affectionately, Elena—sat on top of the vault like a giant lid. Filled with pebbles and rocks of serpentinite and nitrogen gas, Elena weighed two thousand tonnes—as much as six fully laden jumbo jets—and was held in place almost entirely by gravity.

Worse accidents were theoretically possible, of course: engineering calculations suggested that if more than 2—and as few as 3 or 4—of the 1,600 pressure tubes ruptured simultaneously, the sudden release of high-pressure steam would be enough to lift all two thousand tonnes of Elena and the pyatachok off their mounts, severing every one of the remaining steam lines and pressure tubes and resulting in a devastating explosion. Yet the designers saw no need to prepare for such a calamity, which they regarded as outside the realm of reasonable probability. Nonetheless, they granted the scenario its own designation: the beyond design-basis accident.

Dollezhal and the technicians of NIKIET believed that suddenly cutting off the electricity generated by the reactor would be disruptive to the operation of the Soviet grid. And they thought that such an immediate shutdown would be necessary only in the extremely unlikely event of a total loss of external power to the plant. So they designed the AZ-5 system to only gradually reduce the reactor’s power to zero. Rather than dedicated emergency motors, the system was driven by the same electric servos that moved the manual reactor control rods, used by the operators to manage reactor power during normal operation. Starting from their fully withdrawn position above the reactor, it would take between eighteen and twenty-one seconds for the AZ-5 rods

to descend completely into the core; the designers hoped that the rods’ slow speed would be compensated for by their great number. But eighteen seconds is a long time in neutron physics—and an eternity in a nuclear reactor with a high positive void coefficient.

When Steinberg saw steam rising from the top of the vent stack, he knew it meant trouble: a broken pipe inside the reactor at least, and certainly a release of radiation. He picked up the phone. But when he got through to the control room of Unit One to warn the operators there to shut down the reactor, the shift supervisor brushed him off. When Steinberg persisted, the supervisor hung up on him. The engineer gathered his staff and waited to be summoned for the emergency. But no call came. Almost six hours later, at midnight, he and his men got into their cars and drove home to Pripyat.

of the control rods themselves, an unintended consequence of NIKIET’s desire to “save neutrons” and make the reactor more economical to run. Like all the manual control rods used to manage the reactor during normal operation, the AZ-5 emergency rods contained boron carbide, a neutron poison that gobbles slow neutrons to reduce the chain reaction. But even when fully withdrawn from their water-filled control channels, the tips of the rods were designed to remain at the ready, just inside the active zone of the reactor—where, if they contained boron carbide, they would have a poisoning effect, creating a slight but constant drag on power output. To stop this from happening, the rods were tipped with short lengths of graphite, the neutron moderator that facilitates fission. When a scram shutdown began and the AZ-5 rods began their descent into the control channels, the graphite displaced neutron-absorbing water—with the effect of initially increasing the

reactivity of the core. Only when the longer boron-filled part of the rod followed the graphite tip through the channel did it begin dampening reactivity. It was an absurd and chilling inversion in the role of a safety device, as if the pedals of a car had been wired in reverse, so that hitting the brakes made it accelerate instead of slowing down.

The temperature inside the reactor rose to 4,650 degrees centigrade—not quite as hot as the surface of the sun.

“There’s a fire in Unit Four,” he said. Every man was needed at once. Khmel told him to wait while he put on

his uniform, then followed him downstairs to the UAZ jeep waiting on the street. On his way out, the young lieutenant snatched the half-empty bottle of Sovietskoe shampanskoye from the kitchen table. As the UAZ yawed into the sharp left-hand bend on Lesi Ukrainki Street, Khmel held tight to the bottle. He drained it to the dregs. Whatever the emergency, there was no need to waste good Soviet champagne.

Turbine engineer Yuri Korneyev was busy shutting down Turbine Number Eight when Anatoly Baranov, the shift electrician, ran in. Baranov began displacing the hydrogen in both Number Seven and Number Eight turbine generators with nitrogen, averting the possibility of a further explosion. By the time they had finished, an eerie silence had fallen around them and their lifeless machinery. They stepped outside onto a small balcony, to smoke. Only much later did they discover the cost of their cigarette break: the street beneath them was scattered with blocks of reactor graphite, which irradiated them as they rested at the railing.

The evacuation began five days later, sweeping up 363,000 children, as well as tens of thousands of nursing and expectant mothers, in an exodus of a half million people—the equivalent of a fifth of Kiev’s total population. It was a logistical task that dwarfed the initial effort to evacuate the thirty-kilometer zone and, from the outset, was overshadowed by the specter of panic.

Despite widespread failures and carelessness—particularly the belated provision of safe limits for the population’s radiation exposure—90,000 people had been evacuated successfully from the Ukrainian areas of the thirty-kilometer zone.

Although the industrious Ukrainian sportsmen would eventually manage to eliminate a total of twenty thousand agricultural and domestic animals inside the thirty-kilometer zone, it proved impossible to kill them all. Some dogs managed to escape beyond the perimeter and were fed and adopted by the liquidators they found camped there. The soldiers may have been heedless of the radiation the animals brought with them but nevertheless christened them with bitter new names, more appropriate to their changed environment: Doza or Rentgen, Gamma and Dozimetr.

Eventually whole villages would be bulldozed flat and buried, their locations marked with triangular metal signs bearing the universally recognized trefoil symbol indicating a radioactive hazard.

Even the most gentle summer breeze recirculated dust carrying alpha- and beta-emitting particles into the air. Every rain shower washed radiation from the clouds and flushed more long-lived nuclear isotopes into the ponds and streams. The arrival of autumn would send radioactive leaves skittering across the ground. The Pripyat marshes—the largest swamp in Europe—had become a massive sponge for strontium and cesium, and the vast stretches of agricultural land proved too large to be scraped clean even by squadrons of earth-moving machines. Only ten square kilometers of the zone would ever be truly decontaminated. A total cleanup would have required nearly six hundred million tonnes of topsoil to have been removed and buried as nuclear waste. And, even with the seemingly unlimited manpower at the disposal of the Soviet Union, this was regarded as simply impossible.

The government commission calculated that cleaning the city to make it habitable once more would require a dedicated force of 160,000 men. The price of such an operation would be unimaginable. “Forget it,” the physicists told her. “You will never return to Pripyat.”

Collectively, the six men stood accused of negligence in conducting a dangerous and unsanctioned experiment on Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, resulting in the total destruction of the unit, the release of radioactive fallout, the evacuation of 116,000 individuals from two separate cities and dozens of villages, and the

hospitalization of more than two hundred victims of radiation sickness, of whom at least thirty were already dead. The court also heard that the Chernobyl plant had suffered a long history of accidents that had not been addressed or even reported and that what had been regarded as one of the best and most advanced nuclear installations in the USSR had, in fact, operated constantly on the edge of catastrophe as a result of its lax and incompetent management.

Two weeks after Legasov’s death, the Soviet minister of health delivered the opening address of an international conference on the medical consequences of the accident, convened in Kiev and attended by representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization (WHO). For the first time, Soviet scientists admitted that 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at the time of the disaster. Of these, 696,000 had been examined by Soviet medical authorities by the end of 1986. Yet the official tally of deaths ascribed to the disaster to date remained the same as that announced the previous year: 31.

In February 1989, almost three years after the accident, a prime-time report on Vremya revealed to the Soviet people that the true extent of radioactive contamination beyond the perimeter of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone had been covered up—and that the total area of contamination outside the zone was, in fact, even larger than that within it.

the most heavily radioactive hot spots lay as far as three hundred kilometers from the station, across the border in Belarus, in the districts of Gomel and Mogilev, where witnesses had watched black rain fall in April and May 1986. The land was so poisoned that the Belarusian government estimated another hundred thousand people would have to be evacuated, and planned to request the equivalent of $16 billion in further aid from Moscow.

As the third anniversary of the disaster approached, Moscow News reported from a collective farm in the Zhitomir region of Ukraine, forty kilometers west of the Exclusion Zone, where radioactive hot spots of strontium 90 and cesium 137 had been discovered. Farmers in the area had observed a steep rise in the number of birth defects in their livestock since the accident, describing piglets with froglike eyes and malformed skulls, and calves born without legs, eyes, or heads. One member of a team visiting from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev told the press their findings were “terrifying” and insisted the region be evacuated immediately.

The Soviet economy, after decades of spending on the Cold War arms race, was now staggering under the burden of the botched market reforms of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the high price of withdrawing and demobilizing troops from Afghanistan, and the collapse in the international oil market. And the financial cost of Chernobyl—the

continued to rise. The price for the construction and operation of the Sarcophagus alone was 4 billion rubles, or almost $5.5 billion. One estimate put the eventual bill for all aspects of the disaster at more than $128 billion—equivalent to the total Soviet defense budget for 1989.

By the beginning of 1991, as many as six hundred thousand men and women from across the Soviet Union had taken part in cleanup work in the radioactive netherworld surrounding the site of Reactor Number Four and would be officially recognized as Chernobyl liquidators. In acknowledgment of their service, many were issued special identity cards and an enameled medal depicting the Greek letters for alpha, beta, and gamma surrounding a scarlet drop of blood. All understood that, as with the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, their sacrifices had earned them a lifetime of care from their motherland.

Together, by 2005, the contiguous parts of the Belarusian and Ukrainian zones made up a total area of more than 4,700 square kilometers of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus, all of it rendered officially uninhabitable by radiation.

The government in Kiev was still plotting the future of the forbidden zone when, on March 11, 2011, the news came in from the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. The disaster involving the three General Electric–built reactors on the northeastern coast of Honshu followed a now familiar course, this time played out live on television: a loss of coolant led to reactor meltdown, a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas, and several catastrophic explosions. No one was killed or injured by the immediate release of radiation, but three hundred thousand people were evacuated from the surrounding area, which will remain contaminated for decades to come. During the early stages of the emergency cleanup, it became clear that robots were incapable of operating in the highly radioactive environment inside the containment buildings of the plant. Japanese soldiers were sent in to do the work, in another Pyrrhic victory of bio-robots over technology.

He described the enduring costs of the accident, the 115,000 people he said would never return to their homes in the Exclusion Zone, the 2.5 million more living on land contaminated by radionuclides, and the hundreds of thousands of disabled Chernobyltsi who continued to require support from the state and society.

12 The Sarcophagus under construction in mid-October 1986. The upper levels of the Cascade Wall are being backfilled through the pipes of a chain of pumping trucks; on the right, a caterpillar-tracked Demag crane is at work on the tower which will anchor the western end of the building.

13 The completed Sarcophagus in November 1986.

15 One of the equipment graveyards to which buses, fire trucks, helicopters, armored vehicles, and construction equipment—too contaminated to be removed from the exclusion zone surrounding the plant—were consigned after the accident. By 1997, according to one estimate, the total losses resulting from the accident had reached $128 billion. 16 The “Elephant’s Foot,” the huge congealed mass of once-molten sand, uranium fuel, steel, and concrete, found in the autumn of 1986 by the scientists of the Chernobyl Complex Expedition in the basement beneath the ruins of Reactor Number Four. It remained so radioactive that less than five minutes in its presence was enough to guarantee an agonizing death.