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

by Adam Higginbotham

forbidden islands of Novaya Zemlya, high in the Arctic Circle and ground zero for the detonation of the terrible Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear device in history.

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, crushed, or incinerated in the firestorm that followed the blast wave. But by the end of the year, another twenty-five thousand men, women, and children would also sicken and die from their exposure to the radiation liberated by the world’s first atom bomb attack.

The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants.

All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women.

Radiation is invisible and has neither taste nor smell. Although it’s yet to be proved that exposure to any level of radiation is entirely safe, it becomes manifestly dangerous when the particles and waves it gives off are powerful enough to transform or break apart the atoms that make up the tissues of living organisms. This high-energy radiance is ionizing radiation.

Alpha particles are relatively large, heavy, and slow moving and cannot penetrate the skin; even a sheet of paper could block their path. But if they do manage to find their way inside the body by other means—if swallowed or inhaled—alpha particles can cause massive chromosomal damage and death.

Polonium 210, a powerful alpha emitter, is one of the carcinogens in cigarette smoke. It was also the poison slipped into the cup of tea that killed former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Beta particles are smaller and faster moving than alpha particles and can penetrate more deeply into living tissue, causing visible burns on the skin and lasting genetic damage.

Beyond a range of ten feet, beta particles can cause little damage, but they prove dangerous if ingested in any way. Mistaken by the body for essential elements, beta-emitting radioisotopes can become fatally concentrated in specific organs:

Gamma rays—high-frequency electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light—are the most energetic of all. They can traverse large distances, penetrate anything short of thick pieces of concrete or lead, and destroy electronics. Gamma rays pass straight through a human being without slowing down, smashing through cells like a fusillade of microscopic bullets.

Severe exposure to all ionizing radiation results in acute radiation syndrome (ARS), in which the fabric of the human body is unpicked, rearranged, and destroyed at the most minute levels. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, hemorrhaging, and hair loss, followed by a collapse of the immune system, exhaustion of bone marrow, disintegration of internal organs, and, finally, death.

Wilhelm Roentgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895, saw the bones of his hand projected on the wall of his laboratory during the course of an experiment and was intrigued.

in the woods of North Georgia. At the touch of a button, the reactor could be raised from its shielding to ground level, exposing everything within a three-hundred-meter radius to a lethal dose of radiation. In June 1959 the Radiation Effects Reactor was brought up to full power and unsheathed for the first time, killing almost everything in the vicinity stone dead: bugs fell from the air, and small animals and the bacteria living in and upon them were exterminated, in a phenomenon the technicians called “instant taxidermy.”

The effect on plants varied: oak trees turned brown, yet crabgrass remained strangely unaffected; pine trees appeared to be the hardest hit of all. The changes in objects caught in the reactor’s field seemed equally mysterious: clear Coca-Cola bottles turned brown, hydraulic fluid coagulated into chewing gum, transistorized equipment stopped working, and rubber tires became rock hard.

the USSR tested its first thermonuclear device—a hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more destructive than the atom bomb—and both emerging superpowers became theoretically capable of wiping out humanity entirely. Even Kurchatov was shaken by the power of the new weapon he had created, which had turned the surface of the earth to glass for five kilometers around ground zero.

The simplest form of nuclear reactor requires no equipment at all. If the right quantity of uranium 235 is gathered in the presence of a neutron moderator—water, for example, or graphite, which slows down the movement of the uranium neutrons so that they can strike one another—a self-sustaining chain reaction will begin, releasing molecular energy as heat.

ancient subterranean deposits of uranium found in the African nation of Gabon, where groundwater acted as a moderator. There, self-sustaining chain reactions began underground two billion years ago, producing modest quantities of heat energy—an average of around 100 kilowatts, or enough to light a thousand lightbulbs—and continued intermittently for as long as a million years, until the available water was finally boiled away by the heat of fission.

With the rods inserted all the way into the reactor, the core remains in a subcritical state; as they are withdrawn, fission increases slowly until the reactor becomes critical—and can then be maintained in that state and adjusted as necessary. Withdrawing the control rods farther, or in greater numbers, increases reactivity and thus the amount of heat and power generated, while inserting them farther has the opposite effect.

To generate electricity, the uranium fuel inside a reactor must become hot enough to turn water into steam but not so hot that the fuel itself starts to melt. To prevent this, in addition to control rods and a neutron moderator, the reactor requires a coolant to remove excess heat.

A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.

the physicists’ early success in taming the power of the peaceful atom made them dangerously overconfident. They began using gamma rays to extend the shelf life of chicken and strawberries, they built mobile nuclear reactors mounted on tank treads or designed to float around the Arctic, and, like their US counterparts, they designed atomic-powered aircraft. But they also used nuclear weapons to put out fires and excavate underground caverns, restricting the size of their explosions only when the seismic shock began to destroy nearby buildings.

President Jimmy Carter—who had served as a nuclear engineer in the US Navy