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

by Adam Higginbotham

At the dawn of the 1970s, in a bid to meet its surging need for electricity and to catch up with the West, the USSR embarked upon a crash program of reactor building. Soviet scientists had once claimed to lead the world in nuclear engineering and astonished their capitalist counterparts in 1954 by completing the first reactor to generate commercial electricity. But since then, they had fallen hopelessly behind. In July 1969, as US astronauts made their final preparations to land on the moon, the Soviet minister of energy and electrification called for an aggressive expansion of nuclear construction. He set ambitious targets for a network of new plants across the European part of the Soviet Union, with giant, mass-produced reactors that would be built from the Gulf of Finland to the Caspian Sea.

According to Soviet planning regulations, Pripyat was separated from the plant itself by a “sanitary zone” in which building was prohibited, to ensure that the population would not be exposed to fields of low-level ionizing radiation. But Pripyat remained close enough to the plant to be reached by road in less than ten minutes—just three kilometers as the crow flies. And as the city grew, its residents began to build summer houses in the sanitary zone, each happy to disregard the rules in exchange for a makeshift dacha and a small vegetable garden.

In keeping with the Soviet weakness for gigantomania, the RBMK was both physically larger and more powerful than almost any reactor yet built in the West, each one theoretically capable of generating 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve at least a million modern homes.

By the time the young director began work in Chernobyl in 1970, the Socialist economic experiment was going into reverse. The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption—the start of what would come to be called the Era of Stagnation. Shortages and bottlenecks, theft and embezzlement blighted almost every industry. Nuclear engineering was no exception. From the beginning, Brukhanov lacked construction equipment. Key mechanical parts and building materials often turned up late, or not at all, and those that did were often defective.

The quality of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building projects throughout the nation’s power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as “preinstallation overhaul.” Upon delivery from the factory, each piece of new equipment—transformers, turbines, switching gear—was stripped down to the last nut and bolt, checked for faults, repaired, and then reassembled according to the original specifications, as it should have been in the first place. Only then could it be safely installed. Such wasteful duplication of labor added months of delays and millions of rubles in costs to any construction project.

Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them. By the midseventies, this blind conformism had smothered individual decision-making at all levels of the state and Party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines, too.

So when the pressures of the mammoth task he faced in Chernobyl became too much for him, he simply decided to quit. Yet when Brukhanov arrived in Kiev that day in July 1972, his Party-appointed supervisor from the Energy Ministry took his letter of resignation, tore it up in front of him, and told him to get back to work. After that, the young director recognized that there was no escape. Whatever else his job might require, his most important task was simply to obey the Party—and to implement their plan by any means he could.

When Units Five and Six of the Chernobyl station came online in 1988, Brukhanov would preside over the largest nuclear power complex on earth. Under his direction, the Chernobyl plant—by then formally known as the V. I. Lenin Nuclear power station—had become a prize posting for nuclear specialists from all over the Soviet Union. Many of them came straight from MEPhI–the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute, the Soviet counterpart to MIT.

The average age of the population was twenty-six, and more than a third of them were children. The young families had access to five schools, three swimming pools, thirty-five playgrounds, and beaches on the sandy banks of the river.

It existed in an economic bubble; an oasis of plenty in a desert of shortages and deprivation. The food stores were better stocked than those even in Kiev, with pork and veal, fresh cucumbers and tomatoes, and more than five different types of sausage. In the Raduga—or Rainbow—department store, Austrian-made dining sets and even French perfume were available to shoppers, all without having to spend years on a waiting list. There was a cinema, a music school, a beauty parlor, and a yacht club.

A dedicated Socialist, Gorbachev believed that the USSR had lost its way but could be led to the utopia of True Communism by returning to the founding principles of Lenin.

When the building materials specified by the architects of the Chernobyl station had proved unavailable, Brukhanov was forced to improvise: the plans called for fireproof cables, but when none could be found, the builders simply did the best they could. When the Ministry of Energy in Moscow learned that the roof of the plant’s turbine hall had been covered with highly flammable bitumen, they ordered him to replace it. But the flame-retardant material specified for reroofing the structure—fifty meters wide and almost a kilometer long—was not even being manufactured in the USSR, so the Ministry granted him an exception, and the bitumen remained.

They had been told that radiation was so harmless “you could spread it on bread,” or that a reactor was “like a samovar . . . more simple than a thermal power plant.” At home, some drank from glassware colored with iridescent patterns that, they boasted, were created by having been steeped in the radioactive waters of the plant’s used fuel coolant pond.

Fomin had all the overbearing Soviet charisma Brukhanov lacked. An electrical engineer, his appointment had been pushed through by the Party in Moscow over the objections of the Ministry of Energy. He had no previous experience in atomic power but was ideologically beyond reproach—and did his best to learn nuclear physics through a correspondence course.

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.

Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. 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. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.

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.

More than eighty years later, Curie’s laboratory notes remain so radioactive that they are kept in a lead-lined box.

Because radium can be mixed with other elements to make them glow in the dark, clock makers used it to create fluorescent numbers on watch faces and hired young women to perform the delicate task of painting them. In the watch factories of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois, the Radium Girls were trained to lick the tips of their brushes into a fine point before dipping them into pots of radium paint. When the jaws and skeletons of the first girls began to rot and disintegrate, their employers suggested they were suffering from syphilis. A successful lawsuit revealed that their managers had understood the risks of working with radium and yet done everything they could to conceal the truth from their employees. It was the first time the public learned the hazards of ingesting radioactive material.

Harry K. Daghlian Jr., a twenty-four-year-old physicist on the Manhattan Project, was conducting an after-hours experiment in Los Alamos, New Mexico, when his hand slipped. The test assembly he had built—a ball of plutonium surrounded by tungsten carbide bricks—went critical. Daghlian saw a momentary blue flash and was struck by a wave of gamma and neutron radiation amounting to more than 500 rem. He quickly disassembled the experiment, walked away, and admitted himself to medical care without visible symptoms. But radiation had killed him as surely as if he’d stepped in front of an oncoming train. Twenty-five days later, Daghlian slipped into a coma from which he never awoke—the first person in history to die accidentally from close exposure to nuclear fission.

Unlike a nuclear weapon, in which a vast number of uranium atoms fission in a fraction of a second, releasing all their energy in an annihilating flash of heat and light, in a reactor the process must be regulated and delicately sustained for weeks, months, or even years.

Infinitesimal and invisible, the scale of subatomic activity inside a nuclear power reactor is hard to comprehend: generating a single watt of electricity requires more than 30 billion fissions every second.

In a short but galvanizing speech, Kurchatov outlined plans for an ambitious program of experimental reactor technology and a futuristic Communist empire crisscrossed by atomic-propelled ships, trains, and aircraft. He predicted that cheap electricity would soon reach every corner of the Union through a network of giant nuclear power stations. He promised that Soviet nuclear capacity would reach 2 million kilowatts—four hundred times what the Obninsk plant could produce—within just four years.

As the Era of Stagnation began, the Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state—space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power—while emergent technologies, including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics, fell behind.

As one of the twelve founding members of the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1957 the USSR had been obliged to report any nuclear accident that took place within its borders. But of the dozens of dangerous incidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed, not one was ever mentioned to the IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The cost of maintaining this illusion had been high.

At 4:20 p.m. on Sunday, September 29, 1957, a massive explosion occurred inside the perimeter of Chelyabinsk-40 in the southern Urals, a Sredmash installation so clandestine that it had never appeared on any civilian map. The forbidden area encompassed both the Mayak Production Association—a cluster of plutonium production reactors and radiochemical factories scraped from the wilderness by forced labor—and Ozersk, the comfortable closed city that housed the privileged technicians who staffed them.

At MEPhI, Toptunov took up karate—a sport on the long and often inexplicable list of ideas and practices from outside the USSR that were officially forbidden. But information about it was available in samizdat form, and Toptunov learned to kick and punch from illegally circulated homemade manuals.

One scientist from the Kurchatov Institute warned that the design was too dangerous to be put into civilian operation. Another recognized that the hazards of the positive void coefficient made the new reactor inherently prone to explosion, and—although his superiors attempted to have him dismissed from the institute because of his dissent—he began a letter-writing campaign that eventually reached the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Soviet Council of Ministers. But by then, the government—adhering to the rigid needs of central economic planning—had already issued its decree that four of the new behemoth reactors be built.

Accidents were inevitable. On the night of November 30, 1975, just over a year after it had first reached full operating capacity, Unit One of the Leningrad nuclear power plant was being brought back online after scheduled maintenance when it began to run out of control. The AZ-5 emergency protection system was tripped, but before the chain reaction could be stopped, a partial meltdown occurred, destroying or damaging thirty-two fuel assemblies and releasing radiation into the atmosphere over the Gulf of Finland. It was the first major accident involving an RBMK reactor, and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building set up a commission to investigate what had gone wrong. Afterward, the official line was that a manufacturing defect had led to the destruction of a single fuel channel. But the commission knew otherwise: the accident was the result of the design faults inherent in the reactor and caused by an uncontrollable increase in the steam void coefficient. Sredmash suppressed the commission’s findings and covered up the accident.

The inherent instabilities of the RBMK made it so difficult to manage that the senior reactor control engineers’ work proved not only mentally but also physically demanding. Making dozens of adjustments every minute, they were never off their feet and sweated like laborers digging a ditch. Rumors reached them that up in Leningrad, the Sredmash reactor engineers had doubled up on the control desk, “playing duets” to cope with the complexity of the task. The reactor operators worked the panel so hard that the switches governing the control rods quickly wore out and had to be replaced constantly. When one former nuclear submarine officer first took his seat at the desk in Chernobyl’s Unit One, he was horrified by the colossal size of the reactor and how antiquated the instrumentation was.

At their first planned maintenance shutdown, the Chernobyl operators found that the serpentine plumbing of the reactor was riddled with faults: the water-steam coolant pipes were corroded, the zirconium-steel joints on the fuel channels had come loose, and the designers had failed to build any safety system to protect the reactor against a failure of its feed-water supply—eventually, the Chernobyl engineers had to design and fabricate their own.

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.

Meanwhile, every accident that did occur at a nuclear station in the Soviet Union continued to be regarded as a state secret, kept even from the specialists at the installations where they occurred.

Director Brukhanov and the chief engineer of the plant initially insisted that whatever had happened had caused no radioactive releases, and local KGB officers took measures “to prevent the spread of panic-mongering, provocative rumors, and other negative manifestations.” In fact, radioactive contamination, carried on the wind and brought down by rain showers, had reached Pripyat and spread as far as fourteen kilometers from the plant. It included iodine 131, fragments of uranium dioxide fuel, and hot particles containing zinc 65 and zirconium-niobium 95 consistent with partial destruction of the reactor core. Levels of radiation in the village of Chistogalovka, five kilometers from the station, were hundreds of times higher than normal. But a team from Soyuzatomenergo—the USSR’s atomic energy authority—contested these findings. Contaminated areas immediately around the plant were simply sluiced with water and covered with soil and leaves. In Pripyat, decontamination trucks dispensed foam on the streets, and Lenina Prospekt was discreetly spread with a fresh layer of asphalt.

The chief engineer took the blame and was demoted and reassigned to a job in Bulgaria. The incident was classified top secret, and those directly involved were forced to sign gag orders by the KGB. Nikolai Steinberg would wait years before learning the truth about what had happened. In the years that followed, there would be even more serious accidents at nuclear plants elsewhere in the Soviet Union, and all of them would be covered up.

Less than three years later, during the start-up of the first reactor at the Balakovo plant in Russia, a relief valve burst, and superheated steam at 300 degrees centigrade escaped into the annular compartments surrounding the reactor well. Fourteen men were boiled alive. Both incidents were concealed, and word reached the operators at other stations only through the atomshchiki rumor mill and hints in Pravda.

In Control Room Number Four, the staff who had been briefed on the test program had reached the end of their shift and were preparing to go home. And the physicist from the plant’s Nuclear Safety Department—expected to be on hand to help the reactor operator through his part in the test—had been told the experiment was already complete. He hadn’t shown up at all. Stepping up to the instruments on the senior reactor control engineer’s desk, twenty-five-year-old Leonid Toptunov, just two months into his new job, prepared to pilot the capricious reactor through a shutdown for the first time in his life.

Although the specialists who labored under Dyatlov at the Chernobyl plant may have disliked the way he treated them, many admired him, and few doubted his expertise. Eager to learn, they believed that he knew everything there was to know about reactors. And, by crushing dissent and conjuring an air of infallibility, Dyatlov—like the Soviet state itself—expected his underlings to carry out his commands with robotic acquiescence, regardless of their better judgment.

Before completing the change, he was supposed to choose a level at which the computer would maintain reactor power in the new operating mode. But, somehow, he skipped this step. The reactor proved as unforgiving as ever. Bereft of fresh instructions, the computer defaulted to the last set point it had been given: near zero. Now Toptunov watched in dismay as the glowing gray figures on the reactimeter display began to tumble: 500 . . . 400 . . . 300 . . . 200 . . . 100 megawatts. The reactor was slipping away from him. A series of alarms sounded: “Failure in measuring circuits.” “Emergency power increase rate protection on.” “Water flow decrease.” Akimov saw what was happening. “Maintain power! Maintain power!” he shouted. But Toptunov could not stop the numbers from falling. Within two minutes, the power output of Unit Four had plunged to 30 megawatts—less than 1 percent of its thermal capacity. By 12:30 a.m., the reactimeter display was almost at zero. Yet for at least four more minutes Toptunov took no action. While he waited, neutron-scavenging xenon 135 gas began to build in the core, overwhelming what little reactivity remained. The reactor was being poisoned, plunging into what the operators called a “xenon well.” At this point, with the reactor’s power stalled at its minimum, and more xenon accumulating all the time, nuclear safety procedures made the operators’ course quite clear: they should have aborted the test and shut down the reactor immediately. But they did...

According to Toptunov, Dyatlov not only witnessed the power fall but also—enraged—told him to withdraw more control rods from the reactor to increase power. Toptunov knew that to do so could certainly increase reactivity but would also leave the core in a dangerously unmanageable state. So Toptunov refused to obey Dyatlov’s command. “I’m not going to raise the power!” he said. But now Dyatlov threatened the young operator: if he didn’t follow orders, the deputy chief engineer would simply find another operator who would. The head of the previous shift, Yuri Tregub—who had stayed behind to watch the test—was well qualified to operate the board and right there at his elbow. And Toptunov knew that such insubordination could mean that his career at one of the most prestigious facilities in the Soviet nuclear industry—and his comfortable life in Pripyat—would be over as soon as it had started.

Almost seven tonnes of uranium fuel, together with pieces of control rods, zirconium channels, and graphite blocks, were pulverized into tiny fragments and sucked high into the atmosphere, forming a mixture of gases and aerosols carrying radioisotopes, including iodine 131, neptunium 239, cesium 137, strontium 90, and plutonium 239—among the most dangerous substances known to man. A further 25 to 30 tonnes of uranium and highly radioactive graphite were launched out of the core and scattered around Unit Four, starting small blazes where they fell. Exposed to the air, 1,300 tonnes of incandescent graphite rubble that remained in the reactor core caught fire immediately.

Yuvchenko saw the thick concrete columns and walls of the room buckle like rubber, and the door, blown in by a shock wave carrying a wet, roiling cloud of steam and dust, was torn from its hinges. Debris rained from the ceiling. The lights went out. Yuvchenko’s first impulse was to find a safe place to hide. Finally, he thought, the war with the Americans has begun.

At his post in the shadow of the main circulation pumps, Valery Khodemchuk was the first to die, vaporized instantly by the explosion or crushed beneath the mass of collapsing concrete and machinery.

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.

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.

The plant’s civil defense chief, Serafim Vorobyev, arrived in the bunker shortly after two in the morning. The first thing he did was remove a powerful DP-5 military radiometer from storage and turn it on. A bulky Bakelite box with a steel detecting wand at the end of a long cable, the DP-5 was designed for use after a nuclear attack, and, unlike the sensitive Geiger counters used by the power station’s dosimetrists to monitor workplace safety, it could detect intense gamma radiation fields of up to 200 roentgen per hour. Obliged by regulations to report to the local authorities any accident that resulted in a release of radiation beyond the boundaries of the power station, Vorobyev went up to ground level to take measurements. He’d reached only as far as the bus stop outside the front doors when he took a reading of 150 milliroentgen per hour—more than a hundred times higher than normal. He rushed back to tell Brukhanov to warn the plant staff and the population of Pripyat. “Viktor Petrovich,” he said, “we need to make an announcement.” But the director told him to wait. He wanted more time to think.

The doctor in charge of the plant sick bay provided details of casualties so far. There was one dead and dozens of injured; it was clear that they had been exposed to enormous levels of radioactivity and undeniably exhibited the symptoms of radiation sickness. Yet the chief of the station’s external dosimetry, tasked with measuring radiation beyond the plant’s limits, insisted there was no need to evacuate Pripyat. Vorobyev, the head of civil defense for the plant, tried to interrupt to say—once again—that they had a duty to inform the city’s population of the accident, but this time Malomuzh cut him off. “Sit down,” he snapped. “It’s not up to you.”

Children were playing soccer, fresh laundry hung on balconies, and couples lingered in the central square in front of the new shopping center. He asked someone about the radiation levels and was told that here the readings were around ten times normal background—apparently within permissible limits.

“We have to evacuate the local population,” Prushinsky said. “Why are you being so alarmist?” Scherbina asked.

Even the regulations governing when it was necessary to tell the population that a radiation leak had taken place were contradictory, and it was unclear who had the final say in authorizing evacuation. Scherbina may have feared creating panic in Pripyat. But at that point, he had little reason to believe that Soviet citizens—long hardened to news of misfortune and distrustful of official information—would really lose their heads if warned of an accident; more urgent was the state’s compulsion for secrecy.