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

by Adam Higginbotham

Early in December 1991, in a national referendum called by the parliament in Kiev four months earlier, the Ukrainian people voted to declare independence from the USSR, and Mikhail Gorbachev lost the battle to hold together the union of the twelve remaining Soviet republics. Returned briefly to his position as head of state after a failed reactionary coup in August, he had been forced to watch as Russian president Boris Yeltsin stripped him of his powers and announced that he was suspending the activities of the Communist Party. On Christmas Day, Gorbachev appeared on television to deliver an emotional resignation address, and the red banner of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time from the flagpole above the Kremlin. Amid the chaos of the collapsing empire, most of the men and women who had fought the Battle of Chernobyl were forgotten—the final defenders of a nation that had seemingly vanished overnight.

Of the five men who had gathered temperature and radiation readings from the bowels of the reactor in the most terrifying days of May 1986, he told me that four were already dead. “So twenty percent survived,” he said with a dark smile. “If you include me.” The liquidators who lived on did so with the fear that they’d returned from the battlefield with fatal wounds no one could ever see. “We know that the invisible enemy is eating away inside us like a worm,” said General Nikolai Antoshkin, whose helicopter crews fought to extinguish the nuclear inferno. “For us, the war continues, and, little by little, we are slipping away from this world.”

Beyond the borders of the evacuated land, the contamination of Europe with radionuclides from the explosion had proved widespread and long lasting: for years after the accident, meat, dairy products, and produce raised on farms from Minsk to Aberdeen and from France to Finland were found laced with strontium and cesium and had to be confiscated and destroyed. In Britain, restrictions on the sale of sheep grazed on the hill farms of North Wales would not be lifted until 2012. Subsequent studies found that three decades after the accident, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic were still too radioactive for human consumption.

But after a quarter century, the collective memory of the world’s most devastating atomic accident had dimmed and softened. In the harsh light of climbing oil costs and global warming, governments were reconsidering the viability of nuclear power. The first contract to build a new nuclear power plant in the United States in more than thirty years was already under way. At the beginning of March 2011, Ukraine announced plans to begin construction of two new reactors not far from Chernobyl. 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.

Sweeping away the convenient fallacy that what had happened in Chernobyl had been a once-in-a-million-years fluke, the Fukushima accident stifled the nuclear renaissance in the cradle: the Japanese government immediately took all of its remaining forty-eight nuclear reactors off-line, and Germany shut down eight of its seventeen reactors, with the announced intention of closing the rest by 2022 as part of a move to renewable energy. Existing plans for all new reactors in the United States were suspended or canceled. Yet nuclear power endured. More than seven years after the Japanese disaster, the United States still had a hundred licensed and operational power reactors—including one at Three Mile Island. France continued to generate 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, and China had recently embarked on a reactor building spree, with twenty new units under construction and thirty-nine already in operation.

Nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide and have been statistically safer than every competing energy industry, including wind turbines. And at last, more than seventy years after the technology’s inception, engineers were finally developing reactors with design priorities that lay not in making bombs but in generating electricity. In principle, these fourth-generation reactors would be cheaper, safer, smaller, more efficient, and less poisonous than their predecessors and could yet prove to be the technology that saves the world.

“The problem of coal has become clear,” the engineering director of the project said. “Nuclear power provides the only solution.”