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

by Adam Higginbotham

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.

Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along the chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded. To protect his own position, at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them.

The Era of Stagnation had fomented a moral decay in the Soviet workplace and a sullen indifference to individual responsibility, even in the nuclear industry. The USSR’s economic utopianism did not recognize the existence of unemployment, and overstaffing and absenteeism were chronic problems.

Aleksandrov also saved money by dispensing with the containment building, the thick concrete dome built around almost every reactor in the West, intended to prevent radioactive contamination escaping from the plant in the event of a serious accident—but which, because the RBMK was so enormous, would have doubled the cost of building each unit.

The first problem arose from the positive void coefficient, the drawback that made Soviet graphite-water reactors susceptible to runaway chain reactions in the event of a loss of coolant, and that, in the RBMK, had been exacerbated by attempts to make the reactor cheaper to run. To make it more competitive with fossil energy power stations, the RBMK had been deliberately designed to maximize the electricity output of the uranium fuel it burned up. But it was only when they started up Leningrad Unit One that the designers discovered that the effects of the positive void coefficient grew worse as more of the fuel was burned; the longer it was in operation, the harder the reactor became to control.

A second failing of the reactor resulted from its colossal size. The RBMK was so large that reactivity in one area of the core often had only a loose relationship to that in another.

A third fault lay in the heart of the reactor’s emergency protection system, the last line of defense against an accident. If the operators faced a situation calling for an emergency shutdown—a major coolant leak or a reactor runaway—they could press the “scram” button, activating the ultimate stage of the unit’s five-level rapid power reduction system, known in Russian as AZ-5. Pushing this button would drive a special bank of twenty-four neutron-absorbing boron carbide control rods—as well as every one of the remaining 187 manual or automatic control rods that remained withdrawn at the time—simultaneously into the core, quenching the chain reaction throughout the reactor.

In January 1986 the new issue of Soviet Life—a glossy, English-language magazine resembling the stalwart American title but published by the Soviet embassy in the United States—featured the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as the centerpiece of a ten-page report on the wonders of nuclear energy. The special section included interviews with the residents of Pripyat, the city “Born of the Atom”; color photographs of the plant; and pictures of smiling station staff. Legasov coauthored another essay in which he boasted, “In the thirty years since the first Soviet nuclear power plant opened, there has not been a single instance when plant personnel or nearby residents have been seriously threatened; not a single disruption in normal operation occurred that would have resulted in the contamination of the air, water, or soil.”

Sklyarov, who had almost no interest in seeing a blazing nuclear plant at close quarters, tried to object.

The document was brief—a single typed page—describing an explosion, the collapse of the roof of the reactor hall, and a fire, which had already been completely extinguished. Thirty-four people involved in the firefighting were being examined in the hospital; nine had suffered thermal burns of varying degrees, and three were in critical condition. One man was missing, and another had died. There was no mention of any radiation injuries. The document stated that levels of radiation near Unit Four had reached 1,000 microroentgen per second—a tolerable 3.6 r/hr. But it failed to explain that this was the highest reading possible for the equipment used to take the measurements. It concluded with the assurance that the situation in Pripyat remained normal and that radiation levels there were being investigated. At the bottom, in the space provided, Brukhanov signed his name in blue ballpoint.

“People are resting. At 8:00 a.m., the staff office will start working. The situation is normal. The radiation level is rising.”

Boris Scherbina remained implacable. Back inside the White House, he drove the ministers and generals to work harder and more quickly and reserved a furious contempt for the representatives of the nuclear ministries. They seemed to be gifted at blowing up reactors, he roared, but pathetic at filling sandbags.

They couldn’t trace it backward to a source within the plant, and yet, given the weather conditions, radiation levels on the ground outside conformed to what they would expect of a major leak from one of the Forsmark reactors. At ten thirty, Sandstedt ordered approaches to the station sealed off. Local authorities issued a precautionary alert: a warning was broadcast on the radio instructing the population to keep its distance from Forsmark, and police set up roadblocks. Thirty minutes later, Robinson was still in the lab, at work on his new batch of samples, when he heard sirens sound throughout the building: the entire plant was being evacuated.

For Gorbachev, this was a sudden and unexpected test of the new openness and transparent government he had promised the Party conference just a month earlier; since then, glasnost had been nothing more than a slogan. “We should make a statement as soon as possible,” he said. “We can’t procrastinate.”

Gorbachev’s grip on power remained tenuous, vulnerable to the kind of reactionary revolt that had destroyed Khrushchev and his program of liberalization. He had to be careful.

by the time they took a vote, Ligachev had apparently prevailed: the Politburo resolved to take the traditional approach. The assembled Party elders drafted an unrevealing twenty-three-word statement to be issued by the state news agency, TASS—and designed to combat what the Central Committee’s official spokesman called “bourgeois falsification . . . propaganda and inventions.” Whatever Gorbachev’s intentions, it seemed that the old ways were best after all.

The two scientists argued for a few minutes, until Fedulenko eventually admitted the full extent of his fears: that all their efforts to quench the graphite fire were a total waste of time. He said they should just let the radioactive blaze burn itself out. Legasov didn’t want to listen. He insisted that they had to take immediate action—whether it was effective or not. “People won’t understand if we do nothing,” Legasov said. “We have to be seen to be doing something.”

And while this hypothetical nightmare defied the laws of physics, geology, and geography, if a core meltdown had begun in Chernobyl, the China Syndrome posed two real threats. The first and most obvious was to the local environment. The power station sat just a few meters above the water table of the Pripyat River, and if the melted fuel penetrated that far, the consequences would be catastrophic. A whole range of toxic radionuclides would poison the drinking water not only supplied to Kiev but also that of everyone in Ukraine who drew from the waters of the Dnieper River basin—some thirty million people in all—and, beyond that, flow into the Black Sea itself.

But the second threat was even more immediate and frightening to contemplate than the poisoning of the water table. The molten fuel would reach the Pripyat and the Dnieper only if it escaped the foundations of the building. Before that happened, it would have to pass through the steam suppression pools, the flooded safety compartments beneath Reactor Number Four. And some of the scientists feared that if the white-hot fuel made contact with the thousands of cubic meters of water held in the sealed compartments there, it would bring about a new steam explosion orders of magnitude larger than the first. This blast could destroy not only what remained of Unit Four but also the other three reactors, which had survived the accident intact. Amounting to a gargantuan dirty bomb formed of more than five thousand tonnes of intensely radioactive graphite and five hundred tonnes of nuclear fuel, such an explosion could exterminate whatever remained alive inside the Special Zone—and hurl enough fallout into the atmosphere to render a large swath of Europe uninhabitable for a hundred years.

From the outset, the members of the plant staff executing this scheme recognized that it was pointless: the pipework in the area beneath the reactor was almost certainly damaged, and even if it reached the reactor hall, the nitrogen couldn’t hope to starve the fire of oxygen, because the building had no roof; instead of concentrating around the burning graphite and displacing air from the flames, the gas would just drift uselessly into the atmosphere. But orders were orders.

The Politburo now recognized that if the Union’s young draftees—already plagued by alcoholism and drug abuse—continued to be sent into the high-radiation zone, the health of an entire generation of Soviet youth could be ruined, rendering the country incapable of defending itself in the event of an attack from the West.

Only the fate of the crows that had come to scavenge from the debris but stayed too long—and whose irradiated carcasses now littered the area around the plant—provided any visible warning of the costs of ignorance.

In public, the Soviet government continued to assure its people that the catastrophe was under control and that the radiation already released posed no long-term threat. But in its secret sessions within the Kremlin, the Politburo Operations Group heard that the direct effect of the disaster on the population of the USSR was already reaching alarming heights. On Saturday, May 10, Ryzhkov learned that a total of almost 9,500 people had already been hospitalized in connection with the accident, at least 4,000 of them in the previous forty-eight hours alone. More than half of that number were children, 26 of whom had been diagnosed with radiation sickness.