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

by Adam Higginbotham

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.