The meetings went on for hours, yet Aleksandrov used all his considerable skill to squash talk of the reactor’s failings and returned again and again to general discussion of the operators’ mistakes. When that failed, Slavsky—“the Ayatollah”—simply shouted down those whose opinions he didn’t want to hear. The representative from the state nuclear regulator was never even permitted to report on his proposed design revisions, intended to improve the safety of the reactor.
