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.

Party membership was not open to everyone. It required an exhaustive process of candidacy and approval, the support of existing members, and the payment of regular dues. By 1970, fewer than one in fifteen Soviet citizens had been admitted.

The humiliation of enduring an expletive-spattered dressing-down delivered at screaming pitch was a ritual repeated daily in offices everywhere. It engendered a top-down culture of toadying yes-men who learned to anticipate the whims of their superiors and agree with whatever they said, while threatening their own underlings. When the boss put his own proposals to the vote, he could reasonably expect them to be carried unanimously every time, a triumph of brute force over reason.

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.

Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.

The USSR, hopelessly backward in developing computer technology, lacked simulators with which to train its nuclear engineers, so the young engineers’ work at Chernobyl would be their first practical experience in atomic power.

A Western eye may have been drawn to Pripyat’s limitations: the yellowing grass bristling between concrete paving slabs or the bleak uniformity of the multistory buildings. But to men and women born in the sour hinterlands of the USSR’s factory cities, raised on the parched steppes of Kazakhstan, or among the penal colonies of Siberia, the new atomgrad was a true workers’ paradise.

Some were trainee nuclear engineers—aspiring to become a part of the highly qualified technical elite known as atomshchiki—who came to watch the experts at work. But others were mechanics and electricians who came from elsewhere in the energy industry—the “power men,” or energetiki—who harbored complacent assumptions about nuclear plants. 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.

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.

The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants.

Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.

In 1896 Thomas Edison devised the fluoroscope, which projected X-rays onto a screen, allowing him to gaze inside solid objects. Edison’s experiments required an assistant to place his hands repeatedly on top of a box, where they were exposed to X-rays. When he sustained burns on one hand, the assistant simply switched to using the other. But the burns wouldn’t heal. Eventually surgeons amputated the assistant’s left arm and four fingers from his right hand. When cancer spread up his right arm, the doctors took that, too. The disease traveled to his chest, and in October 1904 he died, the first known victim of man-made radiation.

Pierre was killed in a road accident, but Marie continued exploring the properties of radioactive compounds until she died in 1934, probably due to radiation-induced bone marrow failure. 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.

As part of a government program to develop atomic-powered planes, Lockheed Aircraft built a water-cooled 10-megawatt nuclear reactor in a shielded underground shaft in the woods of North Georgia. At the touch of a button, the reactor could be raised from its shielding to ground level, exposing everything within a three-hundred-meter radius to a lethal dose of radiation. In June 1959 the Radiation Effects Reactor was brought up to full power and unsheathed for the first time, killing almost everything in the vicinity stone dead: bugs fell from the air, and small animals and the bacteria living in and upon them were exterminated, in a phenomenon the technicians called “instant taxidermy.”

The first nuclear reactor ever built, assembled by hand beneath the bleachers of the University of Chicago’s disused football field in 1942, was the anvil of the Manhattan Project, the essential first step in creating the fissile material needed to forge the world’s first atomic weapon.

Kurchatov had succeeded with the help of a handful of well-placed spies and information contained in the bestselling book Atomic Energy for Military Purposes—generously published by the US government in 1945 and speedily translated into Russian in Moscow.

The ideal combination of circumstances required for such an event—a criticality—has even aligned spontaneously in nature: in ancient subterranean deposits of uranium found in the African nation of Gabon, where groundwater acted as a moderator. There, self-sustaining chain reactions began underground two billion years ago, producing modest quantities of heat energy—an average of around 100 kilowatts, or enough to light a thousand lightbulbs—and continued intermittently for as long as a million years, until the available water was finally boiled away by the heat of fission.

generating a single watt of electricity requires more than 30 billion fissions every second.

Fortunately, among the remaining 1 percent of neutrons generated in every fission event are a tiny minority released on a timescale more readily perceptible by man, measured in seconds or even minutes. It is only the existence of these delayed neutrons, which emerge slowly enough to respond to human control, that make the operation of a nuclear reactor possible at all.

To generate electricity, the uranium fuel inside a reactor must become hot enough to turn water into steam but not so hot that the fuel itself starts to melt. To prevent this, in addition to control rods and a neutron moderator, the reactor requires a coolant to remove excess heat.

But the Soviet engineers’ work on the plutonium production plants meant that they had far more practical experience with graphite-water reactors. These were also cheaper and easier to construct. The more experimental—and potentially safer—concepts never had a chance.

This positive void coefficient remained a fatal defect at the heart of Atom Mirny-1 and overshadowed the operation of every Soviet water-graphite reactor that followed.

So, to save time, Sredmash decided to skip the prototype stage entirely: the quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production.

During these crucial periods, the engineers at their desks in the control room became almost totally blind to what was happening inside the active zone. Instead of reading their instruments, they were forced to estimate the levels of activity in the core, using “experience and intuition.”

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 operators of other RBMK plants were never informed of its true causes.

Many more hours would pass, and other men would sacrifice themselves to the delusion that Reactor Number Four survived intact, before Director Brukhanov and the men in the bunker acknowledged their terrible mistake.

There were mishaps all the time at the plant, and radiation had never seemed to hurt anyone. The last time something like this happened, trucks had appeared in Pripyat to spray the streets, and children had played barefoot in the decontaminant foam when they passed.

“Captain, it’s maxed out!” the flight engineer shouted. “What’s maxed out?” “The DP-3. The needle’s stuck.” “Then switch to a higher range,” Volodin said, and turned to check the dial himself. But the radiometer was already calibrated to its most extreme setting. The needle was glued to the far end of the range, at 500 roentgen per hour. And Volodin knew that the device took its readings from a receiver in the back of his seat. It seemed impossible: the level of radiation inside the cockpit had risen beyond the worst expected in a nuclear war.

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.

At 11:00 p.m., Director Brukhanov received a phone call from Silayev. “Find the nitrogen,” the commission chairman said, “or you’ll be shot.” Accompanied by a detachment of troops, Brukhanov managed to locate the convoy of tanker trucks sixty kilometers away in Ivankov. The drivers, apparently terrified by the spectral horrors of radiation, had stopped in their tracks and refused to go any farther. Soldiers with machine guns took up positions at each end of the convoy, and the drivers were at last persuaded to deliver their cargo, at gunpoint.

But long before the project was completed on June 24, temperature readings from Prianichnikov’s sensors had declined yet further, and fear of the China Syndrome abated at last. The heat exchanger, with its intricate network of stainless steel tubing, ten kilometers of control cabling, its two hundred thermocouples and temperature sensors layered in concrete and sandwiched beneath a layer of graphite blocks—the result of weeks of frenzied work by hundreds of miners, soldiers, construction workers, electricians, and engineers—was never even turned on.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs turned to the republic’s Society of Hunters and Fishermen for help, calling for twenty teams of local men to spread out across the contaminated territory to begin liquidating all the abandoned pets they could find.

Although the industrious Ukrainian sportsmen would eventually manage to eliminate a total of twenty thousand agricultural and domestic animals inside the thirty-kilometer zone, it proved impossible to kill them all. Some dogs managed to escape beyond the perimeter and were fed and adopted by the liquidators they found camped there. The soldiers may have been heedless of the radiation the animals brought with them but nevertheless christened them with bitter new names, more appropriate to their changed environment: Doza or Rentgen, Gamma and Dozimetr.

The scale of the structure dwarfed the men and machines working in its shadow, and neither could remain near it for long. If brought too close, the engines of the concrete pumps guttered and died, and the dials of the dosimetrists’ equipment went haywire, like compass needles in a magnetic field. It was a phenomenon the experts could never satisfactorily explain.

Attempts to use robots initially ended in the same way as so many others had in the Special Zone. At its first test, one device, created at enormous expense to explore the ruins, proved incapable of navigating even minor obstructions; it had to be rescued repeatedly by its operators and ultimately stopped dead in a high-radiation zone. In a scene captured on video and screened that night before the assembled task force, the robot then unexpectedly came back to life and—in a ridiculous pantomime of flashing lights and waving appendages—fled down the corridor, before it screeched and fell on its side and had to be retrieved by its handlers in a blizzard of invective.

Eventually, rudimentary reconnaissance began with the help of a miniature plastic tank bought by one of the scientists for 12 rubles (the equivalent, then, of $5) from the toy store Detsky Mir—Children’s World—in Kiev. The toy was controlled by a battery-operated box on the end of a long cable and modified to carry a dosimeter, a thermometer, and a powerful flashlight. The scientists used it like a radiosensitive hunting dog which ran ten meters ahead of them and warned of imminent danger.