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
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