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April 10 - April 13, 2023
Amid the chaos of the collapsing empire, most of the men and women who had fought the Battle of Chernobyl were forgotten—the final defenders of a nation that had seemingly vanished overnight.
The electrical engineer Andrei Tormozin, who had miraculously survived exposure to apparently lethal levels of radiation, a failed bone marrow transplant, and blood poisoning, emerged alive from Hospital Number Six but afterward sank into depression and drank himself to death.
The formation, which they named the Elephant’s Foot, stood half as tall as a man and weighed as much as two tonnes. Its surface was emitting an astonishing 8,000 roentgen per hour, or 2 roentgen a second: five minutes in its presence was enough to guarantee an agonizing death.
Finally, a police marksman arrived and shot a fragment of the surface away with a rifle. The sample revealed that the Elephant’s Foot was a solidified mass of silicon dioxide, titanium, zirconium, magnesium, and uranium—a once-molten radioactive lava containing all the radionuclides found in irradiated nuclear fuel that had somehow flowed into the corridor from the rooms nearby.
At the beginning of 1988, they formed a new group, an interdisciplinary team of 30 scientists dedicated to exploring the Sarcophagus and mapping what it contained, backed by a force of up to 3,500 construction workers: the Chernobyl Complex Expedition.
The scientists were bewildered. Where was the fuel? The following day, they inserted a periscope and a powerful lamp to illuminate the scene within and were astonished by what they saw: the giant vault of Reactor Number Four, which had once contained 190 tonnes of uranium fuel and 1,700 tonnes of graphite blocks, and was since supposed to have been filled with load after load of sand, lead, and dolomite, was almost completely empty.
They discovered that only the smallest trace of the 17,000 tonnes of material eventually targeted on the building from above had found its mark inside the reactor vault. Instead, the majority of the loads were discovered, in mounds up to fifteen meters high, scattered elsewhere among the debris filling the central hall.
Moreover, it seemed that almost all of the 1,300 tonnes of graphite that had not been thrown from the reactor by the explosion had been consumed by fire: in the end, the blazing reactor had simply burned itself out.
The Soviet fliers’ courageous efforts to smother it with sand from two hundred meters up had been almost entirely pointless.
They established that the two tonnes of deadly compounds in the Elephant’s Foot represented just a fraction of an incandescent river of radioactive lava that had formed inside the reactor in the minutes after the accident began and had flowed slowly downward into the basement of the building until the reactor vault itself was practically empty.
The zirconium cladding of the fuel assemblies had melted first, reaching a temperature of more than 1,850 degrees Celsius within a half hour of the explosion, and dissolved the uranium dioxide pellets it contained, pooling into a hot metal soup that then absorbed parts of the reactor vessel itself—including stainless steel, serpentinite, graphite, and melted concrete. The radioactive lava, now containing some 135 tonnes of molten uranium, then began eating its way through the lower biological shield of the reactor, a massive steel disk filled with serpentinite gravel, weighing 1,200 tonnes. It
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By the time the corium reached the steam suppression pools, emptied at such great cost by Captain Zborovsky and the specialists from the plant, it had burned and seethed through three floors of the subreactor space, engorging itself with more parts of the building and structura...
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And yet—despite the best efforts of Zborovsky and his men—several hundred cubic meters of water remained gathered in the suppression compartments, and it was not until the flow of corium reached this that the China Syndrome finally came to an end. When the lava dropped into the dregs of the water in the suppression pool, it cooled harmlessly, and the molten heart of Reactor Number Four at last ended its journey—a gray ceramic pumice floating on the surface of a radioactive pond, but just centimeters away from the foundations separating the building from the earth below.
It would take the men of the Complex Expedition until 1990 to find most of the melted fuel and deliver a report assuring the government commission that the ghost of the reactor was unlikely—“for the time being”—to rise again.
Even four years after the accident, the temperature inside some of the fuel clusters remained as ...
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Alexander Borovoi, would eventually make more than one thousand trips into the Sarcophagus.
After the Elephant’s Foot, they came upon other formations of solidified lava inside the ruins of Unit Four, frozen into uncanny shapes, which they granted individual nicknames: the Drop, the Icicle, the Stalagmite, and the Heap.
Among their unique discoveries was a new substance they christened Chernobylite—a beautiful, but deadly, blue crystal silicate composed of zirconium and uranium, which they chipped from the ruins. It could be examined safely only for short periods of time, and samples had to be removed from Unit Four in lead-lined containers.
The Sarcophagus itself, built under conditions of great secrecy with all the haste and ingenuity the USSR could muster, was not proving quite the triumph of engineering the Soviet propaganda machine had claimed.
In prison, Dyatlov continued to suffer from the terrible radiation burns he had sustained as he wandered through the wreckage of Unit Four on the night of the accident and in October 1990 was also granted early release due to his declining health. From his flat in Troieshchyna, the increasingly frail engineer continued a campaign to reveal the truth about the design faults of the reactor and the way the accident had been whitewashed by Academician Legasov and the Soviet delegation to the IAEA.
In the face of opposition from NIKIET and the Ministry of Atomic Energy, the state’s independent nuclear safety board belatedly launched its own inquiry into the causes of the accident.
The leader of the board of inquiry began an intensive correspondence with Dyatlov about the events immediately leading up to the explosion.
The report that the nuclear safety board of inquiry delivered to the Soviet Council of Ministers in January 1991 completely contradicted the story Legasov had told the IAEA in 1986, of a delicate piece of equipment blown up by feckless operators who breached one vital safety regulation after another.
But they made clear that, although the actions of the operators contributed to what happened, they should not be held responsible for a disaster that was decades in the making.
Although Dyatlov, Shift Foreman Akimov, and Senior Reactor Control Engineer Toptunov had violated some operating regulations, they were ignorant of the deadly failing of the RBMK-1000 that meant that insertion of the control rods, instead of shutting down the reactor at the end of the test, could initiate a runaway chain reaction.
Every one of the investigators behind the report now agreed that the fatal power surge that destroyed the reactor had begun with the entry of the rods into its core. “Thus the Chernobyl accident comes within the standard pattern of most severe accidents in the world.
Steinberg recognized that the origins of the accident lay with those who had designed the reactor and the secret, incestuous bureaucracy that had allowed it to go into operation. But he concluded that it was no longer constructive to allocate blame—whether with “those who hang a rifle on the wall, aware that it is loaded, or those who inadvertently pull the trigger.”
It wasn’t until the following year, after the Soviet nuclear safety team’s organization had been dissolved, that its findings were published as an appendix to an updated version of the original IAEA report on the Chernobyl accident.
Seeking to redress the inaccuracies of their 1986 account based on what they described as “new information,” the IAEA experts revealed at last the true magnitude of the technical cover-up surrounding the causes of the disaster: the long history of previous RBMK accidents, the dangerous design of the reactor, its instability, and the way its operators had been misled about its behavior. In dense scientific detail, it described the inherent problems of the positive void coefficient and the fatal consequences of the control rod “tip” effect.
Although the IAEA panel continued to find the behavior of the Chernobyl operators “in many respects . . . unsatisfactory,” it acknowledged that the primary causes of the worst nuclear disaster in history rested not with the men in the co...
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Back in Kiev, former deputy chief engineer Dyatlov, still not satisfied, kept up his lonely struggle for exoneration in the press, until his own death—from cancer of the bone marrow, at the age of sixty-four—in December 1995.
In 2008, more than two decades after the accident, Akimov and Toptunov—along with twelve other engineers, electricians, and machinists from the plant staff—were finally recognized for their heroism on the night of April 26, when President Viktor Yanukovych posthumously awarded each of them the Ukrainian Order for Courage, Third Class.
Almost twenty-five years after the explosion of Reactor Number Four, in February 2011, the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone surrounding the power station remained deeply contaminated.
the territory of the Exclusion Zone had expanded repeatedly, as the newly independent governments overseeing it revised the Soviet norms of what constituted dangerous levels of radiation downward to meet Western standards.
Together, by 2005, the contiguous parts of the Belarusian and Ukrainian zones made up a total area of more than 4,700 square kilometers of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus, all of it rendered officially uninhabitable by radiation.
Beyond the borders of the evacuated land, the contamination of Europe with radionuclides from the explosion had proved widespread and long lasting: for years after the accident, meat, dairy products, and produce raised on farms from Minsk to Aberdeen and from France to Finland were found laced with strontium and cesium and had to be confiscated and destroyed. In Britain, restrictions on the sale of sheep grazed on the hill farms of North Wales would not be lifted until 2012. Subsequent studies found that three decades after the accident, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of
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After the breakup of the USSR, as the economies of Ukraine and Belarus pitched into steep decline, the appetite for funding further Chernobyl research dried up.
In the absence of man, plants and animals were thriving in a radioactive Eden.
What seemed clear from much of the research into low-level radiation conducted since 1986 was that different species and populations reacted to chronic exposure in varying ways.
Yet a 2009 study of soybeans grown near the reactor seemed to show that the plants changed at a molecular level to protect themselves against radiation.
As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster approached in 2011, the government of Ukraine pressed ahead with plans to open the Exclusion Zone as a tourist attraction.
Sweeping away the convenient fallacy that what had happened in Chernobyl had been a once-in-a-million-years fluke, the Fukushima accident stifled the nuclear renaissance in the cradle: the Japanese government immediately took all of its remaining forty-eight nuclear reactors off-line, and Germany shut down eight of its seventeen reactors, with the announced intention of closing the rest by 2022 as part of a move to renewable energy. Existing plans for all new reactors in the United States were suspended or canceled.
Nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide and have been statistically safer than every competing energy industry, including wind turbines. And at last, more than seventy years after the technology’s inception, engineers were finally developing reactors with design priorities that lay not in making bombs but in generating electricity. In principle, these fourth-generation reactors would be cheaper, safer, smaller, more efficient, and less poisonous than their predecessors and could yet prove to be the technology that saves the world.
More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years.
Running at atmospheric pressure, and without ever reaching a criticality, the LFTR doesn’t require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground.
And with each successive five-year milestone after the catastrophe, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), and the IAEA all marched together toward the same conclusion: the public health effects of the Chernobyl accident “were not nearly as substantial as had at first been feared.”
Yet these conclusions were drawn almost entirely from studies conducted on groups of liquidators, often exposed to large doses of radiation, and thyroid cancer sufferers, or from broad risk-projection models. Little effort had been made to establish an internationally recognized body of data on the long-term consequences of the accident on the population at large, to replicate the seventy-year study of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb attacks in 1945.
the opportunity to understand the long-term impact of low-dose radiation on human beings was lost.
He spoke of the accident’s catalytic role in Ukrainian independence and the breakup of the USSR and placed it on the continuum of events that threatened the state’s very existence, halfway between the Great Patriotic War and the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014.
Designed to stabilize and hermetically seal the decaying Sarcophagus, the building was one of the most ambitious civil engineering tasks ever undertaken: a giant steel arc 108 meters high—tall enough to contain the Statue of Liberty—packed with ventilation and dehumidifying equipment and three times as large as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
