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

by Adam Higginbotham

The roof of the twenty-story building had been torn open, its upper levels blackened and collapsed into heaps of rubble. They could see shattered panels of ferroconcrete, tumbled blocks of graphite, and, here and there, the glinting metal casings of fuel assemblies from the core of a nuclear reactor. A cloud of steam drifted from the wreckage into the sunlit sky.

It was February 20, 1970. After months of deliberation, the Soviet authorities had at last settled on a name for the new power plant that would one day make the USSR’s nuclear engineering famous across the globe.

Although now the director and, as yet, sole employee of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, Brukhanov knew little about nuclear power. Back

But at the Ministry of Energy in Moscow, knowledge and experience were regarded as less important qualifications for top management than loyalty and an ability to get things done. Technical matters could be left to the experts.

That winter, as the 1960s came to a close, the energy minister summoned Brukhanov to Moscow and offered him his new assignment. It was a project of enormous prestige. Not only would it be the first atomic power plant in Ukraine, but it was also new territory for the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, which had never before built a nuclear station from scratch.

sandy soil. Meanwhile, Viktor oversaw the genesis of an entirely new settlement—an atomgrad, or “atomic city”—beside the river. The planners designed the settlement, eventually named Pripyat, to house the thousands of staff who would one day run the nuclear complex, along with their families.

attended lessons in the forest schoolhouse. According to Soviet planning regulations, Pripyat was separated from the plant itself by a “sanitary zone” in which building was prohibited, to ensure that the population would not be exposed to fields of low-level ionizing radiation.

And as the city grew, its residents began to build summer houses in the sanitary zone, each happy to disregard the rules in exchange for a makeshift dacha and a small vegetable garden.

By the time the young director began work in Chernobyl in 1970, the Socialist economic experiment was going into reverse. The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption—the start of what would come to be called the Era of Stagnation.

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. Only then could it be safely installed. Such wasteful duplication of labor added months of delays and millions of rubles in costs to any construction project.

Finally, in July 1972, exhausted and disillusioned, Viktor Brukhanov drove to Kiev for an appointment with his boss from the Ministry of Energy and Electrification. He had been director of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station for less than three years, and the plant had not yet emerged from the ground. But now he planned to resign.

Distinct from mere Socialism, True Communism was the Marxist utopia: “a classless society that contains limitless possibilities for human achievement,” an egalitarian dream of self-government by the people.

Yet the Party clung to its role enforcing the dictates of Marxism-Leninism, ossifying into an ideological apparatus of full-time paid officials—the apparat—nominally separate from the government but that in reality controlled decision-making at every level of society.

While officially every one of the fifteen republics of the USSR was run by its own Ministerial Council, led by a prime minister, in practice it was the national leader of each republican Communist Party—the first secretary—who was in control. Above them all, handing down directives from Moscow, sat Leonid Brezhnev, granite-faced general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, chairman of the Politburo, and de facto ruler of 242 million people. This institutionalized meddling proved confusing and counterproductive to the smooth running of a modern state, but the Party always had the final word.

Although by the early seventies many in the Party still believed in the principles of Marxism–Leninism, under the baleful gaze of Brezhnev and his claque of geriatric cronies, ideology had become little more than window dressing. The mass purges and the random executions of the three decades under Stalin were over, but across the USSR, Party leaders and the heads of large enterprises—collective farms and tank factories, power stations and hospitals—governed their staff by bullying and intimidation.

Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them. By the midseventies, this blind conformism had smothered individual decision-making at all levels of the state and Party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines, too. 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 when Brukhanov arrived in Kiev that day in July 1972, his Party-appointed supervisor from the Energy Ministry took his letter of resignation, tore it up in front of him, and told him to get back to work. After that, the young director recognized that there was no escape. Whatever else his job might require, his most important task was simply to obey the Party—and to implement their plan by any means he could. The next month, construction workers poured the first cubic meter of concrete into the foundations of the plant.

Thirteen years later, on November 7, 1985, Brukhanov stood silently on the reviewing stand in front of the new Pripyat Palace of Culture, where the windows had been hung with hand-painted portraits of state and Party leaders. Power station and construction workers paraded through the square below, carrying banners and placards. And in speeches marking the anniversary of the Great October Revolution, the director was hailed for his illustrious achievements: his successful fulfillment of the Party’s plans, his benevolent leadership of the city, and the power plant it served.

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.

As an atomgrad, the city and everything in it—from the hospital to the fifteen kindergartens—was considered an extension of the nuclear plant it served, financed directly from Moscow by the Ministry of Energy. It existed in an economic bubble; an oasis of plenty in a desert of shortages and deprivation. The food stores were better stocked than those even in Kiev, with pork and veal, fresh cucumbers and tomatoes, and more than five different types of sausage. In the Raduga—or Rainbow—department store, Austrian-made dining sets and even French perfume were available to shoppers, all without having to spend years on a waiting list. There was a cinema, a music school, a beauty parlor, and a yacht club.

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. In home movies and snapshots, the citizens of Pripyat captured one another not as drab victims of the Socialist experiment but as carefree young people: kayaking, sailing, dancing, or posing in new outfits; their children playing on a great steel elephant or a brightly painted toy truck; cheerful optimists in the city of the future.

Gorbachev had assumed power in March 1985, ending the long succession of zombie apparatchiks whose declining health, drunkenness, and senility had been concealed from the public by squadrons of increasingly desperate minders. At fifty-four, Gorbachev seemed young and dynamic and found an enthusiastic audience in the West.

A dedicated Socialist, Gorbachev believed that the USSR had lost its way but could be led to the utopia of True Communism by returning to the founding principles of Lenin. It would be a long road. The economy was staggering under the financial burden of the Cold War. Soviet troops were mired in Afghanistan, and in 1983 US president Ronald Reagan had extended the battle into space with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” program. Annihilation in a nuclear strike seemed as close as ever. And at home, the monolithic old ways—the strangling bureaucracy and corruption of the Era of Stagnation—lingered on.

But, like all successful Soviet managers, to do so, Brukhanov had learned how to be expedient and bend limited resources to meet an endless list of unrealistic goals. He had to cut corners, cook the books, and fudge regulations. When the building materials specified by the architects of the Chernobyl station had proved unavailable, Brukhanov was forced to improvise: the plans called for fireproof cables, but when none could be found, the builders simply did the best they could.

When the Ministry of Energy in Moscow learned that the roof of the plant’s turbine hall had been covered with highly flammable bitumen, they ordered him to replace it. But the flame-retardant material specified for reroofing the structure—fifty meters wide and almost a kilometer long—was not even being manufactured in the USSR, so the Ministry granted him an exception, and the bitumen remained. When the district Party secretary instructed him to build an Olympic-length swimming pool in Pripyat, Brukhanov tried to object: such facilities were common only in Soviet cities of more than a million inhabitants. But the secretary insisted: “Go build it!” he said, and Brukhanov obeyed. He found the extra funds to do so by fiddling the city expenses to hoodwink the state bank.

And as the fourth and most advanced reactor of the Chernobyl plant approached completion, a time-consuming safety test on the unit turbines remained outstanding. Brukhanov quietly postponed it, and so met Moscow’s...

In 1985 Brukhanov received instructions for the construction of Chernobyl Two, a separate station of four more RBMK reactors, using a new model fresh from the drawing board and even more Brobdingnagian than the last. This station would be built a few hundred meters away from the existing one, on the other side of the river, along with a new residential area of Pripyat to accommodate the plant workers.

Brukhanov worked around the clock. His superiors could usually expect to find him somewhere in the station at almost any time of the day or night. If something went wrong at the plant—as it often did—the director often forgot to eat, and would subsist for a full twenty-four hours on coffee and cigarettes. In meetings, he withdrew into inscrutable silence, never offering two words when one would do. Isolated and exhausted, he had few friends and confided little, even to his wife.

Brukhanov’s staff, too, had changed. The spirited team of young specialists who had first colonized the freezing settlement in the woods all those years ago, and then worked to bring the first reactors online, had moved on. In their place were thousands of new employees, and Brukhanov found maintaining discipline difficult: despite his technical gifts, he lacked the force of personality necessary for management on the Soviet scale. The

At the top, the experienced team of independent-minded nuclear engineering experts who had overseen the start-up of the station’s first four reactors had all left, and senior specialists were in short supply. The chief engineer—Brukhanov’s principal deputy, responsible for the day-to-day technical operation of the station—was Nikolai Fomin, the former plant Party secretary and an arrogant, blustering apparatchik of the old school. Balding, barrel chested, with a dazzling smile and a confident baritone voice that rose steeply in pitch when he became excited, Fomin had all the overbearing Soviet charisma Brukhanov lacked. An electrical engineer, his appointment had been pushed through by the Party in Moscow over the objections of the Ministry of Energy. 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.

quantities of energy. At 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a fission weapon containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein’s equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second. Some seventy-eight thousand people died instantly, or immediately afterward—vaporized, crushed, or incinerated in the firestorm that followed the blast wave. But by the end of the year, another twenty-five thousand men, women, and children would also sicken and die from their exposure to the radiation liberated by the world’s first atom bomb attack.

Radiation is produced by the disintegration of unstable atoms.

For example, plutonium 239 sheds two protons and two neutrons from its nucleus to become uranium 235. This dynamic process of nuclear decay is radioactivity; the energy it releases, as atoms shed neutrons in the form of waves or particles, is radiation.

Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.

Gamma rays—high-frequency electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light—are the most energetic of all. They can traverse large distances, penetrate anything short of thick pieces of concrete or lead, and destroy electronics. Gamma rays pass straight through a human being without slowing down, smashing through cells like a fusillade of microscopic bullets.

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.

Unlike a nuclear weapon, in which a vast number of uranium atoms fission in a fraction of a second, releasing all their energy in an annihilating flash of heat and light, in a reactor the process must be regulated and delicately sustained for weeks, months, or even years. This requires three components: a moderator, control rods, and a coolant.

Rumors of what had happened in Mayak reached the West, but Chelyabinsk-40 was among the most fiercely guarded military locations in the USSR. The Soviet government refused to acknowledge its very existence, let alone that anything might have happened there. The CIA resorted to sending high-altitude U-2 spy planes to photograph the area. It was on the second of these missions, in May 1960, that Francis Gary Powers’s aircraft was shot down by a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile, in what became one of the defining events of the Cold War. Although it would be decades before the truth finally emerged, the Mayak disaster remained, for many years, the worst nuclear accident in history.

Alexander Yuvchenko, senior mechanical engineer in the reactor department on the night shift of Chernobyl’s Unit Four,

When Natalia returned home from work on the afternoon of April 25, she looked down from the apartment window and spotted her husband on the street below, giving Kirill a ride on the crossbar of his bike. Alexander had worked from midnight until eight the previous night and then spent all day with their son without sleeping. He was due back at the plant again in just a few hours for another shift. Natalia realized how exhausted he must be, and the thought made her uneasy. Despite the bright sunshine and the excited cries of her son drifting up from below, a shadow of apprehension passed over her.

There were also health checks, and security screenings conducted by the KGB. After one of these safety exams, Toptunov sat down with Korol and told him about a strange phenomenon, described deep in the RBMK documentation, indicating that the reactor control rods may—under some circumstances—accelerate reactivity instead of slowing it down.

The first two reactors were housed in separate structures, but—to save time and money—Reactor Number Three and Reactor Number Four had been built together, back-to-back under the same roof, where they shared ventilation and auxiliary systems. Between the turbine hall and the reactors was the spine of the station, which housed the deaerator corridor. Uninterrupted by a single door or dogleg, this seemingly endless hallway ran parallel to the turbine hall, all the way from the main administrative block at one end of the plant to the western end of Reactor Number Four at the other, not quite a kilometer long in total.

Earlier in the day, the reactor had been scheduled for a maintenance shutdown, following a series of long-overdue tests on the turbines. By the time he arrived at work, he understood that everything in Unit Four would be powered down. All he and the others on the graveyard shift would be doing was overseeing the cooling of the reactor: easy work. But down in the control room, there had been a change of plans. The tests were running twelve hours late and were only now beginning in earnest. The impatience of the station’s deputy chief engineer was rising. And there was mounting disagreement about how to respond to the troubling data coming in from Reactor Number Four.

On August 1, 1977, more than seven years after Viktor Brukhanov had watched the first stake being driven into the snow-covered ground beside the Pripyat, and two years later than planned, Reactor Number One of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant at last went critical.

The inherent instabilities of the RBMK made it so difficult to manage that the senior reactor control engineers’ work proved not only mentally but also physically demanding. Making dozens of adjustments every minute, they were never off their feet and sweated like laborers digging a ditch.

At their first planned maintenance shutdown, the Chernobyl operators found that the serpentine plumbing of the reactor was riddled with faults: the water-steam coolant pipes were corroded, the zirconium-steel joints on the fuel channels had come loose, and the designers had failed to build any safety system to protect the reactor against a failure of its feed-water supply—eventually, the Chernobyl engineers had to design and fabricate their own. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the reactor designers continued to discover further troubling flaws in their creation.

In 1980 NIKIET completed a confidential study that listed nine major design failings and thermohydraulic instabilities which undermined the safety of the RBMK reactor. The report made it clear that accidents were not merely possible under rare and improbable conditions but also likely in the course of everyday operation. Yet they took no action to redesign the reactor or even to warn plant personnel of its potential hazards. Instead

every accident that did occur at a nuclear station in the Soviet Union continued to be regarded as a state secret, kept even from the specialists at the installations where they occurred.

Early on the evening of September 9, 1982, Nikolai Steinberg was sitting at the desk in his third-floor office between Chernobyl Units One and Two, overlooking the vent stack shared by the two reactors. Steinberg, a thirty-five-year-old with a short goatee and an easy charm, had worked in Chernobyl since 1971, arriving straight from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute as a graduate in nuclear thermal hydraulics and one of a new breed of bright-eyed atomshchiki. He had spent more than two years studying the RBMK at college before the first of the reactors had even been built, watched the first two units of the Chernobyl plant emerge from the ground, and was now chief of the turbine department for Units Three and Four. When Steinberg saw steam rising from the top of the vent stack, he knew it meant trouble: a broken pipe inside the reactor at least, and certainly a release of radiation. He picked up the phone. But when he got through to the control room of Unit One to warn the operators there to shut down the reactor, the shift supervisor brushed him off. When Steinberg persisted, the supervisor hung up on him. The engineer gathered his staff and waited to be summoned for the emergency. But no call came. Almost six hours later, at midnight, he and his men got into their cars and drove home to Pripyat. When he returned to work the following morning, Steinberg heard that there had indeed been a problem in Unit One, but—despite his seniority and experience—could learn nothin...