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

by Adam Higginbotham

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...