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

by Adam Higginbotham

Circling the reactor at low altitude in the helicopter, Boris Prushinsky realized that Director Brukhanov had been right about the fate of Unit Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. Yet the head of the nuclear emergency response team still found it hard to believe what he was seeing. The roof of the central hall had disappeared. Inside was a gaping black crater, where more than ten stories of walls and floors had been carved away as if scooped out from above by a monstrous spoon. The northern wall of the building had collapsed into a shambles of black rubble that tumbled out across the flat roofs of adjoining buildings and toward the station perimeter. Inside the ruins of the hall, he could see the tangled wreckage of the 120-tonne bridge crane, the refueling machine, the main circulation pumps, and the emergency core cooling tanks. The pilot tilted the helicopter to one side, so the plant photographer could shoot through the window. Prushinsky saw that the lid of the reactor—Elena, the two-thousand-tonne disc of concrete and steel designed to shield it from the outside world—was tilted upward to the sky. Beneath it, deep within the reactor vault, and despite the bright sunshine, he could make out the glowing lattice formed by the remaining fuel cells—and a single spot that burned a fierce yellow-red. As the helicopter banked away, Prushinsky forced himself to confront what his mind still refused to accept: Reactor Number Four had ceased to exist.