NIKIET circulated a notification of the positive scram effect to the senior managers of all RBMK plants. But, swept along in a blizzard of bureaucracy, tangled in secrecy, the news never reached the reactor operators. Nonetheless, as far as Anatoly Aleksandrov and the other nuclear chiefs were concerned, the redoubtable RBMK-1000—the Soviet national reactor—had been troubled by nothing more than temporary setbacks. By the time Viktor Brukhanov put his final signature on the paperwork to acknowledge completion of the fourth reactor of the V. I. Lenin nuclear power plant on the last day of 1983,
...more
