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

by Adam Higginbotham

At a 4:00 p.m. meeting in the Party’s conference room in the White House, Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin finally conceded that the efforts made by his men over the previous twelve hours to keep cooling water circulating through Reactor Number Four had been entirely in vain. He admitted that the reactor had been destroyed and pieces of highly radioactive graphite lay on the ground everywhere. Worse news was to come. That morning, station physicists had entered the contaminated control room of Unit Four and established that the control rods had not descended fully into the reactor before the explosion. They now suspected that the conditions for a new criticality would soon exist in whatever nuclear fuel remained inside the reactor vessel, initiating a new chain reaction—but this time, it would take place in the open air, and they would have no means of controlling it. When the reactor returned to life, it could bring fires and explosions and release waves of deadly gamma and neutron radiation into the atmosphere less than 2,500 meters from the edge of Pripyat. Their estimates suggested they had only three hours to intervene before the new criticality began—sometime after seven in the evening.