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

by Adam Higginbotham

Inside the zone, as thousands of soldiers continued to scour the landscape of radionuclides, bulldoze ancient settlements into the ground, and toss contaminated furniture from the windows of apartments in Pripyat, scientists began to notice strange new phenomena in the wildlife they found there. Hedgehogs, voles, and shrews had become radioactive, and mallards had developed genetic abnormalities; in the cooling reservoir of the plant, silver carp grew to monstrous sizes; the leaves of the trees around the Red Forest had swelled to supernatural proportions, including giant conifers with pine needles ten times their usual size and acacias with “blades as large as a child’s palm.” The authorities announced their intention to set up a wildlife preserve in Belarus and an international research center inside the zone to study the long-term effects of radiation on the environment.

Early in December 1991, in a national referendum called by the parliament in Kiev four months earlier, the Ukrainian people voted to declare independence from the USSR, and Mikhail Gorbachev lost the battle to hold together the union of the twelve remaining Soviet republics. Returned briefly to his position as head of state after a failed reactionary coup in August, he had been forced to watch as Russian president Boris Yeltsin stripped him of his powers and announced that he was suspending the activities of the Communist Party. On Christmas Day, Gorbachev appeared on television to deliver an emotional resignation address, and the red banner of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time from the flagpole above the Kremlin. Amid the chaos of the collapsing empire, most of the men and women who had fought the Battle of Chernobyl were forgotten—the final defenders of a nation that had seemingly vanished overnight.

In the years that followed, many of those who had lived through the catastrophe became invalids in middle age—struck down by mysterious clusters of symptoms, including high blood pressure, cataracts, kidney trouble, and chronic fatigue.

Eventually, rudimentary reconnaissance began with the help of a miniature plastic tank bought by one of the scientists for 12 rubles (the equivalent, then, of $5) from the toy store Detsky Mir—Children’s World—in Kiev. The toy was controlled by a battery-operated box on the end of a long cable and modified to carry a dosimeter, a thermometer, and a powerful flashlight. The scientists used it like a radiosensitive hunting dog which ran ten meters ahead of them and warned of imminent danger. Although fully aware of the perils surrounding them, the members of the Kurchatov task force were urged on by the gravity of their search for the missing fuel—necessary to guarantee that a new chain reaction could not begin—but also by scientific curiosity. Inside the Sarcophagus, they were explorers on the frontier of an alien world, where they found gamma radiation fields scaling heights no one had witnessed before and strange new materials forged at temperatures of more than 10,000 degrees centigrade in the crucible of a disintegrating nuclear reactor.

What they found there was a massive, globular, stalagmite-like formation of some mysterious substance. It appeared to have flowed down from somewhere above their heads before solidifying into an anthracite-black glassy mass. The formation, which they named the Elephant’s Foot, stood half as tall as a man and weighed as much as two tonnes. Its surface was emitting an astonishing 8,000 roentgen per hour, or 2 roentgen a second: five minutes in its presence was enough to guarantee an agonizing death. Nonetheless, orders came down from the government commission for photographs and a full analysis.

the giant vault of Reactor Number Four, which had once contained 190 tonnes of uranium fuel and 1,700 tonnes of graphite blocks, and was since supposed to have been filled with load after load of sand, lead, and dolomite, was almost completely empty.

Although the limitations of the building had been carefully concealed during its construction, Borovoi and his team now found gaps in the walls large enough for a man to pass through and cracks through which water could penetrate and radioactive dust could escape. They also began to fear that, inside the Sarcophagus, what remained of the concrete skeleton of Unit Four could soon collapse. By the time Borovoi was recalled to Moscow, it had become clear that a new means of protecting the world from the remains of the still-hot reactor would have to be found.

Former plant director Viktor Brukhanov walked free from prison on September 11, 1991, having served five years of his ten-year sentence, most of it in the penal colony in Donetsk. He was released early for good behavior, under the rules of the Soviet judicial system, and was permitted to spend the closing months of his punishment in compulsory labor—known as khimiya, or “chemistry”—in Uman, a town closer to his wife, Valentina, in Kiev. At fifty-five, he emerged from incarceration shattered and emaciated.

Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin had never fully recovered from the shock of the accident. Two years after his arrest, in 1988, he was diagnosed with a “reactive psychosis” and transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Granted early release for health reasons in 1990, Fomin found work again at the Kalinin nuclear power plant north of Moscow—although even then his mental state reportedly remained fragile.

Anatoly Dyatlov, the dictatorial deputy chief engineer, had spent his years of incarceration contesting the verdict of the Soviet court, writing letters and giving interviews from prison in an attempt to publicize what he’d learned about the failings of the RBMK reactor and clear his name and those of his staff. He wrote directly to Hans Blix at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to point out the failings of their technical analysis, but also to the parents of Leonid Toptunov, describing how their son had stayed at his post to try to save the crippled reactor and how he had been unjustly blamed for causing the accident. He explained that the reactor should never have been put into operation and that Toptunov and his dead colleagues were the victims of a judicial cover-up. “I fully sympathize with you, and grieve with you,” Dyatlov wrote. “There is nothing more unbearable than losing one’s child.”

From his flat in Troieshchyna, the increasingly frail engineer continued a campaign to reveal the truth about the design faults of the reactor and the way the accident had been whitewashed by Academician Legasov and the Soviet delegation to the IAEA.

the public perception of events remained unchanged—that of a perfectly reliable reactor blown up by incompetent operators.

Incidental documents submitted by the Soviet authorities to the IAEA had already begun to undermine the official version, and in July 1990 one senior member of the original Soviet delegation to Vienna admitted publicly that the designers had been chiefly to blame for the catastrophe, and the operators’ actions played only a minor role.

But they made clear that, although the actions of the operators contributed to what happened, they should not be held responsible for a disaster that was decades in the making.

The Soviet nuclear industry, lacking even rudimentary safety practices, had relied upon its operators to behave with robotic precision night after night, despite constant pressure to beat deadlines and “exceed the plan” that made disregard for the letter of the regulations almost inevitable. He reported that Dyatlov and the now deceased operators in Control Room Number Four had brought the reactor into an unstable condition, but only on account of the acute pressure they felt to complete the test on the turbine.

Although Dyatlov, Shift Foreman Akimov, and Senior Reactor Control Engineer Toptunov had violated some operating regulations, they were ignorant of the deadly failing of the RBMK-1000 that meant that insertion of the control rods, instead of shutting down the reactor at the end of the test, could initiate a runaway chain reaction.

The issue was still unresolved when, in August 1991, Yeltsin and Gorbachev faced down the plotters of the abortive coup and the USSR began its final slide toward extinction.

It wasn’t until the following year, after the Soviet nuclear safety team’s organization had been dissolved, that its findings were published as an appendix to an updated version of the original IAEA report on the Chernobyl accident. Seeking to redress the inaccuracies of their 1986 account based on what they described as “new information,” the IAEA experts revealed at last the true magnitude of the technical cover-up surrounding the causes of the disaster: the long history of previous RBMK accidents, the dangerous design of the reactor, its instability, and the way its operators had been misled about its behavior. In dense scientific detail, it described the inherent problems of the positive void coefficient and the fatal consequences of the control rod “tip” effect.

Although the IAEA panel continued to find the behavior of the Chernobyl operators “in many respects . . . unsatisfactory,” it acknowledged that the primary causes of the worst nuclear disaster in history rested not with the men in the co...

Zone of Exclusion and the Zone of Unconditional (Mandatory) Resettlement. Together, by 2005, the contiguous parts of the Belarusian and Ukrainian zones made up a total area of more than 4,700 square kilometers of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus, all of it rendered officially uninhabitable by radiation.

Beyond the borders of the evacuated land, the contamination of Europe with radionuclides from the explosion had proved widespread and long lasting: for years after the accident, meat, dairy products, and produce raised on farms from Minsk to Aberdeen and from France to Finland were found laced with strontium and cesium and had to be confiscated and destroyed. In Britain, restrictions on the sale of sheep grazed on the hill farms of North Wales would not be lifted until 2012. Subsequent studies found that three decades after the accident, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic were still too radioactive for human consumption.

Venturing deep into the forests and swamps of the abandoned landscape, Gaschak began to spot creatures long since eliminated from the rest of Ukraine and Belarus by hunting and collective farming: wolves, elk, brown bears, and rare birds of prey. His observations helped foster a new notion of the zone, as appealing as it was counterintuitive: demonstrating that nature was apparently capable of healing itself in new and unpredictable ways. In the absence of man, plants and animals were thriving in a radioactive Eden.

What seemed clear from much of the research into low-level radiation conducted since 1986 was that different species and populations reacted to chronic exposure in varying ways.

The government in Kiev was still plotting the future of the forbidden zone when, on March 11, 2011, the news came in from the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan.

The disaster involving the three General Electric–built reactors on the northeastern coast of Honshu followed a now familiar course, this time played out live on television: a loss of coolant led to reactor meltdown, a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas, and several catastrophic explosions. No one was killed or injured by the immediate release of radiation, but three hundred thousand people were evacuated from the surrounding area, which will remain contaminated for decades to come.

Nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide and have been statistically safer than every competing energy industry, including wind turbines. And at last, more than seventy years after the technology’s inception, engineers were finally developing reactors with design priorities that lay not in making bombs but in generating electricity. In principle, these fourth-generation reactors would be cheaper, safer, smaller, more efficient, and less poisonous than their predecessors and could yet prove to be the technology that saves the world.

The Chernobyl Forum, a United Nations study group cooperating with the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, estimated that by 2005, about four thousand people who were children at the time of the accident had developed thyroid cancer caused by iodine 131 from the reactor, leading to nine deaths.

Yet these conclusions were drawn almost entirely from studies conducted on groups of liquidators, often exposed to large doses of radiation, and thyroid cancer sufferers, or from broad risk-projection models. Little effort had been made to establish an internationally recognized body of data on the long-term consequences of the accident on the population at large, to replicate the seventy-year study of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb attacks in 1945. The UN agencies used the unreliable nature of dosimetry conducted among civilians as reason enough to abandon any further effort at lifespan studies, and, as a result, the opportunity to understand the long-term impact of low-dose radiation on human beings was lost. In the absence of large-scale epidemiological work, independent scientists from countries around the world continued to log “endocrinological, musculoskeletal, respiratory, and circulatory problems and a rise in malignant tumors, especially of the breast and prostate,” among residents of the affected areas. And in the space that remained, anxiety and misunderstanding about the real threats of radioactivity and nuclear power continued to multiply.

Following a fall from the fourth floor of her building—she had locked herself out and was climbing into her apartment from a neighbor’s balcony, a feat she had often pulled off successfully in the past—the doctors had told her she was unlikely to walk again. But she had proved them wrong and continued to commute to the Salvador Dalí Art Institute in the city, where she taught interior design.

His invocation complete, Poroshenko launched into a speech, carried live on national television, to mark exactly thirty years since the disaster. He spoke of the accident’s catalytic role in Ukrainian independence and the breakup of the USSR and placed it on the continuum of events that threatened the state’s very existence, halfway between the Great Patriotic War and the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. He described the enduring costs of the accident, the 115,000 people he said would never return to their homes in the Exclusion Zone, the 2.5 million more living on land contaminated by radionuclides, and the hundreds of thousands of disabled Chernobyltsi who continued to require support from the state and society. “The issue of the aftermath of the catastrophe is still open,” he said. “Its heavy burden lay on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people, and we are, unfortunately, still very far from overcoming it for good.”

He would later insist that it was the explosion of Reactor Number Four—and not his own bungled reforms—that proved the catalyst in the destruction of the Union he had so desperately wished to preserve. In April 2006, he wrote: “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl twenty years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”