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

by Adam Higginbotham

The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants.

Radiation is invisible and has neither taste nor smell. Although it’s yet to be proved that exposure to any level of radiation is entirely safe, it becomes manifestly dangerous when the particles and waves it gives off are powerful enough to transform or break apart the atoms that make up the tissues of living organisms. This high-energy radiance is ionizing radiation.

Polonium 210, a powerful alpha emitter, is one of the carcinogens in cigarette smoke. It was also the poison slipped into the cup of tea that killed former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Severe exposure to all ionizing radiation results in acute radiation syndrome (ARS), in which the fabric of the human body is unpicked, rearranged, and destroyed at the most minute levels.

They began using gamma rays to extend the shelf life of chicken and strawberries,

On the night of November 30, 1975, just over a year after it had first reached full operating capacity, Unit One of the Leningrad nuclear power plant was being brought back online after scheduled maintenance when it began to run out of control. The AZ-5 emergency protection system was tripped, but before the chain reaction could be stopped, a partial meltdown occurred, destroying or damaging thirty-two fuel assemblies and releasing radiation into the atmosphere over the Gulf of Finland. It was the first major accident involving an RBMK reactor, and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building set up a commission to investigate what had gone wrong.

“How can you possibly control this hulking piece of shit?” he asked. “And what is it doing in civilian use?”

The report made it clear that accidents were not merely possible under rare and improbable conditions but also likely in the course of everyday operation.

Meanwhile, every accident that did occur at a nuclear station in the Soviet Union continued to be regarded as a state secret, kept even from the specialists at the installations where they occurred.

Perevozchenko, Proskuryakov, and Kudryavtsev remained on the ledge for only as long as Yuvchenko held the door: a minute at most. But even that was too long. All three received a fatal dose of radiation in a matter of seconds.

By daybreak on Saturday, the men of the militsia had sealed off the entire area with roadblocks, and the KGB then cut off the city’s long-distance telephone lines. By nightfall, the local lines were dead, too, and there had still been no radio broadcast to notify the citizens of Pripyat of the accident, let alone warn them to stay indoors or close their windows.

And yet, the civil defense commanders and the physicists disagreed with the health minister’s sanguine forecast: even if the radiation situation in the town seemed tolerable in the short term, it was unlikely to improve.

If even the smallest amount of rain fell on Pripyat, it would bring down radioactive fallout, with terrible consequences for the population.

Late that night, the plume encountered rain clouds over Sweden, and the moisture in them began to scavenge and concentrate the contaminants it contained. When the rain finally fell from the clouds, around the city of Gävle, two hours’ drive north of Stockholm, it had become heavily radioactive.

Air samples taken in Stockholm also showed elevated radiation and an isotope composition containing graphite particles, suggesting a catastrophic accident in a civilian nuclear reactor, but one of a very different type from those at Forsmark.