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March 15 - March 18, 2022
Key mechanical parts and building materials often turned up late, or not at all, and those that did were often defective.
The quality of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building
projects throughout the nation’s power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as “preinstallation overhaul.”
Such wasteful duplication of labor added months of delays and millions of rubles in costs to any construction project.
Party membership was not open to everyone. It required an exhaustive process of candidacy and approval, the support of existing members, and the payment of regular dues.
governed their staff by bullying and intimidation.
Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them.
those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded.
Eventually the supply problems of the centrally planned economy became so chronic that crops rotted in the fields, and Soviet fishermen watched catches putrefy in their nets, yet the shelves of the Union’s grocery stores remained bare.
had learned how to be expedient and bend limited resources to meet an endless list of unrealistic goals.
He had to cut corners, cook the books, and fudge regulations.
A team of dedicated KGB agents and their network of informants at the plant reported a continuing series of alarming building faults.
The Era of Stagnation had fomented a moral decay in the Soviet workplace and a sullen indifference to individual responsibility,
Yet the dead weight of unwanted manpower tugged even at those with urgent responsibilities and infected the plant with inefficiency and a dangerous sense of inertia.
Nor did mortal man escape retribution for accepting Prometheus’s gift. To him, Zeus sent Pandora, the first woman, bearing a box that, once opened, unleashed evils that could never again be contained.
sixty-four kilograms of uranium detonated
The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy.
Adding to or removing neutrons from the nucleus of a stable atom results in an unstable isotope.
The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants.
Alpha particles are relatively large, heavy, and slow moving and cannot penetrate the skin; even a sheet of paper could block their path.
Beta particles are smaller and faster moving than alpha particles and can penetrate more deeply into living tissue,
Gamma rays—high-frequency electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light—are the most energetic of all. They can traverse large distances, penetrate anything short of thick pieces of concrete or lead, and destroy electronics. Gamma rays pass straight through a human being without slowing down, smashing through cells like a fusillade of microscopic bullets.
Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, pharmacies sold patent medicines containing radium as a health tonic, drunk by people who believed radioactivity gave them energy.
More than eighty years later, Curie’s laboratory notes remain so radioactive that they are kept in a lead-lined box.
The US Navy was responsible for choosing the reactor design subsequently used in almost every civilian power station in the country.
Kurchatov had succeeded with the help of a handful of well-placed spies and information contained in the bestselling book Atomic Energy for Military Purposes—generously published by the US government in 1945 and speedily translated into Russian in Moscow.
1950, the First Main Directorate would employ seven hundred thousand people, more than half of whom were forced laborers—including, at one point, fifty thousand prisoners of war—working in uranium mines. Yet even when their prison sentences were complete, the Directorate packed these men and women into freight cars and shipped them into exile in the Soviet Far North, to prevent them from telling anyone what they had witnessed. Many were never seen again.
Less than four months later, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his “Atoms for Peace” address to the UN General Assembly, part of an attempt to mollify an American public facing a future now menaced by the specter of apocalypse. Eisenhower called for global cooperation to control the incipient arms race and tame the power of the atom for the benefit of mankind.
Atom Mirny-1—“Peaceful Atom-1.” At that moment, the first US nuclear power station, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, was still more than two years from completion. Housed in a quaint stucco building with a tall chimney that could easily be mistaken for a chocolate factory, AM-1 generated only 5 megawatts—just enough to drive a locomotive—yet symbolized Socialism’s superior ability to harness nuclear power for the benefit of mankind. Its launch marked the birth of the Soviet nuclear energy industry and the start of a Cold War technological contest between the superpowers.
It was also inherently unstable.
event—a criticality—has even aligned spontaneously in nature:
This negative void coefficient acts like a dead man’s handle on the reactor, a safety feature of the water-water designs common in the West.
This positive void coefficient remained a fatal defect at the heart of Atom Mirny-1 and overshadowed the operation of every Soviet water-graphite reactor that followed.
nuclear scientists continued to dwell in a culture of secrecy and expedience: an environment in which sometimes reckless experimentation was married with an institutional reluctance to acknowledge when things went wrong.
releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131.
They began using gamma rays to extend the shelf life of chicken and strawberries,
used nuclear weapons to put out fires and excavate underground caverns,
Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state—space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power—while emergent technologies, including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics, fell behind.
rich in fish, which thrived in water that had circulated through the plant’s reactors as coolant before being flushed, still radioactive but pleasingly warm, toward the river.
The tests were running twelve hours late and were only now beginning in earnest.
And there was mounting disagreement about how to respond to the troubling data coming in from Reactor Number Four.
Aleksandrov also saved money by dispensing with the containment building, the thick concrete dome built around almost every reactor in the West,
recognized that the hazards of the positive void coefficient made the new reactor inherently prone to explosion,
skip the prototype stage entirely:
Serious design faults dogged
the effects of the positive void coefficient grew worse as more of the fuel was burned; the longer it was in operation, the harder the reactor became to control.
The operators had to control it as if it were not a single unit but several separate reactors in one.
an abrupt emergency stop. Dollezhal and the technicians of NIKIET believed that suddenly cutting off the electricity generated by the reactor would be disruptive to the operation of the Soviet grid.
But eighteen seconds is a long time in neutron physics—and an eternity in a nuclear reactor
acting emergency protection system. Despite their apparent urgency, the reactor designers failed to act on a single one of these directives, and
