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March 15 - March 18, 2022
The day after the Leningrad meltdown, the Soviet Union’s Council of Ministers gave its final approval to construct a second pair of RBMK-1000 units in Chernobyl, expanding the station’s projected output to an impressive 4,000 megawatts.
Making dozens of adjustments every minute, they were never off their feet
also likely in the course of everyday operation.
Yet they took no action to redesign the reactor or even to warn plant personnel of its potential hazards.
But the staff of Soviet nuclear power plants, faced with ever-increasing production targets and constantly malfunctioning or inadequate equipment, and answerable to a bewildering and dysfunctional bureaucracy, had long become accustomed to bending or ignoring the rules in order to get their work done.
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.
leaves. In Pripyat, decontamination trucks dispensed foam on the streets, and Lenina Prospekt was discreetly spread with a fresh layer of asphalt.
for a brief moment, reactor power rose instead of falling.
the rods were tipped with short lengths of graphite, the neutron moderator that facilitates fission.
just two months into his new job, prepared to pilot the capricious reactor through a shutdown for the first time in his life.
Dyatlov said that there remained something unfathomable about the RBMK-1000: a nuclear enigma even he could never fully understand.
The three men’s control panels were festooned with the hundreds of switches, buttons, gauges, lamps, and annunciator alarms needed to manage the primary processes of spinning electricity from nuclear fission.
Akimov knew that the reactor could be dangerously unstable and even harder to manage than usual.
they should have aborted the test and shut down the reactor immediately.
Emboldened by his previous experience,
The reactor was a pistol with the hammer cocked.
The AZ-5 rods jammed at their halfway point.
Head up to the reactor hall, he told them, and force the control rods into the core by hand.
still: a shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light, reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity.
lumps of graphite, fragments of fuel assemblies, and pellets of the reactor’s uranium dioxide fuel itself, scattered across the rooftops and emitting fields of gamma rays reaching thousands of roentgen an hour.
but could not overcome the power of their faith that a nuclear reactor would never explode.
the civil defense duty officer who answered refused to believe that he was serious.
Reactor Number Four was gone. In its place was a simmering volcano of uranium fuel and graphite—a radioactive blaze that would prove all but impossible to extinguish.
Brukhanov’s reassuring assessment of what had happened began to percolate through the upper echelons of Soviet government.
he found that even his own specialist had apparently become incapable of a straight answer.
Yet the chief of the station’s external dosimetry, tasked with measuring radiation beyond the plant’s limits, insisted there was no need to evacuate Pripyat.
But it failed to explain that this was the highest reading possible for the equipment used to take the measurements.
a.m., a colleague mentioned an unpleasant incident at the Chernobyl plant.
he believed in the principles of Socialism and an equal society run by an educated elite.
they still believed that the reactor had been shut down safely and was being cooled with water; there would be no more casualties.
and it was not until later on Saturday afternoon that the report was delivered to Gorbachev.
a command-economy savior come to deliver his underlings from any potentially perilous decision-making.
“We have to evacuate the local population,” Prushinsky said. “Why are you being so alarmist?” Scherbina asked.
the politicians were ignorant of nuclear physics, and the scientists and technicians were too paralyzed by indecision to commit to a solution. Everyone knew that something must be done—but what?
drafted an action plan for repairing Reactor Number Four and reconnecting it to the Soviet electrical grid,
“He’s a panicker!” he yelled at Scherbitsky. “How are you going to evacuate all these people? We’ll be humiliated in front of the whole world!”
Barred from Party membership by her Chinese birth,
he believed that radiation created contaminated particles in the blood—shitiki—against which vodka was a useful prophylactic.
since the Party took precedence over government in emergency situations, was now in charge.
Yet there was no great sense of alarm.
The last time something like this happened, trucks had appeared in Pripyat to spray the streets, and children had played barefoot in the decontaminant foam when they passed.
carefree atmosphere on the streets of Pripyat.
Yet when he awoke at home in Pripyat at ten the following morning, everything seemed so normal.
only to be turned back at the end of Lenina Prospekt by an armed militsia officer manning a roadblock. The city had been sealed off.
Only when he showed her the dark specks of graphite on the leaves of her strawberry plants did she agree to return home.
It seemed impossible: the level of radiation inside the cockpit had risen beyond the worst expected in a nuclear war.
But there weren’t enough iodine pills in the dispensary, and it was imperative that the crisis remain secret.
There were rumors of a citywide evacuation. Some people even packed their bags and went down into the street, expecting to be taken away at any minute. But no official word came.
They turned on the TV hoping for some news, but there was no mention of the plant or an accident.
From their sixth-floor balcony, they watched as yellow and green flames flared a hundred meters into the sky above the torn ruins of Reactor Number Four.
