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March 15 - March 18, 2022
began trying to return to their homes.
By June 24, they had completed a 195-kilometer alarmed fence around the entire Exclusion Zone.
a technical and scientific inquiry,
overseen by Alexander Meshkov, the deputy head of the all-powerful Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which had designed the reactor
The search for appropriate scapegoats began immediately.
the result of an all-but-impossible confluence of events, triggered by the operators.
competed to divert blame from themselves, ideally before the final report reached General Secretary Gorbachev.
These were the men who had created the RBMK, but had also ignored more than ten years of warnings about its shortcomings.
But the specialists from the Ministry of Energy refused to put their signatures on the joint investigation report. Instead, they produced a separate appendix, based upon their own independent investigation. This opinion suggested that—whatever the operators’ mistakes—Reactor Number Four could never have exploded were it not for the profound defects in its design, including the positive void coefficient and the faulty control rods that made reactivity increase rather than decrease.
The commission believes that the thing that triggered the accident was mistakes by the operating personnel.”
Gorbachev was furious. His anger and frustration had been building for weeks as the catastrophe bloomed.
In fact, it seems that you are attempting to cover everything up.”
If it hadn’t happened here and now, it would have happened somewhere else,”
the Party leaders decreed that all existing RBMK plants should be modified to bring them into line with existing safety standards.
Plans to build further RBMK reactors were terminated immediately.
There was no mention of any design faults in the reactor.
acknowledging certain “drawbacks” but glossing over inconvenient facts—and
“The defect of the system was that the designers did not foresee the awkward and silly actions by the operators.”
the delegates left the hall confident in the future of Soviet atomic energy—and
He had doctored the report on the direct orders of Prime Minister Ryzhkov.
“I did not lie in Vienna,” Legasov said to his colleagues in a report he delivered two months later at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “But I did not tell the whole truth.”
the fuel mass would instead require both widespread ventilation, to allow it to continue cooling safely, and constant monitoring, to provide a warning in case a new chain reaction began.
both to halt the spread of radioactivity and also to restart Units One, Two, and Three
in relative safety, and thus salvage something of the USSR’s tarnished technological prestige.
planned to build the new structure from prefabricated sections,
They were thrown into the front line wherever necessary to perform manual tasks in high-radiation zones, one platoon after another.
from behind a series of “pioneer walls” to shield building workers from the invisible fusillade of gamma rays streaming from within the ruins.
Velikhov, feared that the Sredmash construction crews, blindly pumping concrete over the scattered clusters of nuclear fuel, might inadvertently be building a colossal atomic time bomb.
the Politburo had publicly promised that the first two of the three remaining Chernobyl reactors would be restored to life before winter set in.
even the machines intended for use on the surface of the moon were no match for the inhospitable new landscape they encountered
To the soldiers who followed him, speed remained the best protection.
They were told to use long-handled tongs to pick up pieces of nuclear fuel
October 1 the general declared the operation complete. At a quarter to five that afternoon, following months of repairs, modification, and safety tests, the reactor of Unit One came back online at last. For the first time in five months, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was once again generating electricity.
his way out but chose not to do so. Inside the zone, he found total chaos: there were uniformed soldiers everywhere, scurrying to their tasks like green ants, but the senior officers seemed to have little idea what was going on.
The doctors regarded the survival of some of the most badly exposed operators as almost miraculous.
But in the second half of September, the doctors allowed Yuvchenko to go home for a short time to the new apartment his family had been granted by the government,
the state struggled to provide them with new jobs, and schools
Sixty-nine men and women stepped off the buses that first morning, and hundreds more returned every day for months after that, to salvage what they could from their former homes.
they were shunned by their new neighbors, who both resented the refugees and feared the invisible contagion of radioactivity.
The radiation readings in the stairwells and hallways of the new apartment blocks in Troieshchyna were soon found to be hundreds of times higher than elsewhere in Kiev.
The commission even issued orders to resume the construction work on Reactors Five and Six,
Yes, Chernobyl was pain we shared together. But it has become a symbol of the victory of Soviet man over the elements. . . .
the trail of perilous design faults that the scientists had known about all along but kept hidden from Brukhanov and his staff for sixteen years.
the new authority reopened Pripyat’s main swimming pool to give the liquidators somewhere to relax and established an experimental farm in the city’s hothouses, where green-thumbed technicians grew strawberries and cucumbers in irradiated soil.
looting from inside the zone had begun on an industrial scale,
Antonov 22 heavy lift transport aircraft were on their way to the Siberian military district filled with toxic contraband.
a report on the spring fruit and vegetables arriving in Kiev, with dosimetry results showing a reassuring absence of radionuclides.
but the Party did not want its legal pantomime disrupted by an intrusive audience.
the six men stood accused of negligence in conducting a dangerous and unsanctioned experiment on Reactor Number Four
operated constantly on the edge of catastrophe as a result of its lax and incompetent management.
