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March 15 - March 18, 2022
no mention of any faults in the design of the RBMK-1000 reactor.
But it soon became clear that neither the design of the reactor nor the long trail of accidents and institutional cover-ups that preceded the disaster would be considered by the court.
quirks of their reactor became dangerous only in the hands of incompetent operators.
On December 4, 1987, after more than eighteen months of decontamination, repairs, and modifications, the last of the three surviving reactors of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station once again began providing electricity to the Soviet grid.
the twelve other RBMK-1000 units operating elsewhere in the USSR—had all been subjected to the extensive technical refit proposed in the secret Politburo resolution the previous July.
tacit admission of the designers’ culpability in the accident,
more than a year after the disaster, the Politburo received a report showing that Soviet atomic power stations continued to be bedeviled by bad construction, poor staff discipline—and hundreds of minor accidents.
the academician said that Soviet science had lost its way.
leaving behind a generation of young people who were technologically sophisticated but morally untethered.
this profound failure of the Soviet social experiment, and not merely a handful of reckless reactor operators, that Legasov believed was to blame
he told the assembled delegates, “that we can today be certain there are no effects of the Chernobyl accident on human health.”
new psychological syndrome, which he called “radiophobia.”
Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded.
shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower
that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.
In February 1989, almost three years after the accident, a prime-time report on Vremya revealed to the Soviet people that the true extent of radioactive contamination beyond the perimeter of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone had been covered up—and
Farmers in the area had observed a steep rise in the number of birth defects in their livestock
dismissed any connection between such deformities and the accident, blaming excessive use of fertilizers and improper farming methods instead.
tonnes of pork and beef contaminated with radioactive cesium had been secretly mixed into sausages and sold to unsuspecting shoppers throughout the Soviet Union
financial cost of Chernobyl—the irradiation and destruction of equipment, the evacuations, the medical care, and the loss of factories, farmland, and millions of kilowatts of electricity—continued
eventual bill for all aspects of the disaster at more than $128 billion—equivalent to the total Soviet defense budget for 1989.
The continued mobilizations created a public outcry, and, at last, the Soviet military authorities decided to stop sending troops to the zone. In December 1990 the liquidation effectively came to a halt.
they found the state’s doctors reluctant to connect their symptoms to the conditions they had endured inside the thirty-kilometer zone.
“Ordinary illness: not related to ionizing radiation.”
When the newly independent republic of Ukraine began receiving its first bills for electricity generated in Russia, the government reversed its decision to close the plant’s remaining three reactors, and the last of them was not finally shut down until 2000.
the end, the blazing reactor had simply burned itself out.
The Soviet fliers’ courageous efforts to smother it with sand from two hundred meters up had been almost entirely pointless.
When the lava dropped into the dregs of the water in the suppression pool, it cooled harmlessly, and the molten heart of Reactor Number Four at last ended its journey—a
admitted publicly that the designers had been chiefly to blame for the catastrophe, and the operators’ actions played only a minor role.
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.
“Thus the Chernobyl accident comes within the standard pattern of most severe accidents in the world. It begins with an accumulation of small breaches of the regulations. . . . These produce a set of undesirable properties and occurrences that, when taken separately, do not seem to be particularly dangerous, but finally an initiating event occurs that, in this particular case, was the subjective actions of the personnel that allowed the potentially destructive and dangerous qualities of the reactor to be released.”
Steinberg recognized that the origins of the accident lay with those who had designed the reactor and the secret, incestuous bureaucracy that had allowed it to go into operation.
half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic were still too radioactive for human consumption.
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.
levels of radioactivity left in many areas was proving apparently harmless—or, in some cases, even beneficial—to animal populations.
the plants changed at a molecular level to protect themselves against radiation.
the Fukushima accident stifled the nuclear renaissance in the cradle:
“The problem of coal has become clear,” the engineering director of the project said. “Nuclear power provides the only solution.”
health effects of the Chernobyl accident “were not nearly as substantial as had at first been feared.”
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,
And in the space that remained, anxiety and misunderstanding about the real threats of radioactivity and nuclear power continued to multiply.
she had been afraid to talk about everything she had seen—“because
He hadn’t bothered to defend himself in court, he insisted, because he knew that was how the Party had decided it would be.
He spoke of the accident’s catalytic role in Ukrainian independence and the breakup
“Its heavy burden lay on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people, and we are, unfortunately, still very far from overcoming it for good.”
a giant steel arc 108 meters high—tall enough to contain the Statue of Liberty—packed
