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April 17 - May 13, 2023
Boris Scherbina, the balding, bulldog-faced deputy prime minister of the USSR in charge of all fuel and energy operations throughout the Union.
Academician Valery Legasov, first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy,
the lid of the reactor—Elena, the two-thousand-tonne disc of concrete and steel designed to shield it from the outside world—was tilted upward to the sky.
They now suspected that the conditions for a new criticality would soon exist in whatever nuclear fuel remained inside the reactor vessel, initiating a new chain reaction—but this time, it would take place in the open air, and they would have no means of controlling it.
Unit Four was now potentially lethal to approach for anything but the shortest time.
by midafternoon, they had recorded readings of 0.5 roentgen an hour; by nightfall, it was up to 1.8 roentgen. This reading was tens of thousands of times higher than normal background radiation, but the Soviet deputy minister of health insisted that it posed no immediate threat to the population.
an explosion in the reactor core was impossible under any conditions he could imagine.
the level of radiation inside the cockpit had risen beyond the worst expected in a nuclear war.
Legasov estimated that the reactor had contained 2,500 tonnes of graphite blocks, which had caught fire and already reached a temperature of more than 1,000 degrees centigrade.
Legasov determined that the graphite would burn at a rate of around one tonne an hour. Even accounting for the material that had been thrown from the core by the explosion, if his calculations were correct and what remained burned unchecked, the blaze could roar on for more than two months—releasing
so hot that water would not only evaporate instantly into steam, further distributing radioactive aerosols in a cloud of toxic vapor, but also could separate into its constituent elements, oxygen and hydrogen, creating the possibility of a further explosion.
At its heart, it pulsed with some 20 million curies of radioactivity.
Using just three helicopters, they had managed to dump ten tonnes of boron and eighty tonnes of sand into Unit Four by nightfall.
Most crews flew a total of ten to fifteen sorties over the reactor, making two or three bombing runs each time, but the first pilots did even more: one returned seventy-six times to Reactor Number Four in the first three days.
Academician Legasov and the other scientists calculated that a total of 2,000 tonnes of lead would eventually be needed to help smother the graphite
his crews had managed to hit the reactor with another 1,000 tonnes of absorbents.
General Antoshkin had imposed an exposure limit of 22 rem on his men, although many routinely underreported it in order to keep flying longer. They were issued both bitter potassium iodide tablets and a sweet medicinal paste—shipped in from a pharmaceutical plant in Leningrad, intended to help combat radiation—which
Instead of continuing to fall, the radioactive releases from the reactor had now suddenly begun to increase again, doubling from 3 million to 6 million curies overnight. The temperature of the burning core, too, was rising rapidly. By Thursday night, Legasov’s estimates suggested that it was already approaching 1,700 degrees centigrade.
Worse still, the 4,600 tonnes of sand, lead, and dolomite that had been flung into the damaged building from two hundred meters in the air, combined with the impact of the initial explosions a week before, might have fatally compromised the foundations of the reactor.
If the temperature of the molten fuel reached 2,800 degrees centigrade, they suspected it could begin burning through the reinforced concrete floor of the reactor vault.
it would bring about a new steam explosion orders of magnitude larger than the first. This blast could destroy not only what remained of Unit Four but also the other three reactors, which had survived the accident intact.
Amounting to a gargantuan dirty bomb formed of more than five thousand tonnes of intensely radioactive graphite and five hundred tonnes of nuclear fuel, such an explosion could exterminate whatever remained alive inside the Special Zone—and hurl enough fallout into the atmosphere to render a large swath of Europe uninhabitable for a hundred years.
some noticed their voices becoming high and squeaky—a strange side effect of alpha contamination.
They surrendered their clothes and expensive foreign-made watches, too contaminated to be saved, for burial.
The gamma fields varied wildly, from 50 roentgen in places near Unit One, to the most dangerous areas—no more than 250 meters from Unit Four—where exposure reached 800 roentgen.
the chances of a ball of radioactive lava searing through all four of the 1.8-meter-thick reinforced concrete floors beneath the reactor and reaching the water table of the fourth-longest river in Europe were as high as one in ten.
The aircraft that delivered the first wave of patients was dismantled, and one bus was sent to the campus of the Kurchatov Institute, where it was driven into a pit and buried.
One hundred fifteen of them were initially diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome.
Ten had received such massive doses of radiation that the doctors immediately regarded their survival as impossible.
The radiation exposure responsible for causing ARS may be over in a few seconds
As Dr. Guskova and her team knew, by the time the outward symptoms of ARS appeared—including swelling, skin burns and necrosis, bloody diarrhea and hemorrhaging, the decimation of bone marrow, corrosion of the airways and digestive system—it would be too late for them to intervene.
leukocytes. Manufactured in the bone marrow, these cells are the foundation of the body’s immune system and among the most reliable biological markers of the effects of ARS.
Naval doctors, whose expertise had been earned the hard way, through decades of accidents in the close quarters of nuclear submarines, insisted on the Ministry of Defense standard of 25 rem. But both the Soviet Health Ministry and the head of the chemical troops, General Vladimir Pikalov, wanted twice that: 50 rem, the level prescribed for his soldiers in the event of war.
in the wake of a single helicopter flight, radiation levels increased as much as a thousand times.
From inside the body, the damage inflicted by “hot” particles—the almost invisible fragments of nuclear fuel blown out of the reactor core—was exponentially greater than when kept outside:
1 microgram of plutonium could bombard the soft tissues of the esophagus or lungs with 1,000 rads of energetic alpha radiation, with lethal results.
Vodka, in particular, was a powerful engine of violent or sudden death.
iodine 131, cesium 134 and 137, tellurium 132, and ruthenium 103,
180 tonnes of nuclear fuel they believed still lay somewhere within its rising walls.
the structure contained 440,000 cubic meters of concrete, 600,000 cubic meters of gravel, and 7,700 tonnes of metal.
The costs had risen to more than 1 million rubles—or $1.5 million—a day.
The doctors regarded the survival of some of the most badly exposed operators as almost miraculous. One electrical engineer, Andrei Tormozin, had been only 120 meters from the reactor when it exploded, and then spent hours in highly radioactive areas of the machine hall, working to stop feed pumps and extinguish oil fires. He had absorbed what Guskova and the other specialists had always understood to be a mortal dose of gamma and beta radiation: almost 1,000 rem. His body rejected a bone marrow transplant; he contracted blood poisoning and radiation-induced hepatitis and was not expected to
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that the explosion in Chernobyl had been inevitable, and that if it hadn’t happened there, it would have happened at another Soviet station sooner or later.
The price for the construction and operation of the Sarcophagus alone was 4 billion rubles, or almost $5.5 billion.
One estimate put the eventual bill for all aspects of the disaster at more than $128 billion—equivalent
8,000 roentgen per hour, or 2 roentgen a second: five minutes in its presence was enough to guarantee an agonizing death.
the giant vault of Reactor Number Four, which had once contained 190 tonnes of uranium fuel and 1,700 tonnes of graphite blocks,
Together, by 2005, the contiguous parts of the Belarusian and Ukrainian zones made up a total area of more than 4,700 square kilometers of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus, all of it rendered officially uninhabitable by radiation.
for years after the accident, meat, dairy products, and produce raised on farms from Minsk to Aberdeen and from France to Finland were found laced with strontium and cesium and had to be confiscated and destroyed.
Far from enduring decades of inevitable sickness and death in an atomic wasteland, the plants and animals left behind in the evacuated area after the accident had apparently made an amazing recovery.
