Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

They seemed to be gifted at blowing up reactors, he roared, but pathetic at filling sandbags.

the twelve months following the accident, the governments of Sweden, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, and the Philippines all pledged to permanently abandon their nuclear programs, and nine other nations either canceled or delayed plans for further reactor construction. Opinion polls suggested that, since Chernobyl, two-thirds of people around the world opposed any further development of nuclear energy. The United States faced a complete collapse in reactor building, and the very name of the Ukrainian plant became embedded in the international

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.

yet neither wind, solar, hydroelectric, nor geothermal power—nor any combination of them—had the potential to bridge the gap. Nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide and have been statistically safer than every competing energy industry, including wind turbines. And at last, more than seventy years after the technology’s inception, engineers were finally developing reactors with design priorities that lay not in making bombs but in generating electricity. In principle, these fourth-generation reactors would be cheaper, safer, smaller, more efficient, and less poisonous than their predecessors and could yet prove to be the technology that saves the world. Less than a month before the explosion of Reactor Number Four in 1986, a team of nuclear engineers at Argonne National Laboratory–West in Idaho had quietly succeeded in demonstrating that the first of these, the integral fast reactor, was safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island 2 and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), an even more advanced concept developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is fueled by thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive