Inside the hall, it was hard to breathe, and the humid, steam-saturated air carried the smell of ozone. But the operators gave little thought to radiation, and the panicked dosimetrists who dashed through the unit provided no useful information: the needles of all their monitoring equipment simply ran off the scale. The radiometers capable of taking higher readings remained locked in a safe and could not be released without orders from above. Razim Davletbayev told himself that the distinctive scent filling the turbine hall was caused by the short circuits arcing in the air; later, when he
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