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

by Adam Higginbotham

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 to the total Soviet defense budget for 1989.

By the beginning of 1991, as many as six hundred thousand men and women from across the Soviet Union had taken part in cleanup work in the radioactive netherworld surrounding the site of Reactor Number Four and would be officially recognized as Chernobyl liquidators.

Yet nuclear power endured. More than seven years after the Japanese disaster, the United States still had a hundred licensed and operational power reactors—including one at Three Mile Island. France continued to generate 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, and China had recently embarked on a reactor building spree, with twenty new units under construction and thirty-nine already in operation.

Even to begin to head off climate change, all the extra power-generating capacity that the world would need to create over the coming thirty-five years would have to be clean, yet neither wind, solar, hydroelectric, nor geothermal power—nor any combination of them—had the potential to bridge the gap.

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.

In 2015 Microsoft founder Bill Gates had begun funding research projects similar to these fourth-generation reactors in a quest to create a carbon-neutral power source for the future. By then, the Chinese government had already set seven hundred scientists on a crash program to build the world’s first industrial thorium reactor as part of a war on pollution. “The problem of coal has become clear,” the engineering director of the project said. “Nuclear power provides the only solution.”

In the absence of large-scale epidemiological work, independent scientists from countries around the world continued to log “endocrinological, musculoskeletal, respiratory, and circulatory problems and a rise in malignant tumors, especially of the breast and prostate,” among residents of the affected areas.