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

by Adam Higginbotham

The quality of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building projects throughout the nation’s power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as “preinstallation overhaul.”

Party membership was not open to everyone. It required an exhaustive process of candidacy and approval, the support of existing members, and the payment of regular dues. By 1970, fewer than one in fifteen Soviet citizens had been admitted.

Did not ever know that was a thing.

Speaking unselfconsciously in his southern accent, plunging into crowds on apparently spontaneous walkabouts finely orchestrated by the KGB, Gorbachev appeared constantly on the nation’s flagship TV news show, Vremya, watched every night by nearly two hundred million people.

Everything is always propaganda.

atomshchiki

positive void coefficient.

This negative void coefficient acts like a dead man’s handle on the reactor, a safety feature of the water-water designs common in the West.

Ozymandian

The RBMK was so large that reactivity in one area of the core often had only a loose relationship to that in another.

Selsyn

?

samizdat