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

by Adam Higginbotham

To protect his own position, at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them.

The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants.

Kirill.

discovered that the effects of the positive void coefficient grew worse as more of the fuel was burned; the longer it was in operation, the harder the reactor became to control.

nobody knew how the RBMK would behave during a major accident.

the AZ-5 mechanism was not designed to bring about an abrupt emergency stop. Dollezhal and the technicians of NIKIET believed that suddenly cutting off the electricity generated by the reactor would be disruptive to the operation of the Soviet grid. And they thought that such an immediate shutdown would be necessary only in the extremely unlikely event of a total loss of external power to the plant. So they designed the AZ-5 system to only gradually reduce the reactor’s power to zero.

report made it clear that accidents were not merely possible under rare and improbable conditions but also likely in the course of everyday operation.

A stickler for detail, Dyatlov knew his job and prided himself on his knowledge of the reactor and its systems—of mathematics, physics, mechanics, thermodynamics, and electrical engineering.

Lieutenant Pravik called in a number three alarm, the highest-level emergency alert, summoning every available fire brigade in the Kiev region.

struggled to extinguish even the smallest blazes, caused by materials which seemed to burn more savagely when they poured water on them. These were almost certainly pellets of uranium dioxide, which, superheated to more than 4,000 degrees Celsius before the explosion, had ignited on contact with the air; when hosed with water, the resulting reaction released oxygen, explosive hydrogen, and radioactive steam.

Legasov realized that the heroic but doomed efforts of the plant operators to cool the shattered reactor core with water had resulted only in flooding the basement spaces of Units Three and Four with contaminated water and sending clouds of radioactive steam billowing into the atmosphere.

“You can’t restore the reactor, because there is no reactor,” he said. “It no longer exists.” “You’re a panicker.” “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

number 88, handsomely upholstered in red imitation leather.

Sunday, an automatic monitoring device at the Risø National Laboratory north of Roskilde silently logged the cloud’s arrival in Denmark. But because it was a Sunday, the readings went unnoticed. That evening, a soldier at the Finnish National Defense Forces’ measuring station in Kajaani, southern Finland, recorded an abnormal increase in background radiation.

intensely contaminated with the entire spectrum of fission products usually found inside the core at Forsmark-1: cesium 137, cesium 134, and short-lived iodine isotopes—but also a number of other elements, including cobalt 60 and neptunium 239.

Tuesday, April 29, the press in Moscow remained entirely silent about the accident.

microgram of plutonium could bombard the soft tissues of the esophagus or lungs with 1,000 rads of energetic alpha radiation, with lethal results.

radionuclides could be neither broken down nor destroyed—only relocated, entombed, or interred,

Farmers in the area had observed a steep rise in the number of birth defects in their livestock since the accident, describing piglets with froglike eyes and malformed skulls, and calves born without legs, eyes, or heads.

Pripyat, scientists began to notice strange new phenomena in the wildlife they found there. Hedgehogs, voles, and shrews had become radioactive, and mallards had developed genetic abnormalities; in the cooling reservoir of the plant, silver carp grew to monstrous sizes; the leaves of the trees around the Red Forest had swelled to supernatural proportions, including giant conifers with pine needles ten times their usual size and acacias with “blades as large as a child’s palm.”

The Soviet fliers’ courageous efforts to smother it with sand from two hundred meters up had been almost entirely pointless.

substance they christened Chernobylite—a beautiful, but deadly, blue crystal silicate composed of zirconium and uranium,

One rem is a little less than the citizens of Denver, Colorado, absorb from natural background radiation in the course of a year; 5 rem is the annual exposure limit for US nuclear workers; 100 rem is the threshold of acute radiation syndrome; and an instantaneous dose of 500 rem to the whole body would be lethal to most people.