A system in meltdown
TAYLOR DOWNING recommends a harrowing account of how Chernobyl revealed wider failings in the Soviet Union
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham Bantam Press, 560 pages, £20 In the 1950s and early 1960s, Soviet science reigned supreme, both in terms of the space race and in nuclear energy. The first nuclear power station in the world to provide energy for the grid was opened at Obninsk in 1954, followed by many more. In a society without religion, scientists were gods.
In 1970, planning began for a huge new nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in north-west Ukraine. But by this time, Soviet technology had fallen far behind that of the west. The site was poorly constructed using shoddy materials. The reactors were badly designed. Nevertheless, building at Chernobyl was on a vast scale, to meet ludicrously ambitious planning targets. British journalist Adam Higginbotham traces the consequence of all this in his utterly gripping and superbly researched Midnight in Chernobyl.
Construction was under the control of the Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Medium Machine Building. This body had become obsessed with secrecy. Accidents were never reported and a major disaster in 1957 was kept secret for 30 years. Even worse, none of the lessons from this or other accidents were passed on to designers and operators of future systems. Instead they became state secrets.
In the early morning of 26 April 1986, Reactor Four underwent a turbine generator test. The ‘rundown unit’ supposed to take over supplying power had been introduced at speed to meet a construction deadline and had never been tested. It failed and the puzzled operators tried to close the reactor down. This led to a chain reaction and a massive explosion that leaked hundreds of tonnes of radioactive materials. It took days for experts to realise the scale of the unprecedented disaster. Flying over the site, the reactor looked like a simmering volcano of uranium fuel and graphite that was impossible to extinguish. It would continue disgorging nuclear waste for weeks to come.
Higginbotham’s account of what followed is compelling. The knee-jerk response of the authorities was to say nothing. Firefighters and engineers were sent on suicide missions to try to stop the blaze spreading. None were prepared to deal with a nuclear disaster of this magnitude. The people in the nearby town of Pripyat were given no warnings. It was later estimated that 17.5 million people were in the contamination zone below the highly radioactive clouds blowing across Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and then further north-west. Only when these clouds fell as rain in Sweden did the rest of the world discover the extent of the tragedy and Moscow was forced to reveal there had been an accident. Reluctantly, a small exclusion zone was declared. Over the following months, 116,000 local residents were evacuated.
Midnight in Chernobyl is based on interviews and the several investiga-
The knee-jerk response of the authorities to the Chernobyl disaster was to say nothing
tions into the disaster. Higginbotham also draws on memoirs, both published and unpublished. The science of nuclear reactors is complex, but the author makes it accessible. In doing so, he tells a harrowing story.
As engineers struggled to respond, the nightmare grew worse. Would there be a second chain reaction inside what was left of the reactor and an even bigger explosion? Would the burning radioactive lava penetrate the thick foundations and poison the water table of the Pripyat river which flowed into the Dnieper and supplied a vast, densely populated region? Meanwhile, around 30 survivors died in agony as radiation sickness caused their internal organs to disintegrate.
The tragedy at Chernobyl contributed to the collapse of the whole Soviet system that had created it
Higginbotham’s book also explores the political and economic consequences of the disaster. A giant reinforced concrete structure was constructed over the remains of the reactor, known suitably as the Sarcophagus. Some 600,000 men and women were drafted in over the next few years to detoxify the region. The total bill for sorting out the disaster has been estimated at $128bn.
Higginbotham argues persuasively that it was not incompetent operators at Chernobyl who were to blame for the disaster. It was a culture of secrecy, complacency and arrogance that made tragedy inevitable. It happened at the beginning of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, ‘openness’. Higginbotham shows brilliantly how the tragedy contributed to the collapse of the whole Soviet system that had created it.