Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  * * *

  Toptunov met Sasha Korol in 1977, as part of a group of thirty or so first-year students studying atomic power plant engineering at the MEPhI campus in Obninsk. It was a place of thrilling novelties for the aspirant teenaged engineers, a complex surrounded by sixteen other research facilities and with access to two small research reactors. The course work was tough, beginning with general disciplines—mathematics, technical drawing, and chemistry—but also political indoctrination. To excel, the students had to pass courses in historical materialism and “scientific Communism”: the study of the history of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, and the social laws established by Marx and developed by Lenin and Brezhnev, leading to the state of True Communism, then scheduled to arrive in the year 2000.

  In their spare time, the young freshmen in Obninsk were like students everywhere. They drank beer and played cards and went to films and shows. Especially popular were the improvised comedy competitions based on the format of the TV show KVN—Klub vesyolykh i nakhodchivykh, or the Club of the Merry and Quick-Witted—which, although by then long banished from television by Soviet censors, lived on as a cult live spectacle at colleges across the Union. Toptunov, shy looking, with glasses and a lingering hint of puppy fat, was frustrated by his boyish appearance. He grew a mustache that he hoped gave him an air of sophistication. With a charming smile and a thick shock of shaggy, brown hair, he did well with girls.

  At MEPhI, Toptunov took up karate—a sport on the long and often inexplicable list of ideas and practices from outside the USSR that were officially forbidden. But information about it was available in samizdat form, and Toptunov learned to kick and punch from illegally circulated homemade manuals. Against the advice of his tutors, who warned their students it could damage their eyesight, and with it their future in the nuclear industry, he also began to box. Although his retinas emerged from the ring intact, he did eventually have his nose broken, leaving him with a chronic nasal dribble. One night after class, Toptunov got into a drunken argument with an overbearing thermodynamics tutor. The dispute escalated, and, in the bathroom, the two men came to blows. Toptunov gave the tutor a black eye. Afterward, the young student was threatened with expulsion but, somehow granted a reprieve, stayed on.

  After four years of study at MEPhI, Toptunov and Korol began their diploma projects: Korol focused on a technique to isolate faulty fuel rods, while Toptunov worked on using acoustics to identify irregularities in the performance of the reactor. The diploma research required a six-month internship at a nuclear station somewhere in the USSR, and both chose Chernobyl. They liked it so much there that, upon finally graduating from MEPhI in 1983, they opted to return to Chernobyl for their full-time work assignments. Toptunov and Korol arrived just in time for the completion of Chernobyl’s Unit Four, the newest and most advanced of the station’s RBMK reactors.

  Like all other new engineers, they had to start at the bottom, doing menial work for which they were overqualified—patrolling the plant with an oil can, feeling machinery for hot bearings, mopping up spills—while they learned the practicalities and layout of the station and its equipment. The young specialists learned quickly that it was one thing to understand how the reactor worked in principle, and quite another to understand it in reality. When their working shifts ended, they stayed in the station for hours, putting in extra time to trace the pathway of giant steam pipes and cables by hand, finding the location of huge gate valves in the dark, following myriad connections from room to room and floor to floor. It was common practice, too, for the trainees to return to the plant at all hours of the day and night to observe both routine work and special tests, in the hope of gathering extra knowledge that might speed their advancement.

  During the summer and autumn of 1983, as Reactor Number Four was undergoing final assembly, the new trainees were given responsibility for managing quality control. While the giant cylindrical concrete vault, cast to contain the “active zone” of the reactor, was filled slowly with the thousands of tonnes of rectangular graphite blocks that would help moderate its fission, Toptunov, Korol, and the other apprentice operators clambered inside it to check the progress of construction. They compared the work of the assembling teams against the designers’ blueprints and looked for leaks and cracks in the graphite pile; they monitored the welding of the scores of water pipelines that would circulate cooling water through the core, a gleaming thicket of narrow-bore stainless steel. Finally, when the vault was filled and the pipework complete, they watched as the reactor was sealed, loaded with fuel, and went critical for the first time, on December 13, 1983.

  The work left little time for hobbies, but somehow Toptunov managed to fit them in. When he and Korol had first arrived in Pripyat, Toptunov organized a gym downstairs in the dormitories where they lived—he put up a set of Swedish wall bars for everyone to use—and, later, a class in which he tutored high school students from the city in math and physics. He had a girlfriend who worked as a nurse at the Pripyat hospital, Medical-Sanitary Center Number 126, and he loved to go fishing: the network of artificial canals and the giant cooling reservoir around the station were rich in fish, which thrived in water that had circulated through the plant’s reactors as coolant before being flushed, still radioactive but pleasingly warm, toward the river.

  After serving his apprenticeship by helping to build the reactor he would one day operate, Toptunov grew closer to qualifying as a senior reactor control engineer. This was perhaps the most demanding job in the entire plant, as the man—even in the nominally egalitarian Soviet Union, it was always a man—who, minute by minute through each eight-hour shift, governed the enormous power of the reactor. The position required rigorous study and practical experience: the operators spoke their own coded language, dense with acronyms and apparently unpronounceable abbreviations that were muddled into a new vocabulary: the ZGIS and the MOVTO, the BShchU, the SIUR, the SIUT, and the SIUB. Then there were thick stacks of manuals and regulations to pore over, followed by a series of examinations in the station’s Department of Nuclear Safety. There were also health checks, and security screenings conducted by the KGB. After one of these safety exams, Toptunov sat down with Korol and told him about a strange phenomenon, described deep in the RBMK documentation, indicating that the reactor control rods may—under some circumstances—accelerate reactivity instead of slowing it down.

  Only after all of this study and practice was Toptunov permitted to stand behind an existing senior reactor control engineer at the reactor panel in the control room and watch how the work was done. Eventually he was allowed—still under close supervision—to begin touching the buttons and switches of the panel himself.

  * * *

  When Leonid Toptunov let himself into Alexander Korol’s eighth-floor apartment late on the night of April 25, 1986, he had been qualified as a senior reactor control engineer for just two months. Korol, still an assistant, was behind him but hoping to qualify soon as a senior engineer in the Unit Four reactor department. Toptunov found his old friend lounging on the couch, reading a story about a new medical phenomenon discovered in the United States—AIDS—in a recent Russian edition of Scientific American. Leonid told him that there was an electrical test on the turbines scheduled during his shift at Reactor Number Four that night. It would be worth witnessing.

  “Let’s go together,” Toptunov said.

  “No, I’ll pass,” Korol replied. “I’ve got this interesting article to read.”

  At a few minutes before eleven at night, Toptunov set off for the bus stop, a few blocks away on Kurchatov Street, where a scheduled service shuttled workers to and from the plant. He walked down to the end of Sportivnaya and took a right at the darkened windows of the Jubilee home services store. Then on past the post office and the technical school, and across the square toward the end of Lenina Prospekt. It was a warm, sultry night; the sky an inky blue, glittering with stars.

  On the bus, Toptunov joined his colleagues on the midnight shift
in Unit Four. These included the control room staff—Senior Unit Control Engineer Boris Stolyarchuk and Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov—and the engineers from the Reactor Department, among them Leonid’s friend Alexander Yuvchenko, wearing his new clothes. It was a short ride. After ten minutes, they were at the steps of the station’s main administrative block.

  The four-story office building sat, like the bridge of a massive container ship, at the extreme eastern end of the station’s four reactors and the turbine hall, which stretched away into the distance, a narrow concrete box almost a kilometer long. Inside the administrative block were the offices of Viktor Brukhanov and his senior staff and one of the plant’s two main radiation control points: the sanitary locks that marked the barrier between the plant’s “clean” and “dirty”—or potentially radioactive—zones.

  Taking the polished marble stairs to the second floor, past stained glass panels depicting life-sized modernist figures in brilliant shades of yellow, scarlet, and cobalt blue, Toptunov and the others arrived at the double doors of the men’s sanitary lock. Inside, a narrow bench, painted with the instruction “Take off your shoes!,” blocked his path. He sat, removed his footwear, swung his legs over the bench, and walked to the changing room in his socks. He hung his clothes in a narrow steel locker and passed through the door into the “dirty” room wearing just his underpants. Once this door closed behind him, the only way back into the “clean” room was through a radiation monitoring device equipped with sensors to detect alpha- and beta-particle contamination. Toptunov put on freshly laundered white cotton overalls, a white cotton cap like those worn in an operating theater, to protect his hair, and white canvas boots.

  The Chernobyl plant was constructed with a utilitarian disregard for high-minded notions of architecture: its form followed function in the most economical ways the station’s designers could conceive. The turbine hall housed the station’s eight colossal steam turbines in a single row, end to end in a cavernous shed thirty meters high and roofed with corrugated steel. The plant’s four reactors were strung out in a line along the length of the turbine hall: giant concrete boxes arranged in the order they had been constructed, from one to four. The first two reactors were housed in separate structures, but—to save time and money—Reactor Number Three and Reactor Number Four had been built together, back-to-back under the same roof, where they shared ventilation and auxiliary systems. Between the turbine hall and the reactors was the spine of the station, which housed the deaerator corridor. Uninterrupted by a single door or dogleg, this seemingly endless hallway ran parallel to the turbine hall, all the way from the main administrative block at one end of the plant to the western end of Reactor Number Four at the other, not quite a kilometer long in total.

  The deaerator corridor provided the plant staff with access to every part of the station, including each of the four unit control rooms—one dedicated to each reactor—that lay along it. It was also a key orientation point inside a complex that, with its dark spaces and tang of machine oil, often resembled the dark, roaring voids inside a gargantuan submarine more than an ordinary building. Much of it was navigated along catwalks and clanging steel stairwells, lined with hundreds of kilometers of dense pipework and accessed through heavy steel doors. The layout could be bewildering, and workers found their bearings inside the plant using alphanumeric coordinates, lettered in Russian from A to Ya along one axis, and along the other by numbers, from 1 to 68. Instead of conventional floors, the levels of the plant were subdivided vertically by “mark” numbers, showing distance in meters from the ground, and painted on the walls of hallways and landings in large red figures. Climbing from mark -5 in the basement to the station’s highest point at mark +74.5—the roof of the reactor block—the structure stood more than twenty stories high.

  To reach Control Room Number Four, Toptunov, Stolyarchuk, Akimov, and the other men on the night shift had to ascend to mark +10—ten meters above ground level—and then travel almost the entire length of the deaerator corridor: a brisk ten-minute walk from one end of the station to the other. From there, the floor of the Unit Four central reactor hall was higher still: up several flights of stairs, or by elevator, from the control room, to mark +35, or more than ten stories aboveground. Here, accessible through a heavy, airtight door that could be sealed shut against radiation, lay the shining steel lid of Reactor Number Four.

  * * *

  A little more than five hundred meters away from Control Room Number Four, on the other side of the access road that ran beside the plant, the men of the third watch of Paramilitary Fire Brigade Number Two lingered outside their fire station. Their cigarettes glowed in the mellow darkness. It had been a quiet day. As midnight approached, the fourteen firefighters were more than halfway through their twenty-four-hour shift and taking turns to sleep in the ready room. They were not due to be relieved until eight the next morning. The brigade was one of two based close to the Chernobyl plant. Pripyat also had its own paramilitary firefighting crew—Brigade Number Six—who lived beside their station, in a large two-story building near the end of Lesi Ukrainki Street. They had already been called out earlier in the evening, to a blaze reported on the roof of the city bus station. But that had taken the civilian firefighters less than five minutes to put out, and they were soon back at home.

  Brigade Number Two was dedicated to protecting the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but there was never much action. The construction work conducted by shifts of several thousand men, day and night, across the complex, would sometimes cause small fires: welders’ sparks might set light to a pile of trash, or a vat of hot bitumen could be knocked over. The fire station, with offices, a canteen, the ready room with a TV set, and the recreation room with a Ping-Pong table, was within easy reach of the plant and the building sites. The red-and-white-striped ventilation stack between Reactors One and Two dominated the view through the large glass doors at the front of the station. Behind the doors sat four fire trucks: compact ZIL-130s and the bigger, six-wheeled ZIL-131 powder trucks that could carry 2,400 liters of water and 150 liters of foam for smothering electrical fires. At the back of the building was a separate garage holding the special equipment, including a Ural mobile fire tanker capable of pumping 40 liters of water a second.

  The third watch lacked discipline. It was packed with obstinate old hands who disliked following orders. Many of them were from peasant families, close relatives raised in the surrounding countryside. Among them were two Shavrey brothers, Ivan and Leonid, from just over the border in Belarus, and fifty-year-old “Grandpa” Grigori Khmel, who had two sons who were also firefighters—all of them born in a small village ten kilometers away from where the station now stood. The watch commander, Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik, was just twenty-three, a college graduate who dabbled in photography, drawing, and poetry and was a dedicated member of the Komsomol. His wife taught music at a kindergarten in Pripyat and had given birth to their first child, a daughter, just a few weeks before, at the end of March.

  That morning, Pravik had applied to take the day off, offering to switch shifts with his friend Piotr Khmel, chief of the first watch, with whom he’d graduated from the fire safety institute in Cherkasy. Piotr, the younger son of Grandpa Khmel, was a burly, good-natured twenty-four-year-old lieutenant. Khmel had already covered for Pravik after his daughter’s birth, and that morning he had been there again with his uniform on, ready to go. But the deputy station commander wouldn’t approve the change.

  “Major Telyatnikov will get back from his holiday on Monday,” he told Pravik. “He’ll give you permission.”

  Khmel went home to get some rest and prepare for work on Saturday, and Pravik once again took command of the troublesome third watch.

  Back in Pripyat, Piotr decided to take advantage of his unexpected night off and joined three fellow officers from the fire station for dinner at the restaurant in the city’s new shopping center. Despite General Secretary Gorbachev’s ongoing Unionwide campaign against alcohol, they had n
o trouble getting a bottle of vodka. Later, they moved on to Sovietskoe shampanskoye—the cheap, mass-produced “people’s champagne” originally developed on the orders of Stalin. At around eleven, they went up to Khmel’s one-room apartment, in the old low-rise blocks just across the street from the Pripyat fire station. They invited a few girls over to keep the party going. It was well after midnight when Khmel’s guests departed, leaving behind a little chocolate and a half-finished bottle of Soviet champagne on the kitchen table.

  Tired and drunk, Khmel took a shower and prepared for bed.

  * * *

  Over at the power station, Senior Mechanical Engineer Alexander Yuvchenko was already at his post: a large, windowless space at mark +12.5 in a mezzanine between the reactor halls of Units Three and Four. He had a desk there for his papers and a metal cage stacked with equipment and supplies. Although he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, he was expecting a quiet night. Earlier in the day, the reactor had been scheduled for a maintenance shutdown, following a series of long-overdue tests on the turbines. By the time he arrived at work, he understood that everything in Unit Four would be powered down. All he and the others on the graveyard shift would be doing was overseeing the cooling of the reactor: easy work.

  But down in the control room, there had been a change of plans. The tests were running twelve hours late and were only now beginning in earnest. The impatience of the station’s deputy chief engineer was rising. And there was mounting disagreement about how to respond to the troubling data coming in from Reactor Number Four.

  4

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