Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  * * *

  Like the station’s own physicists, Legasov’s first concern was the possibility of a new chain reaction in the remains of Reactor Number Four. The plant operators had already tried to drench the nuclear fuel by pouring bags of boric acid powder—which contained neutron-absorbing boron—into the water tanks of the cooling system. But the chemical solution had disappeared into the maze of broken piping tangled in the reactor hall. They couldn’t be certain where it had gone, and now supplies were running low. Ukrainian energy minister Sklyarov ordered another ten tonnes of the powder to be sent from Rovno nuclear power station, more than three hundred kilometers away to the west. But the Rovno station director was reluctant to part with it—what if he had an emergency? And when it was finally dispatched by truck, the vehicle broke down. It would not arrive in Chernobyl until the following day.

  At the same time, 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. In addition, there was the poisonous torrent of radioactive aerosols being carried into the air from the crater of Reactor Number Four—where the glowing lattice of fuel cells and the ominous spot of incandescence that Prushinsky had glimpsed suggested strongly that something was on fire. Somehow the blaze had to be put out and the reactor sealed.

  But the debris thrown from inside the core also made the station and its grounds a radioactive minefield. Unit Four was now potentially lethal to approach for anything but the shortest time. Getting close enough to cover the reactor, or even fighting the fire using conventional methods like foam—or water, as the British had done in Windscale nearly thirty years earlier—was impossible. Yet no one on the commission could suggest how the burning reactor might be smothered. Legasov looked around him in consternation: the politicians were ignorant of nuclear physics, and the scientists and technicians were too paralyzed by indecision to commit to a solution. Everyone knew that something must be done—but what?

  And as dense clouds of radionuclides continued to roil into the sky above Reactor Number Four, the experts assembled in the White House still could not agree on whether to evacuate Pripyat. The civil defense radiation scouts had been taking hourly readings on the streets of the city since noon, and they found the figures alarming: on Lesi Ukrainki Street, less than three kilometers from the reactor, by midafternoon, they had recorded readings of 0.5 roentgen an hour; by nightfall, it was up to 1.8 roentgen. This reading was tens of thousands of times higher than normal background radiation, but the Soviet deputy minister of health insisted that it posed no immediate threat to the population. He pointed out indignantly that even after the still-undisclosed 1957 disaster in Mayak, the population of the secret city had not been told to leave. “They never evacuated people there!” he said. “Why do it here?”

  Indeed, the threshold officially stipulated by the Soviet authorities for evacuation in the event of a nuclear accident lay far off. According to the state document “Criteria for Making a Decision on Protection of the Population in the Event of an Atomic Reactor Accident,” only if citizens were forecast to acquire a lifetime dose of 75 rem—fifteen times the annual level deemed safe for workers inside a nuclear power station—did evacuation become mandatory. Even the regulations governing when it was necessary to tell the population that a radiation leak had taken place were contradictory, and it was unclear who had the final say in authorizing evacuation. Scherbina may have feared creating panic in Pripyat. But at that point, he had little reason to believe that Soviet citizens—long hardened to news of misfortune and distrustful of official information—would really lose their heads if warned of an accident; more urgent was the state’s compulsion for secrecy. By daybreak on Saturday, the men of the militsia had sealed off the entire area with roadblocks, and the KGB then cut off the city’s long-distance telephone lines. By nightfall, the local lines were dead, too, and there had still been no radio broadcast to notify the citizens of Pripyat of the accident, let alone warn them to stay indoors or close their windows. Even so, in the event of an evacuation, Scherbina knew there would be no way of concealing the exodus of the fifty thousand residents of an entire atomgrad.

  And yet, the civil defense commanders and the physicists disagreed with the health minister’s sanguine forecast: even if the radiation situation in the town seemed tolerable in the short term, it was unlikely to improve. So far, the plume of vapor from the reactor had been drifting north-northwest—away from Pripyat and Kiev, toward Belarus; by noon on Saturday, chemical troops had registered external dosages of radiation along its path measuring a life-threatening 30 roentgen per hour, as far as fifty kilometers from the plant. But the wind could change at any moment, and there were already thunderstorms to the southeast. If even the smallest amount of rain fell on Pripyat, it would bring down radioactive fallout, with terrible consequences for the population. From Kiev, the Ukrainian prime minister had already unilaterally given orders to arrange transport—more than a thousand buses and trucks—for a possible evacuation of the city. Yet nothing would move without sanction from the top. And Scherbina wanted more information before making a decision. He resolved to wait until morning.

  In the meantime, something had begun stirring inside the yawning vault of Unit Four. At around eight o’clock on Saturday evening, the plant’s deputy chief engineer for science noticed a ruby glow shimmering within the ruins. This was followed by a series of small explosions and brilliant white flashes that leapt from the wreckage of the central hall like geysers of light, illuminating the full height of the 150-meter vent stack. Two hours later, a team led by a member of the Ministry of Energy’s nuclear research institute, VNIIAES, was taking samples from the coolant canal when the walls of Unit Four were shaken by a thunderous roar. The technicians took shelter beneath a box-girder bridge as incandescent fragments showered from the sky, and the needles of their dosimetry equipment ran off the end of their dials.

  * * *

  Back in Pripyat, the meetings of the government commission wound on. An air of unreality still prevailed: at one point, the chairman’s assistants drafted an action plan for repairing Reactor Number Four and reconnecting it to the Soviet electrical grid, although by then it was obvious that such a feat was impossible. And, according to Vitali Sklyarov’s account, at sometime before midnight, a functionary interrupted a meeting to tell Scherbina that General Secretary Gorbachev would be calling him shortly for a situation report. The deputy minister ordered the room cleared. As Sklyarov rose to leave, Scherbina stopped him.

  “No, no. Sit down,” he said. “Listen to what I’m going to say. Then you’re going to tell your superiors exactly the same thing.”

  The VCh—the scrambled high-frequency line, from Moscow—rang, and Scherbina answered.

  “There’s been an accident,” the deputy minister told Gorbachev. “Panic is total. Neither the Party organs, the secretary of the oblast, nor the rayon committees are here at present. I’m going to demand that the minister of energy restart all units. We’re going to take all measures to liquidate the accident.”

  Scherbina was silent for a few moments as Gorbachev spoke.

  At last, Scherbina said, “Okay,” and replaced the receiver in its cradle. He turned to Sklyarov.

  “Did you hear all that?”

  He had; he was appalled. “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.”

  A few minutes later, the special telephone rang again. This time it was Scherbitsky, the Ukrainian Communist Party chief.

  Scherbina repeated to Scherbitsky what he’d just told Gorbachev: a can-do shock-work action plan of fantasy and denial. Then he handed the phone to Sklyarov.

  “He wants to talk to you. Just say what I was sayi
ng.”

  “I don’t agree with what Comrade Boris Evdokimovich is saying,” Sklyarov said. “We need to evacuate everyone.”

  Scherbina snatched the phone from the energy minister’s hand.

  “He’s a panicker!” he yelled at Scherbitsky. “How are you going to evacuate all these people? We’ll be humiliated in front of the whole world!”

  8

  * * *

  Saturday, 6:15 a.m., Pripyat

  It was sometime after 3:00 a.m. when Alexander Esaulov was jangled awake by the telephone. Shit!, he thought as he fumbled for the receiver. Another weekend ruined.

  With his wife and children off with the in-laws for a few weeks, he’d been looking forward to enjoying a few days to himself: perhaps squeezing in a little fishing. Having the two children at home—a five-year-old daughter and a son about to turn six months—there was always plenty of work to do, even without his job. And as the deputy chairman of the Pripyat city ispolkom—the equivalent of deputy mayor—Esaulov spent his days reeling from one administrative headache to another.

  He had come to Pripyat from Kiev, where he had worked in the city’s municipal financial planning department. It was a nice step up for the thirty-three-year-old accountant and his family: out of the rotting communal apartment with a queue for the bathroom every morning, into the clean air of the countryside, and a prestigious job with his own secretary and the use of a car—dilapidated but serviceable—for work. Still, Esaulov found his new responsibilities onerous. He had to manage Pripyat’s city budget, expenses, and income—but also served as the head of the planning commission and oversaw transportation, health care, communication, road and street cleaning, the employment bureau, and the distribution of building materials. There was always something going wrong, and the citizens of Pripyat were never hesitant to complain when it did.

  On the phone was Maria Boyarchuk, the secretary from the ispolkom. She’d just been woken by a neighbor who had come from the nuclear power plant. There had been an accident: a fire, maybe an explosion.

  By 3:50 a.m., Esaulov was at his desk in the ispolkom offices, on the second floor of the White House. The chairman—the city mayor—had left for the plant to find out what was going on. Esaulov telephoned the head of Pripyat’s civil defense, who sprang from his bed and raced over to the office. But neither of them had any idea what to do. The plant had its own civil defense staff, and the city had never been involved in any of its exercises. There had been accidents at the station before, but they had always been cleaned up with a minimum of fuss.

  Now they phoned every number they had at the station, but no one would tell them anything. They considered driving there, but didn’t have a car. All they could do was sit and wait. Outside the window, the streetlamps threw pools of amber light across the square; the apartments along Kurchatov Street remained dark and silent.

  But as dawn approached, Esaulov watched from behind his desk as a single ambulance raced down Lenina Prospekt from the direction of the plant. Its emergency lights flashed, but the siren remained silent. The driver took a sharp right at the Rainbow department store, tore along the southern side of the square, and then swung away in the direction of the hospital. A few moments later, a second ambulance followed, and it, too, disappeared around the corner.

  The blue lights faded into the distance, and the city streets were still once more. But then another ambulance sped past. And another. Esaulov began to suspect that there might be something different about this accident, after all.

  * * *

  As dawn broke, word began to spread among those with friends and relatives on the midnight shift at the plant that there had been some kind of accident. But nobody could say exactly what.

  At around 7:00 a.m., Andrei Glukhov, who worked in the reactor physics laboratory at the plant, was in his flat on Stroiteley Prospekt when the phone rang. It was a friend from the Instrumentation and Control Department. He, too, was at home and had heard that something had gone wrong at the station, but he didn’t know any details. As a member of the Nuclear Safety Department, Glukhov had the authority to make calls directly to the control rooms of every reactor at the plant. Would he mind making a few enquiries?

  Glukhov hung up and phoned his friend Leonid Toptunov, on the senior reactor control engineer’s desk of Unit Four. But nobody answered. Strange, he thought. Maybe he’s busy. He tried Control Room Number Two, where the senior reactor control engineer picked up immediately.

  “Good morning, Boris,” Glukhov said. “How is everything going?”

  “Okay,” the engineer said. “We’re raising power on Unit Two. Parameters are normal. Nothing special to report.”

  “Okay. How about Unit Four?”

  There was a long silence on the line.

  “We’ve been instructed not to talk about it. You’d better look out of the window.”

  Glukhov went out to the balcony. The apartment was on the fifth floor, and from his position just behind the new Ferris wheel, he had a decent view of the plant. But he couldn’t see much out of the ordinary. Some smoke hung in the air above Reactor Four. Glukhov had a cup of coffee and told his wife he would head to Kurchatov Street to meet the bus bringing the night shift back from the plant. They’d be able to tell him what was going on.

  He waited at the bus stop, but the men from the shift never arrived. Instead, a truck filled with policemen pulled up. Glukhov asked what had happened. “It’s not clear,” the policeman said. “The wall of the reactor hall has collapsed.”

  “What?”

  “The wall of the reactor hall has collapsed.”

  It was an unbelievable idea. But Toptunov would surely have an explanation.

  Perhaps I just missed the bus, Glukhov thought. Leonid might already be at home.

  It was less than a fifteen-minute walk from the bus stop to Toptunov’s apartment building. Glukhov climbed to the top floor, turned right at the head of the stairs, and walked to the door at the end of the hall: number 88, handsomely upholstered in red imitation leather. He pushed the buzzer. He pushed it again. There was no reply.

  * * *

  The Pripyat hospital, Medical-Sanitary Center Number 126, was a small complex of biscuit-colored buildings behind a low iron fence on the eastern edge of the city. It was well equipped to serve the growing town and its young population, with more than 400 beds, 1,200 staff, and a large maternity ward. But it hadn’t been set up to cope with a catastrophic radiation accident, and when the first ambulances began to pull up outside in the early hours of Saturday morning, the staff was quickly overwhelmed. It was the weekend, so it was hard to find doctors, and, at first, no one understood what they were dealing with: the uniformed young men being brought from the station had been fighting a fire and complained of headaches, dry throats, and dizziness. The faces of some were a terrible purple; others, a deathly white. Soon all of them were retching and vomiting, filling wash basins and buckets until they had emptied their stomachs, and even then unable to stop. The triage nurse began to cry.

  By 6:00 a.m., the director of the hospital had formally diagnosed radiation sickness and notified the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow. The men and women arriving from the plant were told to strip and surrender their personal effects: watches, money, Party cards. It was all contaminated. Existing patients were sent home, some still in their pajamas, and the nurses broke open emergency packages designed for use in case of a radiation accident, containing drugs and disposable intravenous equipment. By morning, ninety patients had been admitted. Among them were the men from Control Room Number Four: Senior Reactor Control Engineer Leonid Toptunov, Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov, and their dictatorial boss, Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov.

  At first, Dyatlov refused treatment and said he only wanted to sleep. But a nurse insisted on putting in an IV line, and he began to feel better. Others, too, seemed not to have been too badly injured. Alexander Yuvchenko felt dizzy and excited but soon fell asleep, woken only when a nurse came to attach a drip.
He recognized her as a neighbor from his apartment building and asked her to find his wife when she finished her shift, to reassure her that he would be home soon. In the meantime, Yuvchenko and his friends tried to estimate how much radiation they had received: they thought 20 rem, or perhaps 50. But one, a navy veteran once involved in an accident on a nuclear submarine, spoke from experience: “You don’t vomit at fifty,” he said.

  Vladimir Shashenok, rescued from the wreckage of compartment 604 by his colleagues, had been one of the first to arrive. Burns and blisters covered his body, his rib cage was caved in, and his back appeared to be broken. And yet, as he was carried in, the nurse could see his lips moving; he was trying to speak. She leaned closer. “Get away from me—I’m from the reactor compartment,” he said.

  The nurses cut the shreds of filthy clothing from his skin and found him a bed in intensive care, but there was little they could do. By 6:00 a.m., Shashenok was dead.

  * * *

  It was not yet eight o’clock when Natalia Yuvchenko heard her doorbell ring. She had awoken early, tired and anxious. Her son’s cold had kept him awake and crying throughout the night, and the apprehension Natalia had felt the evening before only deepened. But the city schools, like those throughout the Soviet Union, had classes on Saturday morning, and she was due to begin teaching at eight thirty. So she washed, dressed, and waited for Alexander to get back from the plant. As the night shift finished at eight, if he hurried to the bus, he’d make it home just in time to take over with Kirill before Natalia had to leave.

  But instead of her husband, a stranger was at the door: a woman whose face looked familiar but whom, at first, she couldn’t place. It was a neighbor who worked at the hospital.