Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  Every few hours, three men raced out to top off the trucks with gas and oil; two others were sent to take readings of the radiation and the water temperature every sixty minutes. At three in the morning on Wednesday, a pair of firemen ran into the bunker to report that the hoses were ruptured. A team of chemical troops conducting radiation reconnaissance in the dark had driven over them in an armored personnel carrier, cutting them in twenty places and crushing the gaskets connecting them together. Radioactive water was gushing onto the ground just fifty meters from the reactor. Two sergeants sprinted out to repair the breaks: they needed twenty new sections of hose; each section took two minutes to replace. They worked on their knees, in a widening pond of gamma-emitting water. The two-fingered rubber mittens of their L-1 suits were clumsy and hot; they threw them off and used their bare hands. An hour later, the task complete, the men retired, exhausted, with an odd taste of sour apples in their mouths.

  The pumping went on all night and into the next day. After fourteen hours of continuous operation, one truck’s engine coughed to a halt. It had to be replaced. Zborovsky’s men were all frightened: one was sent back to the Chernobyl fire station to fetch a case of medicinal vodka but lost his nerve on the way and never returned. Another began ranting incoherently and was taken to the hospital, vomiting. When it was Moose’s turn again to take the radiation readings, he instructed a firefighting captain to come with him—in case he passed out or lost his way inside the building. The officer refused.

  “Don’t bring out the beast in me, you bastard!” Zborovsky roared. “Or I’ll have my troops tie you up and throw you out beside Unit Four. Fifteen minutes out there, and you won’t be able to utter another word.”

  The officer climbed into a rubber suit and did as he was told.

  * * *

  One hundred and forty kilometers away, details of what had happened at the plant had begun seeping into Kiev. The news spread by word of mouth and via the warbling “enemy voices”—the Russian-language radio programming broadcast into the Soviet Union by the BBC, Radio Sweden, and Voice of America—or at least those that KGB jamming could not disrupt. Waves of rumor and anxiety rippled through the city. The surveillance department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs—the MVD—reported on wild speculation about the number of victims of the accident and the contamination of air and water. One informant overheard a taxi driver describing how Pripyat had been evacuated amid chaos and looting, which even government troops had been unable to control; that a government minister was among those killed; that pregnant women were being induced to have abortions; and that the Dnieper was already completely radioactive.

  Soviet authorities were still assuring the public that the danger from the plant was confined to the thirty-kilometer zone. But the streets of Kiev had been emitting gamma radiation for days, as hot particles carried in fallout from the reactor melted slowly into the surface of the asphalt. Scherbitsky, the Ukrainian Communist Party chief, knew that the radiation dose rates in the city had increased steeply. And radioactive iodine in the water of the Dnieper River basin had indeed reached levels a thousand times higher than normal.

  Meanwhile, the head of the Ukrainian KGB warned that the numbers of casualties ascribed to the accident being broadcast on TV by Moscow and by Kiev were sharply contradictory. But his colleagues procrastinated about what—and when—to tell the people.

  Finally, on Tuesday, May 6—ten days after the crisis began—the Ukrainian health minister appeared on local radio and TV to warn Kievans to take precautions against radiation: to remain indoors, close their windows, and protect themselves against drafts. By then, word had gone around that senior Party members had quietly sent their children and grandchildren to the safety of Pioneer camps and sanatoria in the south. Days earlier, at a central Kiev pharmacy favored by members of the Ukrainian Central Committee, the doctor and writer Iurii Shcherbak had discovered a long queue of well-to-do pensioners waiting patiently to buy stable iodine. Worse still, rumors had also leaked of the possibility of a devastating second explosion at the plant and the government’s secret contingency plan for the total evacuation of the city. Many people recognized the state’s reassuring official statements as hollow propaganda.

  That evening, crowds gathered at the railway station as thousands of people attempted to escape the city. Men and women spent the night sleeping on the concourse to keep their places in line for tickets. The Soviet internal passport system prevented most citizens from leaving their areas of registration without good reason, so many workers hurriedly applied for vacations; some who were refused simply quit their jobs in desperation. Fleets of orange street-cleaning trucks soon appeared, to start what would become an incessant effort to wash hot fallout from the city streets. By then, crowds had begun to form outside the city’s banks, some of which were forced to close just a few hours after opening; others limited withdrawals to 100 rubles per person. By afternoon, many banks had run out of money. When the pharmacies sold out of stable iodine pills, people resorted to drinking tincture of iodine, intended for use as an external antiseptic, burning their throats. Lines outside liquor stores quadrupled in length as people sought protection from radioactivity with red wine and vodka, forcing the Ukrainian deputy minister of health to announce, “There is no truth to the rumor that alcohol is useful against radiation.”

  By Wednesday, crowds of frantic Kievans were fighting for tickets out of the city, struggling to flee in numbers not seen since the German blitzkrieg swept east in 1941. At the railway station, men and women thrust fistfuls of rubles directly into the hands of the coach attendants, pressed into four-seat compartments ten at a time, and climbed into the luggage racks. Others attempted to make their escape by road, and traffic choked the southern routes from the city: almost twenty thousand people left by car or bus in one day alone. The government added extra flights at the airport and doubled the number of trains leaving Kiev for Moscow, where Western reporters witnessed railcars arrive packed with unaccompanied children, eyes wide and noses flattened against the windows, their relatives waiting anxiously on the platform.

  Fearing mass panic, aware of the simmering crisis at the plant, the Ukrainian prime minister began to consider an organized evacuation of every child in the city. But the government commission in Chernobyl had provided no directives on the matter. And nobody in the republican apparat really wanted to bear responsibility for taking such a drastic step, which—quite impossible to conceal or suppress—would telegraph to the outside world just how terrifying the situation had become. The prime minister needed expert advice. He asked for the Kremlin’s respective mandarins of radiation medicine and meteorology—Leonid Ilyin and Yuri Izrael—to be sent to Kiev for an urgent consultation.

  In Moscow, the Western fact-finding team from the International Atomic Energy Agency—the director general, former Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, and the American Morris Rosen, director of nuclear safety—had been granted permission to see the plant in person and become the first officials from outside the Soviet Union to visit the scene. They were due to fly to Kiev on Thursday, May 8. When Evgeny Velikhov heard the news, he was horrified. The academician asked Deputy Minister Silayev to call Gorbachev with a message: “Tell him that our outhouse is overflowing, and they’ll have to climb a mountain of shit.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t until around four in the morning on Thursday that the taps in the valve compartment began to emerge from beneath the contaminated water in corridor 001. Deputy Minister Silayev insisted that men be sent in to open them immediately. But the basement was filled with kilometers of pipework, and all the valves looked the same. It was pitch black. Only someone with intimate knowledge of the network of narrow, darkened rooms could hope to navigate the task and emerge safely. Three men from the Chernobyl station staff were selected for the job—two to open the valves and one to escort them in case anything went wrong—and issued with wet suits, personally driven over to the plant by a Ukrainian deputy minister. Clutching wrenches
and flashlights, with pencil dosimeters clipped to their chests and to their ankles at water level, they stepped into the basement shared between Units Three and Four.

  Boris Baranov, chief shift manager for the plant, went first, followed by two engineers, Alexey Ananenko and Valery Bespalov. As they descended the stairwell toward level -3, Baranov stopped to take a reading in the corridor leading beneath Unit Four. He extended the telescopic arm of his DP-5 to its maximum and held the sensor out into the darkness. The dosimeter immediately ran off the scale on every one of its ranges. There was nothing else for it: “Move quickly!” Baranov said, and the three men took off at a sprint. As he ran, one of the engineers couldn’t help himself, and looked back. He glimpsed a giant cone of something black and crumbling, mixed with fragments of concrete—material that had spilled into the passageway from the shattered building above. His tongue tingled with the metallic taste of liquid radiolysis.

  The route down to the entrance of corridor 001 had been surveyed by a dosimetrist with a DP-5 radiometer, who took his final measurement directly above the surface of the water in the corridor. Beyond that, the basement remained a dangerous mystery. No one knew how much water it contained or how radioactive it became as they moved deeper inside. Exposure increased with every moment spent in the tunnel: each second counted.

  Baranov kept watch as the two engineers went in. The space was eerily silent. The slosh of the water parting around their feet resounded from the low ceiling; their ears filled with the sound of their own ragged breathing, stifled by their damp petal respirators. But the men discovered that the water was now only ankle deep and found a large-diameter pipe running along the floor, wide enough to walk on. The valves themselves were intact and labeled clearly: numbers 4GT-21 and 4GT-22 opened easily. A few moments later, Ananenko recognized the sound of the water gurgling from the suppression pools above their heads.

  By dawn on May 8, the imminent threat of a second catastrophic explosion from beneath the reactor had been averted. Soon afterward, an official in civilian clothes sought out Moose Zborovsky at his post in the bunker and handed him an envelope sent from the government commission. Inside he found 1,000 rubles in cash.

  * * *

  The academicians’ relief at the emptying of the suppression pools was brief. While the efforts of the soldiers and engineers headed off the possibility of a devastating steam explosion, the threat to the water table remained, and the scientists’ fear of the China Syndrome only intensified. Some estimates now suggested that if it melted through the foundations of Unit Four, an incandescent mass of fuel might sink as far as three kilometers into the earth before stopping. The metro builders from Kiev had already begun drilling toward the reactor, hoping to freeze the soil with liquid nitrogen, but their efforts were hampered by rain, dust, and highly radioactive debris. They were repeatedly stopped by massive underground obstacles not shown on the plant blueprints, including the foundation plates of the cranes used during the station’s construction. Precious drill bits snapped, and they had to start again at ever-greater depths.

  At the same time, Silayev gave orders to begin pumping gaseous nitrogen into the steam suppression pools, while more men were directed into the basement as part of a plan to fill them with liquid concrete as soon as they had been emptied of water. And by the end of the week, the Politburo had granted permission for the most desperate measures yet: Soviet diplomats were reported to have approached the German Atom Forum, West Germany’s leading nuclear industry group, requesting foreign help. The Soviet emissaries did not provide any specific details of the problem at hand but said they urgently required guidance on “how to handle something extremely hot that may have melted through the nuclear plant floor.”

  In their lab outside Moscow, the scientists at Velikhov’s laboratory continued their round-the-clock research into the properties of molten uranium dioxide, with instructions from the Politburo to reach the most conservative possible prognosis of the meltdown. The physicists worked alongside two separate groups of mathematicians who sat at their computers day and night to test their theories. Running an entire cycle of a single testing algorithm took between ten and fourteen hours, so a colleague sat beside each mathematician to correct his mistakes when he flagged or wake him when he fell asleep. Only when the two groups’ results matched could they be confident of their conclusions.

  They were aghast at the results. If the molten fuel spread out over a large enough area—forming a layer no more than ten centimeters thick—it would begin cooling faster than it could melt soil or concrete, and eventually stop moving and solidify on its own. But they also found that the new substance believed to be oozing from the melting reactor core—a slurry of uranium dioxide mixed with sand, zirconium, and lead, forming a man-made radioactive lava, or corium—could behave in unexpected ways. If it was covered from above—for example, by several thousand cubic meters of liquid concrete—the heat of radioactive decay would be trapped, and the corium would melt down even more quickly. And while, in theory, using a series of pipes to freeze the earth beneath the melting fuel might stop its progress, the computer model revealed that it would do so only within strict limits. If the cooling pipes were any more than four centimeters apart, the corium could simply divide into separate tongues and burn through the spaces between them—before coalescing on the other side into a single mass, like some primitive but resourceful new life-form, to continue its relentless downward path. The scientists realized that the efforts of the metro engineers were doomed to failure, and the attempt to fill the suppression pools with concrete must be stopped.

  The scientists no longer saw themselves as cloistered academics working in the esoterica of pure physics, but as the only men standing between the ignorant fools in Chernobyl and a global disaster. Folding a dot-matrix printout of their computer simulation into his luggage, Vyacheslav Pismenny, the head of the lab, took the next available flight, aboard a Yak-40 executive jet, to Kiev.

  * * *

  On the morning of Thursday, May 8, only hours after water had begun to empty from the steam suppression pools beneath Reactor Number Four, Hans Blix and Morris Rosen of the IAEA embarked from Moscow for their visit to the Chernobyl station. They were met at the airport in Kiev by Evgeny Velikhov, and together they flew northwest by helicopter.

  It was hot inside the aircraft, and they were all sweating in their green overalls. The plant grew steadily closer. Rosen, a veteran administrator from the US nuclear industry, asked Velikhov what range he should set on his dosimeter.

  “About a hundred,” Velikhov replied.

  “Milliroentgen?”

  “No. Roentgen.”

  Rosen looked queasy. His device wasn’t designed for such high radiation exposures. But Velikhov assured him that everything would be fine. His own Soviet-made meter could comfortably measure in that range—and, besides, he made this flight himself every day.

  What the academician did not share with his American counterpart was how little he understood about the radiation levels around the plant. Velikhov was particularly puzzled by why they did not fall as he expected when he moved away from Unit Four, but declined more slowly than the inverse-square law would suggest. Only later did he discover that on each flight they took, he and his fellow scientists were being exposed to powerful gamma fields not just from the reactor below but also from dozens of fuel fragments scattered across the platforms of the vent stack.

  Still, Velikhov could afford—at last—some optimism. While the desperate work had continued to battle the meltdown beneath the reactor, the levels of radionuclides escaping into the air above it had suddenly started to fall—as steeply and inexplicably as they had begun rising five days before.

  As Reactor Number Four came into view, Rosen and Blix could see a light trail of smoke drifting from the ruins, but the level of radioactive release, while still significant, was approaching zero—and the graphite fire was apparently all but extinguished. The temperature on the surface of the reactor had plung
ed, from 2,000 degrees centigrade to just 300 degrees. Although the Soviet scientists were at a loss to comprehend exactly why, it seemed that—thirteen days after it had begun—the emergency might be over at last. Even so, Rosen didn’t want to take any chances. When the helicopter was still eight hundred meters out, Velikhov asked if he’d like to get closer.

  “No,” the American said. “I can see perfectly from here.”

  At a press conference in Moscow the following day, Rosen told reporters that the graphite fire was out and that measurements taken during their helicopter flight revealed that “there is relatively little radioactivity now.” He felt confident there was no longer any risk of a meltdown. “The situation appears to be stabilizing,” he said. “I can say that a competent—a very competent—group of Soviet experts is working at the site. They have many very sensible ideas and are carrying out this work now, at this very moment.”

  That Sunday, May 11, Moscow Central TV broadcast its first report from inside the thirty-kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, including footage of masked policemen stopping traffic at roadblocks, deserted houses, and a well sealed with plastic. Upstairs in the headquarters of the government commission in the center of town, Velikhov and Deputy Minister Silayev gave interviews. Sitting beneath a portrait of Lenin, at a table in an echoing conference room, surrounded by white-suited technicians conferring over maps and notebooks, Silayev appeared pale but jubilant. “We have come to the conclusion today that the primary, most important threat has been eliminated,” he said, and sorted through a folder of aerial photographs of the reactor until he found one taken that day. “This is the latest,” he said. “As you can see, this shows a completely calm state. You can see no smoke here, and certainly no glowing spots.