Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

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  The first cleanup efforts began at the station itself, even as the struggle continued to contain the radiation still leaking from the smoldering husk of Reactor Number Four. The contaminated area was divided into three concentric regions: the outermost thirty-kilometer zone, the ten-kilometer zone, and, within those, the most toxic region of all, the Special Zone, immediately surrounding the plant. The work fell to military engineers and civil defense and chemical warfare troops under the command of the Soviet General Staff, many of them young conscripts. It was chaotic.

  No formal plans, either civilian or military, had ever been devised to clean up after a nuclear disaster on such a scale. Even by the middle of May, there still weren’t enough plant specialists available to supervise an improvised operation, and there was disagreement over setting the maximum dose of radiation that workers could receive safely. Naval doctors, whose expertise had been earned the hard way, through decades of accidents in the close quarters of nuclear submarines, insisted on the Ministry of Defense standard of 25 rem. But both the Soviet Health Ministry and the head of the chemical troops, General Vladimir Pikalov, wanted twice that: 50 rem, the level prescribed for his soldiers in the event of war. Three weeks went by before they finally agreed to the lower limit, by which time many men had been dangerously overexposed. Even then, the 25 rem maximum proved difficult to monitor and was often deliberately disregarded by unit commanders.

  The civilian nuclear industry specialists arriving from other atomic plants across the USSR to help in the cleanup were horrified by the lack of preparation around them. They found too few trained dosimetrists to effectively monitor their radiation exposure. No comprehensive survey had yet been made of the area, and the volume of radionuclides belching from the reactor changed constantly, so reliable radiation information was almost impossible to obtain. There was a chronic shortage of dosimeters. A platoon of thirty soldiers often had to share a single monitoring device: the dose registered by the man wearing it was simply attributed to the others equally, regardless of where they had been or what work they had done.

  The task of clearing the largest and most heavily radioactive pieces of debris from around the reactor fell to soldiers driving massive IMR-2 combat engineering vehicles. Designed to clear the way for troops advancing through minefields or in the chaos following a nuclear attack, these were battle tanks equipped with bulldozer blades and telescopic crane booms instead of gun turrets, bearing hydraulic pincers large enough to pluck fallen telephone poles or tree trunks from their path and move them aside. To minimize their radiation exposure, the drivers’ compartments had been lined with lead, and each man was permitted to work for only a few minutes before being replaced at the controls. Yet one of the first machines to enter the tangle of wreckage around Unit Four quickly got into trouble. The driver, unable to see properly through his narrow armored viewing slots, drove into a maze of wreckage and became trapped on all sides by debris. His commander couldn’t reach him by radio, and his allotted time in the high-radiation zone was ebbing away. Finally, the colonel drove over and, leaning from the open hatch of his own armored vehicle, shouted directions to the stricken driver until he found his way to safety. The soldier was saved, but the few moments in the open were too much for the colonel: the next day, he was sent to a military hospital, suffering from radiation sickness.

  By May 4, the first two colossal radio-controlled bulldozers—one built in Chelyabinsk and the other imported from Finland—were flown to the plant for use in clearing the radioactive rubble and soil from around Unit Four. This area remained the most deadly section of the Special Zone, where gamma exposure from the mountain of pulverized wreckage cascading from the northern wall of the reactor building reached thousands of roentgen an hour. Men could work there unprotected for only a few seconds. After shielding their sensitive remote-control units with sheets of lead, technicians began their first experiments with the bulldozers. Operating from the relative safety of a specially protected nuclear and chemical reconnaissance vehicle parked a hundred meters away, they used them to shunt scattered fragments of nuclear fuel back toward Unit Four. But the Scandinavian machine failed quickly, unable to climb the steep escarpment of radioactive debris, and its nineteen-tonne Soviet counterpart lasted only a little longer before it stopped dead in the shadow of the reactor, where it proved impossible to revive. By September, several of the bright-yellow machines could be found abandoned in a nearby field.

  While the Ministry of Energy urgently sought additional remote-controlled equipment abroad, and Prime Minister Ryzhkov’s Politburo Operations Group made plans to lay a blanket of latex solution across the top of the reactor, the members of the government commission applied an enduring Soviet remedy to the mountain of radioactive rubble at the north wall: they ordered it covered with concrete. Energy Ministry construction teams fed the gray slurry through a pipeline eight hundred meters long; it boiled as it smothered fuel cassettes thrown from the reactor by the explosion, and soon geysers of hot radioactive cement leapt into the air. At the same time, the civil defense reservists of Special Battalion 731 began work on removing the topsoil around the reactor by hand. Even as other troops moved through the high-radiation zone by armored personnel carrier, these men started work in the open wearing regular army uniforms, protected only by cotton petal respirators. They excavated the soil near the reactor walls with ordinary shovels and placed it in metal containers for transport and burial in the partially finished radioactive waste storage vaults under construction for the Fifth and Sixth Units. Their shifts lasted as little as fifteen minutes, but the weather was hot and the radiation relentless. Their throats itched, they felt dizzy, and there was never enough water to drink. Some men suffered nosebleeds, while others began vomiting. Called to help clear chunks of reactor graphite lying on the ground near Unit Three, a detachment of chemical warfare troops arrived in a truck and began to pick them up using their hands.

  Such tasks exposed the liquidators to their maximum allowed annual doses of radiation—often in a matter of seconds. In the high-radiation areas of the Special Zone, a single task that anywhere else could be completed by a single man working for an hour might now require thirty men to work for two minutes each. And the new regulations dictated that as soon as they each reached their 25 rem limit, they should be sent from the zone, never to return. Each job had to be measured not only in time but also in the number of individuals who would have to be “burned” to accomplish it. In the end, some commanders resolved that it was better to keep deploying the men they had—men who had already been exposed to their limits—than to burn fresh troops in the danger zone.

  Meanwhile, underground, the battle against the China Syndrome had intensified. Plant physicist Veniamin Prianichnikov—having successfully evacuated his family from Pripyat by train—had finally been permitted to return to the station at the beginning of May, only to discover everything in his office buried beneath two centimeters of radioactive ash. On May 16 he received orders to gather temperature and radiation measurements from directly beneath the reactor, in the hope of establishing exactly how imminently the melting core might burn through its concrete base. Although the scientists now believed the heat generated by the decaying fuel was falling, they estimated it was still as high as 600 degrees centigrade. It was up to Prianichnikov and his team to gather accurate data on what might happen next: whether the molten corium was still moving, and whether the water of the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers was still under threat of catastrophic contamination.

  Using a plasma torch powered through a huge electrical transformer brought in from Moscow, it took a team of soldiers eighteen hours to cut their way through the thick concrete wall into the subreactor space. Inside the darkened compartment, with the hundreds of tonnes of molten nuclear fuel directly overhead, Prianichnikov imagined that radiation levels could be thousands of roentgen an hour, permitting him to safely spend only five or six seconds at his task; a full minute would be suicide. He dress
ed lightly, in cotton overalls and cloth respirator, planning on using speed alone to protect him against the gamma emissions from the remains of the reactor. But when he crawled through the hole with his radiation and temperature probes, his dosimeter failed, and the work took much longer than he expected. Then, just as he was completing the equipment installation, he felt something powdery shower on his head from above. Terrified, Prianichnikov scrambled from the blackened basement as fast as he could, tearing off his clothes as he went. He sprinted naked along the kilometer-long route to the administrative block, scattering astonished soldiers to the left and right along his path. Only after he arrived did he discover that the debris sprinkling on him had not been nuclear fuel but sand: his eventual dose from the few minutes he spent beneath the reactor was less than 20 rem.

  By then, some four hundred miners from the Donbas and Moscow coal basins were at work on the massive heat exchanger project the scientists had planned to install in the earth beneath Reactor Number Four. Once again, the deadline set by the government commission seemed all but impossible: the entire undertaking would have to be designed and built, tested and ready, in a little more than a month. The miners began tunneling from a pit excavated more than 130 meters away from their objective, near the wall of the third reactor building, and worked around the clock in three-hour shifts. The shaft was just 1.8 meters in diameter, and swelteringly hot, but the earth over their heads shielded them from the worst of the radiation on the surface. They were forbidden to smoke underground but lingered at the tunnel entrance to snatch occasional cigarettes or drink water, where they were unwittingly bombarded with gamma rays from the dust and debris surrounding them. Digging with hand tools and pneumatic drills, pushing the spoil out along a miniature railway line, the miners soon arrived beneath the foundations of the reactor, where they began work on the thirty-square-meter chamber that would house the heat exchanger. Here, they could reach up and touch the foundation plate of the reactor building. The concrete felt warm beneath their palms. The designers from Sredmash warned them repeatedly that making even the slightest departure from their specifications for the chamber risked bringing the entire reactor vessel and its contents down on their heads, in a collapse that would inter them all instantly in a mass grave.

  When the chamber was complete, Sredmash engineers moved in to install the heat exchanger, built in Moscow in sections limited in size by the narrow diameter of the tunnel, and conditions underground became even more infernal. Welding the pieces together filled the narrow, poorly ventilated space with toxic gas, and men began to choke and pass out. The forty-kilogram graphite blocks integral to the design were relayed hand to hand down the length of the tunnel by teenaged military conscripts. Temperatures in the tunnel reached 60 degrees centigrade, and the young men worked half naked until, at the end of each shift, they had to be pulled from the tunnel, spent with exertion.

  Final assembly began in June, under the command of Vyacheslav Garanikhin, a towering Sredmash welding foreman with shaggy hair and a disheveled beard who at one point lumbered through the tunnel threatening construction workers with an axe. But long before the project was completed on June 24, temperature readings from Prianichnikov’s sensors had declined yet further, and fear of the China Syndrome abated at last. The heat exchanger, with its intricate network of stainless steel tubing, ten kilometers of control cabling, its two hundred thermocouples and temperature sensors layered in concrete and sandwiched beneath a layer of graphite blocks—the result of weeks of frenzied work by hundreds of miners, soldiers, construction workers, electricians, and engineers—was never even turned on.

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  By the end of May, General of the Army Valentin Varennikov had been summoned back from Kabul, where he was in command of all ongoing armed operations in Afghanistan, to take charge of the military cleanup in Chernobyl. When the general arrived, he found more than ten thousand men of the Chemical Warfare Divisions alone laboring inside the zone and that hundreds of Ministry of Energy construction workers living nearby had been abruptly drafted. But it was clear that the cleanup operation would need yet more manpower. The Politburo now recognized that if the Union’s young draftees—already plagued by alcoholism and drug abuse—continued to be sent into the high-radiation zone, the health of an entire generation of Soviet youth could be ruined, rendering the country incapable of defending itself in the event of an attack from the West. On May 29 the Politburo and the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued a decree unprecedented in peacetime: calling up hundreds of thousands more military reservists—men aged twenty-four to fifty—for a mobilization of up to six months. They were told they were required for special military exercises; many discovered the truth only when they were already in uniform. By the beginning of July, more than forty thousand of these troops were encamped around the perimeter of the Exclusion Zone, sleeping in rows of tents and driven toward the Special Zone each morning in convoys of open trucks. The journey was long and hot, along newly laid asphalt roads that glistened in the sunlight, sprayed with water by tankers to keep down the dust. The trees and fields that flashed past looked lush and green but were barricaded behind plywood fences marked with the warning “Do Not Pull Over—Contaminated.”

  Whether rising from the roadsides in the slipstream of endless columns of speeding trucks and concrete mixers or whirling in the downdraft of the heavy transport helicopters, the dust carried radiation throughout the zone. Lifted into the sky by the breeze, microscopic radioactive particles a few microns across traveled with insidious ease, settling nearby or brought down as heavy fallout a hundred kilometers away by rain. Physicists from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences ventured into the zone to take air samples using gauze screens and ordinary vacuum cleaners and found that, in the wake of a single helicopter flight, radiation levels increased as much as a thousand times. The dust blanketed equipment, furniture, and documents in offices and found its way into the hair, lungs, and stomachs of those who worked in them. From inside the body, the damage inflicted by “hot” particles—the almost invisible fragments of nuclear fuel blown out of the reactor core—was exponentially greater than when kept outside: 1 microgram of plutonium could bombard the soft tissues of the esophagus or lungs with 1,000 rads of energetic alpha radiation, with lethal results. The liquidators wore berets and caps, and their electrostatic petal respirators hung everywhere; they tried to drink only from sealed bottles of mineral water. Those who understood the threat eventually developed an unconscious habit of picking the tiniest specks of dust off clothes and tabletops—flicking them away in a constant, reflexive process of personal decontamination. But others remained unaware of the invisible dangers around them: soldiers lounged in the sun close to the reactor, smoking cigarettes and stripped to the waist in the summer heat; a group of KGB officers arrived in the zone incognito, clad in tank crew overalls and carrying expensive Japanese-made dosimeters—but approached the ruins of Unit Four without knowing enough to turn the devices on. Only the fate of the crows that had come to scavenge from the debris but stayed too long—and whose irradiated carcasses now littered the area around the plant—provided any visible warning of the costs of ignorance.

  Daily radiation surveys conducted across the length and breadth of the zone and beyond—by helicopter, plane, by armored vehicle, and on foot by troops clad in rubber suits and respirators—revealed that the contamination had spread far across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. The plume from Unit Four had cast a shadow not only across the cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl but also upon collective farms and industrial enterprises, small towns, isolated villages, forests, and great tracts of agricultural land. Dense traces of radioactivity reached north and west across the thirty-kilometer zone, but fallout composed of twenty-one different radionuclides forged inside Reactor Number Four—including strontium 89, strontium 90, neptunium 239, cesium 134, cesium 137, and plutonium 239—had also formed a leopard-spot pattern of intense contamination up to three hundred kilometers from the plant. The threat to
the population from the radiation was twofold: external, from the fine irradiated dust and debris on the ground around them; and internal, from radioisotopes poisoning the food chain through the soil, crops, and farm animals. By the end of May, more than five thousand square kilometers of land—an area bigger than Delaware—had become dangerously contaminated. Wind and weather would only make matters worse, and dust from radioactive areas was being constantly redistributed into areas the troops had already cleaned, making early decontamination work almost entirely pointless.

  The work of decontaminating the huge area beyond the boundaries of the power plant was complicated not only by meteorology and the Herculean proportions of the undertaking but by the varying topography and materials involved. Radioactive aerosols had seeped into concrete, asphalt, metal, and wood. Buildings, workshops, gardens, shrubs, trees, and lakes had all been in the path of the cloud that had drifted across the landscape for days and weeks. Roofs, walls, farmland, machinery, and forest would have to be washed, scraped, picked clean, or cut down and buried. The word “liquidation” was nothing more than a martial euphemism. The reality was that radionuclides could be neither broken down nor destroyed—only relocated, entombed, or interred, ideally in a place where the long process of radioactive decay might pose a less immediate threat to the environment.

  This was a task on a scale unprecedented in human history, and one for which no one in the USSR—or, indeed, anywhere else on earth—had ever bothered to prepare. Yet now it was also subject to the routinely absurd expectations of the Soviet administrative-command system. When General Pikalov, commander of the chemical warfare troops, gave his initial situation report on the thirty-kilometer zone to the visiting leaders of the Politburo Operations Group, he forecast that decontamination work would take up to seven years to complete. Upon hearing this, the hardline Politburo member Yegor Ligachev exploded in fury. He told Pikalov he could have seven months.