Ablaze

by Read, Piers Paul;

  4

  The information about the accident, cautiously and selectively imparted through the Soviet media, did little to reassure the citizens of Kiev. Clips of film showing cows grazing in the shadow of the reactor, which had been broadcast on television in the days that followed the accident, were now revealed as lies to a public already prone to distrust any form of official propaganda. They were more willing to believe the news that filtered in from Radio Liberty, the BBC or simple telephone calls from friends abroad, that Western governments were repatriating their citizens from all parts of the Soviet Union.

  Controlled by the system of internal passports and unable to leave their jobs without good reason, workers in offices and factories in Kiev now put in for their vacations, paid or unpaid, and when these were refused even proffered their resignations. On the night of 5 May, people slept at the railway station to keep their place in the queue for tickets. By the next morning the ticket offices came under siege, and soon the only seats available were on planes and trains departing five or six days later. Pensioners and invalids from the Great Patriotic War, who had precedence, were brutally elbowed aside as parents scrambled to get tickets for their children. A brisk black market sprang up, and tickets were sold for a premium of fifty or one hundred rubles.

  On 6 May, ten days after the accident, at the same time as the first descriptions of it were published in the press, local radio and television stations broadcast the first advice to the inhabitants of Kiev by the Ukrainian health minister, Anatoli Romanenko. This was to wash their vegetables, close their windows and remain indoors. Many preferred to try to leave. Rumours began to circulate about how the party leaders had sent their children and grandchildren to camps and sanatoriums in the Crimea as soon as the accident had occurred. Crowds formed at the banks, and some banks were forced to close only an hour or two after they had opened. Others limited withdrawals to one hundred rubles, but even that depleted their deposits, and by the afternoon of 6 May the banks in Kiev closed because they had run out of money. Those people with cars now tried to flee, and traffic jammed the southern routes out of the city.

  Those who remained, hearing that iodine was a precaution against radiation, flocked to pharmacies, but found that the stocks had sold out. Some got hold of iodine intended for external application, drank it down and scalded their throats. The other reputed antidote was vodka, and the usual lines outside the liquor stores quadrupled in size. The short opening hours decreed on 1 May as part of the drive against alcoholism were abandoned. Believing themselves protected by their intoxication, drunks ventured out in the street. A group tried to pick up a dishevelled young woman in the Khreshchatyk boulevard; it was Lubov Kovalevskaya, the journalist from Pripyat, who had just returned from the airport, where she had sent her daughter off to stay with her sister in Sverdlovsk.

  Since she had to pay a black-market price for the ticket for her daughter, Lubov had returned to Kiev with nowhere to stay and only twenty kopeks in her purse. She was in a state of shock, crazed, unkempt and dirty. She tried to recite some lines of her own poetry, but none came to mind. She could not even tell left from right. She was standing in line for a taxi without any clear idea of where she should go when a man asked if she was from Chernobyl. When she said she was, he took her by the arm, gave her supper at his office, then arranged for a room at the Hotel Moscow. She remained there for five days at his expense; he asked for nothing in return.

  The anxiety and exasperation of the inhabitants of Kiev were shared by their, leaders. Vladimir Shcherbitsky, Brezhnev’s old crony, who was still general secretary of the Ukrainian Communist party, had done everything that had been expected of him. Minor officials might have sent their families out of the city, but he had stood on the rostrum on May Day with his grandson at his side and had appeared at the international bicycle race that had passed through the city on 9 May. But since the Chernobyl station was an All-Union enterprise, and since anything to do with it was kept secret from the province’s leaders, he knew little more of the true situation than the man in the street.

  His minister of health, Romanenko, was equally ill informed. Returning from a conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on 2 May, he had gone to Chernobyl on the 3rd and gained some idea of the seriousness of the accident, but all authority had been vested in the government’s medical commission in Moscow, headed by the Soviet minister, Shepin. Romanenko’s task was to carry out its instructions as best he could, and this he did by mobilizing the entire health service of the Ukraine. He formed a thousand additional medical teams to treat the evacuees from Pripyat and the thirty-kilometre zone, and to examine the inhabitants of villages on the fringe. This put an enormous strain on their resources since there were not enough doctors or laboratory technicians to make blood tests on so many thousands of people. Eventually the army medical corps was mobilized to assist them, but the criteria upon which their care was based was stipulated by the Institute of Biophysics under Academician Ilyn and the State Committee of Hydrometeorology under Professor Yuri Israel.

  Knowing as little about radiation as anyone else, the Ukraine’s political leaders became infected by the growing panic in Kiev, and on 7 May they summoned both Ilyn and Israel to a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine. There Shcherbitsky insisted that they draw up in writing their recommendations for the protection of his people from the fallout. It was an unusual request, suggesting an ominous mistrust of the central organs of power. However, Ilyn and Israel agreed, and retired to prepare the paper.

  The Ukrainian Politburo reconvened at 11.30 p.m. The party leaders, including Shcherbitsky and the redoubtable Ukrainian minister Valentina Shevchenko, sat facing Ilyn and Israel across the wide conference table. They presented their report as follows:

  1.The radiation situation in the city of Kiev and the oblast at present does not present a danger to the health of the population, including children, and is within the limits of norms recommended by national and international atomic-energy agencies in case of accidents at a nuclear power station.

  2.The level of radioactive substances contained in food products at present presents no danger to the populations.

  Ilyn’s and Israel’s recommendations were:

  1.An analysis of the radioactive situation in the city of Kiev demonstrates the absence, at present, of indications of the need for the population, in particular children, to be evacuated to other regions.

  2.The population should be informed through the mass media, television and radio about the situation and the measures being taken.

  This was signed by both Israel and Ilyn and presented to Shcherbitsky, but before the meeting broke up Valentina Shevchenko suddenly leaned forward and asked Israel, ‘Yuri Antoniyevich, what would you do if your own grandchildren were in Kiev?’

  She was later to claim that Israel made no answer, while Ilyn insisted that Israel had reassured her. Whatever the truth, a resolution was passed the next day by the Ukrainian Council of Ministers, with Israel’s concurrence, bringing the school year to an end on 15 May and evacuating children up to the seventh grade from Kiev to areas unaffected by the fallout from Chernobyl.

  On the evening of 8 May, Romanenko spoke on Ukrainian television. He reassured the viewers that since his earlier broadcast the radiation situation had improved. The level of background radiation was gradually falling and was well within the norms recommended by national and international bodies and did not represent a danger to the health of the population, including children. Nevertheless he drew attention to the danger from radioactive dust. The intensive washing of the streets and hosing down of apartment blocks would continue, and people were advised to take a shower and wash their hair every day. Children could play outdoors, but only for a limited period of time. ‘They want to be out in the open air, so let them play, but not as often in good weather from morning until night, but just for the odd hour, and they should not kick balls around in dusty areas.’

  Romanenko t
hen announced that ‘to improve the health of the children of Kiev city and oblast’ the school term would end on 15 May. The children would be sent to Pioneer and holiday camps in the southern oblasts ‘in a well-organized manner, and for this purpose an adequate number of trains and vehicles are being set aside.’ In conclusion, he stressed, ‘All matters connected with the influence of the environment on the health of the population are constantly being monitored by the Ukrainian Republican Ministry of Health.’

  5

  These measures by the Ukrainians were not approved by the government’s medical commission. The dose established by Ilyn’s Institute of Biophysics as virtually harmless was twenty-five rems. This was the special exposure limit set for members of the armed forces dealing with the aftermath of the accident at Chernobyl. On the very day of Romanenko’s broadcast, the commission proposed to set a limit five times lower, at five rems, which would mean that at the current level of contamination, the inhabitants of Kiev were safe for two and a half years. Professor Vorobyov confirmed that this left a vast margin of safety. On 5 May he had been anxious when it was reported that the medical personnel in Hospital No. 6 had been receiving over a short period doses of more than ten to fifteen rems, and had ordered them to work in shifts. But on 8 May, in considering emergency-dose levels leading to intervention, he asked the commission to look at the facts, which were that even one hundred rems did not lead to leukaemia. The chromosomes repaired themselves. A favourable prognosis could be established for one generation. As the deputy Minister of Health Shepin reported to the medical commission, the decision of the Ukrainian leadership to evacuate children from Kiev was ‘an emotional reaction without any objective justification’. It was also the first intimation that the scientists were no longer in control.

  As reports came in of contamination far beyond the thirty-kilometre zone, including vast tracts northeast of Gomel in Belorussia, the medical commission gave orders for the evacuation of the inhabitants of some affected areas and the provision of uncontaminated food and milk in others. There was considerable confusion in the field about the dose levels that should trigger this kind of government intervention. The commission was told that medical staff in the field were applying the ten-rem limit, drawn up to limit their own short-term exposure, as the intervention level for the estimated lifetime exposure of the general population.

  After repeated requests to the commission to arrive at definitive norms, a working party of experts was set up and on 12 May it recommended that temporary norms of ten rems of external radiation to the whole body and of thirty rads to the thyroid be set for children and pregnant women. For the rest of the adult population, intervention was to take place when the estimated lifetime dose was fifty rems. This was approved by the commission for a month, after which it was reduced to thirty-five rems.

  Although areas to the northeast of Gomel were evacuated on 2 May, and measures taken to provide those who remained with ‘clean’ imported milk and food, the contamination of about fifteen hundred square kilometres of land so far from Chernobyl was not mentioned on television or in the press. The public was left with the impression that pollution was restricted to the thirty-kilometre zone. There was a fear of widespread panic if it were to become known that land three hundred kilometres north of Chernobyl had been rendered uninhabitable by the fallout, or that significant deposits of radioactive caesium had been found five hundred kilometres to the west, only two hundred kilometres from Moscow.

  There was also the preoccupation with Soviet prestige. It was thought that reducing the scale of the disaster would limit the damage done to the country’s reputation abroad. For the same reason it also became a matter of urgency for the government to come up with an ideologically acceptable explanation of how the catastrophe had occurred.

  6

  On hearing of the accident at Chernobyl on 26 April, the public prosecutor in Kiev had opened an investigation into a possible offence under Article 220, Section 2, of the criminal code, which covered breaches of regulations at ‘explosive-prone enterprises or in explosive-prone workshops’. The file was tagged as Criminal Case No. 19–73. The following day, 27 April, a team was formed to conduct an investigation, which included not just lawyers from the prosecutor’s office, but investigators from the Ministry of the Interior and the KGB. At the same time, a parallel investigation was started in Moscow by the deputy general prosecutor of the USSR.

  The investigators, however, worked under two constraints: the first was the subordination of all who worked in the Soviet judicial system to the dictates of the party; the second was the abstruse nature of the evidence, which only a few physicists could understand.

  Immediately after the accident, an investigation into its causes was set up by the different ministries and institutions involved in atomic energy – the Ministry of Medium Machine Building; the Ministry of Energy and Electrification; Alexandrov’s Kurchatov Institute; Dollezhal’s design institute, NIKYET; Abagyan’s institute, VNIIAES; the State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy; Hydroprojekt; and by the chief engineer of Chernobyl, Nikolai Fomin. Reporting to the commission on 5 May, this committee of inquiry pointed out that the programme drawn up by Dyatlov for tests of the turbines was flawed; that in implementing it the operators had broken certain safety regulations and the accepted technical procedures; and that the reactor had gone out of control because of these mistakes. However, it recommended that the two ministries running RBMK reactors should reconsider whether in fact they were complying with certain laws on industrial safety, and if it transpired that they were not, should take strict measures to comply with them in all operating RBMK power stations and those under construction.

  At the same time, on 26 April, a second investigation was started by Boris Scherbina, head of the government commission. This was led by Armen Abagyan, chief of VNIIAES, the All-Union Research Institute for Nuclear Power Plant Operation, and included representatives from the same ministries and institutes, among them Alexander Kalugin from the Kurchatov Institute, as well as senior figures from the prosecutor’s office, the Interior Ministry and the KGB. The legality of this investigation’s proceedings was supervised by the deputy general prosecutor of the USSR, O. V. Soroka, and its final report was signed by the general prosecutor of the USSR, A. Reykunkov.

  This committee also blamed the Chernobyl personnel for the breach of safety regulations, including not just Dyatlov as the deputy chief engineer responsible for the tests, but also Brukhanov and Fomin, who ‘made grave errors in the running of the nuclear power station and did not ensure its safety.’ These errors were regarded ‘above all else’ as the real cause of the accident at reactor No. 4.

  However, some additional blame was attached to the Ministry of Energy and Electrification for allowing such tests to be carried out at night and for tolerating ‘physical and technical shortcomings in the RBMK reactor’ without insisting that the chief designer and scientific leader take the necessary measures to improve the safety of the reactor. There was also criticism of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which had permitted the same shortcomings in its RBMK reactors, and, in brackets, as if in passing, its leader, Efim Slavsky, as well as Alexandrov, the scientific leader; Nikolai Dollezhal, the chief designer; and Ivan Yemelyanov, his deputy at NIKYET. All of these were rebuked for failing to implement timely measures to improve the safety of the RBMK reactors in accordance with the requirements ‘stated in general safety regulations’ for nuclear reactors at any stage in their design, development or exploitation. ‘In the design of the reactor,’ the report concluded, ‘there were insufficient technical measures to ensure its safety.’

  The ripples of responsibility for the accident spread further still. Criticism was directed to the State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry, which ‘did not ensure adequate supervision of the implementation of norms and regulations concerning nuclear safety, and did not make full use of its statutory rights.’ Its leaders, Kulov and Sidorenko, had been indecisive an
d had not stopped ‘the breach of norms and safety regulations by the various ministries, enterprises, power stations and factories that supplied equipment and devices.’

  Though mistakes made by the operators initiated the explosion, the report went on, the explosion itself stemmed from flaws in the reactor’s design that permitted a positive void coefficient in the core and the possibility of a sudden surge of power. There were no systems incorporated in the design to deal with such eventualities, and there was a fatal flaw in the specifications for the control rods, which had led to positive reactivity in the first moments of their descent into the active zone. The design of the reactor did not include a device that would show the operating reactivity or threshold of danger.

  Although it ascribed some culpability not just to the designers but also to those who knew of the potential hazard, this report to the commission did not make clear that there was no mention of any danger in the operating manual of the RBMK reactors. An experienced operator should have realized that it was dangerous to remove so many control rods from the core of the reactor, but not that pressing the emergency button to return them would start the process that had led to the explosion. The report made much of the breach of safety regulations, but it did not say that operators were permitted to disregard them on the authority of a deputy chief engineer – in other words, that these regulations were more like guidelines than laws; nor did it point out that most of the breaches, such as disconnecting the emergency core-cooling system, had no bearing whatsoever on what had gone wrong.