But the message behind the Chernobyl museum is clear: the meltdown at reactor four was a freak accident that no one could have seen coming.
“No one believed that the reactor could ever explode” is a line repeated throughout the museum. In an oft-quoted anecdote of questionable veracity, the president of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences frequently bragged that the reactor that would go on to melt down at Chernobyl was so safe, authorities could have installed one on Red Square.
This interpretation would have benefited the Soviet authorities under whose watch the accident happened. But I’m surprised that this opinion continues to be popular today, when a new Ukrainian government is in charge.
After the USSR collapsed, files that were sealed under Soviet institutions no longer had agencies to keep them hidden away. When the Soviet Union dissolved, so did the Soviet KGB. The Soviet KGB had conducted its own investigation into the Chernobyl accident, and as the no longer classified files reveal, it reached a conclusion that differed significantly from that of the museum.
By April 26, 1986, reactor four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had been operating for two years. In that time, the plant had come to produce about 10 percent of Ukraine’s total electricity. But it had yet to verify that one of reactor four’s most vital safety features worked.
This was not ideal.
The USSR mainly employed two types of reactors in these plants: a pressurized water reactor, which was popular in Western countries, and the RMBK, which was not.
The Soviets liked the RMBK because the reactor was cheap, quick to build, and easy to repair. It achieved these efficiencies by doing away with frivolous safety features like containment structures, which protect against the release of radioactive material in the event of an accident. This omission was justified using the same logic that led the Titanic builders to go easy on the lifeboats: the nuclear reactor was unsinkable, and also, unexplodable.
On April 25, 1986, reactor four at the Chernobyl power plant was scheduled to be shut down for routine maintenance. While it was being shut down, the plant hoped to finally conduct a successful test of the reactor’s emergency backup system.
One of the worst things that can go wrong at a nuclear power plant is a sudden loss of power. The systems used to control and regulate the reactors run on electricity, without which operators can quickly lose control of the nuclear reaction taking place in the reactor’s core.
The Chernobyl plant was equipped with backup generators that could power the reactor controls in this situation, but there was a lag between the time when the generators were switched on and the time when they reached full power. The reactors were therefore designed to power themselves using the run-down of energy in the turbogenerator. This was the system plant management planned to test on April 25.
Outside observers would later question why this test was taking place in 1986, and not 1984. The official report released by the Soviet government claimed that plant management was testing a new enhanced safety feature, but what they termed a new enhancement was identical to the safety system listed in the reactor’s design specifications. In other words, it seemed like they were testing the reactor’s original emergency backup system.
This system should have been assessed before the reactor launched into full production. If the Chernobyl plant was testing it now, two years after the reactor started operating, it would seem that this essential safety feature never passed the initial prelaunch inspection. It would be fair to conclude that plant managers may have decided to launch the reactor before ensuring that the safety system was in working order, in order to please their higher-ups.
Not long after the Chernobyl accident, an energy minister named Grigori Medvedev was sent to the plant to conduct an official investigation. The report he went on to publish was scathing. In its official account presented to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Soviet government blamed the accident entirely on two operators, who had conveniently died of radiation poisoning and thus made excellent scapegoats. Medvedev, in contrast, faulted design flaws and a work culture that put little emphasis on safety.
In his report, Medvedev recounted a meeting he’d attended at the Kremlin two months before the Chernobyl accident. A construction manager at a different nuclear power plant had announced that a reactor’s launch would be delayed because the plant hadn’t received parts from an outside vendor on time.
The government minister didn’t care—he told the construction manager to find a way to launch the reactor by the original deadline. The manager protested that the part he was waiting for would barely be ready by then. The minister repeated his instructions: find a way to make it work. In essence, the minister was telling the plant manager to make sure that he fulfilled the work plan on paper—even if that meant launching the reactor with a piece missing.
“This is our national tragedy,” the plant manager lamented to Medvedev afterward. “We ourselves lie and we teach our subordinates to lie. No good will come of this.”
All of this created a culture of cutting corners and meaningless stamps of approval in the Soviet nuclear power industry. And in this context, Chernobyl seems like far less of a freak accident.
I meet Igor, the guide who has arranged my trip to Chernobyl, at seven on a cold, gray morning. He’s easy to find: he’s standing outside a white minibus covered in the black-and-yellow nuclear hazard symbol.
“Good morning!” he says cheerfully. “Can you eat pork?”
The back of the bus displays a split image of a young girl. Half of the frame is a normal photo, but in the other half, she’s wearing a gas mask.
I board the bus, already wary of the kitsch, and I find a half-dozen other sleepy tourists. A few minutes later, Igor bounds onto the bus, full of energy, and takes roll.
“Mark Cameron,” he calls. “Can you eat pork?”
As we drive out of Kiev and head for the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Igor preps us by playing a two-hour video introduction to Chernobyl. This collection of videos can best be described as “Every Video Referencing Chernobyl That Igor Was Able to Find.” The log line, if it has one, would be “Some of Which I Suspect He Did Not Fully Understand.”
Here is some information you will not glean from Igor’s Chernobyl video clips.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was staffed in three shifts. The morning crew arrived at eight a.m. and left at four p.m.; their evening replacements clocked in at four and out at midnight. The unlucky night shift worked from midnight to eight a.m.
The test that led to the Chernobyl accident was scheduled to begin at one p.m. on the afternoon of April 25. A special team of outside engineers had been brought in to make sure things ran smoothly, and the day shift had been thoroughly briefed on the plan.
At one p.m., the day shift operators began to power down one of reactor four’s turbogenerators, as planned. The reactor would produce only half as much electricity for the duration of the experiment. Following test instructions, the operators disabled the emergency core cooling system.
At two p.m., the manager of the electrical grid serving Kiev called the station to report an unexpected surge in demand for electricity (post-Soviet reports indicate that another plant unexpectedly went off-line) and requested that the test be postponed. The turbogenerator was switched back on, and the test was put on hold. Crucially, the emergency core cooling system was never switched back on.
The test was still on hold at four p.m., when the evening shift arrived at the plant. The day shift passed on the instructions it had received that morning and then packed up to go home.
At 11:10 p.m., just as the evening shift was getting ready to leave, the Kiev grid gave the go-ahead to resume the experiment. The reactor had been operating all afternoon and evening with its emergency core cooling system disengaged, in blatant violation of safety protocol.
This was also an inopportune time to resume a risky test. The day shift that had been briefed on the experiment was gone, and the staff would switch agai
n at midnight, when the night shift arrived.
But, perhaps because most employees on-site didn’t understand the dangers the test posed, operators went forward with the experiment and once again commenced powering down the reactor.
At midnight, in the middle of the test, the evening crew was relieved by the night shift. A thirty-three-year-old engineer named Aleksandr Akimov became shift supervisor, while twenty-six-year-old operator Leonid Toptunov took the helm in the control room.
Neither man had particularly expert knowledge of the reactor. Toptunov had been working independently as a senior engineer for only a few months. Akimov was a nuclear engineer, but he had held more of a management role at the plant, and he had never operated the reactor.
The evening shift passed along the instructions, as the day shift had done for them. But by now Akimov and Toptunov were receiving third-hand information—what the evening shift recalled from what the day shift had told them. Later investigations would reveal how haphazard this relay had been. Some of the printed experiment documentation had been annotated with messy handwritten notes that the night shift couldn’t read.
Toptunov took over the controls and continued the power-down that the previous operator had started. The Soviet report would later indicate that Toptunov made a small but fatal error: he positioned the reactor’s control rods a few centimeters below where he should have, and because of this the power dropped drastically.
Once a reactor falls below a certain power level, it begins emitting particles that inhibit nuclear reactions, making it difficult to bring the power level back up. The test required that the reactor be operating at an output of at least seven hundred megawatts (MW); when Toptunov incorrectly positioned the rods, the power dropped to thirty MW—close to shutdown state.
At this point, Toptunov (correctly) concluded that it would be too dangerous to even try to bring the reactor up to seven hundred MW, and his supervisor, Akimov, agreed. Both believed that the test should be aborted and the reactor should be shut down completely.
But the deputy chief engineer, Anatoly Dyatlov, disagreed.
Dyatlov had come to the plant a decade earlier, after working at a physics lab and at a plant that built nuclear submarines. His colleagues knew him as a man of few social graces whose management style leaned heavily on upbraiding.
Perhaps because he’d been pressured by his superiors, or maybe because he took any opportunity to chastise his subordinates, Dyatlov insisted that the test be completed on his shift. He accused Akimov and Toptunov of incompetence and told them if they didn’t raise the power level, he’d put the evening shift supervisor (who had stayed after his shift ended to help) back on duty. This move would have served to humiliate Akimov.
Toptunov reluctantly gave in, removing more rods than was safe to offset the obstructing particles. By one a.m., he’d stabilized power at two hundred MW, an improvement, but still far below what the test called for.
To try to increase power, Toptunov began removing more and more protective rods from the reactor core, which was like taking his foot off the brake pedal of the nuclear reaction. This was in direct violation of safety protocol, because if he were to later try to reinsert the rods, this would cause a surge in power, which could lead to an explosion.
And that, it turns out, is precisely what happened.
Igor’s videos include an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union at the time of the Chernobyl accident. Gorbachev is often criticized for being slow to inform the Soviet public and the international community about what happened at Chernobyl.
The first hint the world received that it had just experienced its worst nuclear disaster came two days after it happened, from Sweden.
On April 28, a Swedish nuclear power plant detected unusually high levels of radiation, which it traced back to the Soviet Union. Swedish scientists hypothesized that there had been some kind of nuclear accident. Foreign media quickly picked up the story, and the Soviets released a terse statement that evening, confirming that an accident had taken place at the Chernobyl plant and declaring, “The effects of the accident are being remedied. Assistance has been provided for any affected people.”
In the film, the interviewer asks Gorbachev, gently, why it took the Soviet Union two days to confirm the accident, and almost three weeks for Gorbachev to discuss it publicly.
“I didn’t know about the radiation,” Gorbachev replies. He got a call saying there had been a fire at the Chernobyl plant, he claims, but no one told him that the smoke was radioactive.
At a rest stop, I ask Igor if he thinks Gorbachev is telling the truth in the video. I assume he gets this question all the time.
Apparently, he does not. “Why, if the Soviet Union was a closed country, was Pripyat evacuated the next day?” he replies, sounding annoyed. “And why, if Japan is an open country, did they take one week to evacuate after Fukushima? The Japanese government also lied.” He shakes his head.
I’m fairly certain Fukushima was evacuated immediately, but I don’t get the sense that Igor would welcome this fun fact. Fukushima was featured heavily yesterday at the Chernobyl Museum, where the reaction to Japan’s nuclear accident could best be described as giddy. Now Ukraine isn’t the only country with a disastrous nuclear meltdown on its record. The museum has set up an entire exhibit dedicated to showing how the Fukushima accident was almost as bad as Chernobyl’s.
Igor goes on to reiterate what I’d heard at the museum: that no one believed the reactor could fail, and that news of a fire wouldn’t have prompted suspicion of radioactive release as it moved up the chain of command. “To hear that the reactor was leaking radiation—it would be like if I told you that a tree had exploded!” Igor exclaims. “Just, for no reason, a tree exploded!”
He sighs. “Anyway, these questions are not for us, normal people. They are for the government. We are only ants.”
But as I get back on the bus, I wonder why no one ever asks him what seems to me like a fairly obvious question. Why, I wonder, is everyone coming to Chernobyl, if not to better understand what happened?
Pripyat, the city Igor mentioned, was not evacuated the day after the accident.
At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, the control room at the Chernobyl power plant was jolted by two powerful explosions.
The first explosion ruptured the roof of the building that housed the reactor. The second sent burning radioactive debris shooting out through the breach. The buildup of heat before the explosion had evaporated uranium fuel and fission products, which quickly rose into the atmosphere. Cooling water spilled out and air rushed in, igniting graphite material and allowing nuclear reactions to continue unimpeded. Radioactive dust quickly coated equipment, walls, floors—anything and everything. Other particles assembled above the plant in a cloud, ready to disperse wherever the wind led.
But because no one had a bird’s-eye view of the plant, the operators and engineers didn’t immediately realize that the damage to the reactor had been so severe that the core was exposed. An exposed core is catastrophic, in terms of radiation release, and also fire management. The water firefighters would later aim at the reactor to subdue the flames could actually ignite materials in the core.
At this time, Dyatlov assumed the reactor was still intact. He sent two low-level engineers to manually lower the control rods into the reactor. When they returned, they reported that the reactor had been completely destroyed, leaving the core so exposed they had seen it with their own eyes.
It was so difficult for Dyatlov to believe that the indestructible reactor had been destroyed that he didn’t. Despite the fact that the two men had returned with tanned faces that indicated they’d received lethal doses of radiation, Dyatlov dismissed their report. He told himself, along with his superiors, that the explosion had come from some piece of equipment outside the reactor, that the building was structurally in trouble, but that the reactor had suffered no damage.
Meanwhile, everyone could see the fires
that had sprouted all around the destroyed reactor and, most critically, were now licking the roof on the adjacent hall containing reactor three. If the fire reached reactor three, it could trigger a second round of equally potent explosions. Putting out the fire on the roof of the reactor three hall became crucial.
The first fire brigade to arrive came from the plant itself. It was followed, soon after, by backup from the nearby city of Pripyat, then the slightly farther town of Chernobyl, and finally, two hours later, reinforcements from far-away Kiev.
Few of the first responders knew that the flames they were battling were radioactive. Fires could occur at nuclear power plants for many reasons unrelated to the core or uranium fuel. The crews didn’t have equipment to test for radiation levels, and they didn’t have protective equipment to prevent them from receiving dangerous doses of radiation.
Two firefighters died that night of acute radiation poisoning; by the end of the year, twenty-eight more had been killed by the radiation they’d been exposed to that night.
But the firefighters were unquestionably the first heroes of the disaster, because by six thirty in the morning on April 26, the fire on the roof of reactor three had been extinguished, as had all others except the one inside the reactor. Reactor four was still pouring radioactive material into the atmosphere, but there wouldn’t be any further explosions, which would have released even more radiation.
Meanwhile, a few miles down the road, the city of Pripyat was waking up to an ordinary Saturday morning. It was a warm spring day, and the city buzzed in anticipation of the upcoming May Day, one of the biggest holidays in the Soviet Union.
Children went to Saturday classes and spent the afternoon playing outside, laughing and soaking up the season’s first strong dose of sunshine. Their bodies were also unwittingly soaking up dangerous doses of radiation, as invisible hot particles settled on their clothes, hair, and skin.
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