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Ablaze
The Story of Chernobyl
Piers Paul Read
CONTENTS
Cast of Characters
The Founders of Soviet Atomic Power
Staff of the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station at Chernobyl
Pripyat
Moscow
Kiev
Introduction
Part One The New Civilization
Part Two Chernobyl
Part Three Radiophobia
Epilogue
Image Gallery
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The Founders of Soviet Atomic Power
Igor Kurchatov
Father of the Soviet atom bomb
Lavrenty Beria
Chief of the NKVD. Director of the atomic bomb project.
Efim Slavsky
Minister of Medium Machine Building
Nikolai Dollezhal
Designer of the first nuclear reactors. Director of NIKYET
Anatoli Alexandrov
Director of the Kurchatov Institute. President of the Academy of Sciences
Valeri Legasov
Academician. First deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute
Staff of the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station at Chernobyl
Victor Brukhanov
Director
Vasili Kizima
Head of construction
Nikolai Fomin
Chief engineer
Anatoli Dyatlov
Deputy chief engineer, 3rd and 4th units
Mikhail Lyutov
Scientific deputy chief engineer
The early morning shift on 26 April
Boris Rogozhkin
Chief of shift, 3rd and 4th unit
Alexander Akimov
Shift foreman, 4th unit
Leonid Toptunov
Senior reactor control engineer
Piotr Stolyarchuk
Senior unit control engineer
Senior turbine control engineer
Yuri Tregub
Shift foreman prior to Akimov
Valeri
Shift foreman, equipment
Perevozchenko
maintenance department, 3rd and 4th units
Victor Proskuriakov
Engineer under Perevozchenko
Sasha Yuvchenko
Proskuriakov’s replacement
Alexander Kudriatsev
Engineer
Gennady Metlenko
Engineer from Donenergo
Alexander
Lelechenko
Head of the electrical workshop
Razim Davletbayev
Deputy head of the turbine section
Piotr Palamarchuk
Director of the start-up enterprise
The engineers from Komsomolsk
Anatoli Sitnikov
Deputy chief engineer, 1st and 2nd units
Vladimir Chugunov
Head of the reactor workshop, 1st and 2nd units
Vadim Grishenka
Deputy chief engineer, 5th block (under construction)
PRIPYAT
Vladimir Voloshko
Secretary of the city committee
A. S. Gamanyuk
Party secretary
Major Teliatnikov
Commander of the Pripyat and Chernobyl nuclear power station fire service
Lieutenant Pravik
Duty officer of the nuclear power station fire service on night of 25–26 April
Lieutenant Kibenok
Duty officer of the Pripyat fire service on the night of 25–26 April
Vitali Leonenko
Director of the Hospital
Anatoli Ben
Surgeon
Lubov Kovalevskaya
Acting editor of Tribuna Energetica
MOSCOW
The Central Committee
Mikhail Gorbachev
General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Nikolai Ryzhkov
Soviet prime minister (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR)
Yegor Ligachev
Secretary of the ideological department
Alexander Yakovlev
Secretary of the propaganda department
Vladimir Marin
Head of the nuclear power department
Defence and Civil Defence
Marshal Akhromeev
Chief of the Soviet general staff
General Altunin
Commander of the Soviet civil defence
General Ivanov
Second-in-command of the Soviet civil defence
Colonel General Pikalov
Commander of the chemical troops
Ministries and Institutes
Efim Slavsky
Minister of Medium Machine Building
Anatoli Mayorets
Minister of Energy and Electrification
Armen Abagyan
Director of the All-Union Research Institute for Nuclear Power Plant Operation (VNIIAES)
Yuri Israel
Director of the State Committee of Hydrometeorology
The Kurchatov Institute
Anatoli Alexandrov
Director
Valeri Legasov
First deputy director
Yevgeni Velikhov
Deputy director. Expert on nuclear fusion
Eugene Ryzantzev
Head of the nuclear safety department
Alexander Kalugin
Scientist responsible for RBMK reactors
Konstantin
Physicist
Fedulenko
Yuri Sivintsev
Physicist
The Institute of Biophysics
Leonid Ilyn
Director
Victor Knijnikov
Head of the laboratory
In-patient Department of Institute of Biophysics at Hospital No. 6
Angelina Guskova
Director. Formerly Kurchatov’s personal physician
Alexander Baranov
Head of the haematology department
Georgi Seredovkin
Specialist in radiation sickness
Robert Gale
American bone-marrow transplant specialist
The Press
Vladimir Gubarev
Science editor of Pravda. Author of the play Sarcophagus
The Chernobyl Commission
Boris Scherbina
Deputy prime minister. First chairman
Deputy prime minister. Second chairman
Oleg Shepin
Deputy minister of health. Chairman of the medical commission
Andrei Vorobyov
Haematologist. Principal expert on the medical commission
KIEV
Officials
Vladimir
General secretary, Communist
Shcherbitsky
Party of the Ukraine
Grigori Revenko
First party secretary of the Kiev region
Vitali Sklerov
Ukrainian minister of power and electrification
Valentina
Ukrainian deputy prime minister
Shevchenko Anatoli Romanenko
Ukrainian minister of health
Defence and Civil Defence
General Berdov
Commander of the Ukrainia
n militia
Major General Antoshkin
Air force commander, Kiev region
Nationalists and Democrats
Yuri Shcherbak
Leader of the Green World movement in Kiev. People’s deputy. Later minister of the environment
Volodomyr
Author. A people’s deputy in the
Yavorivsky
RUKH party. Framer of the Chernobyl Law
Volodomyr
President of the Chernobyl
Shovkovshytny
Union. People’s deputy in the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet
INTRODUCTION
When Valeri Legasov, the scientist who took charge after the accident at Chernobyl, first saw the glowing crater of the ruined fourth reactor, he realized that he faced a disaster comparable to the San Francisco earthquake or the destruction of Pompeii.
Today, it seems likely that Chernobyl may be more significant than either of these historic catastrophes. Many millions have suffered and continue to suffer from the consequences of the accident. Parts of Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine are uninhabitable and will remain so for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to come. The count of the fatalities ranges from the official figure of thirty-one to a projection that Chernobyl will ultimately claim more victims than did World War II.
Equally significant is the effect of Chernobyl on our attitude towards nuclear power. Confidence was already shaken by the accident at Three Mile Island, after which no new nuclear power stations have been commissioned in the United States. In the wake of Chernobyl, some forty reactors in the Soviet Union that were either in operation, under construction or about to be built were closed, cancelled or converted to thermal power. In Austria, a brand-new nuclear power station was mothballed, its cost paid by public subscription. In Italy, all plans for nuclear power were cancelled. In Sweden, where the fallout from Chernobyl was first registered, the government made a commitment to phase out nuclear power by the year 2010.
However, an ever-increasing demand for electricity, together with limited reserves of gas, coal and oil and the growing evidence of the damage done by their combustion to our health and the environment, makes this rejection of nuclear power itself problematic. For this reason, it is important to reach as full an understanding as possible of an event like the accident at Chernobyl.
Several books have already been written on Chernobyl by authors inside and outside the Soviet Union, but none so far as I know by a Western writer since the fall of the Communists from power in 1991 and the subsequent opening of archives and loosening of tongues. Dr Yuri Shcherbak, the author of Chernobyl: A Documentary Story, and Grigori Medvedev, the author of The Truth About Chernobyl, were both engaged in the aftermath of the accident – the first as a doctor, the second as an engineer – and so combine with their narrative the immediacy of a firsthand account. I have drawn on both to describe the role played by their authors. The same is true of Final Warning: The Legacy of Chernobyl by Dr Robert Gale and Thomas Hauser.
Two expatriate Ukrainians, Viktor Haynes and Marko Bojcun, published The Chernobyl Disaster in 1988, an excellent factual account based on published sources. David Marples, from the Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, published Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR in 1987 and has contributed regular well-informed articles on the subject to the Report on the USSR. More recently, there is The Legacy of Chernobyl by Zhores Medvedev, who once worked as a scientist in Soviet nuclear facilities and was expelled from his country in 1973. His book profits from his knowledge and experience and contains a more thorough explanation of the scientific aspects of the disaster than I have attempted here. Finally, Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside by Vladimir Chernousenko, a Ukrainian scientist who took a prominent part in dealing with the consequences of the accident, reflects the anxieties found in his country today.
For the political background that is so important in reaching a proper understanding of the story, I am indebted to The Great Terror by Robert Conquest; Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy by Dimitri Volkogonov; Gorbachev: The Path to Power by Christian Schmidt-Häuer; The New Russians by Hedrick Smith; and Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union by John and Carol Garrard. The quotations from Taras Shevchenko are taken from Taras Shevchenko by Maxim Rylsky and Alexandr Deich, translated by John Weir.
‘A full interpretation of what happened,’ wrote Yuri Shcherbak in 1987, ‘is a matter for the future, perhaps the distant future. No writer or journalist, however well informed he might be, could do that today. The time will come, I firmly believe, when the Chernobyl epic will appear before us in all its tragic fullness.’
Who could have predicted in 1987 quite how quickly that distant future would arrive? Or that Shcherbak himself, then a doctor and an amateur writer, would by 1990 be the minister for the environment in an independent Ukraine? In collecting the material for what follows, I have taken advantage of the 1989 declassification of information relating to atomic power, the release of all those imprisoned and access to certain documents and reports that were hitherto secret – the judges’ summing-up at the trial held in Chernobyl in 1987, the report of the State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry written in 1990, the report of the Ecological Commission of the Supreme Soviet, the protocols of the Politburo’s hitherto secret medical commission set up after the accident, and the numerous reports published by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
Shcherbak was undoubtedly right to describe the story as ‘epic’, and one of my most difficult tasks has been to reduce it to manageable proportions. The catastrophe affected several million people. In choosing to tell the story of only a few, I have tried to include some of the essential protagonists and a sample from different groups, but I cannot pretend that I have given every participant his due.
I have emphasized the human side of the story because, in its essence, the accident was caused by human error – but human error of a complex kind. What happened in the fourth reactor early in the morning of 26 April 1986 is now known. What went on in the minds of the operators, and those who took charge after the accident, is not. To understand what happened, however, it is necessary to return to the genesis of the Soviet atomic programme in the days of Stalin and Beria; to understand the consequences of the accident we must follow the narrative almost to the present day.
There are certain obstacles that a writer must clear to make the story of the Chernobyl disaster intelligible. The first is atomic physics. With no specialist knowledge myself, I have been alternately daunted by the apparent complexity of the subject and encouraged by its essential simplicity. The narrative is based on the assumption that both writer and reader need only a rudimentary knowledge of how nuclear reactors function. I have included, at the end of the Introduction, an explanation of the terms used for measuring radiation.
The second is a general ignorance about the countries most affected by the accident, Belorussia and the Ukraine. For a large number of people in Western Europe and the United States, it was the accident at Chernobyl that put both countries on the map. This fact in itself affects the story, and if there is any advantage to be seen in the tragedy of Chernobyl, it is in the part it played in re-establishing the autonomy of these countries for the first time in many hundreds of years.
Matched to our ignorance of the two countries is the difficulty we encounter in mastering some of the names. Those like Fomin or Steinberg are easily pronounced and so easily remembered. Others, like Palamarchuk, Davletbayev, Smyshlyaev or Shovkovshytny, are not. The accepted transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet leaves a plethora of letters in these Slavic names. The wide boulevard in the centre of Kiev sounds like ‘Kreshatic’ but is spelled Khreshchatyk.
There are similar problems with first names. The Ukrainian version of Vladimir is Volodomyr, and there are many Ukrainians who take exception to the Russification of their names. I have therefore used both forms of the name. For those Russian names that come close in sound to their English equivalent
s, I have used English spelling – Alexander rather than Aleksandr; Victor rather than Viktor (in the case of Brukhanov, this was his choice) – but for those where the sound is different, I have used a Russified form – Piotr rather than Peter, Nikolai rather than Nicholas. It is unfortunate that the names Alexander and Lubov, or Luba, are so common among the characters. To assist the reader, I have included lists of leading characters. I have not given patronymics except where they were used in conversation.
The ‘gigantism’ that was such a feature of the former Soviet Union is nowhere more apparent than in the names of institutions that are either referred to by their initials – VNIIAES for the All-Union Research Institute for Nuclear Power Plant Operations, or NIKYET for Academician Dollezhal’s Scientific Research Institute for Technical Energy Construction – or by the compacted abbreviations adopted by the Bolsheviks: Minenergo for the Ministry of Energy and Electrification or Soyuzatomenergo for the All-Union Industrial Department for Nuclear Energy. Where possible, I have avoided these compacted forms and have either used initials or given a simplified form of the full title.
The further I looked into the accident at Chernobyl, the more I came to realize that writing a book on the subject was a task with grave responsibilities. To exaggerate the damaging consequences would confirm fears about nuclear power; to minimize them would not just encourage its development but also implicitly dismiss the pleas for foreign aid made by charitable organizations like the Chernobyl Union, Chernobyl Help or Children of Chernobyl. Ignorant of haematology, immunology and atomic physics, with little knowledge of the peoples and no knowledge of their languages, it seemed at times reckless to pursue my research.