Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham Book Summary

Midnight in Chernobyl, The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

Table of Contents

Recommendation

The USSR expanded its nuclear power program in the 1970s as its economy stagnated. The first new nuclear plant opened in 1975 in Chernobyl, Ukraine. As journalist Adam Higginbotham masterfully reports, after a failed safety test on a Friday night in April 1986, Reactor Four exploded. The radioactive fire proved nearly impossible to extinguish, and the explosion contaminated the region for decades. This meticulously researched book offers fascinating technical details on nuclear power and a gripping portrait of the USSR’s final years.

Take-Aways

In 1970, the Soviet Union undertook an expansion of its nuclear power program.
Chernobyl’s plant would use a new nuclear reactor, the RBMK.
The Soviet state viewed its nuclear industry as a security secret and did not report failures publicly.
The RBMK reactor was immense, risky and prone to explosion.
On April 25, 1986, staff at the Chernobyl station began a safety test of Reactor Number Four. Within hours, the reactor exploded.
Hours passed before the plant director and other officials acknowledged the event and summoned fire crews.
Scientists formulated a plan to drop a variety of substances into the ruined reactor to stop the fire and prevent the release of radioactivity.
A cloud of radiation traveled thousands of miles, alerting international authorities and forcing Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet officials to respond.
In July 1987, Soviet authorities put the people accused of causing the disaster on trial.

Midnight in Chernobyl Book Summary

In 1970, the Soviet Union undertook an expansion of its nuclear power program.

To meet its electricity needs and compete with Western countries, the Soviet Union launched an ambitious, far-reaching new program of building nuclear reactor early in the 1970s. The USSR had been a world leader in nuclear engineering. In 1954, it built the first nuclear reactor capable of generating commercial-grade electricity. But by the early 1970s, it had entered the “Era of Stagnation,” while the United States was landing astronauts on the moon.

“Behind all the catastrophic failures of the USSR – behind the kleptocratic bungling, the nepotism, the surly inefficiencies and the ruinous waste of the planned economy – lay the monolithic power of the Communist Party.”

With its new nuclear project, the Soviet Union sought to establish itself as the world leader in nuclear power. It would build the “greatest nuclear power station on Earth” in Chernobyl, Ukraine.

Chernobyl’s plant would use a new nuclear reactor, the RBMK.

Bearing the name of the ancient regional capital, Chernobyl, the plant would be the first nuclear power plant in Ukraine, sitting along the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers. The new director and sole employee of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, Viktor Brukhanov, created its infrastructure: a rail line leading to the nearest train station, a riverside dock and a temporary workers’ village. The plant’s original plan included a new nuclear reactor model, the RBMK, or “high-power channel-type reactor,” larger and more powerful than any reactor in the West.

“The deadlines set by his bosses in Moscow and Kyiv required Brukhanov to work with superhuman dispatch.”

In principle, a single RBMK reactor could generate enough electricity to serve a million homes. The schedule for building and getting the reactors online was rigorous, if not impossible. According to the Ninth Five-Year Plan, the first reactor was to go online at the end of 1975.

The Soviet state viewed its nuclear industry as a security secret and did not report failures publicly.

An “atomic politburo” led the USSR’s nuclear work under the supervision of Lavrenty Beria, the infamous head of the NKVD (later the KGB). The Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, the culmination of a project – with the code name Problem Number One – that took place under the leadership of physicist Igor Kurchatov. The bomb used a core of plutonium created in the reactor “Annushka” according to the US model. By the end of 1952, Soviet authorities inaugurated the Scientific Research and Design Institute of Energy Technology for the purpose of creating civilian reactors.

“Kurchatov outlined plans for an ambitious program of experimental reactor technology and a futuristic Communist empire.”

In February 1956, Kurchatov made a rare appearance before the Soviet public. In a Moscow speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he outlined a vision that included nuclear reactors, cheap electricity, and nuclear-powered trains, ships and planes. The government named him to head his own organization, The Institute of Atomic Energy, and gave him the go-ahead to design reactor prototypes that might become models for the future Soviet nuclear energy industry.

Kurchatov died in 1960. His sophisticated reactors gave way to reactors that the Soviets could build more quickly and cheaply. The secrecy became more and more extreme: Scientists became gods, and the authorities kept the public in the dark.

However, the Soviet Union’s participation in the International Atomic Energy Agency, dating back to 1957, requires it to report nuclear accidents. It has never reported a single one. On paper, it had the “safest nuclear industry in the world.” Yet, on September 29, 1957, a major explosion occurred in a reactor in the southern Urals. This complex did not appear on civilian maps. The truth about the explosion did not come out for decades, but it remained “the worst nuclear accident in history” for many years.

The RBMK reactor was immense, risky and prone to explosion.

In 1966, the government officially approved construction of a new generation of nuclear reactors, the RBMK. This new reactor sprang from the original military reactor, the Ivan the Second, and the innovative Atom Mirny-1, but the Soviets built it on an epic scale. A gigantic cylinder made from some 1,700 tons of graphite blocks formed the RBMK’s core. Boron carbide rods, which would slide in or out of the reactor to control the nuclear chain reaction, regulated its power. To protect plant workers, a tank of water – encased in an eight-story vault and capped with metal boxes of iron shot mixed with the neutron-retarding mineral serpentine – surrounded the reactor’s core. The RBMK spoke to Soviet gigantism, but existing Soviet factories could manufacture its parts, and those were easy to assemble on-site.

“Serious design faults dogged the RBMK from the outset. Many became apparent immediately; others would take much longer to come to light.”

A Leningrad factory that made tanks and tractors created the draft plans for the RBMK. One dissenting scientist deemed the design too risky to use in civilian areas, and another claimed that these types of reactors would be prone to explosion, but construction of the new reactors moved forward. Engineers didn’t arrive at a final reactor design until 1968. To save time, those in charge bypassed the prototype phase and put the reactor into mass production.

On April 25, 1986, staff at the Chernobyl station began a safety test of Reactor Number Four. Within hours, the reactor exploded.

When the midnight shift arrived on April 25, 1986, the day’s test hadn’t yet been started, and the station’s deputy chief engineer, Anatoly Dyatlov, was weary and irritable. The test was to gauge a safety system to protect Reactor Number Four during a power outage. It was a “design-basis accident,” in which a power loss would cause pumps circulating coolant to stop, thus putting the reactor at risk of core meltdown.

“The reactor was a pistol with the hammer cocked. All that remained was for someone to pull the trigger.”

The staff began to power the reactor down, leaving it at 720 megawatts. At Dyatlov’s insistence, they pushed it lower. The power kept dropping lower and lower until alarms sounded. Nuclear safety protocol dictated they should abort the test. The reactor was filling with toxic xenon-135 gas. Less than 10 minutes after the power had started to go down, staff attempted to revive the contaminated reactor using manual control rods. They should have geared down the plant’s generator. Reactivity first dropped predictively, then suddenly and uncontrollably spiked upward.

At 1:24 a.m., Reactor Number Four exploded with a force equivalent to more than 50 tons of dynamite. It was completely destroyed. Tons of uranium fuel and graphite blocks shattered into miniscule pieces and shot into the air in a radioactive cloud. Some 1,300 tons of glowing radioactive rubble caught fire.

Hours passed before the plant director and other officials acknowledged the event and summoned fire crews.

Close to 1:30 a.m., flames shot high into the air from Chernobyl, and alarms sounded at the nearby Paramilitary Fire Station Number Two. Men on the third shift had felt the explosion. People in the Unit Four control room tried to understand what had happened and what their instruments were telling them. It looked like a “maximum design-basis accident” that included the possibility of a total core meltdown. People who went outside Control Room Four saw everything in ruins. The ceiling and walls were gone; the station was open to the sky. Where the reactor once stood, they saw a shimmering column of blue-white light, a result of the “radioactive ionization of the air.” That meant the live nuclear reactor was exposed to the open air.

“They were staring into empty space; the bowels of the benighted station were lit by moonlight.”

In the administrative offices in a bunker beneath the plant, senior staff and other personnel struggled to believe what was happening. Many were unable to overcome their belief that a nuclear reactor could not explode, even though they saw the destruction. Some thought that the reactor was undamaged and the explosion had occurred in another location.

The plant’s civil defense chief grabbed a DP-5 military radiometer – which he would normally use only in the event of a nuclear attack – and went to take measurements. He saw that officials needed to warn people who worked in the plant and those who lived nearby, but the director wanted to wait. Hours went by before he and others on the site publicly acknowledged what had happened.

By 7 a.m., they summoned fire crews from all over the Kyiv region. The firemen put out the visible fires, but where Reactor Number Four once stood was a radioactive blaze of uranium and graphite. A full 32 hours after the disaster, authorities issued a carefully worded public statement about the accident. At 10 a.m. on Sunday, April 26, authorities ordered the evacuation of the nearby town of Pripyat.

Scientists formulated a plan to drop a variety of substances into the ruined reactor to stop the fire and prevent the release of radioactivity.

Scientists attempted to formulate an array of substances they could drop into the reactor’s burning ruins to douse the graphite fire, cool the burning nuclear fuel and prevent the further release of radioactive materials. The potential retardant substances included clay, lead and dolomite. None were available near the reactor.

“The pilots and engineers of the 51st Guards Helicopter Regiment returned again and again to fling bags of boron and sand into the mouth of the radioactive volcano.”

Authorities had helicopters bomb the reactor site with powdered boron, which would prevent further chain reactions in the uranium. The managers sent two ministers down to the river to fill sacks with sand. They thought sandbags would dull the fire and prevent the release of radioactive gases. Pripyat was full of abandoned dogs; their howls echoed with the racket of helicopters swooping overhead to deposit bags of boron and sand.

A cloud of radiation traveled thousands of miles, alerting international authorities and forcing Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet officials to respond.

A cloud of radiation rose some 1,500 meters and moved across the Soviet Union and the Baltic Sea. The cloud contained xenon-133, as well as pieces of radioactive graphite and radioactive isotopes such as iodine-131 and cesium-137. Soviet scientists didn’t measure radiation in the air until a day after the accident. By that time, much of it had moved toward Scandinavia. The next day, authorities in Stockholm received reports of abnormal levels of radiation across the region. They determined beyond doubt that Sweden was not the source.

At an emergency meeting of the Politburo that morning in Moscow, people at the highest levels of Soviet power knew little about what had happened. General Secretary Gorbachev insisted the government make a statement immediately. But the Soviet propensity for secrecy prevailed. The Politburo issued an uninformative press release through the Soviet state news agency.

“By the end of the week, the New York Post was going to press with ‘unconfirmed reports’ from Ukraine that 15,000 people had been killed in the accident, their bodies buried in mass graves.”

Despite Gorbachev’s protestations, a second statement admitted to only two deaths and the evacuation of Pripyat. It didn’t mention radiation. Meanwhile, headlines in the New York Post included lines like “2,000 Die in Nukemare.”

In July 1987, Soviet authorities put the people accused of causing the disaster on trial.

Plant director Viktor Brukhanov and five other men who were allegedly responsible for the disaster at Chernobyl went on trial on July 7, 1987. By Soviet law, the trial had to take place within the district where the crime took place, but because – a year later – Pripyat was still part of a contaminated “exclusion zone,” the trial moved to Chernobyl.

The government allowed a few representatives of the press to attend, notably from BBC Radio and Japanese TV, but they were allowed to hear only opening and closing remarks. On July 29, the judge found everyone guilty. Senior people, like Brukhanov and Dyatlov, received the maximum sentence of 10 years in a penal colony. On December 4, 1987, after months of decontamination and repair, the three surviving reactors at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station went back on line. However, 25 years after the destruction of Reactor Number Four, the exclusion zone surrounding the power plant remained contaminated.