Midnight in Chernobyl

Title: Midnight in Chernobyl – The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Author: Adam Higginbotham

Publisher: Bantam, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9780593076842

Pages: 538

In its bid to build up an industrial infrastructure rivalling the West, the erstwhile Soviet Union turned to nuclear power in a big way. A lot of nuclear reactors that generated electric power came up in many parts of the sprawling nation. Chernobyl in Ukraine was one such unit housing four reactors using the Russian-developed RBMK technology, each generating 1000 megawatt of electricity. Construction of two new reactors was progressing at a furious pace in 1986. On the night of April 26 of that year, a terrible explosion occurred in Unit Four that transformed the destiny of the nuclear power industry and accelerated – to a considerable extent – the downfall of communism in the world. At the time of the mishap, the V I Lenin nuclear power station at Chernobyl was the world's largest nuclear power complex. The explosion caused the release of tons of deadly radioactive material into the atmosphere which landed back on ground as dust and rain. The entire Europe was also affected by the nuclear fallout. The authorities had to evacuate the whole population from a zone running thirty kilometres in all directions of the plant. Chernobyl accident was caused by careless planning, sloppy operation, and serious design problems pushed under the carpet. This book tells the story of the incident in panoramic detail. Adam Higginbotham is a journalist who has written for major American newspapers and lives in New York City.

This book presents a critical analysis of the Soviet nuclear program and its unwonted emphasis on secrecy. Accidents were not reported to the international watchdog IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The Communist party controlled all aspects of life in the country and meddled with nuclear technology as well. Nuclear engineers had to study political indoctrination as part of curricula such as the history of the party in the Soviet Union and the social laws established by Marx and developed by Lenin and Brezhnev. Position in the party influenced recruitment such as a person's posting in a plum job. Nikolai Fomin, the operations chief of the Chernobyl plant had risen through party circles and had learnt nuclear physics by a correspondence course!

After outlining the political structure that led to the disaster, the author brings out the design flaws that invited catastrophe. The reactor was huge – as befits the description of any product built inside the iron curtain – having a size twenty times that of Western reactors. Contrary to practice, it had no containment building, the thick concrete dome built around every reactor. Because the RBMK reactor was so immense, building the containment structure would have doubled the cost. The reactor was also riddled with a serious problem called the Positive Void Coefficient. When steam bubbles through water, the displacement of the liquid by the vapour phase reduced its moderating property to control the nuclear reaction. This caused a positive feedback mechanism that undermined reactor stability. The positive void coefficient resulted in runaway chain reactions in the event of a loss of coolant. This was a bane of the RBMK technology. It grew worse as more of the fuel was burnt. The longer it was in operation, the harder the reactor became to control. At the end of the three-year operating cycle, the reactor would be at its most unpredictable.

The extraordinarily large size of the reactor only added to the woes of the operators. Due to the huge size, reaction was often confined to narrow regions. The instrumentation was antiquated and when the control rods were inserted, reaction shot up initially before gradually coming down – another design fault. In addition to the growing list of troubles, the emergency protective system took eighteen seconds to fully insert the control rods to the core to shut down the reactor. In the frenzy to line up the unit at the earliest, several critical tests were postponed during the commissioning stage. The accident occurred when the management had decided to do a rundown test that was long overdue. This test helps to ensure supply of cooling water to the reactor in case of a total blackout. The unit was to be taken out for maintenance after running continuously for three years since its installation. The test and eventual stoppage of the reactor was scheduled during daytime, but the Kiev grid operator refused permission and suggested to stop it after the peak load hours. This pushed the test to begin at around 1:00 am.

An accident is an accident which can happen anywhere and anytime, irrespective of whether the state is socialist or capitalist. What is shocking is the communist state’s obsession with secrecy and cover-up. Every accident that occurred at a nuclear station in the Soviet Union continued to be regarded as a state secret, kept even from the specialists at the installation where they occurred. Even when Chernobyl was making headline news in international media, Soviet citizens were still not informed about the true scale of the disaster and its possible impact on environment and public health. Party-run newspapers relegated highly censored reports to the inner pages, under sports results. Europe took precautions when radioactivity was first detected in Sweden and people made a beeline to drug stores for potassium iodide tablets to keep away harmful effects of radiation. Lack of information bred panic in the West and distrust of the administration in the USSR. In a socialist polity, all parts of the country are supposed to be equal, but the regions where top party leaders reside were more equal than the others. When the wind turned towards Moscow, threatening it with radioactive dust clouds from Chernobyl, Soviet aircrafts flew repeated missions to seed the clouds with silver iodide and forced rain on the countryside. The capital was spared, but hundreds of square kilometres of fertile farmland in Belarus were lashed with black rain containing radioactive graphite particles, rendering the produce unfit for consumption.

However hard you may accuse the socialist system of incompetence and secrecy, once it was awakened out of slumber, the beast did a thorough job of containment and evacuation humanly possible. The author hands out some glowing commendations to the selfless workers who risked their lives to work on the damaged reactor. All souls, except the working crew, were evacuated permanently from a thirty-kilometre zone and all children in Kiev for a few days. Many settlements were decontaminated many times, but homes that resisted the process were simply demolished. Eventually, whole villages were bulldozed flat and buried. Even the leaves on the trees and the earth beneath the feet had become sources of ionizing radiation. The bill for the mitigation measures was a staggering $128 billion. That was equal to the total Soviet defence budget for 1989. This came on the heels of an oil price crash, when oil was a prime source of revenue to the Soviets.

Higginbotham’s focus is on radiation, but he positions a convenient mirror on the life of ordinary people under the Communist party’s dictatorship. USSR had enforced an internal passport system that prevented most citizens from leaving their areas of registration without good reason and concurrence from the authorities. Radio speaker boxes were hardwired in every apartment, piping in propaganda, just like gas and electricity, over three channels – union, republic and city. Even switching it off was regarded with suspicion. The book also talks about the beginning of the end of communism. With Gorbachev's glasnost, the party released its grip on information with more open reporting from Chernobyl. Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet republic began to discover how deeply it had been misled about the accident and ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect its population finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. As the state’s attempts to conceal the truth came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realisation that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.

The heroic efforts of the team called ‘liquidators’ to seal off the damaged reactor are thrilling and extol the glory of Soviet dedication. Just five months after the collapse, Unit One reactor came back online and the three remaining reactors eventually continued to pour electricity to the Ukrainian grid till the year 2000. Higginbotham has made several visits to the affected areas as part of his research for this book. This helps him to lay before us a comprehensive picture of things. By 2005, 4700 sq. km of north western Ukraine and southern Belarus was still declared uninhabitable by radiation. Even after three decades, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic was still too radioactive for human consumption. However, things are not all bleak. In the exclusion zone, ecological rebirth and renewal is now taking place. Groups of animals are thriving there as if humans are a more serious threat than radiation. Even people are surreptitiously settling inside the exclusion zone. The public health effects, as a whole, were not really as substantial as had at first been feared.

The book is absorbing and pleasing to read. The epilogue summarises the later lives of all major characters in the drama that unfolded on that deadly April night in 1986. A neat glossary and a description of radiation-related terms add to the appeal. That can't be said about the many photographic plates included in it. The monochrome images are more of people than of events and vistas related in the text.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star