Chernobyl – History of a Tragedy

Title: Chernobyl – History of a Tragedy

Author: Serhii Plokhy

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780241349021

Pages: 404

Weather you bat for or against it, nuclear power generation has a certain charm associated with it. It is non-polluting, clean and good value for money. The energy produced by an entire rail rake-load of coal in a thermal station can be generated by nuclear fuel that can be comfortably put in the boot of a passenger car. Besides, it is a product of twentieth century physics unlike thermal, hydro- or wind, the principles of which were with mankind from the earliest times. The risks associated with the safe operation of a nuclear reactor and the disposal of spent fuel makes the designers vary of embracing it. The public is also normally averse to have a working reactor in their midst, having raised through textbooks showing the mushroom clouds of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear energy is, in fact quite safe, having caused only three major accidents in its history spanning seven decades - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima and the last one was not due to any human error. The accident that attracted international attention was the disaster in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine of the erstwhile USSR on 26 April 1986. Thirty-one people were killed in the mishap, two by the explosion itself and twenty-nine from the effects of radiation. While these figures are not awful, the fallout of radioactive material that spread to various parts of Ukraine and Europe as a whole had caused an immense health threat to millions of people. This book tells a detailed story of how the disaster occurred, what are the steps that led to it, who were involved in and after the accident and how the regime coped with international public opinion in the aftermath. Serhii Plokhy is a Ukrainian-American historian and author specializing in the history of Ukraine. He serves as professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University.

The book makes a detailed study of the Chernobyl plant and the explosive impact of the accident, but the figures seem to be slightly exaggerated. The blast was said to be equivalent to 500 Hiroshima bombs. Also, each reactor had 500 pounds of enriched Uranium as fuel. If the other three reactors of the plant had been damaged by the explosion then hardly any living and breathing organism would have remained on the planet, the author claims. However this assertion is simply hyperbole. The explosion that occurred was due to steam at very high pressure which caused radioactive material scatter into the atmosphere. No comparison with Hiroshima there! It was the third largest nuclear plant in the world with four reactors producing 1000 megawatt of electricity each and a fifth one under construction. The construction of the plant had begun in 1970 and the first reactor became operational in 1977. The fourth reactor which caused the accident was functional for just two years and three months when it was destroyed. A flourishing little city called Prypiat had developed near the site to house the workers. After the accident, the town was evacuated and still remains as a ghost town like a modern-day Pompeii. The town hears the footfall of only the occasional tourist. Plokhy has made use of newly available archival material and KGB documents.

The constant refrain of the Soviet academic and technical community was that the operators of the plant were to be blamed for the catastrophe. This is given special attention in the book and debunked as a myth. The reactor which belonged to a type designated as RBMK was inherently cheaper to fabricate than the rival type VVER. The most fundamental difference between the two is that in the RBMK, water is boiled to steam in the reactor core itself and the steam is used to drive a turbine to produce power. The VVER heats up pressured water in the core which is then used to make steam from another independent water circuit on which turbine is run. The RBMK scored only on the cost parameter by letting go of many safety-related structures such as the concrete containing dome that surrounds any reactor. They are virtually open to atmosphere. In Chernobyl itself, a fuel channel had burst in 1982 after repair and radiation shot up to 10 times the normal but was eventually contained. Several such episodes prompted the authorities to impose censorship on reporting of nuclear accidents in the country. Moreover, leakage of radioactive water at the rate of 50 cubic metres per hour was continuously coming out from the drains from numerous small leaks inside. The management was oblivious to such flaws and concentrated only on increasing the output. Just the previous year, in 1985, the plant produced 10% more energy than its target partly by cutting time spent on repairs.

Almost a hundred pages are reserved to describe the fateful events that unfolded on the two days of April 26 and 27. The maintenance team wanted to conduct a test to determine how long the lubricating oil pumps of the turbine would run when the steam input is cut off. The test was scheduled to begin at 2 pm, but the grid authority denied permission to shutdown the reactor. The emergency cooling water valves were already closed for this test and nobody bothered to reopen the heavy valves. This did not contribute to the accident but serves as an indicator of the lax culture of safety in the plant. The test was eventually conducted at 1.23 am the next day and the answer came out to be 40 seconds. But in the process, the reactor became hopelessly unstable and one erroneous thing led to other big blunders. Very soon, the reaction became uncontrolled when the operators tried to take an emergency shutdown. Two big steam explosions resulted in the 200-ton containment barrier flying into the air. The graphite blocks and fuel rods of the reactor caught fire when it was showered all over the place. These were deadly radioactive. The firefighters who tried to extinguish the fire from the roof of the reactor hall got sick within half an hour. The radiation sickness started with a severe headache, dry throat and nausea. Even though the fire could be contained by 7 am, most of the early firefighters had absorbed lethal doses of radiation. Most of them died later.

What had happened thus far was pardonable to a certain extent. Design flaws and human errors can happen anywhere. But, the suppression of information about the accident could take place only in a dictatorship such as the one run by the Communists. The authorities kept mum on the terrible happening while children freely roamed the streets of Prypiat where seven weddings took place during daytime. While radioactive dust was settling over the civilian population, the party officials progressed through confusion, disbelief and denial. This was not new in the Soviet Union. In 1957, they had similarly suppressed disclosure of an explosion in a plutonium facility in Ozersk, which was almost in the middle of the gargantuan Russian vastness. But Chernobyl was near the border and two days later, radioactivity was detected in the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden, situated 1257 km away. Soviets had to break silence at 9 pm on that day through a terse announcement on TV. Even then, no newspaper published the story. Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was 130 km away but radiation levels soared. However, the party was defiant and promptly carried out the May Day parade through its streets, risking the lives of the participants. Even general bulletins on what to do in case of radiation sickness had to be got cleared by the Ukrainian politburo. The first televised address on how to cope with radiation was aired ten days later by which time the people no longer trusted the party and the government.

The collective effort to contain the damaged reactor is a heroic tale of self-sacrifice and dedication of the Soviet people. Volunteers from other services called liquidators were used to mop up radioactive debris from the premises while tons of sand was heaped over the reactor through dangerous maneuvers by helicopter pilots. These volunteers were mobilized by the party apparatus and many of them would suffer severe health problems in the coming years. The military decontaminated fields and villages sometimes by burying entire forests by bulldozing. It is estimated that the abandoned town of Prypiat would not be habitable for the next 20,000 years. Plokhy then links the disaster to the rise of dissidence in Ukraine. Organisations such as Rukh and Green World took root under the guise of environmental activism. As Ukraine turned Independent, it instituted schemes to help the victims. A Chernobyl tax of 12% was slapped on corporate income. At the same time, it reduced the acceptable level of lifetime radiation exposure to 7 rem from 35 rem.

What happened next was a climb down from principles as the nascent Ukrainian state battled hard on the economic front. It wanted to close down Chernobyl, but could not do it on account of the cheap power it produced and the considerable employment opportunities it provided. The other three reactors continued production even in the face of heightened radiation risks. Accidents continued to occur. In 1991, a major fire in Unit 2 caused by a faulty switch in the turbine destroyed part of the roof of turbine hall. Unit 2 was immediately closed and the other two units continued production till December 15, 2000 when at last the Chernobyl plant was permanently shut down. Construction of two new nuclear plants was going on at that time at Rivne, and Khmelnytskyi which were connected to the grid in 2004. The country has not divorced nuclear power even though the economic fallout of the disaster was heavy on the whole, since seven million people had received some form of compensation.

The author was a professor of a Ukrainian university at the time Chernobyl threw up the radioactive material. Readers get a first-hand assessment of the sentiments of the Ukrainian public on the shifting stands of their Soviet masters. Written in an elegant, flowing style, the book is very enjoyable in spite of the macabre content. Plokhy is successful in bringing out the soul of Ukrainian resistance to ideological domination. Some photos should have been added to the narrative to give it some more visual appeal.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star