Terrifying. That word comes unbidden reading “Midnight in Chernobyl: The World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster,” by Adam Higgenbotham. This splendid book is by far the most detailed and best account of the April 1986 disaster at the Soviet Union’s V.I. Lenin plant in the Ukraine. This is a story of the deep-seated rot in Communist socialism. Chernobyl made a major contribution to the sudden and tawdry fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics three years later.
It is a tale of hubris, authoritarianism, corruption, arrogance, incompetence, and stunning bureaucratic sclerosis. Take note, western nations. We are not immune to the forces that produced this human, governmental, and industrial tragedy. A similar probing look at Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster would likely produce similar results.
The English translation of Chernobyl is “wormwood,” a common bitter herb. The Christian Bible, Revelation 8:10-11, reads, “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”
Chernobyl was a small Ukrainian city, now largely a ghost town, not far from Kiev and near the border with Belarus. The Soviet Union built four 1,000-MW graphite-moderated, water-cooled (RBMK) nuclear reactors near the city. The Soviets then built an “atomic city,” Pripyat, named for the river that cooled the plant, nearby to house the many thousands of workers at the nuclear complex.
The V.I. Lenin plant was the Soviet Union’s exemplar of its nuclear power prowess, with a dozen of its design in operation. It was a unique boiling water machine, able to produce prodigious amounts of electric power while also providing plutonium for the USSR’s atomic weapons program. A vertical machine, it featured stacks of graphite blocks surrounding the enriched uranium core, cooled by water. A “containment structure,” a series of water pools at the base of the reactor designed to condense steam in the case of a loss coolant accident, was a chief safety design for the plant.
But the RBMK design had a tragic, inherent flaw. The Russian designers never acknowledged this, even when the plant failed in unprecedented fashion, with a massive explosion and graphite fire that irradiated much of the western world, quickly killed scores of plant workers and firefighters, caused evacuations of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens, and shortened the lives of thousands of those exposed to the devastation of Unit 4. The RBMK had a “positive void coefficient of reactivity.” That means that when the reactor loses cooling water, the nuclear reaction spikes to the point that it can’t be controlled. Boom!
During a low power test on April 26, 1986, reactor operators lost control of their machine and it blew apart spectacularly in a steam explosion. In a beautifully-written passage, Higgenbotham recounts the global result: “Lifted skyward on a pillar of fierce heat from the shattered core, convoyed by obliging winds, the invisible cloud of radiation had traveled thousands of kilometers since its escape from the carcass of Unit Four.”
Facing circumstances they had never envisioned, the Soviet system was unable to cope with the catastrophe. Attempts to put out the explosive graphite fires and remediate the surrounding damage failed completely and repeatedly. Evacuations began with scores of thousands of Pripyat resident and then spread to hundreds of thousands over subsequent weeks.
The Soviets refused to accept what they were seeing on the ground. Even after they understood the damage at Chernobyl, their reaction was intransigent. Higgenbotham writes, “Yet little had really changed: more than a year after the disaster, the Politburo received a report showing that Soviet atomic power stations continued to be bedeviled by bad construction, poor staff discipline—and hundreds of minor accidents.”
Once the wreckage was controlled, the USSR reverted to its classical response to failure: show trials in the mode of Joseph Stalin. The leaders of the power station, those who survived, went on trial and served jail terms. It was the unjust nature of Soviet justice.
Among the real villains was Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the ruler of the nation. He presided over the denial, secrecy, and purposeful lying to his citizens and the rest of the world, to preserve the Soviet’s corrupt self-image as technical superstars.
Ultimately, Chernobyl was a major part of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union: an economy in shambles, the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, and increasing unrest among the union’s constituent countries. Higgenbotham writes, “And the general secretary’s own realization that even the nuclear bureaucracy had been undermined by secrecy, incompetence, and stagnation convinced him that the entire state was rotten.”
Adam Higgenbotham, Chernobyl at Midnight, Simon and Schuster,2018.
— Kennedy Maize