Chernobyl, 25 Years Ago on April 26, 1986 (Part 1)

Twenty five years separates us from the worst nuclear disaster in the history of mankind. I recently wrote about the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight and realized that a mere 25 years also separated April 1986 from Gagarin’s first human spaceflight in April 1961.

On an early Saturday morning in April of 1986 at 1:23 AM, as a result of a botched test by relatively junior personnel, the No. 4 reactor at the 3,200 megawatt Chernobyl nuclear power station suffered an unstoppable chain reaction and exploded. It burned out of control killing 31 first responders and forcing 135,000 to be evacuated. Over 500,000 were directly involved in the clean up effort of the accident coming directly in contact with the radioactive matter. The explosion spewed poisonous radiation across Europe and much of the rest of the world, most adversely affecting Belarus.

Chernobyl is a human tragedy of unthinkable proportions. It is believed that it will take nearly 300 years for the radiation levels to subside, but some estimate that it will take over a thousand years. The World Health Organization estimates the death toll from Chernobyl at 9,000 while the environmental group Greenpeace predicts the eventual number to reach 93,000. In terms of the disaster itself and its immediate aftermath, several grotesquely incompetent Soviet actions stand out.

First, the nuclear accident was obviously the result of human error. Granted, there was a flaw in the design of the reactor because it didn’t abort or shut down when things started going horribly wrong. But a faulty design coupled with incompetent Soviet management that ordered young engineers to carry out a reactor test unsupervised who in turn made some serious errors ended not with a whimper but a nuclear bang. In layman’s terms, the personnel carrying out the test weren’t communicating; one pulled out the control rods from the core that absorb the rate of fission (less rods = more fission) thus increasing the heat inside of the reactor. At the same time the other person on duty decreased the cooling water flow to the turbines escalating the internal temperature even more which lead to an explosion in a matter of minutes. Why the two were not communicating about their actions is unclear. In 1987 the Soviet leadership put on a scapegoating show trial of the top management, jailing a few engineers while others were demoted and stripped of their Communist Party membership.

Second, the Soviet authorities were trying to suppress the news of the disaster and put on a face like nothing had happened. Prypiat, the city where most of the workers and their families lived wasn’t evacuated for more than 36 hours after the accident despite the fact that when dawn came on April 26, the burning radioactive material was visible from a surveying helicopter and the reactor was smoking. Even in the age of glasnost, the Soviets only came clean about the disaster when confronted by foreign governments – there were satellite photos taken by the Americans of the Chernobyl accident as proof. Six days after the accident, with only a small and inaccurate paragraph about it in the papers the Soviet government went ahead with a big May Day parade in Kyiv, only 70 miles from Chernobyl.

Third, the conditions in which the so called “liquidators” or military conscripts who were called to clean up the accident were inhumanely lethal. Originally, a few robots were working on the power plant’s roof removing and dumping the radioactive debris that was ejected in the explosion back into the open reactor so it can be buried. Because of high radiation levels equipment malfunctioned and the robots were getting caught in the rubble unable to move. So instead the military reserves were called in. I could not watch the historic footage of the so called “biorobots” without a sense of profound sadness. These poorly equipped young men were using shovels to drop radioactive waste back into the bowels of the reactor. They could only work 40 seconds at a time receiving their lifetime dose of radiation and sometimes 5 to 10 times more in only a few seconds. These dosage numbers were based on Soviet classification that were already several times higher than what was believed to be safe. Couldn’t the Soviets have asked for international help like equipment and robots instead subjecting these young men to such conditions?

Do you remember where you were when you heard of Chernobyl?

We lived in Western Soviet Ukraine at the time and my mother told me that April 26, 1986 was a beautiful warm spring Saturday with many people sunbathing and enjoying the weather on the weekend. On Monday when my mom showed up to work she was informed by a co-worker who had some sophisticated homemade devices and listened illegally to the BBC and Radio Liberty that a major nuclear accident happened in the Soviet Union. The foreign radio stations were sounding the alarm over a nuclear cloud moving across Europe while the Soviet government kept quiet. My mom told me that the following summer the local bazaars were inundated with mushrooms, berries and vegetables that were huge, but nobody dared to buy anything. A maple tree outside our window developed suspicious black spots on its foliage consistent with radiation damage.

The Chernobyl disaster in pictures from the Guardian.

Photos from the Economist.

More pictures and a cool collection of facts about Chernobyl from Abandoned Worlds.

The Battle of Chernobyl video.

Inside Chernobyl’s Sarcophagus – BBC. Highly recommended historic video about the Soviet scientists working/studying the nuclear reactor after the accident.

National Geographic’s Seconds from Disaster episode on Chernobyl.

It Happened in Chernobyl video.

Chernobyl News Round Extra video