The accident at Chernobyl nuclear power station on 26 April 1986 was generated by extreme bureaucratic mismanagement and lack of accountability at design and operational level. The response after the accident was shaped the same way.
The first radiation readings from Chernobyl after the accident reported to Moscow were the figure at which low-level dosimeters maxed out: 3.6 roentgens per hour.
Iodine pills were not immediately issued. It would take a week before they were. Then it was only to around 25% of the population in the areas affected by radiation.
The city of Pripyat, specially constructed to serve the power station, had a hospital, but it was completely unprepared and quickly overwhelmed. The most severe cases began to be airlifted by military helicopter to Moscow.
Local authorities were unwilling to take initiative. As more senior officials arrived the magnitude of the disaster began to be grasped by the leadership. The first evacuation of the city of Pripyat finally began on 27 April. The whole city would eventually be abandoned.
Nuclear disasters
Disasters were not new to the USSR’s nuclear power industry. They included:
• A partial meltdown of Reactor 1 at the Leningrad nuclear power plant in 1975. The subsequent investigation made safety recommendations about the AZ-5 emergency button increasing reactivity. They were never widely circulated. The Chernobyl operatives were unaware of them.
• A similar incident at Chernobyl Reactor 1 in 1982, which had gone unnoticed for hours.
• Incidents at Chernobyl 3 and 4 in 1984 which were only declassified in 2021. These showed the KGB already regarded Chernobyl as a dangerous liability.
• An explosion in 1985 during the refuelling of submarine K-431 in Vladivostok which killed 10 people.
Even including Chernobyl, these civilian-nuclear-power accidents were dwarfed by devastation from the USSR nuclear weapons programme. There were “closed cities” across the Soviet Union which were not shown on maps,. In areas in Kazakhstan (now independent) close to testing grounds, populations have only now begun to be seriously studied for the long term effects.
Even within the senior bureaucracy of the nuclear industry, there had been a minority opinion that it was unwise to roll out nuclear power beyond sparsely-populated parts of the USSR and into more densely populated Eastern Europe.
The management of the industry was characterised by reckless technical ambition, disregard for safety, and extreme secrecy.
With Chernobyl, unlike with previous accidents, the magnitude of the disaster made it impossible to hush up. Staff at Fosmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden detected elevated levels of radiation on 28 April. Having ruled out a breach in their own facility, they deduced that there must have been a serious nuclear incident in Eastern Europe. The Soviet government was forced to publicly acknowledge the disaster to the world.
Even then, the scale of the disaster was played down. This official optimism can be seen in the fact that the May Day demonstration in Kyiv went ahead, albeit curtailed to two hours.
It would take 20 days to put the initial fire out. A continuous rotation of helicopter sorties dropped some 5,000 tonnes of sand, Boron, clay and lead onto the burning reactor. This, however, was only the first step in mitigation.
Passive Safety is the concept in modern design, particularly of nuclear reactors, that systems, if disrupted, should tend towards a safer state as a result of natural processes. Left alone, they should naturally become more stable.
Chernobyl’s design meant that it did not benefit from that principle. It was only through massive active intervention that a far wider disaster was averted.
A combination of the uranium fuel and the materials present in the reactor had melted to form a highly dense and radioactive lava-like substance. It is the formation of that “corium” that defines a nuclear meltdown.
At Chernobyl, that corium, a mixture of uranium dioxide, zirconium, steel, and melted concrete, began to sink into and destroy the concrete pad on which the plant had been built. Engineers were concerned that this posed the risk of another, more powerful steam explosion, generated by the superheating of water in the basement, flooded by the firefighting effort and the “bubbler pools” — large water tanks below the reactor.
That would further damage Reactor 4 and possibly the other three, and a far greater radioactive fallout could be released.
Emergency workers
Three workers, Oleksiy Ananenko, Valeri Bespalov, and Boris Baranov volunteered to enter the basement in diving gear and manually open the sluice gates to release this water. They did so in the knowledge of the massive radiation they would be exposed to. Amazingly, all three survived for many years after. Ananenko seems even to have survived a recent Russian drone attack on the block of flats in Kyiv where he now lives.
Draining the water did not totally avert the risk of a “China Syndrome” ultra-meltdown. Engineers hastily put together a plan to tunnel under the plant and to procure virtually all the liquid nitrogen available in the Soviet Union to install a heat exchange that would refrigerate the plant from beneath.
Tunnelling workers from the Kyiv metro and then coal miners were deployed to excavate the necessary space for this massive equipment. In doing so workers were unable to use heavy machinery to reduce the risk of collapse and were exposed to huge radiation.
In the end the worst case scenario possible within the modelled predictions did not occur. The pad largely held and the heat exchange was never put into operation.
In order to construct a containment over the top of the plant, it was essential to clear the radioactive rubble from the roof. Mine-clearing remote-controlled robots, adapted from those used to clear mines in the war in Afghanistan, from the space program, and some brought in from West Germany, were useful up to a point. But eventually, all had their electronics scrambled by radiation. The efficacy of those sent from West Germany was not helped by the fact that the design brief greatly understated the radiation levels they were to endure.
In the end the solution found was the euphemistically named “bio robots”, human conscripts in improvised protective gear using hand tools sent up for extremely short stints manually throwing rubble back into the reactor building. These missions, some lasting only a couple of minutes, were often enough to exceed the guidelines for lifetime radiation exposure.
Eventually it was possible to begin the construction of the first “sarcophagus”, a reinforced concrete building that had to be built incrementally to enable the completed sections to provide some radiation shielding to workers who could then progress in erecting further.
That provided containment to the site that lasted until its replacement in 2016 by the “Chernobyl New Safe Confinement”, a stainless steel arch that was designed to last 100 years.
“Liquidators”
The sarcophagus and the wider clean-up would eventually require the drafting of between 600,000 and 800,000 “liquidators”, workers from across the Soviet Union. Safety precautions, mostly in the form of time limits on radiation exposure, were routinely violated. Much of the debate around the number of casualties from the disaster relates to how the impact on those workers can be measured. A common joke became that this generation faced the choice between “years in Afghanistan or minutes in Chernobyl”.
The evacuation came in three successive waves of a 10km radius circle, a 30km circle, and then a wider, more irregular area, home to some 350,000 people, which was condemned as indefinitely uninhabitable.
As an “atomgrad”, a purpose-built nuclear town, Pripyat had enjoyed a standard of living higher than most USSR cities with better housing and better availability of consumer goods. Residents now found themselves refugees within Ukraine. A replacement city for Pripyat, Slavutych, was built, and people moved there from 1988. It too has had better facilities than other Ukrainian cities, but has suffered an outflow of people seeking jobs elsewhere, and then, since 2022, fleeing Russian invaders.
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