At noon, they stopped for a break, and Legasov went up to the second floor to chat with a colleague. There, Alexander Meshkov, Slavsky’s deputy, gave Legasov some urgent news: he had been selected to serve on a government commission investigating the Chernobyl incident. He was to be at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport at four that afternoon. Legasov immediately called a car to take him over to the Kurchatov Institute. Despite his seniority at the state’s leading agency for nuclear research, he was a chemist, not a reactor specialist. He would need some expert advice.
The son of a senior Party ideologue, Valery Legasov was the head of the Communist Party Committee at the Kurchatov Institute. As university students in the 1950s, he and Margarita had joined the Komsomol brigades to raise wheat from the plains of southern Siberia, and he later chose to do his postgraduate work in radiochemistry in the remote Tomsk-7 Chemical Combine rather than accept a cozy position in Moscow. Both an intellectual and a scientist, he believed in the principles of Socialism and an equal society run by an educated elite. Legasov was witty and opinionated, and his privileged background gave him the confidence to speak his mind in a world of cowed apparatchiks. In his spare time, he wrote poetry. Despite his candor, he was beloved by his Party superiors and had risen to power with amazing speed, acquiring state prizes for his work and every accolade available to a Soviet scientist, with the exception of the highest award of all: the Hero of Socialist Labor.
Legasov, thickset but athletic, with dark hair and heavy spectacles, was now approaching the pinnacle of his career and enjoyed the life of privilege accorded to the stars of Soviet science. He played tennis, skied, swam, and traveled widely. He and Margarita occupied a grand villa at Pekhotnaya 26, on a tree-lined street within walking distance of his office—where they entertained visiting friends and colleagues, including his boss, Anatoly Aleksandrov. Now eighty-three, the chairman of the Academy of Sciences and head of the Kurchatov Institute lived a few doors down from Legasov. Aleksandrov liked to drop round for dinner and play chess; he often remarked that his deputy was always thinking several moves ahead. Still only forty-nine, Legasov seemed set to assume his place as the director of the Kurchatov Institute just as soon as Aleksandrov stepped aside.
Only one man stood in his way: his next-door neighbor, Evgeny Velikhov, a portly and gregarious plasma physicist, descended from a family of inventors and freethinkers. A personal scientific advisor to Gorbachev and the head of his own theoretical research lab on the outskirts of Moscow, Velikhov was also high up in the administration of the Kurchatov Institute—and Legasov’s closest rival. He had traveled abroad, was well connected with Western scientists, spoke serviceable English, and liked to wear a Princeton tie. But he was a rare presence in the dining room of Pekhotnaya 26. When Legasov professed to be mystified by his colleague’s apparent hostility, his wife had a simple remedy: “Tell him less about your successes.”
When he arrived at the institute at lunchtime on Saturday, it took Legasov a while to find the man he wanted: Alexander Kalugin, the resident expert on RBMK reactors. Kalugin had taken the day off, but when he finally learned of Legasov’s summons, he brought with him all the technical documents he could find about the reactor and the Chernobyl plant. Legasov then rushed home to tell his wife he was leaving—although what he would be doing and how long he would be gone, he didn’t know—and made for the airport. Despite the fine weather, he was still wearing the suit and expensive leather coat he’d put on that morning.
* * *
At around 11:00 a.m., a little more than nine hours after the crisis had begun, the first of the planes from Moscow touched down on the tarmac in Kiev. Led by Boris Prushinsky, the Ministry of Energy’s nuclear accident emergency response team included scientists from Soyuzatomenergo and the institutes that designed the reactor and the plant itself, members of the KGB, and a quartet of specialists from Moscow’s Hospital Number Six—the State Institute of Biophysics’ clinic dedicated to treating radiological injuries. When he landed, Prushinsky learned that a government commission was on its way to take control of the situation. But if any further information about the true extent of the accident had reached the Politburo in Moscow, it was not relayed to Prushinsky and his specialists. As they were driven the 140 kilometers to Pripyat by bus, under police escort, their mood was grim—they knew that two men were now dead. But they remained mystified by what might have happened. Perhaps the roof of the reactor hall had collapsed, or some machinery had caught fire. Yet they still believed that the reactor had been shut down safely and was being cooled with water; there would be no more casualties.
So when the bus finally approached the fork in the road separating the city from the nuclear plant, and Prushinsky saw a militsia officer wearing a lepestok mask with his summer uniform, he was puzzled. The lepestok, or “petal,” was a Soviet-designed cloth respirator, which filtered radioactive aerosols from the atmosphere, and he couldn’t imagine why it might be necessary. But when the team reached Pripyat, someone from the plant was there to meet them and assured him that everything was under control. Relieved, Prushinsky checked into Hotel Polesia, an eight-story concrete building overlooking the central square, and went to lunch in the restaurant downstairs. Afterward, he ambled out onto the sunny hotel terrace and saw Director Brukhanov crossing the plaza toward him.
“What’s the problem with the unit?” Prushinsky asked.
Although the shell-shocked director would later continue to give his superiors contradictory information—and for several more hours tell others that Reactor Number Four remained intact—at this moment, Brukhanov acknowledged the truth.
“There is no unit anymore,” he said.
Prushinsky was dumbfounded. He knew this man was no nuclear expert. But what he was suggesting was simply inconceivable.
“Have a look for yourself,” Brukhanov said in despair. “The separators are visible from the street.”
* * *
Back in Moscow, the information from Brukhanov’s earlier written report was still ascending slowly through the channels of Party bureaucracy. At noon, Deputy Energy Minister Aleksei Makukhin sent a seventeen-line cable to the Central Committee that relayed the director’s reassuring prognosis. Although marked “Urgent,” it passed from the General Department to the Department of Atomic Energy, and it was not until later on Saturday afternoon that the report was delivered to Gorbachev.
“An explosion occurred in the upper part of the reactor chamber,” the cable read. “The roof and parts of the wall panels of the reactor compartment, several roof panels of the machine room . . . were demolished during the explosion and the roofing caught on fire. The fire was extinguished at 0330.”
To a government that had developed a strong stomach for industrial accidents, this was familiar territory. Some sort of explosion, yes; a fire, which had already been put out. A serious incident, certainly, but nothing that couldn’t be contained. The main thing was that the reactor itself remained undamaged; a potential nuclear catastrophe had been averted.
“The personnel of the AES are taking steps to cool the fuel core of the reactor. In the opinion of the Third Main Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Health,” the report stated, “it is not required to take special measures, including the evacuation of the population from the city.”
At 2:00 p.m., the second—more senior—wave of government officials, led by Energy Minister Anatoly Mayorets, arrived in Kiev aboard a chartered executive jet from Moscow. Vitali Sklyarov, Mayorets’s Ukrainian counterpart, met them on the runway, and together they transferred to a pair of antiquated-looking Antonov An-2 biplanes. Mayorets, new to his job and not a nuclear man, was confident. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think we’re going to be sitting around in Pripyat for too long.” He thought they would be on their way home again in forty-eight hours.
“Anatoly Ivanovich,” Sklyarov said, “I don’t think two days is going to be enough.”
“Don’t try to frighten us, Comrade Sklyarov. Our main job is to restor
e the damaged reactor unit as soon as possible and get it back on the grid.”
Bumping down on a dirt airstrip outside Chernobyl, they sped into Pripyat, through the dappled shadows of the poplars on Lenina Prospekt. Sklyarov noticed that people were occupied just as they would be on any warm weekend afternoon. Children were playing soccer, fresh laundry hung on balconies, and couples lingered in the central square in front of the new shopping center. He asked someone about the radiation levels and was told that here the readings were around ten times normal background—apparently within permissible limits. Sklyarov, too, grew more optimistic.
The ministers gathered inside the headquarters of the Pripyat Communist Party and ispolkom, or city council: a five-story concrete building next to the Hotel Polesia, and called by those who worked in it belyy dom, or the “White House.” Malomuzh, the Party boss from Kiev, had established his command post there. General Ivanov, the Soviet civil defense chief, had arrived from Moscow and suggested that the Party authorities make a radio broadcast to warn Pripyat’s citizens that an accident had taken place. In the meantime, his troops were conducting a radiation reconnaissance of the plant and the city itself.
The assembled ministers and experts now began a fierce debate about how best to cool down Reactor Number Four and clean up the mess left by the accident. But they could take no decisive action before the arrival of the commission chairman, Boris Scherbina, who was still en route from Moscow. Outside, the weather was clear and warm. In the hotel next door, a traditional Ukrainian wedding celebration had begun.
* * *
Circling the reactor at low altitude in the helicopter, Boris Prushinsky realized that Director Brukhanov had been right about the fate of Unit Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. Yet the head of the nuclear emergency response team still found it hard to believe what he was seeing.
The roof of the central hall had disappeared. Inside was a gaping black crater, where more than ten stories of walls and floors had been carved away as if scooped out from above by a monstrous spoon. The northern wall of the building had collapsed into a shambles of black rubble that tumbled out across the flat roofs of adjoining buildings and toward the station perimeter. Inside the ruins of the hall, he could see the tangled wreckage of the 120-tonne bridge crane, the refueling machine, the main circulation pumps, and the emergency core cooling tanks. The pilot tilted the helicopter to one side, so the plant photographer could shoot through the window. Prushinsky saw that the lid of the reactor—Elena, the two-thousand-tonne disc of concrete and steel designed to shield it from the outside world—was tilted upward to the sky. Beneath it, deep within the reactor vault, and despite the bright sunshine, he could make out the glowing lattice formed by the remaining fuel cells—and a single spot that burned a fierce yellow-red. As the helicopter banked away, Prushinsky forced himself to confront what his mind still refused to accept: Reactor Number Four had ceased to exist.
* * *
At a 4:00 p.m. meeting in the Party’s conference room in the White House, Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin finally conceded that the efforts made by his men over the previous twelve hours to keep cooling water circulating through Reactor Number Four had been entirely in vain. He admitted that the reactor had been destroyed and pieces of highly radioactive graphite lay on the ground everywhere. Worse news was to come. That morning, station physicists had entered the contaminated control room of Unit Four and established that the control rods had not descended fully into the reactor before the explosion. They now suspected that the conditions for a new criticality would soon exist in whatever nuclear fuel remained inside the reactor vessel, initiating a new chain reaction—but this time, it would take place in the open air, and they would have no means of controlling it. When the reactor returned to life, it could bring fires and explosions and release waves of deadly gamma and neutron radiation into the atmosphere less than 2,500 meters from the edge of Pripyat. Their estimates suggested they had only three hours to intervene before the new criticality began—sometime after seven in the evening.
Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev of the Kiev region civil defense unit ran into the White House with the results of his ground radiation survey of the plant. His armored personnel carrier had come down Lenina Prospekt at one hundred kilometers per hour—so fast that the seven-tonne vehicle became airborne as it crested the railway bridge, and then drove right up the steps and across the pedestrian plaza to the main entrance. The map the breathless Logachev presented to Malomuzh showed the radiation reading just beside the plant cafeteria, scribbled hastily in pencil: 2,080 roentgen an hour.
“You mean milliroentgen, son,” the Party chief said.
“Roentgen,” Logachev said.
Logachev’s commander studied the map. He finished one cigarette and then lit another.
“We need to evacuate the city,” he said.
* * *
The aircraft carrying Scherbina and Academician Valery Legasov landed at Kiev’s Zhuliany Airport at 7:20 p.m. on Saturday evening. They were greeted by a delegation of nervous Ukrainian ministers and a glistening line of big black cars, which delivered them to the steps of the Pripyat ispolkom in the gathering twilight. As they drove north, Legasov had watched collective farms give way to peasant pasture and boundless levels of marsh, lush water meadows, and dense pine forest. They were wound tight with anxiety about what lay ahead; conversation faltered, and stopped. In the lengthening silence, Legasov willed them on to their destination. But in Pripyat, Scherbina—a veteran of gas pipeline explosions and other industrial catastrophes—emerged from the back of his giant Chaika limousine wearing a confident smile: a command-economy savior come to deliver his underlings from any potentially perilous decision-making.
Sklyarov, the Ukrainian energy minister, had encountered Scherbina often over the years, during the Moscow boss’s tours of inspection at the many power plants under construction in the republic. At sixty-six, Scherbina was intelligent, energetic, and hardworking, tough and self-assured—but also emotional and impulsive and always determined to demonstrate that he knew better than anyone else, even the specialists. Small and wiry, what he lacked in stature he made up for with imperious attitude. Some regarded him with respect and admiration. The energy minister had found him all but impossible to work with.
Scherbina introduced himself quietly to each of the gathered experts, until he came to Sklyarov, who, by now, had already driven out to the plant and seen the destruction of the reactor for himself.
“So, are you shitting your pants?” Scherbina asked.
“Not yet,” Sklyarov said. “But I think things are going that way.”
Upstairs, Boris Prushinsky had just returned from his reconnaissance of the plant. As Scherbina came within earshot, Prushinsky was in the hallway, sharing his alarming discoveries with the Soviet minister for nuclear energy. After the helicopter flight over the reactor, Prushinsky had continued his investigation on the ground, studying the ruins of Unit Four through binoculars. From the station perimeter, he could make out the blocks of graphite scattered on the ground around the plant. It was obvious to him that there had been an explosion inside the reactor and that pieces of nuclear fuel must lie among the debris.
“We have to evacuate the local population,” Prushinsky said.
“Why are you being so alarmist?” Scherbina asked.
* * *
The first meeting of the government commission began in the third-floor office of the Pripyat Party secretary sometime after 10:00 p.m. As many as thirty government ministers, military officers, and industry specialists took their seats on three rows of chairs beside the door. Scherbina stood in the middle of the room, at a table littered with maps, documents, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. It was hot, and the air was thick with smoke; the tension was stifling.
Academician Legasov listened as Scherbina took reports from Malomuzh—the regional Party boss—and Mayorets, the Soviet energy minister. But they provided no det
ailed information about the situation at either the plant or in the city and had no plan on how to deal with the consequences of the accident. They said only that during a turbine rundown experiment in Unit Four, there had been two explosions in quick succession, and the reactor hall had been destroyed. There were hundreds of injuries among the staff: two men were dead, and the rest were in the city hospital. The radiation situation in Unit Four was complex, and although levels in Pripyat had departed significantly from normal, they posed no threat to human health.
Scherbina divided the members of the commission into groups. One, headed by Meshkov, the deputy head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, would begin investigating the causes of the accident. A second would take further dosimetry readings. General Ivanov of the civil defense and General Gennadi Berdov of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry would prepare for a possible evacuation. Evgeny Vorobyev, deputy health minister for the entire Soviet Union, would take care of all medical matters. Finally, Valery Legasov himself would oversee the team containing the effects of the disaster.
Midnight in Chernobyl Page 15