In Chernobyl, the commission remained paralyzed over where to send the radioactive water filling the suppression pools, and, in the meantime, the temperature recorded in the reactor above it continued to rise. Silayev held meeting after meeting. Moose Zborovsky tried to sleep when he could, a few minutes at a time, as the arguments went on into the night—the academicians, generals, and politicians shouting over one another. In the middle of it all, Gorbachev phoned from Moscow, his voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room:
“Well? Have you made up your minds?”
Meanwhile, the plant physicists, consumed with fear, wandered around like zombies: seized not by the long-term terrors of radiation but by the imminent threat of the explosion that might kill them—and everyone for hundreds of meters in every direction—at any moment.
Finally, after two days of deliberations, Zborovsky himself thought to ask the advice of one of the plant’s senior engineers about the water. The technician described two open-air pools perfect for the purpose, just outside Pripyat. To reach them from the basement of Unit Four would require one and a half kilometers of hoses, but each pool had a capacity of at least twenty thousand cubic meters. Ominously, the temperature of the water in the basement had begun rising. It was now 80 degrees. And by 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, Legasov’s readings from the reactor touched 2,000 degrees centigrade. Something was happening. They had to act quickly.
12
* * *
The Battle of Chernobyl
Shortly after 8:00 p.m. on the evening of Friday, May 2, President Ronald Reagan landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport aboard Air Force One, at the climax of a ten-day tour through Asia and the Pacific. He had arrived in Japan to attend the first-ever meeting of the G7 nations—including the leaders of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Canada—but from the beginning, the trip had been overshadowed by the nuclear disaster unfolding on the other side of the world.
The first reports of the radiation detected over Sweden had reached Reagan aboard the presidential plane as he was leaving Hawaii on Monday, and his planned day off in Bali on Wednesday had been interrupted by a briefing on what US intelligence knew so far about events at the Chernobyl plant. Since then, Soviet dissembling about the accident had metastasized into a global diplomatic and environmental crisis. From high-resolution spy satellite photographs taken over Ukraine, in which they could make out details as small as individual fire hoses laid in the direction of the reactor cooling canals around the plant, CIA analysts knew that the scale of the catastrophe was far greater than Moscow acknowledged. And officials at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission had begun to suspect that at least one of the other reactors at Chernobyl was now threatened by the ongoing crisis at Unit Four. Yet Moscow had rebuffed Reagan’s public offer of medical and technical assistance, and American nuclear experts could only speculate about what was really happening at the crippled plant.
At the same time, Soviet attempts to suppress further details of the accident were unraveling. In a classified report to Gorbachev on May 3, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze warned that continued secrecy was counterproductive and had already bred distrust not only in Western Europe but also with friendly nations planning to embrace Soviet nuclear technology, including India and Cuba. Shevardnadze wrote that taking the traditional approach to the accident was also endangering Gorbachev’s dream of brokering a historic nuclear disarmament initiative with the United States. Western newspapers were asking how a nation that couldn’t tell the truth about a nuclear accident could be trusted to be honest about how many nuclear missiles it had.
On the morning of Sunday, May 4, President Reagan broadcast his weekly radio address to the United States from his suite in the Hotel Okura. He talked about his summits in Southeast Asia, the need for an expansion in free trade, and the problems of international terrorism—alluding to the recent strike on Colonel Gadhafi’s compound in Tripoli by F-111s of the US Air Force, in retaliation for the Libyan-sponsored bombing of a disco frequented by American soldiers in Berlin.
Reagan reiterated his sympathy for the victims of the accident and his offer of assistance, but then his tone hardened. He contrasted the openness of “free nations” with the “secrecy and stubborn refusal” of the Soviet government to inform the international community of the risks they shared from the disaster. “A nuclear accident that results in contaminating a number of countries with radioactive material is not simply an internal matter,” Reagan said in his folksy rasp. “The Soviets owe the world an explanation.”
That day, radioactive rain fell on Japan before being carried eastward by the jet stream—out across the Pacific at an altitude of 9,000 meters and a speed of 160 kilometers an hour—toward the coasts of Alaska and California. The following afternoon, Monday, May 5, a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency landed in Moscow, at the invitation of the Soviet government. The team, led by IAEA director general Hans Blix, had been promised a full and honest accounting of what had been going on at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
In the hours before their arrival, the Politburo gathered once more inside the Kremlin to discuss the crisis. Among the two dozen men around the table this time were Boris Scherbina, the aged nuclear chieftain academician Anatoly Aleksandrov, and Efim Slavsky, the pugnacious head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Valery Legasov had flown in from Chernobyl to present his report in person.
There was much to discuss: the outlook was grim.
Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov took the floor with a detailed analysis and described what he had seen on his visit to the accident zone two days earlier. The helicopter operation to extinguish the fire was proceeding successfully, he said, and the danger of a renewed chain reaction inside the wreckage had been averted so far. But the response of Soviet and local authorities to the accident had been marred by failure and incompetence. “The extreme conditions revealed, in practice, a high degree of organization in some, and the absolute helplessness of others,” he said.
The evacuation of a zone extending to thirty kilometers around the plant was still under way, with a hundred thousand people already removed from the area, including two districts in Belarus. But the results of the initial operation had been chaotic: “Five or six thousand people are simply lost,” Ryzhkov said. “Where they are now is unknown.”
The civil defense and the Ministry of Health had failed utterly in their responsibilities. There had been no clarity or plan. People leaving the evacuation zone had not even received blood tests for radiation exposure. The fiasco made a mockery of the USSR’s decades of preparation for the consequences of nuclear war. “I can only imagine what would have happened here had something more serious occurred,” the prime minister said in disgust.
So far, more than 1,800 people, including 445 children, had been hospitalized; more were expected. High levels of radioactivity now covered the western Soviet Union, from Crimea in the south to Leningrad in the north, exceeding the natural background levels by five or ten times in most places. The chief of chemical troops of the USSR had already gathered two thousand men inside the evacuated zone and had been ordered to develop a decontamination plan. Ryzhkov had given instructions for a thirty-kilometer dam to be constructed around the accident site to prevent spring rains from flushing contamination from the surface of the ground in the ten-kilometer zone into the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers. He suggested military engineers be given just forty-eight hours to complete the task.
And now, the prime minister explained to his comrades, they must face the greatest threat of all: the reactor meltdown. The scientists had presented him with two possible prognoses for the molten fuel currently scorching its way toward the basement of Unit Four. The first was that the heat of radioactive decay could gradually dissipate on its own; according to their calculations, that might take months.
The second scenario, presented by Academician Legasov and old man Aleksandrov, was much darker. In addition to Velikhov’s fear that, reaching 2,800 degr
ees, the collision of the molten fuel with the water of the suppression pool could result in a blast of steam that would destroy the remains of Unit Four and obliterate Unit Three, the academicians now warned Ryzhkov to consider a further possibility: “a nuclear explosion, with even more disastrous consequences.”
Next, Scherbina took the floor, and Legasov presented a technical breakdown of the obstacles they faced: the radiation releases, the burning graphite, the rising temperature of the melting core, and the need to act quickly. Aleksandrov chimed in. There was disagreement and bickering.
“Don’t get carried away,” Gorbachev’s conservative deputy, Ligachev, told Scherbina.
“You’ve got roentgen and milliroentgen mixed up,” Scherbitsky, the Ukrainian Communist Party head, said to the deputy minister of hydrometeorology.
Akhromeyev, chief of the Soviet General Staff, argued that they should blast through the wall of the suppression pools with a hollow-charge shell. Schadov, the minister of coal, said that such an approach was too dangerous. He suggested that, if the water could be pumped out, his men would stabilize the spaces by filling them with concrete. “If necessary,” he said, “we’ll dig a mining tunnel under the building.”
Legasov concurred: they should excavate beneath the reactor to pump in nitrogen gas and cool it from below. He assured Gorbachev that there was no need yet to send out an emergency appeal for help from the West. If the worst should happen, the maximum evacuation zone would have to be extended no farther than 250 kilometers from the station.
But Gorbachev had already spoken to Velikhov, who had stayed behind in Chernobyl, and the general secretary now believed that they were approaching a terrible denouement: in the event of another explosion, they might need to expand the exclusion zone to a radius of 500 kilometers. That would mean evacuating a vast area of one of the most densely populated regions of the USSR, relocating everyone living in the largest cities in both Belarus and Ukraine, including Minsk and Lvov. In Kiev—a city of more than two million people, the third largest in the USSR—the republican authorities had begun quietly drawing up an evacuation plan but were terrified of having to enact it. They foresaw mass panic and the looting of stores, apartments, and museums. Hundreds of people would be crushed in stampedes at the railway stations and airports.
“We’ve got to pick up our pace and work around the clock,” Gorbachev said. They had to act not merely as if they were at war, he explained, but as if they were under nuclear attack. “Time,” he said, “is slipping away.”
They were still discussing what to do next when Scherbina received a message from beneath Unit Four: Captain Zborovsky’s water-pumping operation had begun.
* * *
Zborovsky had set out for the plant with twenty men, recruited from civil defense companies and fire stations across the region. When they arrived on the scene, they found it eerily silent, deserted except for the skeleton staff of operators tending to Units One, Two, and Three. Abandoned equipment surrounded the chaos of debris near Reactor Number Four: the fire trucks left behind by their colleagues more than a week before, too irradiated to be recovered, were now dented and smashed, hit by mistimed loads of lead and sand released from Antoshkin’s helicopters. Although the air offensive had been halted temporarily, a thin column of smoke—or vapor—rose into the air from the rubble. Pieces of graphite littered the ground, still lying where they had been thrown by the explosion, shimmering in the hot sun.
Back at their base in Kiev, the fire crews had tried deploying hoses onto the ground from a helicopter to reduce the time the firemen would have to spend in the high-radiation zone near the reactor. But these experiments had failed. So the men would have to string out the one and a half kilometers of hoses by hand. They drilled again and again, practicing their routes and shaving seconds off the time it took to put them together and attach them to the special ZIL fire trucks, equipped with powerful pumps that could move 110 liters of water a second.
At first, Captain Zborovsky wasn’t afraid of what lay ahead. After all, he thought, his commanders would never have given him an assignment that they knew was certain to kill him. Only when he had entered the plant did he begin to comprehend the threat he faced. The staff there had already seen many of their friends flown out for treatment in the special clinic in Moscow, and they looked at him with the pity reserved for a condemned man.
The specialists and management from the plant who had remained behind to man the station were still nominally led by Director Viktor Brukhanov and his chief engineer, the once-bombastic Nikolai Fomin. The two men continued to sit by their phones in the dimly lit bunker beneath the plant, awaiting instructions from the government commission. But they were wrung out by exhaustion, radiation exposure, and shock. Fomin had remained in the bunker for five days, curling up to sleep beside the humming equipment in the ventilation room. Since the final evacuation of Pripyat, Brukhanov and the other operators had been sent to live in a Pioneer camp thirty kilometers from the plant site, named Skazochny, or “Fairy Tale.”
A summer camp where the children of the nuclear workers could spend part of their long school vacations, Skazochny was a settlement of small brick and timber dormitories built deep in the forest, decorated with whimsical sculptures of dragons, sea creatures, and characters from Slavic myth. Now the woods and the fields nearby were crammed with ambulances, cars, fire engines, and military vehicles. A dosimetric checkpoint stood at the entrance gate. All over the camp, hanging on the fences and plastered across the windows of the canteen, was a sea of notes: messages written by plant workers seeking their wives and children, displaced families from Pripyat announcing the names of the villages where they could be found, and pleas for information about relatives who had been lost amid the frenzy of evacuation.
While Captain Zborovsky and his men prepared their pumping operation, the other parallel efforts to arrest the meltdown had also begun. First, the subway engineers arrived from Kiev and dug a large pit in the ground beside Reactor Number Three. Using specialized Japanese-built drilling equipment, they began to bore horizontally toward Unit Four, with the intention of creating a series of parallel holes 140 meters long running beneath its foundation. The engineers hoped that these would then carry narrow pipes bearing liquid nitrogen, which would freeze the ground, halting the progress of any melting nuclear fuel before it reached the water table.
At the same time, technicians from the power station embarked on Legasov’s plan to extinguish the burning reactor with nitrogen gas. The idea was to use the plant’s existing pipe network—which before the accident had distributed the various gases used in plant maintenance—to help direct the nitrogen through the basement and into the ruins of the reactor hall. From the outset, the members of the plant staff executing this scheme recognized that it was pointless: the pipework in the area beneath the reactor was almost certainly damaged, and even if it reached the reactor hall, the nitrogen couldn’t hope to starve the fire of oxygen, because the building had no roof; instead of concentrating around the burning graphite and displacing air from the flames, the gas would just drift uselessly into the atmosphere. But orders were orders.
Silayev’s government commission sent out instructions for all the available liquid nitrogen in Ukraine to be rerouted to Chernobyl by truck and by rail. The two massive vaporizers needed to turn the liquid into gas were located at the Cryogenmash plant in Odessa and flown to the airport in Chernigov, while a special shed to accommodate them was constructed near the administrative block of the power station. When they arrived, carried by a pair of Antoshkin’s giant Mi-26 “flying cow” helicopters, the machines proved too large to fit through the door of the shed. The operators had to smash a larger opening with hammers. At 8:00 p.m., the technicians reported to Silayev that pumping could begin as soon as the nitrogen arrived. It was due that night, but the next morning there was still no sign of it. The operators waited all day. At 11:00 p.m., Director Brukhanov received a phone call from Silayev.
“Find
the nitrogen,” the commission chairman said, “or you’ll be shot.”
Accompanied by a detachment of troops, Brukhanov managed to locate the convoy of tanker trucks sixty kilometers away in Ivankov. The drivers, apparently terrified by the spectral horrors of radiation, had stopped in their tracks and refused to go any farther. Soldiers with machine guns took up positions at each end of the convoy, and the drivers were at last persuaded to deliver their cargo, at gunpoint.
* * *
It was eight in the evening on Tuesday, May 6, when Moose Zborovsky’s men finally pulled on military respirators and L-1 chemical protection suits—the heavy, rubberized overalls designed for combat during nuclear war—and drove out toward Reactor Number Four. Zborovsky had conducted his own radiation survey and calculated where they could go and for how long. The gamma fields varied wildly, from 50 roentgen in places near Unit One, to the most dangerous areas—no more than 250 meters from Unit Four—where exposure reached 800 roentgen. The men stopped the trucks inside the transport corridor—the large passageway beneath the reactor through which railcars delivered fresh fuel for the plant. They ran out the hoses in just five minutes—a third of the regulation time—and started the pumps. Leaving the engines running, they closed the gates of the transport corridor behind them and sprinted to a nearby bunker. At last, the water level in the basement began falling. From their posts beneath the station, Brukhanov and Fomin telephoned Silayev, who relayed the news to Moscow.
Midnight in Chernobyl Page 24