Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  * * *

  Two weeks later, on August 25, Valery Legasov, wearing a gray suit and striped tie, his face puffy and haggard behind thick glasses, took the floor on the opening day of the special technical conference at IAEA headquarters in Vienna. The mood was somber and tense, and the wood-paneled conference hall was packed. Six hundred nuclear experts from sixty-two different countries, accompanied by more than two hundred journalists, had come to discover the truth about the accident that, by now, transfixed the world. The burden upon Legasov was enormous: not only the reputation of all of Soviet science but also the future of the global nuclear industry was at stake. The disaster suggested that the USSR’s technicians could not be trusted to build or operate their own reactors and that the technology itself was so intrinsically hazardous that, even in the West, nuclear power stations should be shut down or phased out.

  Legasov had spent much of the summer collating the material he intended to present, drawn from the contributions of a team of twenty-three experts, half of them from the Kurchatov Institute, but also including the designers of the reactor, the chief of the USSR’s environmental and meteorology agency, and the radiation medicine and decontamination specialists, Dr. Angelina Guskova and General Vladimir Pikalov.

  And yet, glasnost or not, the organs of the Soviet state were no more ready to disclose the truth about the myriad failures of Socialist technology than they had ever been. When a draft copy of the report eventually reached the Central Committee, the head of the Energy Department was horrified by what he read. He forwarded it to the KGB with a note attached: “This report contains information that blackens the name of Soviet science. . . . We think it expedient that its authors face punishment by the Party and the criminal court.”

  While his notions of retribution may have been harsh, the fears of the Energy Department apparatchik were not unjustified. Revealing to the world the true roots of the disaster—the design of the reactor itself; the systematic, long-term failures and the culture of secrecy and denial of the Soviet nuclear program; and the arrogance of the senior scientists overseeing its implementation—was unthinkable. If the report acknowledged the design flaws of the RBMK reactor, responsibility for the accident could be traced all the way up to the chief designer and the chairman of the Academy of Sciences. In a society where the cult of science had supplanted religion, the nuclear chiefs were among its most sanctified icons—pillars of the Soviet state. To permit them to be pulled down would undermine the integrity of the entire system on which the USSR was built. They could not be found guilty.

  Legasov’s delivery was masterful. Speaking uninterrupted for five hours through translators, the academician held his audience spellbound. He outlined the design of the reactor in detail—acknowledging certain “drawbacks” but glossing over inconvenient facts—and described a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the accident sequence, far more terrifying than any of the Western experts had imagined. When he finished, he sat for several hours of questions, and Legasov and his team answered nearly every one. Pressed by reporters on the disadvantages in the reactor design he had mentioned, Legasov replied, “The defect of the system was that the designers did not foresee the awkward and silly actions by the operators.” Nonetheless, he acknowledged that “about half” of the USSR’s fourteen remaining RBMK reactors had already been shut down for technical modification, “to increase their safety.”

  Impressed by such apparently unprecedented candor from Soviet scientists, and reassured by the idea that the disaster was an extraordinary event that had little relevance for nuclear safety outside the USSR and that its health and environmental consequences fell within acceptable limits, the delegates left the hall confident in the future of Soviet atomic energy—and of their industry around the world. By the time they departed from Vienna at the end of the week, the mood was cheerful, almost jubilant. For the Soviet Union—and for Valery Legasov personally—the conference was, a prominent British physicist remarked in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “a public relations triumph.”

  On his return to Moscow, Legasov went directly to the Kurchatov Institute and ran up the steps to the third floor. “Victory!” he shouted to a friend.

  Yet nagging questions remained.

  Halfway through the conference, during a coffee break amid three days of sessions closed to the media, the MIT physicist Richard Wilson had buttonholed two members of the Soviet delegation with a question that puzzled him. In the copy of the report that Wilson had obtained, rush-translated by the US Department of Energy and dense with tables and statistics, the simple arithmetic in some places seemed wrong: the sum of figures plotting radioactive fallout in specific regions of the USSR didn’t appear to match the total shown at the end. The two Soviet delegates had to admit that the numbers might not be quite right. Years afterward, Wilson learned that six pages of data on the contamination of Belarus and Russia had been excised from the report, on Legasov’s instructions. He had doctored the report on the direct orders of Prime Minister Ryzhkov.

  “I did not lie in Vienna,” Legasov said to his colleagues in a report he delivered two months later at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “But I did not tell the whole truth.”

  16

  * * *

  The Sarcophagus

  In the darkened room just below the rooftop, the line of soldiers waited as their comrades checked their equipment. Over their olive-green uniforms, they strapped on knee-length lead aprons and bound pieces of the soft gray metal, cut from sheets three millimeters thick, to their chests, the backs of their heads, and along their spines; more was cupped at their groins and stuffed inside their boots. They wore green canvas hoods, cinched tight around their faces. The men pulled on heavy respirators and goggles to protect their eyes. Some put on plastic construction helmets.

  “Are you ready?” asked General Tarakanov. His voice echoed from the concrete walls. The eyes of the first five men flashed with anxiety, and they headed toward the staircase. At the top, they turned right and followed their guide down a blackened passageway, on toward a ragged patch of blinding sky: a hole, blasted through the shell of the building with explosives, and just large enough to allow a man to pass through. This was the way out into Zone M, on the roof above Unit Three, where, months earlier, the firefighters had struggled to douse the burning debris thrown from Reactor Number Four.

  General Tarakanov had divided the rooftops according to their height and level of contamination. He named each area after a woman in his life: Area K (Katya), where the gamma fields reached 1,000 roentgen; Area N (Natasha), up to 2,000 roentgen; and, finally, Area M (for Masha, the general’s older sister). Here, the men spoke of the levels of radiation only in reverent whispers. Directly overlooking the gaping shell of Unit Four and the remains of the shattered reactor within, Area M was a shambles of scorched rubble and chunks of masonry thrown into the air by the force of the explosion. It was strewn with twisted concrete reinforcement rods and pieces of equipment hurled from the reactor hall, some weighing nearly a half tonne. Graphite blocks that had once formed the core of the reactor lay everywhere—some turned white, perhaps by the heat of the explosion, but otherwise intact. Around them, levels of radiation reached as much as 10,000 roentgen an hour: enough for a fatal dose in less than three minutes.

  * * *

  General Nikolai Tarakanov, deputy commander of the Civil Defense Forces of the USSR, was fifty-two years old, a balding and diminutive Cossack, the fifth of seven children, who as a boy had watched his village burned to the ground by the Nazis. He had lied about his age to enlist in the army and, fifteen years later, won a technical doctorate in military science. A specialist in post-atomic combat engineering, Tarakanov had written two Soviet armed forces textbooks on how to begin rebuilding in the aftermath of a nuclear strike. He studied detailed scenarios modeling the expected destruction of US missile attacks on the major cities in the USSR: gruesome visualizations projecting hundreds of thousands of deaths, a population struggling to survive
in a poisoned landscape, and key industries rebuilt underground in the untracked hinterland of the empire. In 1970 he began practical experiments on a military proving ground in Noginsk, outside Moscow, where a small city had been laid out to simulate the postapocalyptic urban environment, complete with piles of debris and ruined buildings. There he helped develop the techniques and the protocols and the massive pieces of engineering equipment—the armored excavators and bulldozers, the IMR-2 vehicles, with their telescopic arms and mechanical pincers—that had been deployed in the most radioactive areas of Chernobyl’s Special Zone at the beginning of May. But now it was September. In Area M, the plans and the technology had failed, and Tarakanov was sending his men into combat, armed only with shovels.

  At the end of the passageway, the soldiers gathered themselves at the threshold. Their breath rasped in their rubber respirators. An officer started his stopwatch, and another five men stepped out into the light.

  * * *

  In the four months since Ivan Silayev had appeared on Soviet television and announced plans to build a sarcophagus to forever entomb the remains of Reactor Number Four, a fresh army of architects, engineers, and construction troops had been mustered in the zone and begun toiling around the clock to make the idea a reality. While their rivals in the Ministry of Energy were made responsible for restarting the remaining three reactors of the plant, the Sarcophagus project was entrusted to a construction unit formed specially for the purpose by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and designated US-605. Designs for the new structure were solicited throughout the ministry’s myriad acronym-bedecked agencies and subdivisions: the All-Union Scientific Research and Design Institute of Energy Technology, or VNIPIET; the ministry’s main construction department, known as SMT-1; and NIKIMT, the experimental laboratory dedicated to research and development in nuclear building projects.

  The final concept would eventually be chosen from a short list of eighteen designs. Engineers from the reactor design bureau, NIKIET, had suggested filling the ruined reactor with hollow lead balls. Others had proposed burying it beneath an enormous mound of crushed stone, or excavating a cavern beneath Unit Four large enough for the reactor to collapse into, so that the earth might swallow it whole. During the first meetings on the subject, Efim Slavsky, the pugnacious head of Sredmash, had presented his own, typically emphatic solution: drown the whole mess in concrete and forget about it. Big Efim’s suggestion was met with an awkward silence, broken eventually by Anatoly Aleksandrov. The head of the Kurchatov Institute pointed out the inconvenient physics of Slavsky’s approach: the continuing decay heat of the nuclear fuel remaining inside the reactor building made sealing it up impractical, if not impossible.

  Attractive as it might have seemed to completely seal off the remains of Reactor Number Four from the atmosphere around it, the fuel mass would instead require both widespread ventilation, to allow it to continue cooling safely, and constant monitoring, to provide a warning in case a new chain reaction began. The ruins would have to be covered by a protective shell, although no one could yet say how this might be done. Unit Four sprawled across an area so large—nearly the size of a soccer field—that any roof would require support from vertical pillars built inside its perimeter. Yet this space was still a no-man’s-land of collapsed walls, mangled equipment, and shattered concrete, much of it buried beneath the thousands of tonnes of sand and other materials dropped from General Antoshkin’s helicopters. The engineers couldn’t know for sure if anything within the ruins retained enough structural integrity to support the weight of even the flimsiest roof. And the radiation made it all but impossible to find out.

  Among the proposed architectural solutions, there were some of soaring ambition, including a single arch with a span of 230 meters, and the suggestion to roll a series of prefabricated vaults across the entire width of the reactor hall; another was a massive single-span roof suspended from a row of inclined steel arms, raised into the air at six-meter intervals, a design the engineers referred to sardonically as “Heil Hitler.” But these fantastical concepts could take years to complete, at astronomical cost—or lay beyond the known limits of Soviet engineering. The final design was instead dictated by a characteristically unrealistic Politburo timetable and the atrocious conditions at the construction site. Whatever was constructed around Unit Four had to be completed as quickly as possible—not in years, but in months—both to halt the spread of radioactivity and also to restart Units One, Two, and Three in relative safety, and thus salvage something of the USSR’s tarnished technological prestige.

  But the technical challenges were formidable, not least because the building would have to be put together remotely. Even after the ruins had been bombarded with sand and submerged in molten lead, radiation levels around Unit Four remained too high for anyone to work there for more than three minutes at a time. So the engineers planned to build the new structure from prefabricated sections, assembled using cranes and robots. And time was short. On June 5 Gorbachev gave Slavsky and his men until September to complete the new building: less than four months to accomplish one of the most dangerous and ambitious civil engineering feats in history. Work began at the site even before the engineers and architects in Moscow had agreed on a viable design.

  * * *

  To limit their overall radiation exposure, the teams of Sredmash US-605 rotated into the Chernobyl zone on two-month tours of duty. The first shift, beginning on May 20, had to clean up the mess left by the Ministry of Energy’s abortive remediation efforts—a tangle of blocked roads, wrecked equipment, and half-finished concreting projects—and create the infrastructure necessary for the enormous undertaking to come. They had to prepare housing, food, and sanitation for a force of twenty thousand men, the majority of them military reservists conscripted into the service of Sredmash, who became known as partizani. The Ministry of Medium Machine Building regarded its technical experts—architects, engineers, scientists, electricians, dosimetrists—as irreplaceable. They had to be protected from overexposure so that they could work in the zone for as long as possible. But the often middle-aged partizans were perceived as ignorant, unskilled, and expendable. They were thrown into the front line wherever necessary to perform manual tasks in high-radiation zones, one platoon after another. These men caught their maximum dose in a matter of hours—or minutes—before being sent home and replaced with more cannon fodder.

  The most important task for the first shift was to guarantee an uninterrupted supply of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building’s chief protection against radiation: reinforced concrete. The rail lines and cement factories used during the construction of the first four Chernobyl reactors had been directly in the path of the first plumes of heavy fallout to rise from Unit Four and were so contaminated that they had to be abandoned. Before building work began, the Sredmash engineers laid thirty-five kilometers of new road and constructed decontamination stations, a rail interchange, a dock to receive shipments of a half million tonnes of gravel by river, and three new concrete plants.

  The engineers then began to lay siege to the reactor, advancing on it slowly from behind a series of “pioneer walls” to shield building workers from the invisible fusillade of gamma rays streaming from within the ruins. At a safe distance, the engineers welded hollow steel forms, 2.3 meters square and almost 7 meters long, which they stacked like huge bricks on flatbed railcars. They pushed these into position around the reactor using armored combat engineering vehicles, and concreted them in place—railcars and all—using pumps stationed at least 300 meters away. More than 6 meters high and 7 meters thick, the resulting walls threw a “gamma shadow” in which workers could remain safely for up to five minutes at a time. The surface of the ground around them was also decontaminated: sprayed with dust-suppressant solution and gradually covered with another half-meter-thick layer of concrete.

  The work was relentless, continuing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in four shifts of six hours each. At night, the site was illum
inated with searchlights and lit from overhead by a tethered blimp. The government commission measured the construction teams’ progress on the Soviet scale, by the volume of reinforced concrete they poured each day, and kept them under incessant pressure. By the middle of the summer, a stupendous one thousand cubic meters of concrete—twelve thousand tonnes—was being churned out every twenty-four hours by the Sredmash plants. It was rushed to the remains of Unit Four in a relay of mixers and pump trucks, driven down the new roads at one hundred kilometers per hour by drivers who had to move fast to prevent their cargo setting in the summer heat—and who feared the radiation in the air around them. The roadsides were soon littered with the wrecks of overturned trucks.

  In July and August, the second shift of Sredmash engineers filled in the space between the first pioneer wall and the walls of Unit Four itself with more concrete, rubble, and pieces of debris and contaminated equipment. From these foundations, they began building upward. Three high-capacity Demag cranes, including two mechanical monsters on caterpillar tracks bought from West Germany at a cost of 4.5 million rubles, arrived in the zone by rail. Capable of lifting almost twenty times the load of an ordinary crane, they were used to install huge prefabricated steel forms, which were backfilled with still more concrete, entombing the escarpment of highly radioactive debris that had tumbled from the northern side of the reactor building. This became the “Cascade Wall,” which rose in a series of terraces—four colossal steps, each fifty meters long and twelve meters high—like the temple of a vengeful prehistoric god. The scale of the structure dwarfed the men and machines working in its shadow, and neither could remain near it for long. If brought too close, the engines of the concrete pumps guttered and died, and the dials of the dosimetrists’ equipment went haywire, like compass needles in a magnetic field. It was a phenomenon the experts could never satisfactorily explain.