Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  The liquidators who lived on did so with the fear that they’d returned from the battlefield with fatal wounds no one could ever see. “We know that the invisible enemy is eating away inside us like a worm,” said General Nikolai Antoshkin, whose helicopter crews fought to extinguish the nuclear inferno. “For us, the war continues, and, little by little, we are slipping away from this world.”

  When I visited Alexander and Natalia Yuvchenko in their apartment not far from Moscow State University in 2006, the engineer’s arms and back were scarred violet-red with the results of skin-grafting operations so numerous he had stopped counting at fifteen. He had gone back to work as quickly as he could after being discharged from Hospital Number Six but later spent weeks in a hospital in Germany being treated by military doctors and still had to undergo two weeks of medical testing every year. Yuvchenko had recently started a new job that returned him to his chosen field, nuclear engineering, for the first time since 1986. He was delighted to be able to make business trips to Ukraine, where he visited the country’s remaining atomic power stations and worked once more with the same colleagues he had known since his days at university in Odessa.

  Yet when he began to talk about the accident, rivulets of sweat ran through his close-cropped hair, and the handkerchief he kneaded in his fist was soon soaked through. Yuvchenko didn’t know if the radiation made him infertile, although the doctors assured the couple that they could safely have had more children. But Natalia didn’t trust them and questioned their motives: she didn’t want to become the unwitting subject of some callous experimental study.

  So their son, Kirill, then studying to become a doctor, remained an only child, and they had adopted a Siamese cat named Charlie—born on April 26, which they agreed was a good omen. But Alexander said that the effects the radiation had on his health weren’t as bad as people might have imagined. “The doctors keep telling me I’ve survived—so I can carry on now without worrying,” he said. “But when I went back to Ukraine, they started telling me about people who had died. Was it due to radiation? I don’t know. I don’t understand anything about statistics. But when my friends ask me about it, I tell them: the less you think about it, the longer you’ll live.”

  19

  * * *

  The Elephant’s Foot

  The afternoon of Monday, April 25, 2016, was beautiful and warm in Pripyat—more like summer than spring. The city was still and empty: poplar seeds floated and danced on the breeze, the heavy green silence broken only by birdsong. Almost exactly thirty years after the explosion of Unit Four, the atomgrad that Viktor Brukhanov conjured from an empty field was finally being reconquered by nature. The fine Baltic roses planted on the director’s orders had long ago run wild, and their blackened hips rotted in a ragged tangle of bushes in the middle of the city square; a forest of willow, pine, and wild pear filled the soccer stadium; a single silver birch sapling burst from the shattered front steps of the White House; and clusters of oak and acacia had transformed a broad stretch of Kurchatov Street into a dappled woodland path. On the lampposts, the hammer and sickle symbols endured, but the Soviet stars were rusted and bent, pushed aside by thrusting branches, and the images on the crosswalk signs had been erased by decades of sun and rain. A blanket of thick moss stretched beneath the disintegrating Ferris wheel.

  Open to the elements, attacked by water, frost, and corrosive lichens, many of the buildings of the city were in danger of collapse. On Sportivnaya Street, the entrance to one apartment house was cut off by massive panels of fallen concrete. Looters and scavengers had stripped the city of almost every piece of metal they could find, leaving behind rooms furnished only with the dark silhouettes of vanished radiators and holes in the streets where they had torn steel pipes and cables from deep underground. In the blocks on Lenina Prospekt, the stairwells were carpeted with broken glass, and paper curled from the bedroom walls in limp sheets, powdery and leached of color. On the fourth floor of Building 13/34 overlooking Kurchatov Street, the front door of Brukhanov’s family home had been torn from its hinges and lay in the hallway beneath a heavy coat of pale gray dust. The big corner apartment was almost bare, and there was little evidence of who had once lived there: a child’s picture of a vintage car stuck to the tiles in the darkened bathroom, a single high-heeled shoe on the kitchen floor. But from the balcony of a room overlooking the square, the words on the roof of the ten-story apartment block opposite were still just visible above the trees: Hai bude atom robitnikom, a ne soldatom!

  “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier!”

  Three kilometers away, the construction cranes above Reactors Five and Six of the Chernobyl plant remained frozen where they had stopped when work there was abandoned on the night of the accident. But inside the main part of the power station, a skeleton staff labored on. When the newly independent republic of Ukraine began receiving its first bills for electricity generated in Russia, the government reversed its decision to close the plant’s remaining three reactors, and the last of them was not finally shut down until 2000. Since then, a dwindling workforce had tended to the cooling, decommissioning, and dismantling of Units One, Two, and Three, commuting to work every day on a dedicated electric train from an hour away in Slavutych.

  When I first visited the Chernobyl station, one morning in the depths of winter, the heating had stopped working, and the inside of the complex was bitterly cold. Up on mark +10, on the “dirty” side of the sanitary lock, a light snow blew past the windows, and two men in white overalls and thick coats walked briskly down the deaerator corridor, their breath condensing in clouds. In Control Room Number Two, three engineers stood around their desks, smoking cigarettes and making murmured telephone calls. Many of the dials and annunciator alarms on the desk were plastered with paper labels, printed with the legend “Taken out of service.” In the center of the mothballed control panel that had once twitched constantly with readouts from the reactor, a small color television screen displayed closed-circuit images from the machine hall, where the giant turbines were being slowly dismantled. Farther west down the long corridor that once connected all four of the plant’s reactor units, the skeleton staff melted away. Inside the dormant hulk of Unit Three, an oppressive quiet gathered in the dim machine rooms. The floors were still covered with the yellowing plastic mats laid during decontamination in 1986. Drab, gray light seeped through the filthy glazing, heavy pipework hung from the ceiling, and a tang of machine oil and ozone lingered in the damp air.

  Down one more staircase and along a windowless corridor, it became impossible to go farther. The presence of something close by but unseen, something monstrous, became almost tangible. The cluster of thick pipes running overhead came to a sudden halt, their severed ends hanging in the air just short of what had once been the entrance to a passageway, now sealed with solid concrete. Against this wall, surrounded by a puddle of milky liquid, stood a red marble monument bearing a bronze bas-relief: the dark shape of a man wearing the cylindrical cap of a power plant worker, one arm outstretched in alarm, as if reaching for help that would never come. This was the tombstone of Valery Khodemchuk, the first man to die as a result of the explosion in Unit Four. His surviving colleagues had built the memorial as close as they dared to the place where they believed his body lay buried. Whatever remained of the vanished machinist lay immediately beyond this point, on the other side of three meters of concrete and a layer of lead, beneath thousands of tonnes of rubble, sand, and twisted debris. Somewhere in there with him, too, was the melted heart of Reactor Number Four, a protean mass of uranium, zirconium, and other core elements that remained almost as enigmatic and deadly as it was on the day the catastrophe began almost thirty years before.

  * * *

  From the very start, the small band of Kurchatov Institute specialists who began exploring inside the rising Sarcophagus in the summer of 1986 had faced terrible obstacles. Sent from Moscow to locate the hundreds of tonnes of nuclear fuel that had once fired Reactor Four, they we
re hampered by fields of gamma radiation, collapsed wreckage, cascades of freshly pumped Sredmash concrete, and malfunctioning equipment. Attempts to use robots initially ended in the same way as so many others had in the Special Zone. At its first test, one device, created at enormous expense to explore the ruins, proved incapable of navigating even minor obstructions; it had to be rescued repeatedly by its operators and ultimately stopped dead in a high-radiation zone. In a scene captured on video and screened that night before the assembled task force, the robot then unexpectedly came back to life and—in a ridiculous pantomime of flashing lights and waving appendages—fled down the corridor, before it screeched and fell on its side and had to be retrieved by its handlers in a blizzard of invective.

  Eventually, rudimentary reconnaissance began with the help of a miniature plastic tank bought by one of the scientists for 12 rubles (the equivalent, then, of $5) from the toy store Detsky Mir—Children’s World—in Kiev. The toy was controlled by a battery-operated box on the end of a long cable and modified to carry a dosimeter, a thermometer, and a powerful flashlight. The scientists used it like a radiosensitive hunting dog which ran ten meters ahead of them and warned of imminent danger. Although fully aware of the perils surrounding them, the members of the Kurchatov task force were urged on by the gravity of their search for the missing fuel—necessary to guarantee that a new chain reaction could not begin—but also by scientific curiosity. Inside the Sarcophagus, they were explorers on the frontier of an alien world, where they found gamma radiation fields scaling heights no one had witnessed before and strange new materials forged at temperatures of more than 10,000 degrees centigrade in the crucible of a disintegrating nuclear reactor.

  In the autumn of 1986, the members of the Kurchatov team made one of their first and most memorable discoveries, when they finally entered the mysterious corridor 217/2, where months before their remote radiation probe had run off the scale and burned out. To reach it, the scientists now wriggled through a narrow tunnel formed in the ruins, armed with flashlights and clad in thin plastic suits to protect them from radioactive dust. What they found there was a massive, globular, stalagmite-like formation of some mysterious substance. It appeared to have flowed down from somewhere above their heads before solidifying into an anthracite-black glassy mass. The formation, which they named the Elephant’s Foot, stood half as tall as a man and weighed as much as two tonnes. Its surface was emitting an astonishing 8,000 roentgen per hour, or 2 roentgen a second: five minutes in its presence was enough to guarantee an agonizing death. Nonetheless, orders came down from the government commission for photographs and a full analysis.

  Unable to find the fuel from the reactor, the scientists had also found no sign so far of the more than sixteen thousand tonnes of materials dropped into the reactor by General Antoshkin’s heroic helicopter crews and therefore hoped that the Elephant’s Foot might contain some of the lead intended to cool the core. But it did not readily surrender samples for testing. The substance proved too hard for a drill mounted on a motorized trolley, and a soldier who volunteered to attack it with an axe left the room empty-handed—and so overexposed he had to be evacuated immediately from Chernobyl. Finally, a police marksman arrived and shot a fragment of the surface away with a rifle. The sample revealed that the Elephant’s Foot was a solidified mass of silicon dioxide, titanium, zirconium, magnesium, and uranium—a once-molten radioactive lava containing all the radionuclides found in irradiated nuclear fuel that had somehow flowed into the corridor from the rooms nearby. But it contained no trace of the lead dropped into Unit Four from the air during the frantic early days of May.

  By measuring the temperature of the air inside the subreactor spaces, the Kurchatov experts found evidence that there might be more lava, still hot from the energy of radioactive decay, in the room at the end of the corridor, which had housed the gigantic stainless steel cross—Structure S—supporting the reactor vessel and everything in it. But, once again, they found their path blocked by rubble and radioactivity. At almost every meeting of the government commission, Boris Scherbina and his officials reproached them for their failure to find the fuel and questioned them about the continuing danger of a new self-sustaining chain reaction.

  At the beginning of 1988, they formed a new group, an interdisciplinary team of 30 scientists dedicated to exploring the Sarcophagus and mapping what it contained, backed by a force of up to 3,500 construction workers: the Chernobyl Complex Expedition. Using horizontal drilling rigs, extending up to 26 meters in length, operated by technicians from Sredmash and the Soviet mining industry, the Complex Expedition began boring deep within Unit Four, extracting core samples from the debris to examine the very fabric of the building. By the late spring of 1988, almost exactly two years after the explosion, the drilling had reached the reactor vessel itself. On May 3 a drill bit burst through the outer concrete wall of the shaft, passed through the layer of sand ballast, the steel walls of the inner protection tank, and, at last, into the reactor vault. The scientists pushed a probe through the hole and toward the center of the vault in an attempt to gauge the parameters of the destruction in the graphite stacks and fuel assemblies of the reactor core—the origin point of the accident. But the probe encountered no resistance, and traveled smoothly on across the full 11.8-meter diameter of the former active zone, without pause or interruption.

  The scientists were bewildered. Where was the fuel? The following day, they inserted a periscope and a powerful lamp to illuminate the scene within and were astonished by what they saw: the giant vault of Reactor Number Four, which had once contained 190 tonnes of uranium fuel and 1,700 tonnes of graphite blocks, and was since supposed to have been filled with load after load of sand, lead, and dolomite, was almost completely empty.

  In the course of an operation that would continue for years, as they penetrated farther and farther into the warren of ruins within Unit Four, taking samples and photographs and shooting video footage of what they found, the men of the Complex Expedition unraveled the mystery of what had happened inside the building during the most feverish period of the Battle of Chernobyl. They discovered that only the smallest trace of the 17,000 tonnes of material eventually targeted on the building from above had found its mark inside the reactor vault. Instead, the majority of the loads were discovered, in mounds up to fifteen meters high, scattered elsewhere among the debris filling the central hall. Some lead ingots had struck the red-and-white-striped vent stack, and the roof of Unit Three, almost a hundred meters away from the target, had been smashed in by cargo dropped from the air. Moreover, it seemed that almost all of the 1,300 tonnes of graphite that had not been thrown from the reactor by the explosion had been consumed by fire: in the end, the blazing reactor had simply burned itself out. The Soviet fliers’ courageous efforts to smother it with sand from two hundred meters up had been almost entirely pointless.

  But the Complex Expedition also revealed that the theoretical physicists’ terror of the China Syndrome, initially dismissed as nearly impossible by the practically minded nuclear wildcatters of Sredmash, had not been so far-fetched after all. They established that the two tonnes of deadly compounds in the Elephant’s Foot represented just a fraction of an incandescent river of radioactive lava that had formed inside the reactor in the minutes after the accident began and had flowed slowly downward into the basement of the building until the reactor vault itself was practically empty.

  The zirconium cladding of the fuel assemblies had melted first, reaching a temperature of more than 1,850 degrees Celsius within a half hour of the explosion, and dissolved the uranium dioxide pellets it contained, pooling into a hot metal soup that then absorbed parts of the reactor vessel itself—including stainless steel, serpentinite, graphite, and melted concrete. The radioactive lava, now containing some 135 tonnes of molten uranium, then began eating its way through the lower biological shield of the reactor, a massive steel disk filled with serpentinite gravel, weighing 1,200 tonnes. It burned clean through the shield
and its contents, absorbing around a quarter of its total mass, and ran smoothly into the rooms below. The steel cross supporting the entire reactor vessel—Structure S—reached its yield point and buckled; the shield fell out of the bottom of the reactor, and the searing corium began burning a hole in the floor of the subreactor space. The pipes of the steam suppression system, which had proved unable to save Reactor Number Four in its death throes, now provided a convenient path for the lava as it attempted to leave the building entirely, spreading out to the south and east along four separate routes, melting metalwork, flowing through open doorways, slowly filling corridors and rooms, and creeping down through the plumbing, one floor after another, toward the foundations of Unit Four.

  By the time the corium reached the steam suppression pools, emptied at such great cost by Captain Zborovsky and the specialists from the plant, it had burned and seethed through three floors of the subreactor space, engorging itself with more parts of the building and structural debris until it reached a combined weight of at least a thousand tonnes. In some rooms, molten metal gathered in puddles fifteen centimeters deep and solidified where it lay. And yet—despite the best efforts of Zborovsky and his men—several hundred cubic meters of water remained gathered in the suppression compartments, and it was not until the flow of corium reached this that the China Syndrome finally came to an end. When the lava dropped into the dregs of the water in the suppression pool, it cooled harmlessly, and the molten heart of Reactor Number Four at last ended its journey—a gray ceramic pumice floating on the surface of a radioactive pond, but just centimeters away from the foundations separating the building from the earth below.