Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  It would take the men of the Complex Expedition until 1990 to find most of the melted fuel and deliver a report assuring the government commission that the ghost of the reactor was unlikely—“for the time being”—to rise again. Even four years after the accident, the temperature inside some of the fuel clusters remained as high as 100 degrees Celsius. But unless it became saturated with water, the scientists calculated that a new criticality was almost impossible, and they installed a new monitoring system to give them an early warning if one did begin. By that time, the final implosion of the Soviet Union had started, and financial and political attention shifted far from Chernobyl.

  Increasingly forgotten and starved of resources, the Complex Expedition slogged on regardless. Its leader, the portly neutrino physicist Alexander Borovoi, would eventually make more than one thousand trips into the Sarcophagus. Borovoi said that he had always lacked physical courage and simply understood the dangers of radiation well enough to manage the risks. But each time he entered the great, black building, it evoked in him the same feelings as the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony: an ominous prelude to a struggle between life and oblivion. The physicists lacked computers and protective equipment, and whenever he went inside, Borovoi carried a roll of medical tape with which to patch his plastic overalls in case of tears.

  Eventually the men ran short even of underwear, and, following the screening of a documentary about the expedition by the BBC, the scientists began receiving care packages of hand-knitted socks from the West. Borovoi handed these out as rewards to members of the group who distinguished themselves inside the Sarcophagus. And yet the scientists found their work so fascinating and important that some refused to leave at the end of their assignments; many deliberately left their dosimeters in the office to avoid officially registering their maximum dosages and being sent home. After the Elephant’s Foot, they came upon other formations of solidified lava inside the ruins of Unit Four, frozen into uncanny shapes, which they granted individual nicknames: the Drop, the Icicle, the Stalagmite, and the Heap. Among their unique discoveries was a new substance they christened Chernobylite—a beautiful, but deadly, blue crystal silicate composed of zirconium and uranium, which they chipped from the ruins. It could be examined safely only for short periods of time, and samples had to be removed from Unit Four in lead-lined containers. And, as money ran out and fears of a new self-sustaining chain reaction subsided, the Complex Expedition became aware of a new problem. The Sarcophagus itself, built under conditions of great secrecy with all the haste and ingenuity the USSR could muster, was not proving quite the triumph of engineering the Soviet propaganda machine had claimed.

  Although the limitations of the building had been carefully concealed during its construction, Borovoi and his team now found gaps in the walls large enough for a man to pass through and cracks through which water could penetrate and radioactive dust could escape. They also began to fear that, inside the Sarcophagus, what remained of the concrete skeleton of Unit Four could soon collapse. By the time Borovoi was recalled to Moscow, it had become clear that a new means of protecting the world from the remains of the still-hot reactor would have to be found.

  * * *

  Former plant director Viktor Brukhanov walked free from prison on September 11, 1991, having served five years of his ten-year sentence, most of it in the penal colony in Donetsk. He was released early for good behavior, under the rules of the Soviet judicial system, and was permitted to spend the closing months of his punishment in compulsory labor—known as khimiya, or “chemistry”—in Uman, a town closer to his wife, Valentina, in Kiev. At fifty-five, he emerged from incarceration shattered and emaciated. The good Czech overcoat Valentina had bought him after her move to Kiev hung off him like a sack. When he came home, she showed him around their new apartment—in the same complex in the city where so many of his invalided colleagues and employees had been rehoused, by then becoming known as Little Pripyat—and introduced him to the five-year-old granddaughter he had never met.

  Brukhanov emerged into a profoundly changed world. The rigid certainties of the Party he had served so unfailingly were dissolving, and even his popular infamy as the man responsible for the Chernobyl disaster was being swept away amid the revelations of higher and more unspeakable crimes. On December 26, 1991, the president of the Collegium on Criminal Cases of the USSR Supreme Court sent a two-line letter to Brukhanov’s lawyer in Moscow, notifying him that the appeal against his client’s sentence had been returned without review, since the state responsible for imposing it no longer existed.

  At first, Brukhanov longed to return to Pripyat and—in spite of everything that had happened—may have hoped to find a new job at the nuclear plant he had built. Eventually Vitali Sklyarov, the sardonic former apparatchik still overseeing the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy, now part of the independent national government, found Brukhanov a position with the ministry’s body for international trade in Kiev. In early 1992 he quietly went back to work, a forgotten man.

  The fallen director was the last of the Chernobyl plant staff punished for their part in the explosion of Reactor Number Four to be set free. Kovalenko and Rogozhkin had successfully petitioned for early release and already returned to jobs at the plant. The former nuclear safety inspector, Laushkin, had also been released but died of stomach cancer soon afterward. Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin had never fully recovered from the shock of the accident. Two years after his arrest, in 1988, he was diagnosed with a “reactive psychosis” and transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Granted early release for health reasons in 1990, Fomin found work again at the Kalinin nuclear power plant north of Moscow—although even then his mental state reportedly remained fragile.

  Anatoly Dyatlov, the dictatorial deputy chief engineer, had spent his years of incarceration contesting the verdict of the Soviet court, writing letters and giving interviews from prison in an attempt to publicize what he’d learned about the failings of the RBMK reactor and clear his name and those of his staff. He wrote directly to Hans Blix at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to point out the failings of their technical analysis, but also to the parents of Leonid Toptunov, describing how their son had stayed at his post to try to save the crippled reactor and how he had been unjustly blamed for causing the accident. He explained that the reactor should never have been put into operation and that Toptunov and his dead colleagues were the victims of a judicial cover-up. “I fully sympathize with you, and grieve with you,” Dyatlov wrote. “There is nothing more unbearable than losing one’s child.”

  In prison, Dyatlov continued to suffer from the terrible radiation burns he had sustained as he wandered through the wreckage of Unit Four on the night of the accident and in October 1990 was also granted early release due to his declining health. From his flat in Troieshchyna, the increasingly frail engineer continued a campaign to reveal the truth about the design faults of the reactor and the way the accident had been whitewashed by Academician Legasov and the Soviet delegation to the IAEA.

  Despite the publication of popular accounts, including Grigori Medvedev’s Chernobyl Notebook, which called into question the official Soviet version of the story, the government commission’s reports into the causes of the accident remained classified, and the public perception of events remained unchanged—that of a perfectly reliable reactor blown up by incompetent operators. But as the bonds of the secret state began to loosen further, the truth about the origins of the explosion in Unit Four at last started to emerge. In the face of opposition from NIKIET and the Ministry of Atomic Energy, the state’s independent nuclear safety board belatedly launched its own inquiry into the causes of the accident. The board sought advice from both midlevel members of the RBMK design team and former specialists from the Chernobyl plant. The leader of the board of inquiry began an intensive correspondence with Dyatlov about the events immediately leading up to the explosion. Incidental documents submitted by the Soviet authorities to the IAEA had already begu
n to undermine the official version, and in July 1990 one senior member of the original Soviet delegation to Vienna admitted publicly that the designers had been chiefly to blame for the catastrophe, and the operators’ actions played only a minor role.

  The report that the nuclear safety board of inquiry delivered to the Soviet Council of Ministers in January 1991 completely contradicted the story Legasov had told the IAEA in 1986, of a delicate piece of equipment blown up by feckless operators who breached one vital safety regulation after another. Their findings couldn’t entirely vindicate Dyatlov, who maintained not only that the plant personnel had nothing to do with the accident but also that at the fateful moment in its development—when Leonid Toptunov raised the reactor power from zero so that the rundown test could take place—he hadn’t even been in the room. But they made clear that, although the actions of the operators contributed to what happened, they should not be held responsible for a disaster that was decades in the making.

  In May 1991, while the report was still under review by the Fuel and Energy Department of the Council of Ministers, one of its principal authors, former Chernobyl chief engineer Nikolai Steinberg, presented his findings to the inaugural International Congress on Human Rights held by Moscow’s Sakharov Center. He told the delegates that the origins of the Chernobyl disaster lay in a combination of “scientific, technological, socioeconomic, and human factors” unique to the USSR. The Soviet nuclear industry, lacking even rudimentary safety practices, had relied upon its operators to behave with robotic precision night after night, despite constant pressure to beat deadlines and “exceed the plan” that made disregard for the letter of the regulations almost inevitable. He reported that Dyatlov and the now deceased operators in Control Room Number Four had brought the reactor into an unstable condition, but only on account of the acute pressure they felt to complete the test on the turbine.

  “Under those circumstances,” Steinberg said, “the unit operators and managers made a decision that, in all probability, predetermined the subsequent accident.” But nobody could know for sure, because they had still not determined whether, once the test began, the reactor might have been shut down without risking disaster. Although Dyatlov, Shift Foreman Akimov, and Senior Reactor Control Engineer Toptunov had violated some operating regulations, they were ignorant of the deadly failing of the RBMK-1000 that meant that insertion of the control rods, instead of shutting down the reactor at the end of the test, could initiate a runaway chain reaction.

  Every one of the investigators behind the report now agreed that the fatal power surge that destroyed the reactor had begun with the entry of the rods into its core. “Thus the Chernobyl accident comes within the standard pattern of most severe accidents in the world. It begins with an accumulation of small breaches of the regulations. . . . These produce a set of undesirable properties and occurrences that, when taken separately, do not seem to be particularly dangerous, but finally an initiating event occurs that, in this particular case, was the subjective actions of the personnel that allowed the potentially destructive and dangerous qualities of the reactor to be released.”

  Steinberg recognized that the origins of the accident lay with those who had designed the reactor and the secret, incestuous bureaucracy that had allowed it to go into operation. But he concluded that it was no longer constructive to allocate blame—whether with “those who hang a rifle on the wall, aware that it is loaded, or those who inadvertently pull the trigger.”

  But the barons of the atomic industry had no more appetite for the truth than they had five years earlier. The Kremlin’s nuclear minister did not immediately accept the findings in Steinberg’s report but instead ordered up a second investigation from a new commission, this time packed with the same men behind the Vienna report of 1986. Under pressure from the reactor designers in NIKIET, the compass needle of their accusations began to swing once more toward the operators. Two members of the commission chosen from the state nuclear safety board resigned in protest, and their boss refused to put his signature on the new document. The issue was still unresolved when, in August 1991, Yeltsin and Gorbachev faced down the plotters of the abortive coup and the USSR began its final slide toward extinction.

  It wasn’t until the following year, after the Soviet nuclear safety team’s organization had been dissolved, that its findings were published as an appendix to an updated version of the original IAEA report on the Chernobyl accident. Seeking to redress the inaccuracies of their 1986 account based on what they described as “new information,” the IAEA experts revealed at last the true magnitude of the technical cover-up surrounding the causes of the disaster: the long history of previous RBMK accidents, the dangerous design of the reactor, its instability, and the way its operators had been misled about its behavior. In dense scientific detail, it described the inherent problems of the positive void coefficient and the fatal consequences of the control rod “tip” effect.

  Although the IAEA panel continued to find the behavior of the Chernobyl operators “in many respects . . . unsatisfactory,” it acknowledged that the primary causes of the worst nuclear disaster in history rested not with the men in the control room of Unit Four but with the design of the RBMK reactor. Six years after their burial in Mitino cemetery, the report at last went some way to rehabilitating the reputations of Alexander Akimov, Leonid Toptunov, and the other operators who had died in Hospital Number Six. But by then, the turgid technicalities of the revised report attracted little attention outside specialist circles. Back in Kiev, former deputy chief engineer Dyatlov, still not satisfied, kept up his lonely struggle for exoneration in the press, until his own death—from cancer of the bone marrow, at the age of sixty-four—in December 1995. In 2008, more than two decades after the accident, Akimov and Toptunov—along with twelve other engineers, electricians, and machinists from the plant staff—were finally recognized for their heroism on the night of April 26, when President Viktor Yanukovych posthumously awarded each of them the Ukrainian Order for Courage, Third Class.

  20

  * * *

  A Tomb for Valery Khodemchuk

  Early one evening in October 2015, I returned to the brick apartment building off Vernadsky Prospekt in Moscow where almost ten years earlier I had met Alexander and Natalia Yuvchenko. The sun had already set, and it was cold outside, but the first snow of the year had not yet fallen. The Yuvchenkos’ ninth-floor flat had been expensively renovated, with a glossy modern kitchen and a new bathroom, but seemed spartan and cold. Charlie the cat was gone. Natalia said that she had spent a lot of time in Germany recently, where she worked as a cosmetologist, and visited her Moscow home only occasionally. At fifty-four, pale and birdlike, Yuvchenko wore a short-sleeved green sweater decorated with pink piping, her hair dyed a dark auburn and teased into a bouffant. She made herb tea, offered a plate of sweet pastries, and, after a while, told the story of what had happened to her husband.

  Alexander had seemed fine when I visited in 2006, and it wasn’t until the end of that year that Natalia first noticed him looking thinner. Even then, she thought it was good for her husband to lose some weight; it made him look younger. His new nuclear engineering work was going well, and he seemed fit and happy. In early October they had taken a vacation in Crete, and one day he came down to the beach holding a canoe paddle: “Natasha,” he said, “I want you to keep me company!” Although he had left behind competitive rowing more than twenty years before, his love for the sport hadn’t left him, and he never missed a race on TV.

  Now he had found a dinghy but needed a partner. Natalia had never rowed in her life, but her husband was insistent: just across the bay; it would take only a few minutes. She climbed into the bow, and Alexander got in behind. She dipped her paddle into the blue water. It wasn’t easy. She was so slight and inexperienced, and her husband, still only forty-four, remained broad backed and powerful. She had to paddle frantically to keep up with his long arms and practiced stroke, but she found a rhythm and threw herself into it. A
nd when they reached the beach at last, Natalia turned to find her husband behind her, delighted and panting—exhausted by having to keep up with his wife’s extraordinary pace. “You’re a champion!” he said. In place of a trophy, he bought her a pair of fine aquamarine earrings from a nearby jewelry store.

  At the end of the vacation, the couple were on the plane back to Moscow when Alexander suddenly felt faint, and the blood drained from his face. He put it down to the change in air pressure in the cabin and thought little more about it. By the time they were settled in at home again, he seemed well enough, although he continued to look very pale. But the results of his regular blood tests were clear, and Natalia thought he had been traveling too much for work. He probably just needed to slow down.

  After the New Year holiday, in early January 2007, Alexander came down with a high fever. They thought it was probably a virus, and he took medication to bring it down. But his temperature continued to seesaw—low in the mornings, spiking at night—and they realized that there was some underlying problem. Their son, Kirill, called the doctor.

  They discovered that Alexander’s spleen had expanded to several times its normal size—a common symptom of leukemia. His blood counts had proved misleading, and by the time he was admitted to a hospital, Yuvchenko’s bone marrow had started to fail. He returned to Hospital Number Six, now renamed the Burnasyan Medical Center, where the two doctors who had overseen his treatment in 1986—Angelina Guskova, by then eighty-two, and Anzhelika Barabanova, seventy-two—continued to work as consultants. Initially, Natalia Yuvchenko hoped that with the right medication, her husband’s disease could be managed and he would have a few more years of normal life. But over the next eighteen months, he developed a tumor that grew to a size and malignancy that thwarted all therapy, including new and experimental drugs imported from Switzerland.