At the beginning of the 1980s: Sich, “The Chornobyl Accident Revisited,” 148.
A dense network: Schmid, Producing Power, 34.
Brought forward by a year: David R. Marples, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 120.
Labor and supply problems: Kovalevska, “Not a Private Matter.” David Marples translates and discusses excerpts of Kovalevska’s article in Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR, 122–24. Also see an interview with Kovalevska by the journalist Iurii Shcherbak in his book Chernobyl: A Documentary Story, trans. Ian Press (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 15–21.
A team of dedicated KGB agents: By the time of the accident the station was monitored by 91 KGB agents, 8 residents, and 112 “authorized persons,” according to Volodymyr Viatrovych, head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (lecture in Kiev, April 28, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJpQ4SWxHKU). For an example of KGB reports on Chernobyl supply and construction problems, see Document No. 15, “Special report of the 6th department of the UkSSR KGBM . . . concerning the facts of shipping of poor-quality equipment for the Chernobyl NPS from Yugoslavia,” from January 9, 1984, in Yuri Danilyuk, ed., “The Chernobyl Tragedy in Documents and Materials” [Чорнобильська трагедія в документах та матеріалах], Special Issue, Z arkhiviv VUChK–GPU–NKVD–KGB 1, no. 16 (2001).
Brukhanov received instructions: Viktor Kovtutsky (chief accountant at Chernobyl construction department), author interview, Kiev, Ukraine, April 24, 2016.
An office at the top: Viktor and Valentina Brukhanov, author interview, 2016.
Any time of the day or night: Sklyarov, Chernobyl Was . . . Tomorrow, 123.
If something went wrong: Author interviews: Viktor and Valentina Brukhanov, 2015; Steinberg, 2015; Serhiy Parashyn (Communist Party secretary of ChNPP), Kiev, November 30, 2016.
Despite his technical gifts: Author interviews with Parashyn and Kizima.
Derided him as a “marshmallow”: Vasily Kizima, account in Grigori Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl, trans. Evelyn Rossiter (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 141.
A moral decay: Steinberg, author interview, 2017; Valery Legasov, “My duty is to tell about this,” a translated recollection of the Chernobyl accident provided in full in Mould, “Chapter 19: The Legasov Testament,” Chernobyl Record, 298.
The USSR’s economic utopianism: Alec Nove, The Soviet Economy: An Introduction, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 258.
The inexorable construction work: Brukhanov described twenty-five thousand construction workers in need of steady employment in his interview with Fakty i kommentarii in 2000. Details on Jupiter employees, many of them women, come from Esaulov, The City That Doesn’t Exist, 13, as well as the author’s interview with Esaulov in 2015.
The highly qualified technical elite: Schmid, Producing Power, 87.
The “power men”: Ibid., 90.
“you could spread it on bread”: Alexander Nazarkovsky (senior electromechanical engineer at Chernobyl), author interview, Kiev, February 2006.
“like a samovar”: Legasov, “My duty is to tell about this,” 300.
Drank from glassware: Anna Korolovska (deputy director for science of the Chernobyl Museum), author interview, Kiev, July 2015.
Listlessly filled out their shifts: Read, Ablaze, 45.
Group of Effective Control: Ibid.
At the top: Steinberg, author interview, 2017; Schmid, Producing Power, 153. For a discussion of how staff turnover amplified the problem, see Marples, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR, 120.
The chief engineer: Grigori Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl, 44.
Pushed through by the Party: Gennadi Shasharin, who in 1986 served as Deputy Minister of Energy and Electrification of the USSR, discusses Fomin’s appointment in “The Chernobyl Tragedy,” in A. N. Semenov, ed., Chernobyl. Ten Years On. Inevitability or Accident? [Чернобыль. Десять лет спустя. Неизбежность или случайность?] (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 1995), 98.
Physics through a correspondence course: Expert testimony in trial transcript, Karpan, From Chernobyl to Fukushima, 148.
The decision had already been taken: Shasharin, “The Chernobyl Tragedy,” 98.
The news would be announced: Esaulov, author interview, 2015.
A lush variety of trees and shrubs: “Chernobyl NPP: Master Plan of the Settlement” [Чернобыльская АЭС: Генеральный план поселка], Ministry of Energy and Electrification of the USSR, 1971, 32.
But Brukhanov was especially fond of flowers: Author interviews, 2015: Esaulov, Kirichenko, and Viktor and Valentina Brukhanov; Viktor Brukhanov, interview by Anton Samarin, “Chernobyl hasn’t taught anyone anything” [Чернобыль никого и ничему не научил], Odnako, April 26, 2010, www.odnako.org/magazine/material/chernobil-nikogo-i-nichemu-ne-nauchil-1/.
On the elevated concrete plaza: Maria Protsenko (chief architect for the city of Pripyat), author interview, Kiev, September 5, 2015. A photo of the placeholder monument can be seen at “Pripyat Before the Accident: Part XVI,” Chernobyl and Pripyat electronic archive, December 2011, http://pripyat-city.ru/uploads/posts/2011-12/1325173857_dumbr-01-prc.jpg.
2. ALPHA, BETA, AND GAMMA
Unimaginably dense: Robert Peter Gale and Eric Lax, Radiation: What It Is, What You Need to Know (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 12.
“the strong force”: Robert Peter Gale and Thomas Hauser, Final Warning: The Legacy of Chernobyl (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 6.
“neither mass nor energy”: Ibid.
In 1905 Albert Einstein: Ibid., 4–6.
580 meters above the Japanese city: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 711.
The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: Emily Strasser, “The Weight of a Butterfly,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists website, February 25, 2015; Jeremy Jacquot, “Numbers: Nuclear Weapons, from Making a Bomb to Making a Stockpile to Making Peace,” Discover, October 23, 2010.
Some seventy-eight thousand people died instantly: As a result of the chaos and destruction caused by the bombing, and uncertainty about the number of people present in the city at the time, figures for the total death toll directly attributable to the explosion vary significantly, and the true numbers will never be known. These figures are part of a “best estimate” for casualties from Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 408.
The atoms of different elements vary by weight: Gale and Hauser, Final Warning, 6.
Adding to or removing neutrons: Fred A. Mettler Jr., and Charles A. Kelsey, “Fundamentals of Radiation Accidents,” in Igor A. Gusev, Angelina K. Guskova, Fred A. Mettler Jr., eds., Medical Management of Radiation Accidents (Boca Raton, FL: CSC, 2001), 7; Gale and Hauser, Final Warning, 18.
Radiation is all around us: Craig Nelson, The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 3–4.
Radon 222, which gathers as a gas: Gale and Lax, Radiation, 13 and 17–18.
Polonium 210, a powerful alpha emitter: Ibid., 20.
It was also the poison: John Harrison et al., “The Polonium-210 Poisoning of Mr Alexander Litvinenko,” Journal of Radiological Protection 37, no. 1 (February 28, 2017). The FSB was organized in 1995 as the principal Russian state security service and the successor to the KGB.
Gamma rays—high frequency electromagnetic waves: Gale and Hauser, Final Warning, 18–19.
Severe exposure to all ionizing radiation: Mettler and Kelsey, “Fundamentals of Radiation Accidents,” 7–9; Dr. Anzhelika Barabanova, author interview, Moscow, October 14, 2016.
To the atomic pioneers: Gale and Lax, Radiation, 39.
“I have seen my own death!”: Timothy Jorgensen, Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation (Princeton, NJ: Pr
inceton University Press, 2016), 23–28.
In 1896 Thomas Edison devised: Ibid., 31–32; US Department of the Interior, “The Historic Furnishings Report of the National Park Service, Edison Laboratory,” 1995, 73, online at www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/edis/edis_lab_hfr.pdf. A photograph of the box can be found in Gilbert King, “Clarence Dally: The Man Who Gave Thomas Edison X-Ray Vision,” Smithsonian.com, March 14, 2012.
Even as the damage caused: Jorgensen, Strange Glow, 93–95.
In 1903 Marie and Pierre Curie: Gale and Lax, Radiation, 43–45.
Because radium can be mixed: Jorgensen, Strange Glow, 88–89.
A successful lawsuit: Gale and Lax, Radiation, 44.
Some radionuclides: Timothy Jorgensen, associate professor in the Department of Radiation Medicine at Georgetown University, author interview, telephone, June 19, 2016.
The survivors of the atom bomb: National Research Council, Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR VII Phase 2 (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2006), 141.
Of those who lived through the initial explosion in Nagasaki: Data provided by Masao Tomonaga (head of the Atomic Bomb Disease Institute at Nagasaki University), cited in Gale and Lax, Radiation, 52–57.
The effect of ionizing radiation: James Mahaffey, Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power (New York: Pegasus, 2009), 286–89 and 329–33. Also see Dwayne Keith Petty, “Inside Dawson Forest: A History of the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory,” Pickens County Progress, January 2, 2007, online at http://archive.li/GMnGk.
On August 21, 1945: Daghlian’s estimated whole-body dose was 5,100 millisieverts, equal to 510 rem. Jorgensen, Strange Glow, 111; James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima (New York: Pegasus Books, 2014), 57–60.
Admitted himself to medical care: A colleague of Daghlian’s at Los Alamos, Joan Hinton, recalls driving him to the hospital after he walked out of the building just as she happened to pull up in her car. See Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 54–55.
Attributed his death to burns: “Atomic Bomb Worker Died ‘From Burns,’ ” New York Times, September 21, 1945. See also Paul Baumann, “NL Man Was 1st Victim of Atomic Experiments,” The Day, August 6, 1985.
“the Article”: David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 213. The Soviet bomb’s American predecessor, the device detonated in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert in 1945, was known by the scientists who constructed it as “the Gadget.”
Noted by his secret police minders: Svetlana Kuzina, “Kurchatov wanted to know what stars were made of—and created bombs” [Курчатов хотел узнать, из чего состоят звезды. И создал бомбы], Komsomolskaya Pravda, January 10, 2013, www.kp.ru/daily/26012.4/2936276.
Initially modeled on the ones in Hanford: Although the production reactor was at first slated to follow a horizontal design like those in Hanford, it was ultimately based on a vertical design by the Soviet engineer Nikolai Dollezhal (Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 183; Schmid, Producing Power, 45).
Kurchatov had succeeded: Mahaffey, Atomic Awakening, 203. The full title of the book was Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945. Fifty thousand copies of the Russian translation were printed and made available to Soviet scientists (Josephson, Red Atom, 24).
Nuclear work was the responsibility: In Russian, the First Main Directorate was known as PGU, short for Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye. Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, translated by Ellen Dahrendorf (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 133; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf, 2004), 501–2.
By 1950, the First Main Directorate: Medvedev and Medvedev, Unknown Stalin, 134 and 162.
In direct proportion to the punishment: Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 218–19.
Only as a concession: Ibid., 347.
It was not until the end of 1952: Josephson, Red Atom, 20–26.
Theoretically capable of wiping out humanity: Gale and Lax, Radiation, 48.
Kurchatov was shaken: Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 307 and 317.
Part of an attempt to mollify: Stephanie Cooke, In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 106–11.
No one was especially surprised: Josephson, Red Atom, 173.
It marked the first time in twenty years: Cooke, In Mortal Hands, 113.
Just enough to drive a locomotive: Schmid, Producing Power, 97.
Arrested, imprisoned, and shot: Montefiore, Stalin, 652.
The First Main Directorate was reconstituted: Schmid, Producing Power, 45 and 230n29.
Newly appointed Soviet premier: Josephson, Red Atom, 11.
With the success of Atom Mirny-1: Ibid., 4–5.
The physicists who worked on AM-1: Paul Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture,” in Loren Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 174.
“near-mythic figures”: Josephson, Red Atom, 11. The Great Patriotic War was the name given to the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, beginning with the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941.
Not all that it seemed: Ibid., 25; Schmid, Producing Power, 45.
Atom Morskoy, or “Naval Atom”: Ibid., 46.
Inherently unstable: Josephson, Red Atom, 26–27.
Has even aligned spontaneously in nature: Evelyn Mervine, “Nature’s Nuclear Reactors: The 2-Billion-Year-Old Natural Fission Reactors in Gabon, Western Africa,” Scientific American, July 13, 2011.
30 billion fissions every second: Ray L. Lyerly and Walter Mitchell III, Nuclear Power Plants, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Atomic Energy Commission, 1973), 3; Bertrand Barré, “Fundamentals of Nuclear Fission,” in Gerard M. Crawley, ed., Energy from the Nucleus: The Science and Engineering of Fission and Fusion (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2016), 3.
“shakes,” for a “shake of a lamb’s tail”: Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History (Arlington, TX: Aerofax, 1988), 11.
Fortunately, among the remaining 1 percent of neutrons: World Nuclear Association, “Physics of Uranium and Nuclear Energy,” updated February 2018, www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/introduction/physics-of-nuclear-energy.aspx; Robert Goldston and Frank Von Hippel, author interview, Princeton, NJ, February 2018.
By inserting electromechanical rods: Goldston and Von Hippel, author interview, 2018.
To generate electricity: The first reactor in the United Kingdom was the GLEEP, or Graphite Low Energy Experimental Pile, which began operation at Harwell, Oxfordshire, in 1947. In the United States, the first experimental boiling water reactor was created by the Argonne National Laboratory in 1956. See “Nuclear Development in the United Kingdom,” World Nuclear Association, October 2016; and “Boiling Water Reactor Technology: International Status and UK Experience,” Position paper, National Nuclear Laboratory, 2013.
The first Soviet reactors: Frank N. Von Hippel and Matthew Bunn, “Saga of the Siberian Plutonium-Production Reactors,” Federation of American Scientists Public Interest Report, 53 (November/December 2000), https://fas.org/faspir/v53n6.htm; Von Hippel and Goldston, author interview, 2018.
It was a risky combination: Mahaffey, Atomic Awakening, 206–7.
Three competing teams: Josephson, Red Atom, 25; Schmid, Producing Power, 102.
But the Soviet engineers’ work: Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 347.
The more experimental: Josephson, Red Atom, 56.
The first major defect with their design: Ibid., 27.
When working normally: “RBMK Reactors,” World Nucle
ar Association, June 2016, www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/appendices/rbmk-reactors.aspx.
Revealed a fantastical vision: Igor Kurchatov, “Speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” in Y. N. Smirnov, ed., Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov in Recollections and Documents [Игорь Васильевич Курчатов в воспоминаниях и документах], 2nd ed. (Moscow: Kurchatov Institute/Izdat, 2004), 466–71.
Four different reactor prototypes: V. V. Goncharov, “The Early Period of USSR Atomic Energy Development” [Первый период развития атомной энергетики в СССР], in Sidorenko, ed., The History of Atomic Energy, p. 19; Schmid, Producing Power, 20.
But before construction could begin: Schmid, Producing Power, 22 and 26–27.
Like their counterparts in the West: Ibid., 18.
“too cheap to meter”: This infamous phrase was coined in September 1954 by Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S.’ Atomic Energy Commission, in a speech to the National Association of Science Writers, and has haunted the nuclear industry ever since. Thomas Wellock, “ ‘Too Cheap to Meter’: A History of the Phrase,” United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Blog, June 3, 2016.
Yet the sheer size of the Union: Schmid, Producing Power, 22.
Apparently convinced by Kurchatov’s promises: Ibid., 21. The first station, in its design stage in 1956, would become Novovoronezh nuclear power plant. The second, under construction since 1954, was the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station (103 and 275n125).
Construction costs skyrocketed: Ibid., 29.
In the meantime, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building: Ibid., 106 and 266n41; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 348.
The EI-2, or “Ivan the Second”: Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 348 and 443n16.
A new emphasis: Schmid, Producing Power, 34.
A toothy, young Queen Elizabeth II: The Atom Joins the Grid, London: British Pathé, October 1956, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVBGk0R15gA.
A costly fig leaf: In the film Windscale 1957: Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Disaster (Sarah Aspinall, BBC, 2007), British journalist Chapman Pincher says, “I believe there were times when it was taking electricity out of the grid rather than pumping it in.” See also Lorna Arnold, Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 21; and Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents, 181.
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