The meeting started at 11.00 a.m. with Mikhail Gorbachev as chairman. First, Scherbina presented a report. Brukhanov was then invited to speak, and gave a brief explanation of what had occurred. Gorbachev asked him if he had known about the accident at Three Mile Island, and Brukhanov said that he had. He was impressed by the courtesy of the general secretary, noting that the higher the party official, the better he behaved. At the city level, they had snarled and shouted at him, at the district level they were a little more civil and here in the Kremlin, they were calm and polite.
The meeting continued until 7.00 p.m. At the end of it Gorbachev pronounced sentence: Brukhanov was dismissed from the party.
Brukhanov returned to Kiev with a foreboding that worse was to come. As a party member, he had been protected from arrest; this rule had been instituted by Khrushchev to prevent arbitrary action by the KGB. But now that he was no longer a party member, the legal process could begin. In Kiev, where a room had been reserved for him at the Leningrad Hotel, he was summoned each day to the office of the public prosecutor to draw up a statement, which when finished ran to ninety pages.
When it was completed, Brukhanov was driven back to the Pioneer camp, and it was only when he got there that he realized that he was no longer the director of the Chernobyl nuclear power station. No one told him, but he discovered that in his absence he had been replaced by Erik Pozdyshev. He still had some weeks’ holiday to his credit, so he remained at the camp for the rest of June and throughout July with nothing much to do. Occasionally he would travel to Kiev to visit his wife, who was in the hospital for a heart complaint.
When it was time to return to work, Brukhanov asked if he could work as deputy chief of the industrial-technical unit, but his request was refused. On 12 August, the deputy chief engineer, Smyshlyaev, told him that he was to report to room 203 at the prosecutor’s office at 10.00 a.m. the next day. There he was charged under two articles of the Criminal Code of the Soviet Union. The first, Article 220, Section 2, covered the breach of safety regulations at ‘explosive-prone enterprises or … workshops’; the second, Article 165, Section 2, covered the abuse of power for personal advantage, and related not to the accident itself but to the signing of a document containing false data on the levels of radiation that followed it.
There was a break for lunch. When Brukhanov returned, two men had joined the prosecutor’s team, and he was told that he was to be taken into custody by the KGB, where he would receive better treatment than if left in the hands of the militia. He complained that this was unnecessary because he was unlikely to abscond; only later did he realize that it was to prevent him from taking his own life. He was driven off in a jeep by the two officers from the KGB. When they reached the prison he gave up his belt, shoelaces and watch before being locked in a cell measuring two metres by four. There was a lavatory, a washbasin and, in the steel door, a spy hole, which opened every minute.
Brukhanov was to remain in this cell for a year awaiting trial.
On 21 July, before Brukhanov’s arrest, the Politburo’s full and final judgment was published in Pravda:
‘It was established that the accident occurred because of a whole series of crude violations of the rules for the operation of reactor installations that were perpetrated by the workers of this power station.’
Experiments on the turbogenerators had been carried out without coordination or authorization from the appropriate organizations, and while they were being carried out, proper control was not exercised and appropriate measures were not taken. Both the Ministry of Energy and Electrification and the State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry were chastised for allowing such laxity at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, which had led to the deaths of twenty-eight people, the sickness of many more, the destruction of a reactor, the pollution of one thousand square kilometres of land, all to a value of around three billion rubles.
Promising to hand over the evidence collected by its own inquiry to the prosecutor’s office, the Politburo then announced the sentence it had served on those held responsible. Yevgeny Kulov, the chairman of the State Committee for Safety in the Atomic Power Industry; Gennady Shasharin, the deputy minister of energy and electrification; Alexander Meshkov, Slavsky’s first deputy minister of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building; and Professor Ivan Yemelyanov, Dollezhal’s deputy director at NIKYET, were all dismissed from their posts. Anatoli Mayorets, the minister of energy and electrification, would have been dismissed if he had not been in his post for such a short period of time; as it was, he received a severe reprimand and was threatened with more serious punishment if he did not learn from his mistakes. Only Victor Brukhanov was expelled from the party. The fates of lesser figures, such as Dyatlov and Fomin, were left to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine. No disciplinary measures were taken against any scientists at the Kurchatov Institute.
9
This apparently impartial investigation by the Politburo, followed by the punishment of the culprits, cleared the decks for the Soviet team led by Legasov to present its case in Vienna. Few remarked upon the inherent contradiction in the Politburo’s judgment: if the accident was caused by the breach of safety regulations by the operators, which in turn derived from the failings of Brukhanov, then why punish Dollezhal’s deputy, Professor Yemelyanov, or Slavsky’s deputy, Alexander Meshkov, at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building?
On 25 August the meeting of the world’s experts on atomic energy was convened by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. In the four months since the accident, Chernobyl had aroused an obsessive and terrified curiosity throughout the world, so that as well as delegates from the accredited governments, thousands of correspondents descended on the ornate capital of the former Austrian empire.
It was sometimes a struggle to attend the deliberations, for there were only four hundred seats for delegates from 150 accredited governments. Legasov arrived with a large team, among them Guskova, Ilyn and Abagyan. The United States was limited to eighteen delegates, and so in order to attend, an independent expert on atomic safety, Professor Richard Wilson, first arranged to be included in the Kuwaiti delegation and then, when this was considered inappropriate by the State Department, was accredited as a correspondent of the British scientific magazine Nature.
The conference opened with Legasov’s report; he spoke without faltering for over five hours. After a prologue expressing Gorbachev’s good intentions, he proceeded to describe the RBMK reactor without mentioning any deficiencies in its design. He listed the different safety systems, suggesting that the comparatively slow rate at which the independent regulatory rods were inserted into the core when the emergency system was triggered ‘was offset by their large number.’ He described the tests made on the turbines in the early morning of 26 April, how the power surged out of control, leading the operators to press the emergency AZ button, but how ‘in the conditions that had now arisen, the violations committed by the staff had seriously reduced the effectiveness of the emergency protection system. The overall positive reactivity appearing in the core began to increase. Within three seconds the power rose above 530 megawatts, and the total period of the excursion was much less than twenty seconds. The positive void coefficient worsened the situation.’
In analysing the causes of the accident, Legasov insisted that ‘the design of the reactor facility provided for this type of accident, with allowance for the physical characteristics of the reactor, including a positive steam void coefficient of reactivity.’ He then listed ‘the most dangerous violations of the operating rules committed by the staff of the fourth unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant: … The chief motive of the staff was to complete the tests as expeditiously as possible. The failure to adhere to instructions in preparing for and carrying out the tests, the noncompliance with the testing programme itself and the carelessness in handling the reactor facility are evidence that the staff was insufficiently familiar with the special features of the tech
nological processes in a nuclear reactor and also that they had lost any feeling for the hazards involved.’
The designers had not provided a protective safety system to prevent an accident of this kind because they never envisaged ‘the deliberate switching off of technical protection systems coupled with violations of the operating regulations’; they had ‘considered such a conjunction of events to be impossible. Thus, the prime cause of the accident was an extremely improbable combination of violations of instructions and operating rules committed by the staff of the unit.’
Next, Legasov described the measures taken to protect the population from the effects of the accident, and announced that 135,000 people had been evacuated from the Pripyat and the surrounding zone. ‘As a result of these and other measures, it proved possible to keep population exposures within the established limits. The radiological effects on the population in the next few decades were evaluated. The effects will be insignificant against the natural background of cancerous and genetic diseases.’
It was a virtuoso performance and was greeted with great acclaim. Together with the charts, diagrams and statistics provided by the Soviets, the impression was given that the full and frank disclosure promised by Gorbachev had been delivered. ‘At last,’ said the headline in a Viennese newspaper, ‘a Soviet scientist who tells the truth.’ Not only did Legasov seem to speak with much greater candour than the world had come to expect from behind the Iron Curtain, but there were moments when emotion showed through the traditionally impersonal manner of the Soviet spokesman – for example, when Legasov said that the commission would like to have heard more from one of the operators (Akimov), ‘but unfortunately he died.’
The next day it was Guskova’s turn to describe the treatment that had been given to her patients in Hospital No. 6. Some of the cases made medical history: no one had imagined that someone as severely irradiated as Piotr Palamarchuk or Anatoli Tormozin could survive. Robert Gale was with the United States delegation when Guskova stated that this was not due to, bone-marrow transplants, which both men had rejected. He felt that political pressure had been put on Guskova to downgrade American assistance.
Given the publicity he had received in his own country, Gale had become something of a hero. He seemed to symbolize the superiority of American medicine, and hence the American way of life. Therefore it was galling to hear from Guskova that while the Soviets were grateful for his help, and particularly for the equipment donated by Armand Hammer, it had not actually saved a single life.
Guskova, on the other hand, who had been annoyed by the way Gale, an expert on bone-marrow transplants, had been presented by the media as a specialist on radiation sickness, noted with some satisfaction that her fellow specialists on the American delegation seemed to share her irritation with the man.
After Guskova, there was an address by the jovial Armenian, Professor Armen Abagyan. His institute, albeit under the umbrella of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, was nevertheless distinct from either Dollezhal’s bureau or the Kurchatov Institute. Specifically set up after the accident at Three Mile Island to supervise safety in the atomic industry, it had recognized the deficiencies in the RBMK’s design, but given the climate at the time, did not insist on its analysis of the accident appearing in Legasov’s report.
Indeed, Abagyan, when questioned by experts from Canada about the emergency-shutdown systems operating at Chernobyl, avoided answering; to the anger of many of the delegates, he appeared to pretend that he did not understand. When asked what measures would be taken against those responsible for the accident, he replied that punishment did not fall within his area of expertise. It was as close as he could come to suggesting that the operators alone were not to blame.
Wednesday, 27 August, was an open day during which experts from different countries could question their Soviet colleagues. Professor Wilson approached two members of the Soviet delegation – a professor from the Institute of Applied Geophysics and a young researcher from the Kurchatov – and asked if he could compare his own data on the release of radioactivity with theirs. There followed an open and straightforward discussion that lasted for three hours. They described their methodology to Wilson; it broadly coincided with his, but when he checked the total recorded emission with the sum of figures on the printout, he found that they did not match.
The two Soviets looked confused and told Wilson that there must have been some mistake in the calculation. In reality, six pages covering the serious contamination of the area north of Gomel had been removed. Wilson was later told that this had been done on Legasov’s instructions.
IX
1
While the political damage done by Chernobyl was contained at Vienna, work continued on the site to clear up the mess. On 11 May, Ivan Silayev, who had succeeded Boris Scherbina as chairman of the government’s Chernobyl commission, broadcast to the nation that ‘the main threat from the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power station has gone.’ Academician Velikhov, also without spelling out quite how terrible things might have been, confirmed that ‘we really do see today that we are not threatened by the major catastrophe we feared.’ Now they would move on to the next stage, ‘which consists of total – well, putting it crudely – deactivation of the territory, and the conservation and encapsulation of all the radiation.’
After the blanket of secrecy that had covered Chernobyl in the weeks following the accident, a policy of relative glasnost now prevailed. On 17 May on Moscow television Silayev described in some detail the building of the heat exchanger under the damaged reactor, a ‘concrete cushion’, and announced the construction of a structure to entomb the radioactive core. He called it ‘a sarcophagus … a huge container, let us say, which will enable us to secure the burial of everything that remains of the radioactive fallout of this entire accident in general, so that it can be reliably contained and supervised and will not give rise to any doubts whatsoever.’
To design this sarcophagus, Silayev enlisted a team from the Leningrad All-Union Research, Design and Development Institute of Power Engineering. It was a complex task, not simply because the sarcophagus had to be built in such hazardous conditions but because the corpse to be buried was still twitching; plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,360 years. The graphite had burned out, and the temperature in the core had declined to about 270°C, but the fuel was still there in an unknown condition. It required no oxygen for fission to resume; therefore it could not simply be buried. The sarcophagus would have to contain the radiation, yet have apertures for ventilation and observation.
Nor was the core itself the only source of highly dangerous radioactivity. Lumps of graphite and fragments of the fuel itself had been spewed out by the explosion. These were difficult to find, and it was highly dangerous to walk around the site waiting for the needles on the dosimeters to jump to a level of two thousand rads per hour.
General Pikalov, commander of the chemical troops, developed a better method. The day after he arrived at Chernobyl, his men had taken aerial photographs of the power station, which were then collated to form a photographic map of the whole area. On this Pikalov noticed small glowing spots, which were discovered to be fragments of nuclear fuel. These were covered with rubble, concrete and concrete slabs by the arm of the tracked EMR2 reconnaissance vehicles, and by eighteen-ton remote-controlled bulldozers that had been flown in from Chelyabinsk in cavernous Ilyushin 76 transport aircraft.
More problematic were the lumps of highly radioactive graphite that lay on the roof of the third unit. The Soviet Union did not possess the robotic equipment to throw them over into the crater of the ruined reactor, so small mobile robots were purchased from Germany and flown to Chernobyl. They did not work. The bitumen roof was too soft; the robots either got stuck on the mushy surface or were stopped by the blocks of graphite themselves.
There was only one solution: the task had to be done by humans. The dosimetrists made the calculations. Wearing protective clothing, one chemical trooper could spend b
etween one and two minutes on the roof before accumulating a dose of twenty-five rems. Pikalov, who had faced German bullets at the age of fifteen, saw no reason to doubt a comparable heroism in the young men under his command. The enemy might be invisible, but the call of their Soviet motherland was the same.
It was done. Television cameras were set up so that the officers could show their men where they should go and what they should do. The soldiers wore special lead plates to protect their testicles, hands, feet, chests and backs; goggles and respirators covered their faces. Like contestants in a grotesque race, the young soldiers in their costumes weighing 55 lbs climbed the staircase leading up to the roof; then, one after the other, each man ran out with a shovel, scooped up the graphite or fuel-rod fragments, rushed to the edge, threw the lumps over into the abyss and ran back to take cover behind the concrete wall. ‘Whoever you speak to,’ Silayev reported to the cameras of Moscow television, ‘they say, “We understand what the homeland requires of us and we will do it.” Therein lies the heroism of our Soviet man.’
At times Soviet man required reassurance; with as many as 260,000 men working over the months as liquidators in the zone, not all showed the same degree of courage or insouciance. Pikalov’s troops became afraid that the food they were given was contaminated, and the general had to go to their camp and eat from the common pot. Detachments were summoned from all the Soviet republics, and some were reluctant to go – particularly those from the Baltic states. In Latvia wives tried to prevent their husbands from leaving home by locking the doors of their flats. Members of the Estonian brigade were so dissatisfied with their encampment, and the absence of dosimetric data to show the risk they were taking, that they rioted and marched to the railway station, ignoring their officers’ commands. Subsequently there were rumours – broadcast by the Voice of America but emphatically denied by the Soviets – that the twelve leaders of this demonstration had been shot.
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