Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

by Piers Paul Read

  In the Soviet Union itself, not everyone shared Kurchatov’s vision. Khrushchev’s chief scientific adviser, Vladimir Kirillin, argued vigorously against atomic power because of the unsatisfactory return on the investment required. In contrast to the hydroelectric power stations planned at Bratsk on the Angara River, which would produce 4,500 megawatts of electricity, the experimental power station at Obninsk produced only five megawatts – insufficient for the plant’s own requirements. The nuclear power station planned at Beloyarsk was to produce a mere fifty megawatts.

  In his struggle with Kirillin, however, Kurchatov had the backing of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Beria might be dead, but the empire he had founded remained a state within a state, incorporating the burgeoning defence industries and with loyal allies in the ministry of planning, Gosplan, and the KGB. It could always play the trump card of the ideological imperative: when it became known that the Americans were developing a new type of reactor cooled by water held under pressure so that it could not boil, it was not difficult to persuade the Central Committee that the Soviets must do the same. Authorization was given for the construction of a new power station using a reactor of this kind at Novovoronezh, about thirty miles south of the city of Voronezh.

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  The man chosen to head the development of the pressurized water reactor was a scientist who had worked with Kurchatov throughout his career, Anatoli Alexandrov. Like Dollezhal, he too was a ‘bourgeois specialist’: his father had been a judge in the Ukraine until the Revolution of 1917, when he had changed his profession to that of a schoolteacher: a new species of justice required judges of a different kind. Showing an aptitude for physics, the young Anatoli had taken a post at the Roentgen Institute in Kiev. In due course, his work there attracted the attention of Abram Ioffe, who offered Alexandrov a job in his institute in Leningrad, working alongside the young Igor Kurchatov.

  In developing a pressurized-water reactor, Alexandrov faced a formidable task because the requirements for the large pressure vessels tested Soviet technology to its limits. As a result, the construction of Novovoronezh was delayed over and over again by problems with the reactor, and the Soviet government eventually decided to revert to conventional, fossil-fuelled power generation.

  When Kurchatov got wind of this, he drove straight from his institute to the Kremlin and there insisted that the Central Committee and Council of Ministers reconsider their decision. He argued forcefully that the Soviet Union must be in the vanguard of nuclear science. Was it not the first society in human history to be based upon scientific principles? Could they allow it to be shown that the world’s first Socialist society, the new civilization, built according to the precepts of Marx and Lenin, was incapable of matching the technological advances made in the decaying, capitalist West? Had not Lenin defined communism as Soviet power plus electrification? Then how could the application of science par excellence to the generation of electricity be abandoned for the coal and water that had been in use since feudal times?

  Kurchatov had his way: the resolutions were rescinded. When asked by a sceptical minister when they could hope to see tangible benefits from nuclear power, Kurchatov replied that for twenty-five or thirty years they should regard the programme as no more than an expensive experiment. Only then would the benefits become apparent; they would have to wait until around 1985.

  The debate about nuclear power focused on cost, not safety. Safety was never an issue; yet during these deliberations some members of the Central Committee, the military high command and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building had known that in 1957 there had been a catastrophic accident at Mayak. Radioactive waste had been stored a mile or so from the plants, in concrete tanks lined with stainless steel. These tanks had been cooled by water piped through their walls. In 1956 leaks of this coolant had been noticed, but nothing had been done to stop them. It had been assumed that the waste was stable, but it had dried out and, when ignited by a spark from a control device, chemicals had exploded – blowing the lid off the tank and sending twenty million curies of radioactive elements into the atmosphere.

  Most of the heavy particles had fallen back to the ground in the vicinity of the tanks, but around two million curies of lighter particles had been carried off by a southwesterly wind towards Sverdlovsk. No deaths were ascribed to the accident, but more than 10,000 people were evacuated and 250,000 acres of agricultural land laid waste.

  Two further accidents were to follow at Mayak: the first, when radioactive waste was dumped directly into the Techa River; the second, when the highly radioactive waters of an artificial lake used to cool the reactors were whipped up by a cyclone and spread over a large area of land around Kyshtym. Eight thousand people living on the banks of the Techa River were evacuated and many thousands of acres were made barren.

  All these accidents were hidden from the outside world. No one broke the code of omertà. It was not just the fear of the KGB but the esprit de corps of those who worked for the military-industrial complex under the aegis of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Patriotism, too, played its part. Few doubted their government’s propaganda that the Americans were preparing for a war to obliterate the new Socialist civilization. Irene, the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, and her husband, Jean-Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a pioneer of nuclear fission, were both Communists and on international questions followed the party line. So too did a large number of Western intellectuals like Louis Aragon and Jean-Paul Sartre; there was therefore no reason for the Soviet scientists to doubt the existence of saboteurs and spies. Closed cities like Mayak and Obninsk were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guarded by whole regiments of special troops.

  This esprit de corps was sustained by the favourable conditions within the perimeter. There were theatres and cinemas far superior to those found in other provincial cities. The flats were better built and the shops stocked with goods that were unobtainable elsewhere. Absolute discretion was maintained with both stick and carrot: no one wanted to betray his country, go to prison or lose his job.

  It was also noted that the accidents at Mayak had nothing to do with the reactors themselves. With such a new and advanced technology, it was impossible to anticipate every eventuality: the most important thing for the scientists was to learn from these mishaps about the effects of radiation, not so much to prepare them for further accidents but for the aftermath of the anticipated atomic war. An institute of biophysics was set up next to the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, which had laboratories at Mayak. A young radiobiologist, Leonid Ilyn, wrote his thesis on what he had learned after research in the area around Kyshtym on the absorption of radioactive strontium in meat. Kurchatov’s personal physician, a young woman called Angelina Guskova, at Mayak from 1948 to 1958, learned from the accident how best to treat victims of radiation sickness.

  In 1957, at the age of only fifty-four, Guskova’s principal patient, Igor Kurchatov, suffered a stroke. There was no specific link between this and the dose of radiation that he had inevitably accumulated in the course of his life, but the struggle to arm his country with an atomic bomb had meant years of incessant labour with great stress and little sleep. Even after the stroke he continued to work from a sanatorium, where three years later he suffered a second and fatal seizure while sitting on a bench next to a fellow physicist, Academician Khariton.

  Kurchatov died in the knowledge that his work was largely done. Not only was the Soviet Union armed with nuclear weapons, but it was committed to the development of nuclear power. From the small group of young scientists whom he had gathered around him in 1943, there had grown an enormous empire. His institute in Moscow employed ten thousand people; Obninsk was a city of one hundred thousand. Now not just the old institutions, like Ioffe’s Physical Technical Institute in Leningrad or the Roentgen Institute in Kiev, but every major university and technical college had its department of nuclear physics. The armed forces had their own facilities, from the testing grounds in the deserts of Kazakhstan to the
dockyards at Komsomolsk, where reactors were fitted into nuclear submarines. His service to his nation had been outstanding and was recognized by those in power: Nikita Khrushchev was one of the pallbearers who carried his coffin to his grave.

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  The man chosen to succeed Kurchatov as sovereign of his atomic empire was his companion from the early years in Leningrad, Anatoli Alexandrov. Now aged fifty-seven, he was a man whose scientific skills were augmented by a talent for administration and a natural authority – no doubt inherited from his father, the czarist judge. He was tall with a huge hairless head, pointed ears, an aquiline nose and a commanding manner. Already an academician, decorated with medals for the defence of Leningrad, Stalingrad and Sevastopol, the winner of an order of the Red Banner, an order of the October Revolution, three Heroes of the Soviet Union and four state awards, as director of the Kurchatov Institute Alexandrov now gained patronage of an unparalleled kind. It was he who now decided subordinate appointments and allocation of funds, research projects and trips abroad. As editor in chief of Atomenergo he controlled the publication of all the findings in the field of nuclear physics, and as director of the Kurchatov he could take advantage of the well-established practice of publishing papers written by his subordinates under his name.

  Alexandrov was also now a leading member of the unacknowledged aristocracy of Soviet society, into which only the inner circle of political leaders were admitted, along with a few favoured scientists, writers, artists and musicians. As an academician, he became entitled to a dacha and a larger flat in a better building; a further emolument was added to his salary as the director of an institute. With his family, he had access to special recreational facilities and medical care; his children could attend elite schools and coveted institutes of higher learning. There was a black chauffeur-driven Volga to take him from his flat to the Kurchatov Institute or to the beautiful Neskuchny Palace, which housed the presidium of the Academy of Sciences.

  Alexandrov was not alone among Kurchatov’s colleagues to be rewarded in this way. Dollezhal, too, was made a member of the Academy of Sciences and was now the director of his own bureau for designing atomic reactors, the Scientific Research Institute of Technical Energy Construction, or NIKYET. Never fond of each other, as each had been of Kurchatov, the two leaders of the nuclear industry were now further separated by the distance between their institutes and the vast armies of underlings each had at his command.

  The mutual antipathy of these two leaders of the atomic community did little to help solve the practical problems that, despite the growth of the theoretical institutes, continued to bedevil the industry. At the start-up of a new reactor at Mayak, Alexandrov himself had to take over control from an operator to prevent an accident. At the Kolski nuclear power station an operator happened to notice steam coming out of a pipe. The reactor was shut down, the pipe examined and a crack found in the moulded seam. Further checks were made, and twelve additional seams, which the inspectors had certified as sound, were discovered to be faulty.

  Deficiencies of this kind were particularly dangerous in the pressurized water (VVER) reactors and the projected fast-breeder reactors, where the coolant was liquid sodium, which, if brought into contact with water as a result of a ruptured pipe, would lead to both an explosion and a fire. The later VVER reactors had to be built with complex and expensive containment structures to prevent the spread of hazardous radiation in the case of an accident.

  Given the difficulties they faced in developing the VVER and fast-breeder reactors, it was a comfort to Alexandrov and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building to have the tried and tested design of the very first reactors at Mayak and Obninsk. If the VVERs were thought of as the gazelles of the industry, this old design was seen as the workhorse. It had proved so safe and reliable that there seemed no need for an expensive containment structure; and the industrial base required to build it had been in existence since the war. All that was required to increase its capacity was to increase its size.

  Following this reasoninig, there emerged from the drawing boards of Dollezhal’s institute plans for a ‘high-powered, boiling, channel-type reactor’ – the RBMK – which would generate one thousand megawatts of electrical power. Although it used the same graphite moderator, uranium fuel and water coolant as the early prototypes, there had been developments in the design. For example, the turbines at Obninsk had been driven by steam in a separate circuit, which had led to a considerable loss of thermal energy at the point where the heat was exchanged. At Beloyarsk, therefore, and in subsequent reactors of this kind, the steam came straight from the fuel channels of the reactor itself.

  The advantage of this design was not just the increase in efficiency but the more modest technological demands. The temperatures of the water and the pressure of the steam in the pipes had been substantially reduced, and the only defences considered necessary were watertight walls around the reactor and the circulation pumps, so that any leaks of radioactive steam or water could be fed into the tanks, known as the ‘bubbler pools’, beneath the reactor.

  Three airtight cylindrical containers filled with gas, water and sand surrounded the reactor itself. Between the reactor and the bubbler pool below there was a thick concrete floor, and above the reactor there was a neutron shield made of steel and concrete. It was seventeen metres in diameter, three metres thick, and perforated with holes to enable the fuel and control rods to enter the reactor. One of the advantages of the RBMK design was that it could be refuelled without being closed down.

  These safeguards, however, were to protect the operating personnel from the harmful radiation emanating from the reactor, not to contain a potential explosion. Although the graphite blocks surrounding the fuel channels were combustible, the worst hazard imaginable was the rupture of one or possibly two of the fuel rods, which could at most cause a localized leak of radioactivity. The reactor itself could always be kept stable by the 211 boron control rods, which when lowered into the reactor absorbed the neutrons and either slowed the rate of fission or brought it to an end.

  In the early 1960s approval was given for the construction of two RBMK-1000 reactors outside Leningrad. So confident were Alexandrov and Dollezhal of this design that they proudly described it in 1971 to the Fourth International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva. Even though the Leningrad reactors were not yet operational, the go-ahead had been given to build further reactors of the same type in other parts of the Soviet Union – among them Ignalina in Lithuania and Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

  The few misgivings expressed about the design, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, were either dismissed, overlooked or ignored. The Americans had used graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactors to produce plutonium, but not for civil power. British graphite-moderated reactors were cooled by CO2. The lack of a containment structure, and the danger of a ‘positive void coefficient’ were among the seven reasons given by the British Atomic Energy Authority as to why a RBMK-type reactor could not be licensed in the United Kingdom. There was also a considerable margin between theory and practice; for example, it took eighteen seconds to lower the control rods into the reactor core, although the physicists had said that it should take three.

  The enormous size of the active zone of the RBMK-1000 reactors worried Boris Dubowski, the man whom Kurchatov had appointed to head the department of nuclear safety at Obninsk. At a meeting in 1976 called to discuss safety at the RBMK reactor built near Kursk, he suggested that extra boron control rods be installed into the lower part of the reactor. In this he was supported by Alexandrov, and it was decided to recommend to Dollezhal’s bureau that this be incorporated into the design. But even though the measure had Alexandrov’s blessing and the chief nuclear safety inspector was present at the meeting, the modifications were never made. Like so many other measures during this period, which was to be called the era of stagnation, the idea travelled sluggishly through the clogged arteries of the obese Soviet administration, moving from
department to department and committee to committee in the vast bureaucracies of NIKYET and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, where a combination of the expense involved in making the changes and the apparent safety record of the RBMKs ensured that nothing was done.

  In addition, those who had called for the changes had other things on their minds. Dubowski himself, following an accident at Obninsk for which he was technically responsible, lost his position as head of the nuclear safety department, while the year before Alexandrov had been appointed president of the Academy of Sciences. This was a majestic achievement that not only recognized his accomplishments as a scientist but also revealed the continuing prestige of the military-industrial complex in the collective mind of the Central Committee. Unlike an atomic scientist in the West, Alexandrov was no mere back-room boffin who came up with clever ideas; he was a scientific leader, a general in command of battalions dedicated to the Bolshevik cause. New discoveries were made both to serve and to defend the new Soviet civilization, and with the glory came the usual perquisites of power. No longer was Alexandrov driven to and fro in a mere Volga; like General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev himself, he became eligible for a Zil. But unlike the party leader, who looked like a gorilla, Alexandrov, the judge’s son, had the haughty demeanour of a true aristocrat; and when he descended from his huge limousine to walk up the elegant staircase of the Neskuchny Palace, where he now reigned supreme, it was as if to the manner born.

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  Preoccupied now with his wider duties as president of the Academy of Sciences, Alexandrov delegated many of his powers as director of the Kurchatov Institute to his first deputy director, Valeri Legasov. A much younger man than Alexandrov, Legasov shared his leader’s zeal for the cause of their Communist country; but he was no ‘bourgeois specialist’, having been born after the Revolution into the privileged elite of Soviet society. His father, Alexsei Legasov, the son of an Orthodox priest, had been head of the ideological department in the secretariat of the Central Committee, which, like the Holy Inquisition in the Roman Catholic church, decided what conformed to the true faith. As a student, Valeri served on the committee of the Communist Youth organization, Komsomol, and in 1951 – impatient to do something dramatic for his country – he led brigades of students from the Mendeleev Institute, where he studied, to bring in the harvest in Siberia.