Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

by Piers Paul Read

  The work Valeri had first embarked upon at the Kurchatov Institute followed from his graduate research into the chemistry of noble gases. Drawing around him a team of able scientists like Vladimir Klimov and Nikolai Protzenko, he and his team rapidly made discoveries of a theoretical nature that had practical applications in industry and defence. His extraordinary capacity for hard work, for taking risks, for understanding and solving the problems that arose in the course of their research made Legasov the natural leader of his group. The position held by his father in the Central Committee gave him a confidence no ordinary Soviet scientist could afford: he would take risks in his research, and also mock the pomposity of the most eminent party leaders who visited the Kurchatov. He was a wonderful raconteur, and because of his access to foreign books and journals, which he would sometimes lend to his colleagues at the Kurchatov, he had a breadth of culture far greater than that of the general product of the Soviet educational system.

  Legasov rose rapidly in the hierarchy of the Kurchatov Institute: from senior researcher to head of the lab, from head of the lab to head of the department. Loyal to the system in which he fervently believed, and with ambitions beyond the realm of science, he served for a period as the institute’s Communist party secretary. This political zeal, combined with his scientific achievements, led to further promotions. For his work in applying fluoride chemistry to military technology, he was made a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. When Alexandrov was appointed its president in 1975, Legasov was his choice as first deputy director. From then on he became responsible for running the Kurchatov Institute, a position of power that made him both enemies and friends. To old friends like Protzenko, he became remote, distanced not just by his eminence, but by a coterie of ambitious sycophants who fawned on him to promote their own advancement.

  All the patronage that had been Alexandrov’s was now in Legasov’s hands. In the allocation of funds he made enemies, such as the physicist Yevgeny Velikhov, who led the team doing research into nuclear fusion. To Legasov, this was a dream that consumed billions of rubles from their budget; to Velikhov, Legasov was a chemist who, though his work might have led him into physics, was not qualified to rule on questions of this kind.

  Legasov also had to decide the petty but all-important question of which scientists should be sent to congresses and symposia in the West. Here race played a role; the Jewish scientists were considered too assiduous in putting themselves forward for perks of this kind. Legasov, who was Russian, held them back: by reason of equity, according to the Russians; from prejudice, according to the Jews. There was also rancour among many of his colleagues that Legasov had risen so far and so fast. The influence of Brezhnev was thought to be behind his promotion; Legasov remained the golden boy of the Central Committee. It was unquestionably satisfying for the party leadership to see the success of one of their own – to approve his appointment as a professor at the Physical Technical Institute of Moscow University, and in 1980, when he was only forty-four years old, to make him a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

  7

  It was not just the patronage of politicians, but his adoption by Alexandrov that made Legasov his heir apparent. Already over seventy when he was made president of the Academy of Sciences, it was beyond Alexandrov’s capacity to perform the functions that this office entailed, as well as direct an institute of ten thousand physicists and supervise atomic power throughout the Soviet Union.

  In 1979 a crisis arose in this domain because of an accident outside the Soviet Union. On 29 March at four a.m. at a nuclear power station at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a fault in the boiler feed system led to the lifting of a safety valve in a reactor primary-cooling circuit. This led to a loss of core-cooling water. Unaware of what had happened, the operators in the control room shut off the emergency cooling system, which had automatically come into operation. Water in the core of the reactor began to boil; the uranium fuel rods overheated and finally ruptured. When this critical situation was discovered two hours later, water was pumped into the reactor to restore core cooling. By the time the operators regained control of the reactor, the core was badly damaged, in part melted and slumped down, and the cooling water was highly radioactive. Little radioactivity escaped into the atmosphere, but thousands fled the vicinity of the reactor, and many people throughout the world lost faith in the assurances they had been given that nuclear power was safe.

  Although it was tempting for the Soviet leaders to gloat over the discomfiture of their rivals in America, they were aware of the skeletons hidden in their own cupboards. Nor did they wish to alarm their own people about the potential dangers of nuclear power. Thus instructions were given that little about the accident was to appear in the Soviet press.

  However, the facts were known to those academicians, like Nikolai Dollezhal, who had access to foreign journals, and later in the year, assisted by an economic specialist, Yuri Koryakin, he wrote an article on Soviet nuclear power that was published in the magazine Kommunist. He began with a description of the development of the industry to date and continued with assurances about its safety. ‘Designs of nuclear power stations,’ Dollezhal wrote, ‘take into account any kind of emergency situation, even hypothetical ones, so that later they cannot endanger the personnel at the plant or the environment.’ Soviet scientists, he insisted, ‘because they do not have any other interest but the interests of their people,’ always make technical decisions based ‘primarily on human considerations’ – unlike, he implied, the capitalist Americans, who were only interested in profit.

  Nevertheless, there were problems, notably with the processing of spent fuel and the disposal of nuclear waste. In words laden with significance for those who knew about the accidents at Mayak, Dollezhal reminded his readers that the handling of waste remained ‘a major problem.… This is why places for the regeneration of nuclear fuel are located far away from industrial areas and populated settlements.’ On the other hand, most of the planned nuclear power stations were to be built in the European part of the Soviet Union – west of a line drawn from the Volga to the Baltic, an area that contained 60 per cent of the country’s population. This meant that they were encroaching upon the most valuable land and damaging the environment. ‘The current principle of deployment,’ he warned, ‘could very quickly, in our opinion, lead to the exhaustion of the ecological capacities of the region.’

  Dollezhal and Koryakin estimated that the land required to build fifty nuclear power stations could grow enough food for several million people and that the amount of water lost through evaporation in the already fertile regions was in danger of damaging the ecological balance. The solution to the problem, wrote Dollezhal, was to build huge clusters of new nuclear power stations in the remoter areas of the Soviet Union – Siberia, the Arctic and the Far East – where water was plentiful and the land barren.

  Dollezhal’s article was immediately refuted by Alexandrov. Taking the unusual course of calling a press conference to which Western diplomats and foreign journalists were invited, Alexandrov insisted that atomic energy was completely safe. Dollezhal, he said, merely designed reactors, and his colleague Koryakin was an economist; how could either of them feel qualified to pronounce on nuclear technology? The suggestion that had been made by Dollezhal, and also by the nuclear physicist Academician Per Kapitsa, was dismissed by Alexandrov as absurd.

  Alexandrov’s reaction was not just the expression of an old man’s pride. The dispute between the academicians reflected differences between party leaders about how the development of the Soviet energy industry should proceed. Energy had always been seen as a measure of the strength of the Communist system itself, and the country’s appetite for power had grown at an accelerating rate since the end of the Second World War. Generating capacity, only 1.2 gigawatts in 1920, had risen to 11.2 gigawatts by 1940, reaching 295 gigawatts by 1983.

  Yet despite these dramatic increases, demand for power continued to exceed supply. Not only w
as Soviet industry profligate in its use of power, but the chief reserves of fossil fuels were to be found in Siberia, thousands of miles from the centres of industry in the European part of the Soviet Union. Added to this was the need for the Soviet Union to provide energy for its satellite countries in Eastern Europe, none of which had satisfactory sources of their own.

  The large coal mines in the Donbas region of the Ukraine and in the fields south of Moscow were rapidly becoming exhausted; the coal that remained was in deep seams that were expensive to exploit. Bringing coal from Siberia to replace these stocks already tied up 40 per cent of the freight on the country’s railways; to build more coal-fired power stations could only make things worse.

  There were alternative sources of energy in oil and gas, both of which could be piped from Siberia, where reserves were plentiful, but these were also the only commodities for which the Soviets could find a ready market abroad. With recurrent shortages of grain from poor harvests that had to be made up by purchases in hard currency on the international market, Soviet planners became loath to squander this precious asset on their own energy requirements. It seemed much more sensible to provide for the shortfall in energy by a rapid expansion of nuclear power.

  It was for this reason that the full authority of the Central Committee and the Soviet government came down on the side of Alexandrov. Dollezhal’s article, which some had seen as the beginning of a debate, turned out to be a flash in the pan. No further criticisms were published; Alexandrov, assisted by Legasov, made sure that the journal Atomenergo rejected any articles that dealt with the question of safety. In the numerous papers included in the twelve issues published between 1975 and 1987, none even referred to real or potential accidents in the industry.

  Privately, Legasov was concerned about the safety of various installations – chemical plants and thermal as well as nuclear power stations – in the event of war. The Israelis’ bombing of a Soviet-built reactor in Iraq had shown that there were potential nuclear hazards in a conventional war. Power might be cut off from the servomotors for the control rods and the pumps of the cooling system before the reactors could be shut down. However, he had no reason to suppose that under normal operating conditions the RBMKs were not entirely safe, and in November 1985 he co-wrote an article in the magazine Priroda reassuring its readers of the safety of the RBMK reactors.

  This was now the party line. The eleventh Five-Year Plan, launched by President Brezhnev in December 1980, accepted Alexandrov’s view that ‘the entire deficit in the fuel and power balance should be covered by a substantial expansion of atomic power.’ In 1981, at the Twenty-sixth Party Congress, it was stated that any expansion of electrical production in the European part of the USSR would be in the nuclear and hydroelectric sectors, and Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev’s successor as general secretary, confirmed to the presidium of the Central Committee that ‘the future of our power industry lies first and foremost in the use of the latest nuclear reactors.’

  8

  Alexandrov had triumphed and, given his present preeminence and past achievements, it was only appropriate that his eightieth birthday on 13 February 1983 should be a cause for several celebrations. In the Kremlin, a ninth Order of Lenin was awarded by Yuri Andropov himself. At the Academy of Sciences their president was acclaimed by a gathering of the nation’s most distinguished citizens; scientists, statesmen, even astronauts were there. His family gave a private party at home, while Legasov and his colleagues at the Kurchatov prepared elaborate festivities in the institute’s House of Culture – first a concert and speeches in the auditorium to which four hundred and fifty were invited; then a more select party in the restaurant.

  Someone noticed that there were eighty steps leading up from the entrance of the House of Culture to the auditorium, and so on each step they recorded the achievements appropriate to that year, and over the elevator – for some of Alexandrov’s old friends like Academician Khariton could hardly be expected to climb the eighty steps – they had painted a huge paw like that of a gorilla with the words, ‘A hairy hand did not push him to the top’ – a reference to the way in which the late General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had given preference to his family and friends.

  Accompanied by his wife and family, and with his loyal lieutenant, Valeri Legasov, at his side, Alexandrov took his place before the podium, and the festivities began. There were speeches full of praise for the distinguished physicist’s achievements; and even ribald jokes, as when Alexandrov’s wife complained that even now, at their advanced age, he pestered her with his attentions. This brought cheers from the audience of friends and admirers. It was his taste for red meat and vodka that did it! Then to round off the evening there was a competition: a box of chocolates for the first person to interpret the signalling flags that old friends from Alexandrov’s days in the navy had strung out as a backdrop on the stage.

  It was shameful: the old men could not remember. But then a little boy, Alexandrov’s grandson, sitting with his family on the front row, stood up and read what it said: ‘Keep going along the same lines for another eighty years, Anatoli Petrovich!’ He was right. There were more cheers. The boy went forward to collect the box of chocolates and was promised as an extra prize one of the three remaining hairs from his grandfather’s head.

  PART TWO

  CHERNOBYL

  For man must strive, and striving he must err.

  Johann Wolfgang Goethe

  Faust, Part I (1801)

  II

  1

  In the late 1960s, when it had become apparent that the demand for energy in the European part of the Soviet Union could not be met without an increase in nuclear power, the decision had been taken by the Council of Ministers of the USSR to end the monopoly of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and permit nuclear power stations to be commissioned and operated by the Ministry of Energy and Electrification. There was no change to the status of the RBMK-1000s that had already been built in Leningrad and Ignalina; and anything to do with nuclear power remained classified. The power stations that used nuclear reactors would have their own detachments of guards and departments of classified information run by the KGB, but they would no longer be confined to the military-industrial empire ruled by the ageing Efim Slavsky.

  Thus when a power station was to be built in the Ukraine, the choice of a site and of a director was left to the Ukrainian minister of energy and electrification. This man, Aleksei Makukhin, advised by experts from the Kurchatov Institute and NIKYET, Dollezhal’s bureau, looked for a site close to Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, where the electrical power was required.

  To the south of the city lay the valuable plains of black earth that, before the collectivization of agriculture by the Communists, had provided enough grain to feed the whole Russian empire and still export a surplus through Odessa. Fifty miles north, however, at the top of the huge artificial lake made by damming the Dnieper in the 1930s – one of the early triumphs of socialism – there was a region known as the Polessia. Here the Dnieper was joined by the Pripyat River where it emerged from the Pripyat marshes – a huge area of swamps, lakes and forests stretching five hundred miles into Belorussia and to the west to the Polish border. It was a neglected area with sodden, sandy soil, populated largely by peasants who in the 1930s had been forced into state or collective farms. They spoke their own dialect and, besides working for the state, cultivated their own plots of land.

  The administrative capital of the area was a small town called Chernobyl built on a spit of elevated land beside the Pripyat. Founded in the twelfth century by Prince Strezhiv from Kiev, it had developed, by the early 1960s, into a small regional centre with a hospital, a polytechnic institute, an agricultural college and a music school, as well as the cultural facilities found in any Soviet country town – a cinema, a library and a House of Culture. There were a few small industrial enterprises, some food-processing plants, and a shipyard to repair the river boats from the Pripyat and the Dnieper.

  T
he site chosen for the new power station was twenty kilometres to the north of Chernobyl, close to the Belorussian border, where the Pripyat River was crossed by the railway line that ran from Ovruc to Chernigov. It was to be named after Lenin, and the land was surveyed not just for the huge RBMK reactors and turbine halls, but for a new town to house the workers. In all, twenty-two square kilometres of land were transferred by government decree from the sovkhoz and kolkhoz – the state and collective farms – to the Soviet Ministry of Energy and Electrification.

  To direct this new enterprise, Makukhin recruited a man of only thirty-five named Victor Brukhanov. With a reputation for great competence as an engineer, Brukhanov was both diligent and ambitious. After graduating from the polytechnic institute in Tashkent, where he had been born to Russian parents, he had studied hard to master the new technology of turbine engineering, and when he became head of a workshop, he had joined the Communist party. When Makukhin offered him the job at Chernobyl he was deputy chief engineer at the Slavanskaya coal-fired power station.