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.
The 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.
It was a wonderful opportunity for such a young man. When Brukhanov first arrived in the town of Chernobyl, the whole enterprise consisted of nothing more than some plans in a briefcase and a rubber stamp. He took a room in the only hotel and then drove with Makukhin to the site where construction was due to begin. It was winter and there was snow up to their knees when Brukhanov drove the first wedge into the ground.
To begin with, Brukhanov had a hundred men and women working under him, and he had to find somewhere for them to live. He got hold of some rudimentary mobile homes – wooden huts on small metal wheels – and established a small settlement in a clearing in the woods. In August of 1970 he himself went to live there and was joined by his wife, Valentina, her mother and their two children.
Brukhanov soon realized that he had taken on awesome responsibilities. He had to supervise the construction of both the power station and the town to house the workers; and before either could be started he had to build sidings for the delivery of supplies and a plant to make the cement. Every month he had to certify expenditures, which started at 77,000 rubles per month and rose over the years to 120 million. Often he had to fiddle the accounts because the plans he was given were impractical. While waiting for the planned supermarket to be built, he found the money for smaller shops to sell groceries to the workers.
Goods came by rail to the sidings, and the enterprise could be fined if it did not release the rolling stock in a short space of time. Yet before the materials could be accepted their specifications had to be checked, and often they were discovered to be deficient. Caught between the demands of the planners on the one hand and the shortcomings of the suppliers on the other, Brukhanov found that he was expected to perform a superhuman task.
The initial plan for the power station was produced by a number of different institutes. The overall design, first drawn up by Elektroprojekt in the Urals, was later taken over by Zukh-Hydroprojekt in Moscow, whose expertise was principally in hydroelectric power. The plans for the reactor came from Dollezhal’s bureau, NIKYET.
Although it was a tried and tested design, the simple expedient of increasing the reactor’s output by increasing its size had led to an engineering project of gigantic dimensions. The reactor core was a huge graphite block weighing 1,700 tons. Like an immense honeycomb, it was penetrated by large-diameter machined holes: 1,661 channels for fuel assemblies – zirconium alloy tubes filled with pellets of uranium – and a further 211 channels for the boron control rods, which, when lowered into the core, absorbed the neutrons and either reduced the rate of fission or brought it to an end.
A plethora of piping brought water from six huge pumps into each of the fuel channels, where it was turned into a mixture of steam and scalding water by the heat generated by the nuclear fission. It then rose into drums, where the steam and water were separated, the steam going on to the turbines to generate electricity while the water returned to be recirculated through the reactor core.
Besides this principal circuit taking water through the reactor, there was a secondary circuit carrying water from reservoirs through the condensers, and an emergency core-cooling system designed to protect the fuel assemblies should the main system fail or prove insufficient. This required piping and pumps of its own, and although it was considered an advantage of the RBMK’s design that the rupture of a fuel assembly caused by overheating and consequent melting of the zirconium casing could be contained within a single channel, and that the water and steam were never under great pressure, it was still essential that every seam, every valve and every metre of piping should be flawless, and every installation entirely sound.
What Brukhanov discovered, however, was that the parts specified by the designers were frequently impossible to find. The industrial base existed to build the RBMK-1000s, but its productive capacity had not kept pace with the expansion of nuclear power. The Chernobyl nuclear power station had to compete with the other RBMKs being built at Ingalina and Kursk by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. This huge, secretive institution had long-standing links with suppliers and could exert the kind of pressure that came from its contacts with the armed forces and the KGB. Retaining its monopoly in the mining and processing of uranium, upon which all nuclear power stations depended, it also controlled the production of gold and precious stones. This wealth put Slavsky’s officials in a strong position when negotiating with other branches of industry or the planners at Gosplan.
Outbid in this way by his rivals, yet under great pressure to launch the first unit by 1975, Brukhanov was frequently obliged to manufacture the components he needed in workshops built on site. This encouraged a spirit of improvisation, which, though common enough in Soviet industry at the time, was dangerous when it came to nuclear power.
2
Besides this unfair competition with the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, Brukhanov had to deal with the anomalies of the Soviet system itself. First of all, there was the Communist party, which acted as a shadow administration in every social, political, industrial or cultural structure. With few exceptions – Dollezhal was one – anyone who wished to hold a position of authority was expected to join the party, and, once a member, he became answerable to those above him in the party organization. Thus Brukhanov had to report not just to the officials of the Ministry of Energy and Electrification but also to the regional party committee in Kiev. It was the regional committee he feared most, because in the Soviet Union the party had a monopoly of power. In theory one could move from one job to another, or from the management of an industrial enterprise into the civil service, but wherever one worked, one’s prospects depended upon one’s standing in the party – and, of course, clearance by the KGB.
Although some idealists were still to be found in the party hierarchy, the majority of those who parroted Leninist slogans did so to further their own careers. Besides the glory of holding high office, there were more tangible benefits, like a higher salary, better house, a car, reserved shopping facilities, holiday hotels and sanatoriums, passports and hard currency for travel abroad, and access to the best educational opportunities for their children. However, promotion came only with performance, and for this the apparatchiks depended upon Brukhanov.
A small, curly-haired man with a mild manner, Brukhanov was ill-equipped to stand up to the party bosses in Kiev. The kind of brutality that had been found in the Communist officials who had administered Stalin’s terror in the 1930s had evolved forty years later into a bullying manner, crude language and a threatening tone of voice. It was said that you could always tell a party functionary because he had the face of a truck driver but the hands of a pianist. ‘What is the first thing you want to do when you reach the top?’ asked Mikhail Zhvanetsky, the Jewish humourist from Odessa. ‘Spit down!’
To cover up their shortcomings, the party bosses took advantage of the dogma that the party could never err. In implementing the most recent Five-Year Plan, they were merely obeying the will of the party, as made manifest in the most recent Congress or a decree of the Central Committee. Its leaders, as the heirs to Marx and Lenin, were not only politically all-powerful, but morally infallible too. It was therefore impossible for Brukhanov to criticize the Plan. Since the party was always right, anyone who failed it was by definition either a criminal or a saboteur, and any criticism that suggested that there were shortcomings in socialism was counterrevolutionary.
Everyone knew that the party’s rhetoric was false; they learned to live with lies. A large part of the population withdrew into itself, with little expectations of life outside a small circle of family and friends. Already possessed of the Slav temperament – moody and sentimental, passionate yet apathetic, prone to hypochondria and self-dramatization, and with little love of work for its own sake – they ignored the collectivist slogans that were put out by the party and brandished on banners above public buildings. C. G. Feifer, an American correspondent in Russia at the time Brukhanov was building the power station at Chernobyl, remarked that no one he knew felt driven to get a job done, or even to go to work when not in the mood. The foreman could usually be persuaded to overlook an odd day’s absence: a favour to be returned in due course with a bottle of vodka or a dozen eggs from one’s mother-in-law’s dacha. But even if one went to work, little was done. ‘On a given day, in any one office,’ Feifer was told, ‘eighty per cent of the staff are in the corridor gossiping, going out to pee or comb their hair, or making a glass of tea.’
Besides this general distaste for hard work, there were particular difficulties with the work force at Chernobyl. Gone were the days when red banners on the construction site or exhortatory Bolshevik slogans would inspire heroic achievements. Makeshift accommodations in the middle of nowhere had not attracted either skilled or experienced workers. The workers were mostly young, and the quality of their workmanship was poor. The head of construction, Vasili Kizima, was a tough and determined man, but neither threats nor exhortation could provide skills for the unskilled or persuade them to spend their evenings going to night school rather than getting drunk.
These problems with both labour and supplies meant that construction at Chernobyl fell behind schedule. After only a year as director, Brukhanov bitterly regretted that he had ever taken the job and tendered his resignation. It was refused. He remained as director and, leaving the problems of construction to Kizima, started to recruit the operating personnel.
3
The most important post to be filled was that of chief engineer. Because of the rapid expansion of the industry, there was competition for the best men, and Brukhanov’s first choice left soon after his appointment to work for the Nuclear Safety Committee in Moscow. His successor, Akinfiev, came from the same military facility in Tomsk where Academician Legasov had worked in the 1960s. To head the turbine unit, Brukhanov hired a man named Taras Plochy, whom he knew from his days at the Slavanskaya power station. Nikolai Fomin, a Russian from the Donets region, was made head of the electrical workshop; like Plochy, his background was in conventional power generation, and there were whispers that Brukhanov chose his deputies from his own field because he felt intimidated by specialists in the nuclear sphere.
In the summer of 1973, during his summer vacation, a nuclear engineer named Anatoli Dyatlov came to Chernobyl prior to applying for a job at the nuclear power station at Kursk. On Akinfiev’s recommendation, Brukhanov offered Dyatlov the post as deputy head of the reactor workshop. With many years’ experience installing small VVER reactors into nuclear submarines in the Soviet Far East, Dyatlov came with the highest recommendations: the management at Chernobyl was delighted to snatch him from under the eyes of their rivals at Kursk.
Besides his qualifications as a nuclear specialist, Dyatlov was politically sound – a good example to the younger workers of how a man from the humblest background could flourish under socialism. He was the son of a Siberian peasant whose job had been to light the buoys each night on the Yenisey River. At fourteen, when his father died and the village school closed for lack of students, he ran off to Norilsk, a city in the Arctic Circle that in winter hardly saw the light of day. There, after four years at a vocational school, he worked as an electrician, studying by night to qualify for further education. In time, he won a place at the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physical Engineering. It meant that his wife had to live with her parents in Vladimir: for six years Dyatlov lodged in a student dormitory and only saw his family on weekends. In 1959 he graduated and went back east, this time to Komsomolsk on the Amur.
This majestic river, which for a thousand miles forms the border between China and the USSR, flows into the sea of Okhotsk by the island of Sakhalin. Two hundred miles inland is the city of Komsomolsk, founded in 1932 as part of the first Five-Year Plan. Built by Komsomol volunteers, by the 1960s it had grown into a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, with oil refineries, steel works and heavy engineering. It was here, in the greatest secrecy, that the small VVER reactors developed by the Kurchatov Institute were fitted to Soviet nuclear submarines.
In the naval shipyards, it was Dyatlov’s task to assemble the active zones of these reactors and then test them both on shore and at sea. He liked the work. He was well paid by Soviet standards; he could afford to send his family on holidays to Russia, the Caucasus or the Crimea, although he could rarely go with them because it was in summer that the submarines underwent trials in the Sea of Japan.
Dyatlov rose to be the head of the physics lab, leading a team of young nuclear engineers. He was a difficult man to work for – demanding, despotic and aloof. Having reached his present position by dint of his own efforts and innate intelligence, he was intolerant of the shortcomings of others: His knowledge was not limited to science; he loved literature and had collected the entire Library of World Literature that Maxim Gorky had started in the 1930s. But despite his arrogance and tactlessness, he inspired admiration as well as fear in the younger engineers. He was an outstanding nuclear specialist, and they were eager to learn from him. Some compared him to a snake that mesmerizes its victims; it would never occur to any of those who worked under him to question what he said.
Komsomolsk was not a pleasant place to live. It was devoted to its industries; the cultural amenities were poor. Almost everyone who worked there hoped to move on after a couple of years. For a time Dyatlov was the exception; only after more than ten years did he start to feel restless and consider looking for another job.
By the time Dyatlov started work at Chernobyl the construction of the first two units was well under way and plans had been drawn up for two more. ‘The bigger the better’ had become an axiom of Soviet planners, and it applied not just to the enormous generating capacity of each unit but also to the number of them at any one location; by the mid-1980s there were six RBMK-1000 reactors either operative or under construction at Chernobyl.
The building that arose was huge and bland. A rectangular white block like a large shoe box housed the turbine halls, while the reactors were built in the square wings. Inside these geometric shapes was a mass of piping and machinery, but the exterior was clean and smooth. When the four units were completed, there were three chimneys – one, by the fourth unit, painted red and white – and outside the building there were clusters of pylons carrying the electricity to Kiev and beyond.
On either side of the power station were smaller buildings – stores and workshops of various kinds – and near the first unit was the administrative block where Brukhanov had his office. In the basement of this block was a series of interconnected rooms known as ‘the bunker’: living quarters, a communications centre and a clinic for use in the event of an emergency.
Seeing the power station for the first time was always extraordinary for those who came to work there because this temple to modern technology was set in such a backward part of the world. On the road from Kiev, visitors would pass through a landscape of ponds, slow-flowing rivers and huge marshy meadows. Solitary peasant women, scarves tied tightly around their heads, tended herds of cows, as their ancestors had done for hundreds of years, while their husbands brought back their crops from the fields in horse-drawn carts. The only signs of the twentieth century were the occasional tractor or motorbike with a sidecar, and the long lines of pylons carrying power across the mournful landscape towards the pine forests to the north.
While the peasants who lived around Chernobyl spoke their own dialect and had lived there in ancient wooden cottages for many generations, the dazzling new town of Pripyat, which grew up only two kilometres from the gigantic power station, was inhabited by people from all over the Soviet Union. It was a young town – the average age of the inhabitants was around twenty-six – and exemplified the Soviet way of life. It was well planned, with well-spaced, eighteen-story blocks of flats. There were shopping centres, sports facilities, five schools, three different swimming pools and a permanent amusement park with a Ferris wheel. The city soviet, or town hall, was known as the ‘White House’, and besides a hotel with two hundred beds, called the Polessia, there was a government guest house with 104 rooms and four suites for visiting party grandees.
There was no church, of course, but there was a cultural centre for poetry readings and theatrical productions, as well as cinemas and excellent libraries. The town was well placed. To those who had lived in faraway places like Komsomolsk, Pripyat seemed to be at the heart of the nation. Kiev was only two and a half hours away by hydrofoil, and it was only a long day’s drive to Moscow, Minsk, Moldavia or the Black Sea. To those who had queued for scarce groceries in some of the larger cities, Pripyat was a place of abundance. Thanks to energetic lobbying by Brukhanov, the shops were full of food; in one butcher’s store, a newcomer counted fourteen different kinds of meat and sausage! And if an item could not be found in Pripyat, it was a simple matter to drive over the border into Belorussia, where food was always in good supply.
Better than the abundance of food or the facilities, however, was the proximity of the countryside. In a nation so recently industrialized, where most of the scientists and engineers were either the children or grandchildren of peasants, it was common to feel a strong bond with nature. In Pripyat, there was no pollution – nuclear fission gives off no fumes – and the town was surrounded by forest. A short walk or bicycle ride found the operators of the nation’s most sophisticated technology among the birches and pine trees, fishing in the many rivers and lakes, collecting berries or mushrooms or letting their children run wild in the woods and bathe in the river.
The society there was also relatively egalitarian. The bosses had their perks, of course: Brukhanov was driven around in a white Volga and also had a dacha; but in Pripyat his flat on Lenin Street looked like all the others. There were rumours that it had been surreptitiously enlarged by the builders at the expense of his neighbours, and that a blue bathroom suite, intended for the Palace of Culture, had been appropriated for the director, but even if true, these were modest forms of privilege and corruption.
Indeed Brukhanov, who as director was responsible for the city, was much liked by the people of Pripyat. Not only was he free of the bullying manner so common in other leaders but he exerted every effort to make Pripyat a pleasant place to live. While in most other Soviet cities there was a waiting list of many years for housing, a family moving to Pripyat was soon allocated a flat; Brukhanov had calculated, quite accurately, that this was more important than any wage differential in attracting the best workers to the Chernobyl power station. He had also made sure that the shops were well stocked, and he had used spare supplies of steel to make greenhouses so that his people could have access to the unheard-of luxury of fresh tomatoes. Because of his passion for roses, they had been planted in abundance in the municipal flower beds. Every aspect of life in the community was his responsibility; for example, when a fireman, Leonid Shavrey, wanted to buy a motorbike he had to apply to Brukhanov in person for permission. When a light bulb in a street lamp failed, it was Brukhanov who was informed and Brukhanov who had to get it changed. He worked so hard to live up to his responsibilities that the chief disadvantage of his solicitousness was not immediately apparent: by directing so much of his energy to ensuring a good life in Pripyat, he was distracted from running the power station.
5
In 1976, as the first unit was nearing completion, a group of young graduates from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute arrived at Chernobyl and went to live in the wooden huts of the forest settlement. With the dearth of experienced engineers like Dyatlov, many of the specialists came straight from the universities and polytechnics in this way: they were young men who had learned the theory behind the generation of nuclear power and certain basic skills, but who had also been taught a conformity and respect for authority found in all branches of the Soviet educational system. They had not been encouraged to show initiative or display a spirit of inquiry. Nor did they have access to training with simulators, which were available to young nuclear operatives in the West. They had to be trained on the job by the older engineers. Kizima, the head of construction, described Chernobyl as ‘the first university of atomic construction’.
Some were bright. Students who graduated at the top of their class could express a preference for where they wanted to work, and Chernobyl was often their first choice. They were from the most diverse backgrounds, reflecting the ethnic and national variety of the Soviet Union. Nikolai Steinberg, who came straight from the Moscow Institute of Electrical Engineering with a degree in hydraulic physics, was a Jew from Odessa; the first language of his grandfather, a banker, had been French. Razim Davletbayev and his wife, Inze, were both Tatars from Bawly near Kazan.
Following Kizima’s dictum that they had to learn on the job, even graduates with the highest honours started at the bottom. Razim worked as a labourer and studied in the evening to qualify for promotion. Housed in the little wooden huts, the new workers would pore over plans laid out on the floor. It was little better than camping, with communal kitchens and communal showers, but they were all so glad to be involved in this prestigious project that no amount of hardship could restrain their zeal.
The older specialists, several of whom had followed Dyatlov from Komsomolsk, were as eager to teach the young as the young were to learn. There was no question of anyone expecting extra money for extra effort: Razim Davletbayev spent not only the evenings but also half his summer vacation studying the new technology of nuclear power. His wife, Inze – a woman with a wide Tatar face and gentle, soulful eyes – had a job in the department of industrial safety, checking the amount of radiation received by each worker, but all her ambitions were for her husband; she saw to all the household chores so that Razim could continue with his studies. After the birth of a baby, she spent much of the day with the child: Razim left for work at seven in the morning and only returned at nine at night.
Among Inze’s closest friends was Luba, the wife of Alexander Akimov, whom Razim had known at the Institute in Moscow. Akimov had gone on to study at Zukh-Hydroprojekt, with the designers of the power station, and it was here that he had met Luba, also the daughter of an army officer and a student in the same department. Akimov had a gangling figure, thick glasses, a high forehead, receding hair and a small moustache. Luba was a tall, skinny girl with a delicate constitution, short dark hair and a sophisticated sense of humour. She loathed pretentiousness of a bourgeois kind, and was choosy about her friends.
Upon graduating, Akimov was sent to work for Zukh-Hydroprojekt in Chernobyl, and Luba went with him as his wife. They moved straight into a flat in Pripyat, where Luba gave birth to their first child. They, too, embarked upon the life at Chernobyl with the greatest enthusiasm. Akimov worked hard to establish his professional reputation; he also joined the party. In his free time, he read historical biographies, subscribed to magazines on military technology, and went after duck and hare with his Winchester rifle.
The Akimovs’ life was not without trouble. Their second child was born with a twisted hip: every two weeks Luba had to make the five-hour journey on the hydrofoil to take her baby to see a specialist in Kiev.
6
On 26 September 1977, two years behind schedule, the first unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power station was finally commissioned. Despite the delays, it was hailed as a triumph. One thousand megawatts of electrical power could now be fed into the grid at Kiev, a saving in terms of thermal power of three and a half million tons of coal each year. Brukhanov and Kizima were praised and decorated. Soviet science and technology had triumphed yet again.
Razim Davletbayev, who had worked as a simple labourer at the start-up, was promoted to turbine engineer. Alexander Akimov, now a specialist in the automation of electrical power, was transferred from Hydroprojekt onto the staff of the power station itself. He served under Nikolai Steinberg, who, with the departure of Taras Plochy to be chief engineer at the Balakovsky nuclear power station, was now chief of the turbine hall. It was a particularly cheerful unit; Steinberg, who had a keen eye for members of the opposite sex, had taken on an exceptionally pretty girl called Katya Litovsky, the only woman among twenty-two men. This did little for her marriage – she soon separated from her husband – but much for the morale of the engineers.
Akimov, a more earnest character than Steinberg, served as Communist party secretary for the unit – a chore that reflected his commitment to communism and also helped his career. His friend Razim Davletbayev also joined the party, although Inze tried to dissuade him; she thought there were as many good people outside the party as in it and resented the way in which her mother, who had toiled for twenty years, had never been invited to join until she had taken a degree.
At a higher level, Nikolai Fomin, who had been head of the electrical workshop, laid aside his professional duties to serve as party secretary for the power station as a whole. Under the system it was a position of both power and responsibility; as the elite, party members were answerable for the successes or failures of their organization; and, whatever their rank in the station’s administration, they had to defend themselves against criticism at party meetings.
Fomin, although already middle-aged, also studied physics by correspondence to add to his existing qualifications. When he returned to nonpolitical work he was rewarded with the post of deputy chief engineer.
Little more than a year after the launch of the first unit, on 21 December 1978, the second unit went on line. Knowing only what they were told by their superiors or had read in the Soviet press about the absolute safety of Soviet reactors, none of the operators realized that three years before there had been a meltdown of a fuel element in the No. 1 unit at Leningrad, which was identical in design to the unit at Chernobyl. Such was the secrecy that still surrounded anything to do with nuclear power that the accident was concealed even from those who worked in the industry. There was little opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others.
Nor was this accident at Leningrad the first; there had been others at Leningrad and at Beloyarsk. Only ten days after the commissioning of the second unit at Chernobyl a fire at Beloyarsk burned through the control cable and the reactor momentarily went out of control. No news of these accidents reached the outside world, and the Chernobyl operators proceeded on the assumption that if they kept to the regulations in the documentation that went with the reactor – drawn up by a department of the Ministry of Energy in the 1960s upon the advice of the scientific supervisor, Anatoli Alexandrov, and approved by the State Committee on Nuclear Safety and the chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power station – there was no possible danger of a serious accident.
There were certain minor contradictions, but this was nothing new. Modifications made to the later reactors suggested that the earlier ones were not perfect; for example, in the first two reactors the control rods were lowered into the reactors by manual operation of the drive motor switches, and it was only later that automatic controls were introduced. It was also generally understood that with so much piping, there was always the possibility of a rupture of some kind, but the possibility of a major accident never entered anyone’s mind. An accident was conceivable in a pressurized-water reactor, with its greater power density and higher fuel rating, but not in the RBMKs.
If the RBMKs were safe, however, they were not always easy to control. It was an advantage that they did not have to be closed down for refuelling; one fuel element could be replaced at a time. But the number of dials that the operators had to monitor at any one time, as well as the complexity of the information from the Skala computer, which scanned the reactor’s condition only every five minutes and printed out its findings fifty metres from where the operators were stationed, made it difficult for them to understand at all times exactly what was going on.
The operators also discovered that the reactor was unstable when run at low power: in the same way as a jet aircraft might stall at low throttle and crash, power could collapse in the reactor. It therefore became accepted practice, when it looked as though the reactor would die on them, to withdraw more of the boron control rods than was permitted by the regulations. The regulations governing safety were not set in stone but could be overruled upon the authority of the chief or deputy chief engineer. Over the years of running the RBMKs, the engineers had decided that the parameters recommended by the designers bore as much relationship to the reality of running the reactors as did the Communist rhetoric to the realities of life in the USSR.
There were also risks to be run by playing safe. An emergency shutdown of the reactor – easily done by pushing the AZ button, which automatically lowered all the rods into the core – led to a catastrophic cut in the generating capacity of the nuclear power station and in loss of electricity to the grid. It was estimated that an unscheduled shutdown would cost the power station six hundred thousand rubles in lost revenue. If it was subsequently considered unnecessary, it could lead to demotion, loss of salary, even dismissal and expulsion from the paradise of Pripyat. A shutdown was therefore not something a young operator would want to do on his own authority; he would always prefer to seek the approval of a senior engineer.
When news filtered through about the accident on Three Mile Island, it only seemed to confirm the truth of what the operators at Chernobyl had always been told: that where profit was at stake, the capitalists would take insensate risks with the safety of the local population. Moulded by their Communist education, taught to accept without question what they were told by their superiors, isolated by an all-pervasive censorship from any hint of doubt, they never questioned the assurances given by the eminent physicists in Moscow. If the president of the Academy of Sciences himself, Anatoli Alexandrov, insisted that Soviet reactors were entirely safe, who were they to doubt him?
They were aware, of course, that minor accidents could occur – hence the leak-tight containment and contingency plans for a ruptured seam or a burst pipe. They also knew that there might be a dangerous release of radioactivity in the immediate vicinity of the power station – hence the bunker under the administrative building – but they all considered the likelihood remote. When given the task of drawing up a programme for such a hypothetical accident, Alexander Akimov calculated a probability factor of one in ten million per year.
The most likely moment for such an accident was during the start-up of a reactor, when all the circuits were being used for the first time. In December 1981 the third reactor was successfully launched, and the new input of one thousand megawatts into the grid enabled the first reactor, which had been running for five years, to be closed down for routine maintenance in the summer of 1982. In the course of the first reactor’s restart in September the valves controlling the flow of water into the reactor were inadvertently closed. Some of the fuel assemblies overheated, the uranium melted, and there was an explosion in the core and a release of radioactivity into the power station, some of which escaped through the filters into the air outside.
No one was killed. The emergency core-cooling system did its work, and the reactor was closed down. Engineers repairing the damage received significant doses of radiation. Outside the plant, no measurements were taken. The streets of Pripyat were hosed down by water tankers as a precautionary measure, but no one was told of the accident; indeed, so thorough was the regime run by the KGB’s department of classified information that even the operators in the other two reactors did not know what had happened in unit No. 1.
From the point of view of the management and the Ministry of Energy, the most serious consequence of the accident was not the minor release of radioactivity but the eight months it took to repair the reactor. This meant a large loss of revenue to the enterprise, and as a result heads had to roll. The chief of shift and a deputy chief engineer were both demoted, and the latter was transferred to the thermal power station at Zaporozhye. But the buck did not stop there. After an investigation by the Kurchatov Institute and Dollezhal’s bureau, the Party Committee in Kiev decided that the chief engineer, Vyachslav Akinfiev, should be held responsible. He was demoted to the level of deputy chief engineer and removed from any responsibility for the running of the plant.
For Akinfiev this was intolerable. He did not feel that the accident had been his fault; he thought that the deputy chief engineer alone was to blame, and, having been a leader of the enterprise since its inception, he felt humiliated to be reduced to a subordinate role. Although no one dared ask what his crime had been, his fellow workers knew that he was now in disgrace: he was cold-shouldered by the very colleagues who once had fawned on him. Therefore he resigned and, through contacts in Moscow, was offered a job at a new VVER power station then being built by Soviet engineers at Kozloduy in Bulgaria.
7
Akinfiev’s demotion created a vacancy for the post of chief engineer. Among the candidates was Nikolai Fomin, then a deputy chief engineer. A competent and hard-working electrical engineer who knew no more about nuclear physics than he had learned from his correspondence course, he could now draw on the ideological credit he had banked when serving as party secretary for the plant. It was enough, it was argued, to have atomic specialists like Anatoli Dyatlov and Mikhail Lyutov as deputy chief engineers. For the post of chief engineer it was more important that the man should be an effective leader. Fomin’s irascible, dominating manner was thought, like Kizima’s, to counterbalance Brukhanov’s gentler style.
Fomin got the job, whereupon the intrigue now centred on his replacement as deputy chief engineer for units 3 and 4. The choice narrowed down to two – Steinberg, aged thirty-five, or Dyatlov, fifty-two. Brukhanov himself favoured Steinberg, but Dyatlov could call on contacts he had made during his years in Komsomolsk. Moreover Steinberg was a Jew, and while Jews, like the Volga Germans, were often the most able engineers, they were also often the victims of envy and prejudice among Slavs in the Moscow ministries and the party apparatus in Kiev.
Dyatlov was appointed. To the team of engineers who had followed him from Komsomolsk – men like Sitnikov, Chugunov and Grishenka – the ministry had chosen the best man for the job. Fomin was an electrical specialist; Steinberg a turbine engineer. It was essential to have a nuclear specialist in the upper echelons of the plant’s direction, and Dyatlov was, in their opinion, by far the best physicist on hand.
There was also an element of self-interest. The Soviet educational system turned out a large number of engineers, and since there could be no overt unemployment in a socialist state, these new graduates were allocated to different enterprises throughout the country. As a result, Chernobyl, like any other power station, was obliged to employ many more technicians and specialists than it actually required. Whereas each shift at a nuclear power station in Western Europe or the United States might consist of ten or fifteen operators and engineers, at Chernobyl there would be seventy. Many, naturally, would have nothing to do, and bored workers were sometimes found reading novels or playing cards.
The management dealt with this overmanning by creating an inner elite to run the station, called the Group of Effective Control. Everyone started at the bottom and worked for a time in the various departments, but through a process of natural selection the ablest were put into teams that actually ran the station.
As in any organization, however, there was more room at the bottom than at the top, so even for these high flyers there was a limited chance of promotion. With Fomin in place as chief engineer; Dyatlov, his deputy, in charge of units 3 and 4; and Dyatlov’s friend Sitnikov overseeing units 1 and 2, patronage for the foreseeable future was firmly in the hands of the group from Komsomolsk. Steinberg therefore decided that the time had come to move on, and with the highest references from Brukhanov he went to the Balakovsky nuclear power station, where his old friend Taras Plochy was chief engineer.
When Steinberg left Chernobyl, about thirty other specialists went with him, realizing that they could expect no promotion under the new regime. This demoralized many of those who remained behind – not just the pretty Katya Litovsky, whom Steinberg had brought into the turbine unit, but some of the more open-minded engineers who disliked the dogmatic and dictatorial style of both Fomin and Dyatlov.
Of the two, Fomin, with his deep voice and pleasant smile, had the more agreeable manner. He could, however, be brusque, and he disliked criticism. ‘We’re not at a party meeting here,’ he would say to any subordinate who dared to question his instructions. In the opinion of some of the nuclear specialists from Komsomolsk, he was overconfident about his own abilities in their sphere of expertise. He certainly had no doubts whatsoever about the safety of the reactors. He often reassured visitors by comparing the reactors to samovars; when the Ukrainian minister of health, Anatoli Romanenko, visited Chernobyl Fomin told him that the chances of an accident there were much the same as being hit by a comet. ‘How many comets hit the earth? One almost every hour. Yet we know of only two cases where they caused fatalities: one hit a man going for a walk, and the other fell into the washtub where a German woman was doing her laundry. No, Comrade Minister, the chances of a serious accident with a reactor are about the same as being hit by a comet.’
Fomin spoke in all sincerity, for though he knew that there had been an accident at the recommissioning of the first unit, he also knew that the emergency systems had done the job for which they were designed. Certainly there were minor accidents, as there were in any industry – on building sites, at steel works and in power stations burning coal. But even the disaster at Three Mile Island, where the profit-hungry capitalists had been indifferent to the fate of the workers, had injured no one, and it was only as a result of the sensational reporting of the accident in the irresponsible capitalist press that people living in the vicinity had panicked and fled from their homes.
Dyatlov was a more complex character. A tall, wiry man with high cheekbones and a receding hairline, his quizzical expression made him resemble the celebrated bust of Voltaire. An unhappy childhood spent near the penal settlements in the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia seemed to have left him with a gloomy outlook on life. As with many self-made men, he was impatient with the failings of others. He was also tormented by the conflicts inherent in the system. On the one hand he was an active party member, carrying the banner of his section at the May Day parades in Pripyat, and he was grateful to a social system that had enabled him to rise from a poverty-stricken background in the remotest corner of Asia to his position as a prominent and powerful engineer.
Yet Dyatlov could not hide from himself the deficiencies of the system, or fail to notice the shroud of falsehood that concealed them from the outside world. This was particularly evident in the work he was engaged in, the construction of the fourth reactor. The plans were inadequate and called for materials that were either unobtainable or were delivered late and were frequently defective when they finally did arrive. The fireproof roofing and electrical cable specified in the plan were not to be found, and so the builders had to improvise, and the supervisors to turn a blind eye to violations of the regulations. In the middle of the unit there was a ‘dead zone’ where nothing could be built because the plans had not arrived; yet construction continued around it in the hope that the two different sections would eventually fit together.
This chasm between rhetoric and reality was like a painful fissure in Dyatlov’s own personality. He had done everything the system expected him to do; he had read every book in the Library of World Literature and knew Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin by heart; yet neither the science nor the culture that he had acquired so diligently had made him a happy man. As a result he was irascible and domineering, and the younger operators feared him. Even his friends from Komsomolsk, whom he saw on his time off, were often uncomfortable in his presence. He inspired their respect but not their affection. Only Anatoli Sitnikov, who had started with him all those years ago installing reactors in nuclear submarines, could talk to him on an equal footing. His wife adored him – or so it seemed to their friends – but she was a small, cosy woman, not the type to tame the tyrannical traits in her husband, and there was the shadow of a shared sorrow between them: their second child had died in infancy in Komsomolsk.
Dyatlov was also getting older, and many men in their middle fifties begin to feel the strain of a demanding profession. He delegated certain duties, such as the training of personnel, and during the laborious months leading to the start-up of reactor No. 4, many of the operators felt that he gave them no real guidance but left it to the section leaders to settle matters between themselves.
As the autumn of 1983 turned to winter, pressure built on the engineers at Chernobyl to complete reactor No. 4 by the end of the year. To do so would mean that they were a year ahead of schedule and would be eligible for numerous bonuses and awards – not just for the workers, but for everyone involved, including Dyatlov, Fomin, Brukhanov, and those above Brukhanov in the Ministry of Energy and Electrification.
As the year drew to a close, what held the engineers back was not the construction but the numerous tests that had to be carried out by the government commission responsible for certifying the safety of the plant. In particular there was the vexing question of how to deal with an unexpected cut in the supply of electricity to the control-rod drive mechanism, and both the main circulating pumps and the emergency core-cooling system. Earlier tests had not proved satisfactory.
Unknown to the operators, there had been two further accidents since the destruction of the fuel assembly in reactor No. 1 in September 1982. Only a month later there had been an explosion in a generator at the Armyansk nuclear power station, after which the turbine hall had burned to the ground; and in June 1985 there had been a horrific accident at the pressurized-water nuclear power station at Balakovsky, to which Taras Plochy and Nikolai Steinberg had gone from Chernobyl. Because of mistakes made by operators under Plochy’s command, during the recommissioning of reactor No. 1, a valve had burst and sent steam at 300°C (572°F) into the area around the well of the reactor, where fourteen men were working. All were poached alive.
It was not this tragedy, however, that called for the tests on the turbines at Chernobyl, but rather an earlier and potentially more disastrous power cut at the Kursk nuclear power station in 1980. In the RBMK reactors, electricity was required to drive both the control rods and the water pumps. In the event of an unexpected power cut, certain standby measures could be taken: the control rods could be disconnected from the power drive and allowed to drop into the reactor under their own weight, and also standby diesel generators had been installed that could provide an alternative source of power for the pumps.
The danger occurred during the forty seconds between the power cut and the start-up of the generators. At Kursk, in 1980, the natural circulation of the water had proved sufficient to prevent an uncontrolled power surge, but it was impossible to count on this. The turbine manufacturers hoped to be able to modify the generators to squeeze sufficient power for those few crucial seconds from the turbines themselves while they were spinning to a halt. However, it was clear that it would be impossible to conduct tests to verify the efficacity of this modification if the reactor was to be commissioned before the end of the year, and since the likelihood of a power cut was remote and the outcome at Kursk had been satisfactory, the tests on the turbines were postponed.
There was a further anomaly that had first been noticed by scientists from the Ministry of Medium Machine Building during the physical start-up of the first unit of the Ignalina nuclear power station that year. As the control rods were inserted into the reactor core, instead of an immediate decrease in reactivity, there was a momentary surge before the decrease began. This seemed to be caused by a flaw in the design of the control rods, and although it was also noted at the start-up of the fourth unit at Chernobyl – again by scientists from the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, who inspected the finished reactor – it was not thought sufficiently hazardous to be mentioned to the operators or written into the documentation.
On 21 December 1983, the fourth reactor was commissioned, and on 31 December, at the eleventh hour, Brukhanov signed a receipt for the completed reactor. The SPC certificate was signed by an official from the Ministry of Energy and Electrification. The bonuses were secure and the awards followed: for Brukhanov a Hero of Socialist Labour, for Fomin a medal for Valorous Labour, for Dyatlov an Order of the Red Banner.
On 27 March of the following year, three months ahead of schedule, and amid a fanfare of congratulatory publicity in the press, the fourth unit at Chernobyl went into commercial operation. For the opening, potted palm trees were laid out in the turbine hall, and not only the minister of energy and electrification and all the party leaders from Kiev, but also the president of the Academy of Sciences, Anatoli Alexandrov himself, came to Pripyat. He could look upon what he saw with some satisfaction. Four units, all powered by RBMK reactors, were now generating four thousand megawatts of electricity for homes and industries throughout the western republics of the Soviet Union, and for the grid of the neighbouring fraternal socialist republics in Eastern Europe. It was a triumph for Soviet science, for Soviet technology, and a significant contribution to the construction of the new Socialist civilization. While the Americans were faltering over nuclear power after Three Mile Island, the Soviets forged ahead to establish an undisputed ascendancy in the field. In the middle distance, Alexandrov could see the foundations of units 5 and 6, then under construction. When they were built and went on line, the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station at Chernobyl would be the largest power station in the world.