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Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the… por Adam Higginbotham
As of April 15, 2020, the virus has been directly responsible for the death of more than 25,000 Americans. In a month. The 9/11 attacks initially caused the deaths of 2,700 Americans, and more than 250,000 deaths as a result of attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath.
According to the Soviet Government, the explosion of Reactor 4 at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, only resulted in 31 deaths. One man was crushed in the explosion, and the remainder died from radiation poisoning. 115,000 people were evacuated from their homes never to return. 2.5 million more people were living on contaminated land, and the exact number of people who suffered from cancers resulting from the catastrophe may never be known because it was something the government never wanted to be known. Right up until the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
On the night of the explosion, plant officials barely believed their own eyes. Regional Communist flunkies delayed the evacuation of citizens of a town explicitly built to service the four nuclear reactors built so as not to spread panic, and Mikhail Gorbachev's government denied to the international community exactly what had happened for weeks after clouds of radioactive fallout passed over Belarus, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Germany.
Reading this fine history of the Chernobyl disaster by Adam Higginbotham brings me full circle from a work I read many years before, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Rhodes great work set me off on a journey of reading whatever history I could find about the rise of technology in the west, to understand for myself what changes have taken place. Its impact on society and their impact on the planet.
Today we are battling an invisible enemy with pretty non-technological tools. Standing apart from one another. Setting aside our tools of work and play, if only for a few weeks or months at most.
The parallels between Chernobyl and COVID-19 are interesting. The people who worked to clean up the radioactive mess were climbing an uphill battle. Everything they touched, their hair, the food they ate, the grass, the trees, their pets, their cattle, the dust in the air, everything was contaminated. In Kiev children were taught not to touch the children of evacuees. In the hospitals mens’ skin was literally peeling off before their eyes. It was gross and if you saw it it was really unsettling.
The Chernobyl disaster resulted from a combination of very human failings: major flaws in the design of the reactors (of which there are over 100 in operation) were never addressed, the materials and workmanship in building the reactor were suspect, managers were pressed by incentives to get things up and running quickly, that nobody planned proper protection for workers to remediate in the event of a meltdown, that operators of the plant were ill informed of what could go wrong and why even though the reactor's designers knew full well which problems hadn't been resolved, untrained and incompetent technicians, and a culture of secrecy prevented everyone involved from learning from previous nuclear accidents in the Soviet Union.
In the end there were scapegoats aplenty.
The story is also a fascinating introduction to radioactive substances and what happens when they are unconfined. The scope of the disaster is wide in terms of distances (from Wales to Scandinavia, etc. with an exclusion zone of 1400+ kilometers) and years (sheep in Northern Wales reach levels finally in 2012 where they are not destroyed, and wild bore hunted in the Cech Republic often still too radioactive to eat.0
Finally regarding autocracy vs democracy, the times we live in do not really allow for such a simple dichotomy in terms of more information being better. There is a sweetspot and even for democracies once social media came into play, there can be too much information of low or no quality that leads to the same kind of problems and inefficiencies that an autocracy has. Con artists and spreaders of misinformation can now ply their trade to tens of thousands of unwillting victims in an instant, and without a truly informed citizenry, there is little hope that much of the partakers of such information will swallow it hook, line, and sinker.
"Midnight in Chernobyl" by Adam Higginbotham
This is a DETAILED work of investigative journalism that chronicles the events leading up to and following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.
The author delves deep into the complex political, social, and scientific factors that contributed to the disaster and the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.
Higginbotham's meticulous research and vivid storytelling make for a gripping and haunting read that sheds new light on one of the most catastrophic events of the 20th century.
This was a recommended read in my ALA reading journal and is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the true human cost of nuclear power and the dangers of government secrecy.
The book begins much earlier than you would think with the site of the new nuclear power plant decided before the real work begins – build the plant, build the city for the workers (later known as Pripyat). It’s all up to Viktor Brukhanov to carve it out in the north of Ukraine. From the start, the Soviet timelines are near impossible on the budget given and small shortcuts need to be taken. It’s this way in the design of the RBMK nuclear reactors too – needing to compromise on safety to meet budgets as well as to be seen as different to the American reactors being built. Pripyat becomes a desirable city for the workers of the plant with access to goods and everything appears to be going well until the night shift at the plant in April 1986. A routine (but overdue) test goes wrong and the reactor does not respond as expected, with reactivity increasing instead of decreasing. This leads to the explosion of Unit 4 and a nuclear disaster. What makes the response astonishing is how little the first responders knew about the radioactivity at the site and the failure of those in charge to recognise the magnitude of the disaster. It’s barely recognised at the local levels and despite the introduction of glasnost, the USSR does not reveal anything until radiation is detected in Europe. It isn’t until much later that the residents of Pripyat are evacuated and the clean-up (or ‘liquidation’) begins.
Higginbotham tells all of this in detail in a logistic and interesting way that reads like a thriller at times. The reader is introduced to the major players, from the plant workers and administration to the scientists, armed forces and first responders. Each of them are described as people, with backgrounds, flaws and interests that make it harder to let them go at the end of the book. The ending describes what happened to them all and it makes for sombre reading. The book is also a great insight into how the Soviet system worked – and how truth telling versus the need to follow the party line or that of your superiors – could make or break your career.
Another theme I took away from this book was that cutting corners, seemingly small at the time, can add up to monumental issues later on. Not only were there design flaws in the nuclear reactor, but in the building of it and subsequent testing. Workers were ignorant of these and often various sectors did not talk to each other, compounding the problem. It goes back to the need for communication and doing a thorough job, even though if may take longer or cost more. Otherwise lives are at stake and safety is in jeopardy. (Interestingly, only 31 deaths were reported as a result of the Chernobyl disaster – so what of these orphans Grandma was helping? Doctors were instructed to code medical issues as not being related to radiation, despite higher than normal levels not just in Pripyat but in Kyiv during the May Day celebrations…)
Overall, Midnight in Chernobyl is a bleak but I feel necessary, read. It is very detailed and doesn’t pull any punches as to what went wrong and the suffering of the people.
http://samstillreading.wordpress.com
This book was just boring unless you like reading a lot about engineering and the technical structure of power plants and buildings. In addition, there are a zillion Russian names, and even with Kindle X-Ray and a guide to who was who, I struggled because the people just were not brought to life for me.
This is reporting. It's very strong reporting, and it unveils the type of cover-up that makes you worried about government and implies that conspiracy theories can be true. The story is important. I just did not find it interesting because of the absolute overload of details, many of which were beyond my understanding or ability to picture.
Maybe my timing in picking up this one was just way off . . .as we are in the middle of a crisis ourselves, my concentration is pretty shot. So, judge this one by the reviews of others. I just can barely bring myself to give it 3 stars.
One last comment, I was surprised to find that, after an extensive drilldown into the most serious manmade accident in history, Higginbotham closed with a ringing endorsement of nuclear energy as the earth's best hope for the future. Citing statistics that particulates from fossil fuels are responsible for 13 thousand deaths a year in the U.S. and three million deaths annually worldwide, he concludes that modern liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR) are "safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima," and concludes that "these fourth-generation reactors would be cheaper, safer, smaller, more efficient, and less poisonous than their predecessors and could yet prove to be the technology that saves the world".
Bottom line: This is both a high-tension thriller of a very well-researched report of events that have long been cloaked in a mantle of secrecy. I highly recommend it.
Maybe the answer is not much of anything; partly due to time, possibly to being in denial. Much of the story that I learned from Grigori Medvedev's old book still seems relevant, but what Higginbotham plays up is the bad design of the reactor, and an accident waiting to happen, whatever else were the failings of the personnel operating the system. Apart from that, one gets a blow by blow accounting of the accident, and then the efforts to cope with quarantining the contaminated zone. Finally, Higginbotham does a fine job of giving you the personal perspective of those who had the misfortune to be immediately involved in this disaster, which brought into sharp contrast the flaws of the old Soviet system.
Also, as an aside, I thought the depth of examination of the technical details of the reactor, and the institutional politics that incubated the disaster, were great.
Despite Gorbachev’s stated policy of glasnost, a blanket of secrecy was drawn over the catastrophe. Operators were blamed and punished, despite multiple design flaws. Thirty-one people died, according to official numbers, though the statistics were not meticulously tracked, and subsequent deaths were intentionally attributed to causes other than radiation. It is almost unbelievable how long it took to evacuate the nearby town of Pripyat.
This book provides a detailed analysis of causes and effects, focused on scientific and political explanations. It requires a strong interest in science to fully appreciate it. The chapters related to the disaster are both horrifying and riveting. There were many people involved and it is sometimes difficult to keep them straight. I listened to the audiobook, read by Jacques Roy. He does an excellent job. His narration is smooth and lively.
I found it an enlightening examination of the Soviet bureaucracy and cultural legacy of the era. Employees generally had no desire to communicate bad news upward in the organization for fear of reprimand. Political loyalty was prized above technical proficiency. The “narrative” was tightly controlled such that what really happened was obscured from public view. I think a great deal can be learned (mainly on what not to do) from this in-depth assessment of the disaster.
P.20:
"when the Ministry of Energy in Moscow learned that the roof of the plant's turbine Hall had been covered with highly flammable bitumin, they ordered him [Brukhanov] to replace it. but the flame-retardant material specified for re-roofing the structure – 50 m wide and almost a kilometer long -- was not even being manufactured in the USSR, so the Ministry granted him an exception, and the bitumen remained."
The Soviet Union didn't recognize unemployment, so there was vast over employment at the Chernobyl station:
P.21-2:
"some were trainee nuclear engineers – aspiring to become a part of the highly qualified technical elite known as 'atomShchiki' – who came to watch the experts at work. but others were mechanics and electricians who came from elsewhere in the energy industry – the 'power men,' or 'energetiki' – who harbored complacent assumptions about nuclear plants. They had been told that radiation was so harmless 'you could spread it on bread,' or that a reactor was 'like a samovar... More simple than a thermal power plant.' at home, some drank from glassware colored with iridescent patterns that, they boasted, were created by having been steeped in the radioactive Waters of the plant's used fuel coolant pond. Others listlessly filled out their shifts reading novels and playing cards. those who actually had important work to do were known – with a bureaucratic frankness that hinted at satire – as the Group of Effective Control. yet the dead weight of unwanted manpower tugged even at those with urgent responsibilities and infected the plant with inefficiency and a dangerous sense of inertia."
The moment that RBLK1000 reactor blew up was frightening, even just to read about:
P.87-8:
"On the wall of Control Room Number Four, the lights of the Selsyn dials flared. The needles had stopped dead at a reading of 3 m. in desperation, Akimov threw the switch releasing the AZ-5 rods from their clutches, so they could fall under their own weight into the reactor. but the needles remained frozen. It was too late.
"At 1:24 a.m., there was a tremendous roar, probably caused as a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen that had formed inside the reactor space suddenly ignited. The entire building shuddered as Reactor Number Four was torn apart by a catastrophic explosion, equivalent to as much as 60 tonnes of TNT. the blast caromed off the walls of the reactor vessel, tore open the hundreds of pipes of the Steam and water circuit, and tossed the upper biological shield into the air like a flipped coin; it swatted away the 350 ton refueling machine, wrenched the high-Bay bridge crane from its overhead rails, demolished the upper walls of the reactor hall, and smashed open the concrete roof revealing the night sky beyond.
"In that moment the core of the reactor was completely destroyed. Almost seven tons of uranium fuel, together with pieces of control rods, zirconium channels, and graphite blocks, were pulverized into tiny fragments and sucked high into the atmosphere, forming a mixture of gases and aerosols carrying radioisotopes, including Iodine 131, Neptunium 239, Cesium 137, Strontium 90, and Plutonium 239- among the most dangerous substances known to man. a further 25 to 30 tons of uranium and highly radioactive graphite were launched out of the core and scattered around Unit 4, starting small blazes where they fell. Exposed to the air, 1,300 tons of incandescent graphite rubble that remained in the reactor core caught fire immediately."
The men of Fire Brigade Number 2 did their best to put out the hellish fire:
P.102-3:
"Sweating in their heavy canvas uniforms and rubber jackets, they ran out more hoses just as they had been trained to do – 5 in 17 seconds. They threw them over their shoulders, dragged them up the staircases, and poured foam onto the roof of Unit 3. kibenok had a separate line connected to the Pripyat brigade's big Ural fire tanker, which could move 40 l of water a second. even then, the handful of men on the roof struggled to extinguish even the smallest blazes, caused by materials which seemed to burn more savagely when they poured water on them. these were almost certainly pellets of uranium dioxide, which, superheated to more than 4000° C before the explosion, had ignited on contact with the air; when hosed with water, the resulting reaction released oxygen, explosive hydrogen, and radioactive steam."
The evacuation of the City and surrounding countryside of the Chernobyl plant was a disaster:
P.202:
"the evacuation of a zone extending to 30 km around the plant was still underway, with 100,000 people already removed from the area, including two districts in Belarus. But the results of the initial operation had been chaotic: 'five or six thousand people are simply lost,' Ryzhkov said. 'where they are now is unknown.'
"the civil defense and the Ministry of Health had failed utterly in their responsibilities. There had been no clarity or plan. people leaving the evacuation zone had not even received blood test for radiation exposure. The fiasco made a mockery of the USSR's decades of preparation for the consequences of nuclear war."
The firefighters and the men in the Control Room Number 4 were horribly burned and damaged by radiation. They were sent to Hospital Number 6 in Moscow. Surgeon Alexander Baronov ...
P.232-3:
"was a pioneering Soviet surgeon responsible for the first bone marrow transplant ever performed in the USSR, but he had the haunted look of a man who had watched many of his patients die in agony. He chained smoked constantly ...
"up here was the hospital sterile unit, where the transplant recipients recovered after their operations. Until the transplanted marrow cells became sufficiently well established to begin producing blood components – a process that could take 2 weeks or a month--the patient's immune systems would be all but useless, leaving them susceptible to hemorrhages, minor infections, and even pathogenic attack from the bacteria in their own intestines, any of which might prove fatal.
In the sterile unit, Gale [a volunteer surgeon from L.A. who had received special permission to aid the radiation victims] found four patients sealed inside 'life islands' – plastic bubbles designed to provide a vital line of defense in the doctors' battle to keep the men alive long enough for the marrow cells to engraft. The patients breathed air that had been filtered or passed through a duct where it was sterilized by ultraviolet light. to further isolate them from infection, they could be reached only by staff whose hands and clothing had been sterilized or through portholes in the plastic fitted with gloves. because the hospital had far fewer life islands than it needed, their use was rationed. To Gale, who had never seen a beta burn before in his life, the four men he examined that afternoon appeared sick, but not alarmingly so. he participated in his first transplant procedure, assisting Baronov in drawing marrow from a donor, soon afterward."
P.300-1:
"Alexander Yuvchenko, who had listened as the machines sustaining his friends in adjacent rooms fell silent One by one, had himself lingered close to death throughout the month of May. for weeks, his wife, natalia, woke each morning in a nearby hostel, fearing what might have happened overnight, and asked her mother to phone the hospital. Superstitious, Yuvchenko hoped that if she didn't call the doctors herself, the news about her husband's condition would be better period when his bone marrow function collapsed, the physicians kept him going with blood transfusions, and Natalia scoured the city for scarce and expensive ingredients to keep up his strength....
"It was June before Yuvchenko's bone marrow began functioning again, the first white cells reappeared in his bloodstream, and it seemed certain he would live. But it also seemed possible that the radiation Burns – especially the ones on his arm and shoulder – would never heal fully, and the surgeons had to cut away repeatedly at both skin and muscle to remove the rotting black tissue from his shoulder blade. The agonizing open wounds left where beta particles had eaten into the flesh of his elbow made it unlikely he would ever be able to live a normal life again.
But in the second half of September, the doctors allowed Yuvchenko to go home for a short time to the new apartment his family had been granted by the government, in a well-heeled neighborhood near Moscow State University . He looked gaunt and skinny and had become addicted to the narcotics the doctors had used to stifle the terrible pain of his burns. While the doctors wanted to wean Yuvchenko off the painkillers, they also had to encourage him to learn how to live for himself after weeks of around-the-clock care. but the radiation was far from finished with him. New Burns continued to reveal themselves on his legs and arms even months after the explosion, and he was admitted once more to Hospital Number 6 for further treatment.
P.248-9:
"the work of decontaminating the huge area beyond the boundaries of the power plant was complicated not only by meteorology and the Herculean proportions of the undertaking but by the varying topography and materials involved. Radioactive aerosols had seeped into concrete, asphalt, metal, and wood. Buildings, workshops, gardens, shrubs, trees, and lakes had all been in the path of the cloud that had drifted across the landscape for days and weeks. Roofs, walls, farmland, machinery, and Forest would have to be washed, scraped, picked clean, or cut down and buried. The word 'liquidation' was nothing more than a martial euphemism. The reality was that radionuclides could be neither broken down nor destroyed – only relocated, entombed, or interred, ideally in a place where the long process of radioactive decay might pose a less immediate threat to the environment."
P.327:
"for the final rulers of the USSR, the most destructive forces unleashed by the explosion of Reactor Number Four were not radiological but political and economic. The cloud of radiation that spread out across Europe, making the catastrophe impossible to conceal, had forced the touted openness of Gorbachev's glasnost on even the most reluctant conservatives in the Politburo. and the general secretary's own realization that even the nuclear bureaucracy had been undermined by secrecy, incompetence, and stagnation convinced him that the entire state was rotten. after the accident, frustrated and angry, he confronted the need for truly drastic change and plunged deeply into perestroika in a desperate bid to rescue the socialist experiment before it was too late."
P.328-9:
"in February 1989, almost 3 years after the accident, a prime-time report on Vremya revealed to the Soviet people that the true extent of radioactive contamination beyond the perimeter of the 30 km Exclusion Zone had been covered up – and that the total area of contamination outside the zone was, in fact, even larger than that within it. ' "glanost wins after all" is the way we might begin this story' the correspondence said, standing in front of multi-colored maps showing that the most heavily radioactive hot spots lay as far as 300 km from the station, across the border in byelarus, and the districts of Gomel and Mogilev, where witnesses had watched black rain fall in April and May 1986. the land was so poisoned that the Belarusian government estimated another hundred thousand people would have to be evacuated, and planned to request the equivalent of $16 billion in further aid from Moscow."
P.331:
"One estimate put the eventual bill for all aspects of the disaster at more than $128 billion – equivalent to the total Soviet defense budget for 1989. The bleeding was slow but proved impossible to stanch – one more open wound that the state could no longer shrug off as the Soviet Colossus sank slowly to its knees."
Shocking the lengths which were taken to attempt to cover up what happened.
Loved the pictures at the end.
The book itself has none of the coronavirus discussion because it was published pre-pandemic, in 2019. But it's a strong, thorough attempt to first walk through, minute by minute, exactly what happened on April 26, 1986, the Soviet response or lack thereof as the situation developed, and the current state of things at Chernobyl (again, no mention of the war in Ukraine or the Russians temporarily seizing control of the power plant earlier this year and the subsequent stirring up of radioactive material).
Nearly as fascinating was the section discussing all of the ways the very construction of Chernobyl was dogged by problems exacerbated by the Soviet system that rewarded pretending everything was going fine even as corners were being cut and safety measures slashed to meet unrealistic timelines and budgets. And the look back at previous nuclear accidents in the USSR, many of which never came to public attention until the Soviet Union fell apart, is chilling. The largest nuclear disaster before Chernobyl, in fact, was in the 1950s at a super-secret plutonium production facility, although the Soviets never admitted that it happened or even acknowledged they had a nuclear facility in the location until decades later. The Soviets were not alone in their extreme secrecy around nuclear events, though; there was a large fire and radiation release in 1957 in the United Kingdom that released masses of radiation across the UK and Europe. The full scale of the accident — which while severe did not approach the level of Chernobyl — was suppressed by the British government for 30 years.
As you might imagine, there is a lot of science in this book. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to track it all, but Higginbotham does a good job of explaining in clear language exactly what happens in a nuclear reactor, how the Soviet design differs from those in the West, and the effects exposure to high levels of radiation have on living things — the most harrowing passages in the book, by far. The book does a good job contrasting what happened at Chernobyl with the causes of disasters at Windscale in the UK, Three Mile Island in the U.S., and Fukushima, Japan. Apparently, nuclear disasters are like Tolstoy's families, each unhappy accident unhappy in its own way.
Higginbotham continued his reporting even into the 2010s, as he continued to visit with people who had survived the accident (or their living relatives in the case of those who died), detailing the ways in which it had affected and in many cases shortened their lives. And he seems particularly keen to make clear that while it was the operators in the control room on the night of the disaster who bore the brunt of the blame and criminal prosecution, the accident actually stemmed from a known flaw in the reactor design, which the Soviets had known since the very first reactor of that type they ever built, in the 1950s. The flaw was documented in academic papers and immediately suppressed instead of trying to fix it and make the reactors safer, which could have prevented Chernobyl from becoming a name that invokes fear and horror around the world.
I don't suppose this book is for everyone; it's grim and extremely difficult to read in many ways. But if you're interested in learning more about how secrecy, coverups and an intolerance for honest feedback from subordinates can lead to immense tragedy, it's well worth your time.
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rosalita | 78 reseñas más. | Jun 5, 2022 |
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