J. M. Irvine (1939–2012)

Most of this book was just what was promised in the title, a brief introduction to key concepts in nuclear power. The book starts from the early history of nuclear physics and goes on to detail how this new science was applied, first in war and then later for civilian power purposes. The writing was a little dense at times but the brevity of the book and helpful charts and appendix made it comprehensible.

But.

There appears to be at least one, glaring inaccuracy in this book that I haven’t been able to resolve, and I can’t help but wonder about the rest of the volume in light of this apparent error.
“At Chernobyl, the authority of the reactor operators was not questioned when they began an illegal reactor experiment in May 1986" (pg. 68).

The author mentions the cause of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 being an “illegal reactor experiment”. This immediately struck me as an odd statement. Illegal? In what way? The safety test on the night of the disaster was certainly not something unknown or unauthorized to the managers of the plant. Everything I’ve read about Chernobyl seems to agree that pressure to complete the safety test on schedule from higher ups at the plant lead to an untrained team conducting the test at a time later than expected (it was meant to be done by an earlier shift of workers who had been trained for it but got postponed). There were certainly many issues with how the experiment was carried out but “illegal” doesn’t seem to fit the bill. The author’s point could just have easily been made by highlighting the issues with the test, the timing, the untrained staff, the lack of failsafe measures without referring to the test as illegal. This wording seems to imply the reason the accident happened at all was because plant operators were breaking actual laws or regulations in place at the time which simply doesn’t seem to be true.

The author mentions this several times, always referring to the “illegal experiment”. I haven’t yet found anything to indicate this safety test was illegal in any traditional sense of the term.

It’s possible the author was referring to this information from the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, stating that in a previous edition it had said the test was in violation of regulations at the time but has revised that statement in light of new info.

“It was stated in INSAG-1 that blocking of the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) was a violation of procedures. However, recent Soviet information confirms that blocking of the ECCS was in fact permissible at Chernobyl if authorized by the Chief Engineer, and that this authorization was given for the tests leading up to the accident and was even an approved step in the test procedure” (INSAG-7, 1992, pg. 10).



The author also says the “illegal experiment” was carried out in May of 1986. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster took place on the night of April 26 1986, not in May. It’s a very small part of a book that covers a lot of ground (and most of it fairly well), but this date is very obviously incorrect and should have been caught in editing.

References

IAEA. (1992). Chapter 3: The Accident. In The Chernobyl accident: Updating of INSAG-1: INSAG-7: A report by the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (pp. 10–12). essay.

Irvine, H. M. (2011). Nuclear power: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.… (más)