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HTML:A Chernobyl survivor and the New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe "mercilessly chronicles the absurdities of the Soviet system" in this "vividly empathetic" account of the worst nuclear accident in history (Wall Street Journal). On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of the Communist party rule, the regime's control over scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else. Today, the risk of another Chernobyl looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world. A moving and definitive account, Chernobyl is also an urgent call to action.… (más)
Суббота, 26 апреля 1986 года, выдалась солнечной. В городе Припяти все стремились оказаться на улице, ловя яркие лучи. Кто-то ради раннего загара даже располагался на крышах домов, дети игрались в песочницах, а в местном ЗАГСе радостно зарегистрировали семь свадеб. Не сразу стало понятно, что весенний загар какой-то чересчур интенсивный. Еще бы – взрывом на Чернобыльской АЭС в 3 км от города был выброшен радиационный эквивалент 500 Хиросим. Щитовидки детишек на улицах подверглись излучению, в три раза превышающем крайнюю дозу, допустимую для работников ЧАЭС в экстремальных ситуациях. Но паники быть не должно было, и КГБ перерезало междугороднюю связь... В своей книге историк Сергей Плохий использовал недавно рассекреченные новой властью украинские архивы для более полного воссоздания картины произошедшего, включая реакцию властей и госорганов.
Reading this book, you can't help but feel angry at the hiding of facts and wilful denial of the scale of the disaster by the Soviet authorities in the aftermath. But the book itself is well-written and easy to follow, even if the subject matter is hard. ( )
Esta é a história da central nuclear de Chernobyl desde a sua construção à sua desativação. Em 26 de abril de 1986, às 13:23, um reator da Usina Nuclear de Chernobyl, na Ucrânia soviética, explodiu. Enquanto as autoridades tentavam entender o que havia acontecido, trabalhadores, engenheiros, bombeiros e aqueles que viviam na área foram abandonados ao seu destino. A explosão colocou o mundo à beira da aniquilação nuclear, contaminando mais da metade da Europa com a precipitação radioativa.
Excellent, readable history of the personalities, science, and politics of the catastrophe involving both the Soviet Union and Ukraine by a Ukranian with mostly Ukrainian sources. ( )
Phenomenal book showing just how close Europe came to becoming completely uninhabitable through a catastrophic combination of cost-cutting, maladministration, bad communication and bureaucracy. Saving the situation, real heroes stepped into the breach and through luck and sacrifice, saved much of the planet from man-made destruction. The story is well told and easy to follow, despite the many characters and institutions involved. ( )
Plokhy aims to replace the myth with history, drawing on newly released archive material and interviews with eyewitnesses. His narrative is thorough and well organized, but consensus is elusive. Those involved were working with different and often contradictory sets of facts, in the service of mutually incomprehensible agendas and ideologies ... As for the lessons to be learned from Chernobyl, Plokhy’s conclusion is anything but reassuring.
As an author, he is a brilliant interpreter not only of the events themselves but of their longer-term historical significance. Plokhy definitely has his head around all the science (there’s a two-page footnote on roentgen, bone marrow and gamma rays). But he manages it so comfortably that even the biggest science-phobe (ie me) is not put off. More importantly, he never loses sight of the human picture ... This history reads like an academic thriller written by Malcolm Gladwell. Without losing any detail or nuance, Plokhy has a knack for making complicated things simple while still profound. As moving as it is painstakingly researched, this book is a tour de force and a cracking read. No physics GCSE required.
a lucid account of how the Soviet mania for nuclear power combined with endemic shoddiness in the industrial sector and near-paranoid habits of state secrecy led to the 1986 disaster ... Plokhy concentrates on the political fallout of Chernobyl in Ukraine, leaving little space for Russia and Belarus. This is a pity, because the political repercussions in Russia were far-reaching, while Belarus was by far the hardest-hit republic in terms of radioactive damage. But these do not detract from what is the most comprehensive, convincing history of Chernobyl yet to appear in English.
The author concludes that even in the wake of Chernobyl, we have not gotten much better at containing meltdowns—consider Fukushima, still poisoning the Pacific—and need to cooperate to 'strengthen international control over the construction and exploitation of nuclear power stations.' A thoughtful study of catastrophe, unintended consequences, and, likely, nuclear calamities to come.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
To the Children of the Nuclear Age
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
There are eight of us on the trip to Chernobyl, marked on my Ukranian map as "Chornobyl." - Preface
Around 7 a.m. on April 28, 1986, Cliff Robinson, a twenty-nine-year old chemist working at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plan two hours' drive from Stockholm, went to brush his teeth after breakfast. -Prologue
It was a big day - many in Moscow and throughout the Soviet Union believed that it signaled the dawn of a new era. -Chapter 1
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
At least 50 million curies of radiation were released by the Chernobyl explosion, the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima bombs. All that was required for such catastrophic fallout was the escape of less than half of the reactor’s nuclear fuel. Originally it had contained close to 400,000 pounds of enriched uranium—enough to pollute and devastate a good part of Europe. And if the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion of the first, then hardly any living and breathing organisms would be left unaffected on the planet.
The accident marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union: a little more than five years later, the world superpower would fall apart, doomed not only by the albatross of its communist ideology but also by its dysfunctional managerial and economic systems.
In December 1991, when Ukrainians voted for their country’s independence, they also consigned the mighty Soviet Union to the dustbin of history—it was officially dissolved a few weeks after the Ukrainian referendum. While it would be wrong to attribute the development of glasnost in the Soviet Union, or the rise of the national movement in Ukraine and other republics, to the Chernobyl accident alone, the disaster’s impact on those interrelated processes can hardly be overstated.
In early modern times, the rule of Kyivan princes over the region was replaced by that of Lithuanian grand dukes, and then of Polish kings. The Cossacks claimed the territory in the mid-seventeenth century, but after a few years they had to cede it to the Poles. The town became the private property of local nobles and magnates.
In the mid-1920s, Kaganovich became the communist boss of Ukraine and presided over the policy of korenizatsiia, or indigenization, which put a temporary halt to the cultural Russification of the local population and promoted the development of Ukrainian and Jewish culture. As Stalin’s policies changed, however, so did the role that Kaganovich played in Ukraine. In the early 1930s, he became one of the main architects of the Holodomor, the great Ukrainian famine that took the lives of close to 4 million survivors of the revolution and the civil war and of the children who had been born to them in the years that followed. Some 1 million people died in the Kyiv region alone. In Kaganovich’s native district of Khabne, the death toll was 168 individuals per 1,000—the area was more than decimated.
Then came the horrors of World War II. The Germans entered Chernobyl on August 25, 1941.
The communist-organized guerrilla groups, which enlisted local Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants, were active in the region from the fall of 1941. But the low-intensity war between the communist-backed partisans and the German-organized police (including local cadres) turned into a bloody vendetta. The executions of partisans, and, once the tide of the war turned, of policemen, took place in public, further brutalizing the local population. The settling of accounts among the relatives of those involved in the conflict would continue long after the end of the war.9 The Red Army recaptured Chernobyl and its environs from the Germans in the fall of 1943
For the locals, the long-awaited liberation from the Nazis brought more death and hardship. With the Red Army in control of the region, the local male population was immediately called up and enlisted in the army. Many of those who survived the occupation were thrown into battle without arms, training, or even uniforms, dying on the outskirts of their villages and towns.
The tips of the rods, however, were made of graphite, and the graphite tips appear to have tipped the already highly unstable reactor toward catastrophe. As the rods began to descend into the core of the reactor, the tips replaced neutron-absorbing water in the top part of the active zone, thus not decreasing, but further increasing, the rate of the reaction. This was the positive void effect—the deadly design problem of RBMK reactors that had almost destroyed one of them at the Leningrad power station in 1975. Now the positive void effect was once again at work.
Soviet managers and bureaucrats tended to do what years of party rule had trained them to do—avoid responsibility. Everyone was afraid of being accused of spreading panic, and everyone was glad to defer to the higher authorities to make a decision. They were company men, the “company” being the Soviet system.
“coverage of the Chernobyl disaster marked a turning point in the history of Soviet communications. For the first time, television… began to meet people’s demands for ‘bad news,’ to abandon the silence about domestic disasters.”28 The turning point would prove critical for the development of the Soviet media, Soviet-American relations, and the incipient collapse of the USSR. The Soviet Union was living out its final years. There would be a great deal of bad news to come, and, after Chernobyl, no way for the Soviet regime to hide it from its own people and the world.
Coming up with quick, cost-efficient, and almost always temporary fixes for complex problems—achieved with the help of invariably limited technical resources and usually unlimited human ones—had been the essence of Slavsky’s whole career and of the Soviet nuclear industry in general since its inception.
In the long run, the deal turned out to be disastrous for Ukraine. Twenty years later, in March 2014, nuclear-free Ukraine became an object of aggression by one of the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum when Russia, now led by President Vladimir Putin, annexed Ukraine’s Crimea and unleashed a hybrid war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The Ukrainian parliament appealed to the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum but did not get very far, as the memorandum did not require any military action on the part of the signatories.
Moscow, the former capital of the empire responsible for the design and operation of the damaged reactor, disappeared behind the borders of the Russian Federation, leaving it to Ukraine and the international community to clean up the mess. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 brought the fighting within 322 kilometers of the city of Enerhodar, the site of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which operates six reactors. The war also interrupted the nuclear cycle whereby Ukraine received its nuclear fuel from Russia and sent its spent fuel back there. In 2016, Ukraine began the construction of its own spent-fuel facility and declared plans to reduce its almost total dependence on Russian fuel by covering 40 percent of its needs with purchases from the US-based Westinghouse Electric Company. While the war and the disruption of the traditional nuclear cycle brought new challenges to the struggling Ukrainian economy, the nuclear industry of the land of Chernobyl took another important step away from its Soviet legacy.20 What remained unchanged and impervious to remedy by any amount of internal mobilization or outside assistance were the long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The half-life of plutonium-239, traces of which were found as far away as Sweden, is 24,000 years. -Chapter 21
The world has already been overwhelmed by one Chernobyl and one exclusion zone. It cannot afford any more. It must learn its lessons from what happened in and around Chernobyl on April 26, 1986. -Epilogue
Business.
Science.
Technology.
Nonfiction.
HTML:A Chernobyl survivor and the New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe "mercilessly chronicles the absurdities of the Soviet system" in this "vividly empathetic" account of the worst nuclear accident in history (Wall Street Journal). On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of the Communist party rule, the regime's control over scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else. Today, the risk of another Chernobyl looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world. A moving and definitive account, Chernobyl is also an urgent call to action.