Liquidator

The Chernobyl Story

Sergei Belyakov

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813227446
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Physik

In the late April of 1986, the world learned about the quaint town in the Central Ukraine — Chernobyl. The largest nuclear catastrophe in the history of mankind, which affected the lives of millions and millions, had forced the USSR government to take unprecedented actions. One of them was the formation of a cleanup crew from the Army reservists. They were tasked with a titanic chore of cleaning the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant from radioactive debris after the explosion of Reactor #4. Sergei Belyakov, then a PhD scientist, volunteered to become one of the many 'nuclear jumpers' of that long-forgotten crew. This book sums up his recollections about that nuclear jumper stint. It is written not as a traditional memoir, but as an alloy of personal views and feelings, templated over the information about the Chernobyl disaster from the official sources of those days. It will give the Western readers a chilling sense of the magnitude of the event that brought down the almighty Soviet Union.

Contents:

• Part 1: 'Are You Tired of Your Life?'
• Part 2: Forewarned...
  • July 31, 1986: Chernobyl NPP, first hodka
  • August 5, 1986: Oranoe village, Camp of the 25th Brigade of Chemical Defense
  • August 6, 1986: Chernobyl NPP, second hodka
• Part 3:... Is Forearmed
  • August 7, 1986: Chernobyl NPP, third hodka
  • August 13, 1986: Chernobyl NPP, ninth hodka
  • August 17, 1986: Chernobyl NPP, thirteenth hodka
  • August 27, 1986: Chernobyl NPP, nineteenth hodka
  • September 1–September 8, 1986: Oranoe village, Camp of the 25th Brigade of Chemical Defense
  • September 8–September 9, 1986: Kiev
• Appendices:
  • RBMK Reactor: General Overview and Main Technological Features
  • Chronology of the Accident and the Aftermath
  • Factors That Triggered the Accident and Affected Its Aftermath

Readership: People who are interested in the Chernobyl story. Chernobyl;Nuclear Jumper;Liquidator;Nuclear Power Plant;Nuclear Catastrophe;Chernobyl Sarcophagus0 Key Features:

• Authentic recollections of the actual cleanup efforts during "pre-sarcophagus" time at Chernobyl NPP
• Personal accounts of a nuclear jumper: fear, bravery, creativity, camaraderie, resilience, determination, exhaustion, and many others
• Unique atmosphere of liquidator's daily life, on and away from the Plant

PART 1

“Are You Tired of Your Life?”

In late April of 1986, two of my friends and I went for a fishing trip to the upper Dnieper river region, Farther Lakes, a beautiful natural setting, where the main river stream splits into dozens of minor ones, and often loses the urgency to go south, forming innumerable small lakes and springs filled with clean fresh water. Branches, lakes and springs were a true home to the wildlife, from wolves, foxes and even bears to weasels, ferrets, and countless flocks of cranes, herons, geese, ducks and of course every kind of fresh water fish known in Eastern Europe. Farther Lakes were the place of our yearly pilgrimage at the end of the spring semester — all three of us were teaching at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Dnepropetrovsk, or simply Dnepr.

The end of April in Ukraine epitomizes the start of the summer. Yes, it is still far from the muggy, sweaty, overbearingly hot July and August, and even from June, full of sunny hot days and yet refreshing cool nights. It is the time when nature fires up all jets of budding, blooming, blossoming … Boris and Georgiy are avid fishermen, but I am not, thus I joined this trip more as an observer; besides fishing, we were testing our newly synthesized mosquito repellent on ourselves.

Friday evening in April at Farther Lakes gets colder by the minute after the sun goes down. A wet twig in the bonfire shoots a bunch of sparks in the darkness above, and its loud crack breaks the idyllic silence.

I do not remember who went down to check on the fishing gear (we left it set for the night, a few yards down to the lake shore from our camp); I think it was Boris.

He returned quickly.

“Guys, the water level is down … Way down!” He said with quite a concerned voice.

(Every resident of Dnepr and its vicinity knows exactly what this means: the dam shutters are put down, holding the river waters running south. This happens a few times every year during spring and summer, and when it happens, it indicates a major problem — contamination of the river with wastes that were “accidentally” dumped by one of the mega-plants or industrial giants, built on the banks of the Dnieper upstream. As a cheap source of water that is used for cooling, washing, soaking, and so on, the river was abused by these monsters, not rushing to admit the responsibility for contaminations or take steps to clean up their own mess, which usually manifested itself in the silver streaks of dead fish stretching for miles, the disturbingly bright-green algae “soup”, or on the contrary, the starkly brown murky waters.)

We looked at each other, concerned, and without saying anything rushed down to the shore. The water level was lowered by a yard, if not more — shiny, oil-black roots of the big birch tree that sat on the water edge were exposed to the air and resembled the tentacles of an underwater beast.

None of us had seen the level this low; it most definitely meant that the dam shutters were fully shut down for quite a while. Worried, we returned to the camp fire and for some time tried to filter out any comprehensible information from the old VEF radio that we had with us, endlessly tuning it in.

The Soviet radio stations were broadcasting typical bravura songs related to the upcoming May 1st Labor Day, and the only jot of anxiety that had seeded in our minds that breezy April night was a disturbed voice of some Swedish or Danish station anchor, repeating the word “Chernobyl” almost in every sentence.

You don’t have to be a detective to figure out that something bad had happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which sits right on the Pripyat river, feeding Dnieper above Kiev and above the Dneprodzerzhinsk dam, the one that smothered the river stream at Farther Lakes.

This was the first time when I had heard the name Chernobyl in association with the nuclear plant accident.

A sleepless night ended early. With the first ray of sun we packed, walked a few miles to the nearest village and took the first bus to the city. There, in the bus, we learned that there indeed was a fire at one of the Chernobyl reactor buildings; the fire was put down, but at a cost: two firemen lost their lives.

The situation has stabilized.

In recent years, I frequently contemplate a thought: how would the Chernobyl accident and its aftermath go, if the features common to our daily life today — internet, cell phones, blogging, social networks, and many, many others — had been available in 1986? That would include the speed and the volume of information sharing, news coverage, openness of the Soviet Union authorities (both internal and external), response of the world community and its actions (help and/or sanctions) and much, much more.

The answer is equally frustrating and gratifying.

Clearly, the magnitude of the catastrophe would have been much smaller, starting from the night of the accident on April 26th, 1986. Remember that the only available means of communication between the decision makers (plant management, nuclear experts, State and local authorities) and the plant staff (engineers, technicians, operators, etc.) was the phone, the good old land line. No mobile technology or cell phones available meant the loss of the precious minutes when the accident was in its initial phase. Dithering, procrastination, dragging in the decision-making process and the actions resulting from it were definitely affected by the information shortage. Internet, Skype, Facebook, Twitter would have ultimately made the information flow, exchange, and distribution much more abundant and rapid both in the first days and weeks of the aftermath and during the following months of the clean-up efforts. From my point of view, it would have had a history-changing impact not only on my personal involvement in the Chernobyl accident, but more so on the following key events related to it:

–Initial assessment of the situation after the Unit 4 failure and measures to prevent further deterioration of the reactor by both plant management and the personnel of the Unit 4 night shift;

–Full understanding by the State authorities and Communist Party leaders of the accident severity, related contamination levels around the plant and especially expanded contamination of the remote areas by radioactive plumes (including not only USSR but other European countries);

–Steps taken by the plant management, related industry officials, State and local governments to prevent further spread of radioactivity, clean-up and decontamination measures following the accident;

–Agonizingly painful story of Pripyat evacuation (about fifty thousand people were moved the next day after the accident);

–Political, social, moral impact of the accident to millions of people in the USSR and around the world.

One can only guess how the Chernobyl tale would have paved its way in the world’s history, particularly, how this would have affected the fate of the existing and newly built nuclear power plants, for example, the Fukushima Daichi plant.

Ironically, about a year prior to the catastrophe, Anatoliy Majorets, then the Minister of Energy and Electrification of the USSR, decreed that information on any adverse effects caused by the functioning of the energy industry on employees, inhabitants and environment, were not suitable for publication by newspapers, radio or television. This decree had perhaps the most overwhelming effect on the available information related to the Chernobyl accident, even months after it happened, because it literally gagged everyone who worked in his Ministry’s network. Imagine how this would have been possible in the era of internet.

But I digress.

How did we live during that incredibly hot and sunny summer of 1986?

No one can say that people were oblivious and unconcerned. In the very beginning, the absence of the official acknowledgement of the accident’s real scale and grave danger it put the world in, and fully manicured TASS¹ daily news, made rich soil for a variety of rumors and gossip that were spreading like weeds.

In early May, when the Ukrainian capital was really close to a total evacuation, the most outrageous rumors scattered mightily in the country, one grimmer than the other. Strangely, it seemed that nothing was out of the ordinary in Kiev: the Labor Day parade was held on radiation-steeped Khreshchatyk, and multicolored wave of the Peace cycling peloton waved through the city roads … Meanwhile, in Pripyat the families of plant workers were already evacuated in a hurry (including my cousin Peter’s family, who at the time worked as an electrician at Chernobyl NPP — his younger son later had a lot of health issues related to the radiation over-exposure). Because our institute was closely related to the headquarters of the regional Administration of Civil Defence, so the officers from the Military Department² knew of course much more than the filtered information from the government sources to the media, and knew it first-hand; even a tiny bit of information that had seeped through that source gave all teachers and scientists of the institute a nightmarish feeling of helplessness and doom. The overall lack of reliable and trustworthy data about what happened and what was going on there, multiplied by the knowledge of the danger of radioactive contamination that my colleagues at the institute carried due to their professional involvements, was literally placing all of us in a state of shock. Here are some of the most memorable rumors and realities of those days.

–Kiev is drowning in the chaos and the full-scale abandonment, as in times of war.

–For a one-way train ticket — anywhere, just to get out of the doomed city — people pay up to a thousand rubles, and yet all ticket kiosks are closed.

–The main railway station and all airports are cordoned by the armed soldiers with vicious dogs.

–Mothers literally throw their children into the windows and doors of departing trains, just to get them out of the radioactivity-laden capital.

–Thousands of troops are entering Kiev to confront the riots and looting.

–A threat of a radionuclide seepage into the Dnieper is very real (in fact, the Dneprodzerzhinsk dam was fully shut down when we were fishing). Therefore, it is necessary to stock up drinking water, in the maximum possible amounts, since all three water-uptake stations of the city could be shut down any minute and will stay closed indefinitely.

–It is necessary to take whopping doses of potassium iodide, in case the radioactive cloud passes over the city and iodine radioactive isotope will accumulate in the thyroid gland.

On May 8, the Ukrainian Minister of Health Romanenko spoke to the public. He stated the necessary preventive measures: frequent hand washing, daily wet wiping of the apartment interior, careful removal of dirt from shoes, keeping the windows sealed. Nothing was said about the true state of the radiological situation in Kiev and in the republic — his report was obviously carefully doctored by the Politburo.³ Meanwhile, consumers in all Dnepr city wet markets spontaneously boycotted the vegetables and fruits (particularly, potatoes and apples) sold from trucks with Kiev regional license plates.

Gorbachev appeared on television for the first time on May 15 — more than two weeks after the accident. Many westerners do not pay attention to this fact, but to me it was just as bad as an overwhelming majority of Gorby’s internal political decisions and choices, or rather indecisiveness and spineless ways to handle the country that for centuries relied on a strong leader, be it a czar or a Party boss.

In his appeal to the Soviets, Glasnost⁴ receives a huge kick in the keister: profoundly talking about complete control of the situation at Chernobyl NPP, about the role of the Politburo, and about the heroism of Soviet people, he did not drop a word about the true scale of the catastrophe, about the potential consequences, about the containment actions related to the Chernobyl accident. The Secretary General concluded with a standard psalm about the grave danger of the nuclear arsenals in foreign countries, which could cause the nuclear catastrophes thousands and thousands of times worse than the Chernobyl disaster.

Mid-May onwards, radiation fear as a result of the information blockade had reached its climax. Rumors stated that the damaged reactor was ablaze, that hundreds of people were irradiated to death. The first eyewitness reports and stories emerged from liquidators: they came through rare phone calls, through letters, through relatives who had the guts to come and meet with loved ones, face to face in the vicinity of Chernobyl. News was not as scary as rumors, but was still in frightening dissonance with TV and newspapers.

Dnepr streets were abundantly and regularly sprinkled in the mornings, especially in the central areas, where the bigwigs lived. The early summer of Dnepr was irresistibly beautiful, and its flowery, refreshed boulevards and avenues drived up the anguish and suspense. Oddly, such splendor revived the visions of June 1941, right before the Nazi troops began the invasion of the USSR. I saw that similar beautiful summer morning in the movies; the serenity of Soviet border and nearby towns shattered in a matter of hours, and the brutal reality that swiftly replaced the peace and happiness was in stark contrast to those beautiful morning streets.

Two colonels from the Military Department were the first at the institute, who were called “for special military training”. My colleagues and I had a rough idea of what sort of “training” they had to expect, particu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Series Editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Part 1 “Are You Tired of Your Life?”
• Part 2 Forewarned …
• Part 3 … Is Forearmed
• Appendix A RBMK Reactor: General Overview and Main Technological Features
• Appendix B Chronology of the Accident and the Aftermath
• Appendix C Factors That Triggered the Accident and Affected Its Aftermath
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations