May 1, 2011

Chernobyl: Twenty-Five Years of Wormwood

By Kennedy Maize

Twenty-five years ago last month, engineers and technicians were running low-power tests at the 1,000-MW Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant outside Kiev. They quickly, inexplicably, lost control of the light-water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor. In an instant, the critical chain reaction flared out of control. The plant exploded like a small, dirty bomb, the graphite caught fire, and the worst catastrophe in civilian nuclear power was under way.

The immediate fallout, using the term broadly, not only killed brave first responders—who faced brutal radiation doses as they flew helicopters over the smoking carcass to drop sand, clay, boron, and lead to suffocate the beast—but also a photographer who documented their bravery and plant workers unlucky to be working the early morning shift when the unit went wild.

How many died? Former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev was running the Soviet government when the reactor exploded. Writing in the March-April 2011 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Gorbachev’s estimate 25 years later remains imprecise: “Some 50 workers died fighting the fire and reactor core meltdown, and another 4,000 or more deaths may eventually be shown to have resulted from radioactive releases. The radiation dosage at the power plant during the accident has been estimated at over 20,000 roentgens per hour, about 40 times the estimated lethal dosage, and the World Health Organization identified 237 workers with Acute Radiation Sickness.”

1. Days after. This is an aerial view of Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant just days after it caught fire and exploded on April 26, 1986, sending a radioactive cloud of dust over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and other parts of Europe. Courtesy: Reuters

2.    Buried trouble. A concrete sarcophagus was erected by December 1986 to seal off the reactor and halt the further release of radiation into the atmosphere. The heat inside the reactor remains over 200C today, and the concrete structure is showing signs of stress. At the time of the explosion, only 3% of the nuclear material in the plant was expelled, leaving about 216 tons of uranium and plutonium buried in the reactor. Courtesy: Reuters

The Accident was Local...

A radioactive cloud spread westward over much of Europe. For weeks, the release fell over cities and fields. The atomic industry coined a euphemism to describe the event: “rapid disassembly of the core.”

Chernobyl dominated newspaper, radio, and television news. In countries with nuclear power programs, a political tussle broke out among those who ran—and advocated—nuclear plants and those who sought to shut them down. Opponents of nuclear power sought to make Chernobyl a symbol of the evils of the atom. Proponents stressed the inherently flawed, one-off design of the RBMK plants, unlike the West’s typically water-cooled and -moderated plants.

There was satisfaction for the supporters of civilian atomic power plants that the machines the Soviets provided to their captive satellite countries were similar to, and perhaps stolen from, modern U.S. and European light water reactors. Western engineers, with tongue in cheek, often described the Soviet VVER designs as “Eastinghouse” reactors. The Russians were reluctant to supply their conquered Warsaw Pact allies with units that could make both electricity and weapons-grade plutonium, fearing that Poles and Czechs and Hungarians might get ideas about turning plowshares into swords.

Predictably, the Chernobyl disaster had cultural echoes. In 1988, Marvel Comics produced a “Meltdown” series of comic books, featuring the superhero Wolverine and using the Chernobyl accident a plot device. In 2005, crime writer Martin Cruz Smith, author of the best-selling Gorky Park, wrote Wolves Eat Dogs, which also featured Chernobyl in the back story. For those interested in nuclear energy history, nuclear accidents have figured in popular culture at least since the 1954 Castle Bravo H-bomb test on Bikini Atoll. That incident accidentally exposed a Japanese fishing boat, the Fukuryu Maru, sickening all 23 crew members, one of whom died within seven months of radiation sickness. That episode set off a firestorm of controversy in Japan and inspired the Godzilla monster movies. The 1959 French movie Hiroshima Mon Amour, dealing with the lasting and evanescent qualities of memory, started a motion picture genre known as “new wave.” In 1979, The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, eerily preceded the Three Mile Island accident.