Indeed Brukhanov, who as director was responsible for the city, was much liked by the people of Pripyat. Not only was he free of the bullying manner so common in other leaders but he exerted every effort to make Pripyat a pleasant place to live. While in most other Soviet cities there was a waiting list of many years for housing, a family moving to Pripyat was soon allocated a flat; Brukhanov had calculated, quite accurately, that this was more important than any wage differential in attracting the best workers to the Chernobyl power station. He had also made sure that the shops were well stocked, and he had used spare supplies of steel to make greenhouses so that his people could have access to the unheard-of luxury of fresh tomatoes. Because of his passion for roses, they had been planted in abundance in the municipal flower beds. Every aspect of life in the community was his responsibility; for example, when a fireman, Leonid Shavrey, wanted to buy a motorbike he had to apply to Brukhanov in person for permission. When a light bulb in a street lamp failed, it was Brukhanov who was informed and Brukhanov who had to get it changed. He worked so hard to live up to his responsibilities that the chief disadvantage of his solicitousness was not immediately apparent: by directing so much of his energy to ensuring a good life in Pripyat, he was distracted from running the power station.
5
In 1976, as the first unit was nearing completion, a group of young graduates from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute arrived at Chernobyl and went to live in the wooden huts of the forest settlement. With the dearth of experienced engineers like Dyatlov, many of the specialists came straight from the universities and polytechnics in this way: they were young men who had learned the theory behind the generation of nuclear power and certain basic skills, but who had also been taught a conformity and respect for authority found in all branches of the Soviet educational system. They had not been encouraged to show initiative or display a spirit of inquiry. Nor did they have access to training with simulators, which were available to young nuclear operatives in the West. They had to be trained on the job by the older engineers. Kizima, the head of construction, described Chernobyl as ‘the first university of atomic construction’.
Some were bright. Students who graduated at the top of their class could express a preference for where they wanted to work, and Chernobyl was often their first choice. They were from the most diverse backgrounds, reflecting the ethnic and national variety of the Soviet Union. Nikolai Steinberg, who came straight from the Moscow Institute of Electrical Engineering with a degree in hydraulic physics, was a Jew from Odessa; the first language of his grandfather, a banker, had been French. Razim Davletbayev and his wife, Inze, were both Tatars from Bawly near Kazan.
Following Kizima’s dictum that they had to learn on the job, even graduates with the highest honours started at the bottom. Razim worked as a labourer and studied in the evening to qualify for promotion. Housed in the little wooden huts, the new workers would pore over plans laid out on the floor. It was little better than camping, with communal kitchens and communal showers, but they were all so glad to be involved in this prestigious project that no amount of hardship could restrain their zeal.
The older specialists, several of whom had followed Dyatlov from Komsomolsk, were as eager to teach the young as the young were to learn. There was no question of anyone expecting extra money for extra effort: Razim Davletbayev spent not only the evenings but also half his summer vacation studying the new technology of nuclear power. His wife, Inze – a woman with a wide Tatar face and gentle, soulful eyes – had a job in the department of industrial safety, checking the amount of radiation received by each worker, but all her ambitions were for her husband; she saw to all the household chores so that Razim could continue with his studies. After the birth of a baby, she spent much of the day with the child: Razim left for work at seven in the morning and only returned at nine at night.
Among Inze’s closest friends was Luba, the wife of Alexander Akimov, whom Razim had known at the Institute in Moscow. Akimov had gone on to study at Zukh-Hydroprojekt, with the designers of the power station, and it was here that he had met Luba, also the daughter of an army officer and a student in the same department. Akimov had a gangling figure, thick glasses, a high forehead, receding hair and a small moustache. Luba was a tall, skinny girl with a delicate constitution, short dark hair and a sophisticated sense of humour. She loathed pretentiousness of a bourgeois kind, and was choosy about her friends.
Upon graduating, Akimov was sent to work for Zukh-Hydroprojekt in Chernobyl, and Luba went with him as his wife. They moved straight into a flat in Pripyat, where Luba gave birth to their first child. They, too, embarked upon the life at Chernobyl with the greatest enthusiasm. Akimov worked hard to establish his professional reputation; he also joined the party. In his free time, he read historical biographies, subscribed to magazines on military technology, and went after duck and hare with his Winchester rifle.
The Akimovs’ life was not without trouble. Their second child was born with a twisted hip: every two weeks Luba had to make the five-hour journey on the hydrofoil to take her baby to see a specialist in Kiev.
6
On 26 September 1977, two years behind schedule, the first unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power station was finally commissioned. Despite the delays, it was hailed as a triumph. One thousand megawatts of electrical power could now be fed into the grid at Kiev, a saving in terms of thermal power of three and a half million tons of coal each year. Brukhanov and Kizima were praised and decorated. Soviet science and technology had triumphed yet again.
Razim Davletbayev, who had worked as a simple labourer at the start-up, was promoted to turbine engineer. Alexander Akimov, now a specialist in the automation of electrical power, was transferred from Hydroprojekt onto the staff of the power station itself. He served under Nikolai Steinberg, who, with the departure of Taras Plochy to be chief engineer at the Balakovsky nuclear power station, was now chief of the turbine hall. It was a particularly cheerful unit; Steinberg, who had a keen eye for members of the opposite sex, had taken on an exceptionally pretty girl called Katya Litovsky, the only woman among twenty-two men. This did little for her marriage – she soon separated from her husband – but much for the morale of the engineers.
Akimov, a more earnest character than Steinberg, served as Communist party secretary for the unit – a chore that reflected his commitment to communism and also helped his career. His friend Razim Davletbayev also joined the party, although Inze tried to dissuade him; she thought there were as many good people outside the party as in it and resented the way in which her mother, who had toiled for twenty years, had never been invited to join until she had taken a degree.
At a higher level, Nikolai Fomin, who had been head of the electrical workshop, laid aside his professional duties to serve as party secretary for the power station as a whole. Under the system it was a position of both power and responsibility; as the elite, party members were answerable for the successes or failures of their organization; and, whatever their rank in the station’s administration, they had to defend themselves against criticism at party meetings.
Fomin, although already middle-aged, also studied physics by correspondence to add to his existing qualifications. When he returned to nonpolitical work he was rewarded with the post of deputy chief engineer.
Little more than a year after the launch of the first unit, on 21 December 1978, the second unit went on line. Knowing only what they were told by their superiors or had read in the Soviet press about the absolute safety of Soviet reactors, none of the operators realized that three years before there had been a meltdown of a fuel element in the No. 1 unit at Leningrad, which was identical in design to the unit at Chernobyl. Such was the secrecy that still surrounded anything to do with nuclear power that the accident was concealed even from those who worked in the industry. There was little opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others.
Nor was this accident at Leningrad the first; there had been others at Leningrad and at Beloy
arsk. Only ten days after the commissioning of the second unit at Chernobyl a fire at Beloyarsk burned through the control cable and the reactor momentarily went out of control. No news of these accidents reached the outside world, and the Chernobyl operators proceeded on the assumption that if they kept to the regulations in the documentation that went with the reactor – drawn up by a department of the Ministry of Energy in the 1960s upon the advice of the scientific supervisor, Anatoli Alexandrov, and approved by the State Committee on Nuclear Safety and the chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power station – there was no possible danger of a serious accident.
There were certain minor contradictions, but this was nothing new. Modifications made to the later reactors suggested that the earlier ones were not perfect; for example, in the first two reactors the control rods were lowered into the reactors by manual operation of the drive motor switches, and it was only later that automatic controls were introduced. It was also generally understood that with so much piping, there was always the possibility of a rupture of some kind, but the possibility of a major accident never entered anyone’s mind. An accident was conceivable in a pressurized-water reactor, with its greater power density and higher fuel rating, but not in the RBMKs.
If the RBMKs were safe, however, they were not always easy to control. It was an advantage that they did not have to be closed down for refuelling; one fuel element could be replaced at a time. But the number of dials that the operators had to monitor at any one time, as well as the complexity of the information from the Skala computer, which scanned the reactor’s condition only every five minutes and printed out its findings fifty metres from where the operators were stationed, made it difficult for them to understand at all times exactly what was going on.
The operators also discovered that the reactor was unstable when run at low power: in the same way as a jet aircraft might stall at low throttle and crash, power could collapse in the reactor. It therefore became accepted practice, when it looked as though the reactor would die on them, to withdraw more of the boron control rods than was permitted by the regulations. The regulations governing safety were not set in stone but could be overruled upon the authority of the chief or deputy chief engineer. Over the years of running the RBMKs, the engineers had decided that the parameters recommended by the designers bore as much relationship to the reality of running the reactors as did the Communist rhetoric to the realities of life in the USSR.
There were also risks to be run by playing safe. An emergency shutdown of the reactor – easily done by pushing the AZ button, which automatically lowered all the rods into the core – led to a catastrophic cut in the generating capacity of the nuclear power station and in loss of electricity to the grid. It was estimated that an unscheduled shutdown would cost the power station six hundred thousand rubles in lost revenue. If it was subsequently considered unnecessary, it could lead to demotion, loss of salary, even dismissal and expulsion from the paradise of Pripyat. A shutdown was therefore not something a young operator would want to do on his own authority; he would always prefer to seek the approval of a senior engineer.
When news filtered through about the accident on Three Mile Island, it only seemed to confirm the truth of what the operators at Chernobyl had always been told: that where profit was at stake, the capitalists would take insensate risks with the safety of the local population. Moulded by their Communist education, taught to accept without question what they were told by their superiors, isolated by an all-pervasive censorship from any hint of doubt, they never questioned the assurances given by the eminent physicists in Moscow. If the president of the Academy of Sciences himself, Anatoli Alexandrov, insisted that Soviet reactors were entirely safe, who were they to doubt him?
They were aware, of course, that minor accidents could occur – hence the leak-tight containment and contingency plans for a ruptured seam or a burst pipe. They also knew that there might be a dangerous release of radioactivity in the immediate vicinity of the power station – hence the bunker under the administrative building – but they all considered the likelihood remote. When given the task of drawing up a programme for such a hypothetical accident, Alexander Akimov calculated a probability factor of one in ten million per year.
The most likely moment for such an accident was during the start-up of a reactor, when all the circuits were being used for the first time. In December 1981 the third reactor was successfully launched, and the new input of one thousand megawatts into the grid enabled the first reactor, which had been running for five years, to be closed down for routine maintenance in the summer of 1982. In the course of the first reactor’s restart in September the valves controlling the flow of water into the reactor were inadvertently closed. Some of the fuel assemblies overheated, the uranium melted, and there was an explosion in the core and a release of radioactivity into the power station, some of which escaped through the filters into the air outside.
No one was killed. The emergency core-cooling system did its work, and the reactor was closed down. Engineers repairing the damage received significant doses of radiation. Outside the plant, no measurements were taken. The streets of Pripyat were hosed down by water tankers as a precautionary measure, but no one was told of the accident; indeed, so thorough was the regime run by the KGB’s department of classified information that even the operators in the other two reactors did not know what had happened in unit No. 1.
From the point of view of the management and the Ministry of Energy, the most serious consequence of the accident was not the minor release of radioactivity but the eight months it took to repair the reactor. This meant a large loss of revenue to the enterprise, and as a result heads had to roll. The chief of shift and a deputy chief engineer were both demoted, and the latter was transferred to the thermal power station at Zaporozhye. But the buck did not stop there. After an investigation by the Kurchatov Institute and Dollezhal’s bureau, the Party Committee in Kiev decided that the chief engineer, Vyachslav Akinfiev, should be held responsible. He was demoted to the level of deputy chief engineer and removed from any responsibility for the running of the plant.
For Akinfiev this was intolerable. He did not feel that the accident had been his fault; he thought that the deputy chief engineer alone was to blame, and, having been a leader of the enterprise since its inception, he felt humiliated to be reduced to a subordinate role. Although no one dared ask what his crime had been, his fellow workers knew that he was now in disgrace: he was cold-shouldered by the very colleagues who once had fawned on him. Therefore he resigned and, through contacts in Moscow, was offered a job at a new VVER power station then being built by Soviet engineers at Kozloduy in Bulgaria.
7
Akinfiev’s demotion created a vacancy for the post of chief engineer. Among the candidates was Nikolai Fomin, then a deputy chief engineer. A competent and hard-working electrical engineer who knew no more about nuclear physics than he had learned from his correspondence course, he could now draw on the ideological credit he had banked when serving as party secretary for the plant. It was enough, it was argued, to have atomic specialists like Anatoli Dyatlov and Mikhail Lyutov as deputy chief engineers. For the post of chief engineer it was more important that the man should be an effective leader. Fomin’s irascible, dominating manner was thought, like Kizima’s, to counterbalance Brukhanov’s gentler style.
Fomin got the job, whereupon the intrigue now centred on his replacement as deputy chief engineer for units 3 and 4. The choice narrowed down to two – Steinberg, aged thirty-five, or Dyatlov, fifty-two. Brukhanov himself favoured Steinberg, but Dyatlov could call on contacts he had made during his years in Komsomolsk. Moreover Steinberg was a Jew, and while Jews, like the Volga Germans, were often the most able engineers, they were also often the victims of envy and prejudice among Slavs in the Moscow ministries and the party apparatus in Kiev.
Dyatlov was appointed. To the team of engineers who had followed him from Komsomolsk – men like Sitnikov, Chugunov and Grishenka – the
ministry had chosen the best man for the job. Fomin was an electrical specialist; Steinberg a turbine engineer. It was essential to have a nuclear specialist in the upper echelons of the plant’s direction, and Dyatlov was, in their opinion, by far the best physicist on hand.
There was also an element of self-interest. The Soviet educational system turned out a large number of engineers, and since there could be no overt unemployment in a socialist state, these new graduates were allocated to different enterprises throughout the country. As a result, Chernobyl, like any other power station, was obliged to employ many more technicians and specialists than it actually required. Whereas each shift at a nuclear power station in Western Europe or the United States might consist of ten or fifteen operators and engineers, at Chernobyl there would be seventy. Many, naturally, would have nothing to do, and bored workers were sometimes found reading novels or playing cards.
The management dealt with this overmanning by creating an inner elite to run the station, called the Group of Effective Control. Everyone started at the bottom and worked for a time in the various departments, but through a process of natural selection the ablest were put into teams that actually ran the station.
As in any organization, however, there was more room at the bottom than at the top, so even for these high flyers there was a limited chance of promotion. With Fomin in place as chief engineer; Dyatlov, his deputy, in charge of units 3 and 4; and Dyatlov’s friend Sitnikov overseeing units 1 and 2, patronage for the foreseeable future was firmly in the hands of the group from Komsomolsk. Steinberg therefore decided that the time had come to move on, and with the highest references from Brukhanov he went to the Balakovsky nuclear power station, where his old friend Taras Plochy was chief engineer.