where every cubic metre of reinforced concrete must be a guarantee of reliability, and thus of safety. And the main factor governing everyone involved in the construction of power projects must be, above all, his conscience. I am convinced that anyone with a conscience finds defects unacceptable, because he finds them degrading.
It is offensive and insulting to the worker to have to correct mistakes made by others because this shows, above all, a lack of respect for him. An absurd situation arises; the structure has arrived, but it cannot be used; yet there will be no replacement. Just how much self-control, sharp-wittedness, strength and nervous energy is required from the builder to finally put a structure like this in order?
Lubov wrote the article in a single evening. She would have liked to have left out the fawning references to the odious general secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, or the directives of the Twenty-seventh Congress and speeches by the minister of energy and electrification on the Five-Year Plan. There were also things she would have liked to have put in: her contempt for the corruption she saw all around her in Pripyat; the way leaders gave well-paid jobs to their unqualified wives so that they could go for holidays to the Black Sea; the way senior managers took on their old friends in their departments and covered up for their errors; the way everyone spouted the slogans of collectivism while looking out only for himself.
On 27 March, Lubov’s article appeared in Literaturnaya Ukraina under the title ‘The Resolutions of the 27th CPSU Congress Being Put into Action. It Is No Private Matter.’ The immediate reaction in Chernobyl was one of anger and dismay. Although Lubov’s criticism was chiefly directed at suppliers, it was thought disloyal to bring matters of this kind into the open. Brukhanov, who was always at odds with Kizima, was happy enough to see his rival discomfited, while Kizima told Lubov that she was not qualified to write an article of this kind. It was said that she had sold out her friends in Pripyat to make a name for herself in Kiev, and rumours reached her that the town committee was considering expelling her from the party.
2
Two days before the publication of Lubov Kovalevskaya’s article in Literaturnaya Ukraina, Nikolai Fomin, the chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power station, had returned to work after a long period convalescing from a severe spinal injury. He had left his flat one evening without his keys, and when he got back he had tried to climb in through the balcony but had slipped and fallen onto the pavement. He had remained semiparalysed in the hospital in Pripyat for a month and a half, but had returned to work as soon as the doctors would allow him. Grigori Medvedev, a former deputy chief engineer, visiting Chernobyl at the time in his capacity as an official of Hydroprojekt, was taken aback by the change he saw in Fomin. Medvedev suggested further convalescence, but Fomin said that there was too much to do.
If Fomin was an invalid, Brukhanov was under pressure from different directions. It was not just the construction of the new units that were plagued with difficulties but also the working reactors themselves. There were leaks in the air vents and drainage channels; up to fifty cubic metres of radioactive water escaped every hour and the extraction units could barely deal with it.
Brukhanov was constantly pressured by those above him in Moscow and Kiev. The Ministry of Energy in Moscow had ordered him to replace the inflammable roof of the turbine halls without telling him where he was to find a fireproof roof one kilometre long and fifty metres wide. He would have to petition for exemption. They had once complained that the cables did not have fireproof covers as the specification required, but had later agreed with Brukhanov that such covers were also unobtainable and had agreed to make an exception to the rules.
Quite apart from the problems facing the power station, there was a new directive from the government that every industrial enterprise had to diversify into some kind of consumer goods. Brukhanov knew the problems facing the economy: although only trained as an engineer, he had been a delegate at the Twenty-seventh Party Congress and had therefore voted along with all the others for the new party line. But what could Chernobyl produce other than electricity? He was told that his colleagues at Beloyarsk were already manufacturing souvenirs: an aluminium plaque showing a detachment of cavalry against a background of the steppes, something to appeal, no doubt, to their minister, Slavsky, who had ridden with Budenny during the civil war. But what could Chernobyl produce? The only suggestion was nuclear-powered meat-mincing machines!
Brukhanov was tempted to put his foot down and say, ‘A nuclear power station is not a craft shop. We will stick to what we know best and only generate electricity!’ But it was not in his nature to put his foot down, and if he did so he felt sure that he would be either sacked or demoted, leaving his successor with exactly the same insoluble problems. Therefore he simply did his best to deal with each problem as it arose – the latest being a demand from the regional Party Committee in Kiev that the nuclear power station manufacture two hay-storage facilities for a neighbouring collective farm.
With Brukhanov distracted and Fomin convalescent, the burden of the everyday operation of the power station fell on the shoulders of the deputy chief engineers. That April the load was particularly heavy for Anatoli Dyatlov, the irritable Siberian from Komsomolsk who, as deputy chief engineer responsible for units 3 and 4, had to supervise the shutdown of the fourth reactor for routine maintenance and repairs.
In itself, this was not a complicated procedure, but it was important to take advantage of the process to conduct a variety of tests on the equipment. Among them was to be a further attempt to measure the modifications made to the turbogenerators, which should have been made before the reactor went on line. It had still to be established whether, in the event of a power cut, the declining momentum of the turbines could generate enough electricity to power the pumps for the forty or fifty seconds before the standby diesel generators took over.
The test was to be conducted by the enterprise Donenergo, which had manufactured the generators. Their representative, Gennady Metlenko, had been sent to Chernobyl with a special mobile measuring unit, manufactured in the west by Mercedes-Benz, and borrowed from the Karkhov turbine factory. He had drawn up a draft programme for the test; all that was required of Dyatlov was that the reactor be run on low power and then switched off so that the turbines could be disconnected and idle to a halt. Dyatlov discussed the proposal with Metlenko and with the heads of different workshops, like Piotr Palamarchuk, a tall, broad-shouldered Ukrainian from Vinnitsa. As the head of the start-up workshop, Palamarchuk had a team of twelve men conducting six different tests on the pumps, valves and turbines. Alexander Kovalenko, the head of the reactor workshop, looked over the proposal for a quarter of an hour and then approved it.
When the draft was agreed to, Dyatlov had it typed out and sent to Fomin for approval. Fomin, of course, was not a nuclear specialist, and Lyutov, the scientific deputy chief engineer with overall responsibility for nuclear matters, was away having a medical checkup. It was not thought necessary to consult Yuri Laushkin, the resident safety inspector, or to show the new programme to the head of the shift, Boris Rogozhkin. The provisions for safety on the proposal were included in a purely formal way, but that was not unusual; they had remained more or less the same since they had first been drawn up in the late 1960s, and Dyatlov had not thought it necessary to rewrite each clause. Moreover, most of the regulations contained the proviso that they could be overridden by the chief or deputy chief engineer, and Dyatlov intended to be in the control room during the shutdown. Fomin approved the proposal and sent it back to Dyatlov.
3
In Pripyat preparations were under way for a shutdown of a different kind. The first of May was the major festival of the Communist year, and although it would fall on the Thursday of the following week, many meant to take time off and start their holiday on the previous weekend. Some planned to go away to relatives in the country; others would stay for the parade and the festivities in Pripyat, but even those w
ho remained had to stock up on food and drink.
The weather was exceptionally fine. In the Ukraine, it was usual for the long winters to give way rapidly to spring, but it was so warm this year that it seemed more like early summer. The grass was green and the cherry trees were in bloom. The air was scented by the pine trees of the forests surrounding Pripyat, and everyone, from those who worked in the power station to the doctors in the hospital and the teachers in the schools – and above all the children sitting restlessly at their lessons – longed for the holiday to begin.
The different teams that ran the fourth unit worked in eight-hour shifts – three days on, three days off, two days on, two days off. At midnight on the night of 24 April, Alexander Akimov clocked on as shift foreman along with the twenty-six-year-old engineer Leonid Toptunov as his senior reactor-control engineer. Piotr Stolyarchuk was the senior unit-control engineer and Igor Kirschenbaum, only two years older than Toptunov, was senior turbine-control engineer. They were alert and eager to learn from the experience of the shutdown; to study what happened afterwards, equipment had been installed to record what was said.
At 1.00 a.m., on Dyatlov’s instructions, Akimov started to reduce the reactor’s power. This could not be done quickly because the xenon gas that came from the radioactive decay of uranium 135 absorbed neutrons. If not allowed to decay, which it did in a few hours, it could accelerate the decline in the reactor’s activity and close it down altogether.
At 8.00 the next morning, a new shift took over. At 1.00 p.m. the reactor reached half power and the No. 7 turbine generator was switched off. At 2.00 p.m. everything was ready to start the test on turbine generator No. 8, but there was a danger that either the decrease in water supply to the reactor or the start-up of the auxiliary diesel generators would signal an accident to the sensors and start the emergency core-cooling system, which would then flood the reactor and close it down.
Since disconnecting the emergency system without the permission of the chief or a deputy chief engineer was forbidden by the regulations, Dyatlov’s authorization was required for Metlenko’s experiment to continue. It was given, and once the system was disconnected, the operators were ready to reduce the power still further, to the point where the second turbine could be switched off, while keeping the reactor on low power for a short period in case the test had to be repeated; but at this moment a call came through from the load dispatcher in Kiev saying that the power generated by the No. 8 turbine would be required by the grid until 11.00 p.m. This meant that the test had to be postponed.
The group of observers dispersed. Leaving instructions to the shift foreman to keep the reactor working at half power, Dyatlov now went home for some sleep. He was tired and frustrated by the delay. At 4.00 p.m., a new shift under Yuri Tregub took over in the control room of the fourth unit. Since it had been assumed that the experiment would have been completed by now, some were not familiar with the programme and studied it for the first time. Seeing a section that had been crossed out, one of the operators telephoned another and asked if he should comply with the deleted section or not. His friend hesitated and then said, ‘Yes, follow the deleted instructions.’
The reactor was held steady at half power. Towards evening Dyatlov returned. Metlenko and his two assistants took up their positions in a small annex to the control room. They all awaited the call from Kiev. In the turbine hall, Razim Davletbayev was completing the tests he had supervised on the turbine equipment. He went to his office to fill in the logbook so that the shift that followed would know what was to be done after the shutdown of the reactor.
In Pripyat the night shift prepared to return. The young turbine engineer Igor Kirschenbaum ate supper with his wife, Alla, and their three-year-old daughter, Anna. Like Steinberg, Igor’s family came originally from the Jewish community in Odessa, and like Steinberg, he felt that his career had been hampered by anti-Semitism. He was small and shy, with dark hair and a cautious, methodical manner, but he had been a brilliant pupil at school and had hoped to study at the university in Kiev. Some of his family had cautioned him against such high hopes, but his father, a lifelong member of the party, had assured him that there was no anti-Semitism in a Socialist state.
Igor had been turned down and had gone instead to a vocational school to train as a lathe operator. Later, however, he applied to the faculty of nuclear energetics at Odessa, where he hoped he would stand a better chance. He was given a place, and when he graduated with a red diploma was offered a post at Chernobyl, his first choice. There he was assigned to the chemical workshop, but it was grossly overmanned and his supervisors could think of nothing for him to do. He sensed that they disliked him, so he went to see Steinberg who, on learning that he had won a red diploma, gave him a job in the turbine hall and put him in the elite group of effective control.
Sasha Yuvchenko was another graduate from Odessa who, like Igor Kirschenbaum, had been at Chernobyl for only three years. In contrast to Igor, he was tall and strong, with a wide face and pleasant smile.
That afternoon it had been so warm that Sasha had taken his two-year-old son Kirill for a ride on the crossbar of his bike, and the little boy had tried to remove his father’s hands from the handlebars, shouting, ‘I want to ride it myself, I want to ride it myself!’ After they had eaten and the child had been put to bed, Alexander’s wife, Natasha, had settled down to watch the final episode of an Irwin Shaw mini-series on television; but Sasha had been restless. He had taken a bath and then, even though he was due to leave for the power station at about 10.45 p.m., he had put on a suit as if he was going to a party and gone to the kitchen to drink a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette. Then, all at once, he longed for the company of his wife, so he called to her to stop watching television and join him in the kitchen. They sat together talking about nothing in particular, until the time came for Sasha to leave for the station.
The bus left Pripyat at 10.45 p.m., stopping twice to pick up personnel. As soon as the new shift arrived at the station, the workers went to the changing room, where each man stored his clothes in a locker, took a shower and, dressed only in his underpants, passed through from the ‘clean’ into the ‘dirty’ zone. Once through, they could not return; there was no handle on the dirty side of the door. Now they put on the white clothes and berets that gave them all the look of surgeons in an operating theatre and then proceeded to the final barrier, where they stepped into special boots.
Each then proceeded to his particular post. Sasha went to his office, situated between the third and fourth units, to be briefed by the young man he was replacing, Victor Proskuriakov. He was surprised to discover that the reactor was still running and that the tests on the turbines had been postponed. Victor showed him the programme, pointing out that it mostly concerned the turbine engineers. Then, while Sasha went to the third unit to report to his superior, Valeri Perevozchenko, a former officer in the marines, Victor went to the control room to ask for permission to watch the test.
4
There the shutdown was under way. At eleven that night, the load dispatcher in Kiev had given his permission for No. 8 turbine to be detached from the grid. This had been relayed from the head of shift for units 3 and 4, and at 11.10, upon Dyatlov’s orders, the shift foreman for unit 4, Yuri Tregub, had started to reduce the power of the reactor from seventeen hundred thermal megawatts to around seven hundred, at which point the test on the turbogenerator could begin.
At midnight the new shift took over. Alexander Akimov replaced Tregub, who, like Valeri Perevozchenko, decided to stay on and watch the experiment. So did the engineer relieved by Igor Kirschenbaum. Above Akimov, in his office in the third unit, was the overall head of the shift, Boris Rogozhkin; under him, in the control room, were, once again, Leonid Toptunov, the young reactor-control engineer; Igor Kirschenbaum, the turbine-control engineer; and Piotr Stolyarchuk, the unit-control engineer. Also present in the control room to observe the test were Akimov’s friend Razim Davletbayev, the deputy head of the tu
rbine section; Piotr Palamarchuk, the huge Ukrainian who directed the Chernobyl start-up enterprise, and young Victor Proskuriakov, who had been joined by another young engineer, Alexander Kudriatsev, eager to add to his experience by watching what was going on.
In an adjacent room, separated from the control room by a window, with their own equipment ranged before them, were Gennady Metlenko from Donenergo and his two assistants. They were introduced to Igor Kirschenbaum who, although trained for any eventuality, had not been shown the programme for the tests. He took his place at the turbine controls, uncomfortable about what he was required to do. He did not like the idea of switching off the turbine and disconnecting it from the circuit while the reactor was still working; he was afraid of the damage it might do to the turbine. However, he was only half the age of Dyatlov, and so assumed that both he and Akimov knew what they were doing. His duty was simply to do what he was told.
At the main control board, Akimov and the young Leonid Toptunov stood facing a bewildering array of dials and gauges. Normally assisted in the running of the unit by a number of automatic devices, they knew that the reactor was running with the reactor’s emergency core-cooling system switched off. Assisting them in running the reactor was the Skala computer, but it scanned many thousands of parameters at a leisurely pace and printed out the information at some distance from where they stood.
The most essential information for the young Leonid Toptunov concerned the number of control rods. Power was reduced by lowering them into the reactor, but he had to balance their absorption of neutrons which reduced the fission with the naturally dampening effect of the short-lived iodine and xenon gas. To gain more control, in line with the programme and with Dyatlov’s approval, Akimov now told Leonid to switch off the system of local automatic control, which sent control rods in and out of particular sections of the core to ensure that power never dropped below seven hundred megawatts. To his dismay, Leonid discovered that the power of the reactor then sunk to only 30 megawatts. The reactor had fallen into what was known as an iodine well, from which it was hazardous to attempt to pull it out.