Up in the Unit Four control room, everyone was talking at once, as Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov struggled to understand what the instruments were saying. A constellation of warning lamps flashed red and yellow across the consoles of the turbine, reactor, and pump desks, and electric alarm buzzers honked incessantly. The news seemed grave. At Senior Unit Control Engineer Boris Stolyarchuk’s desk, the readings showed all eight main safety valves were open, and yet no water remained in the separators. This scenario was the maximum design-basis accident and an atomshchik’s worst nightmare: an active zone starved of thousands of gallons of vital coolant, raising the threat of a core meltdown.
When a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded and burned 33 years ago, it generated a radioactive cloud that contaminated parts of the Soviet Union and Europe before dissipating.
Pripyat
But the accident also created a fog of misunderstanding and confusion—in large part the result of a deliberate cover-up by Soviet authorities—that has been slower to lift. Even three decades later, thorough authoritative accounts of the world’s worst atomic-power disaster are few and far between.
A new book offers perhaps the clearest, and fullest, look at the catastrophe yet. Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl is a compelling and comprehensive account of one awful night in Ukraine and the consequences that were felt worldwide. Higginbotham’s observations, and his writing, are so sharp there is no need to overdo anything for dramatic effect. Told so clearly and in such detail, the story is dramatic—and horrific—enough.
Pripyat
The basics of the disaster are well-known. During a badly conceived (and even more poorly executed) test at Chernobyl’s Unit No. 4 shortly after midnight on April 26, 1986, a sudden surge of power in the reactor caused it to blow apart. The resultant fire burned for days.
It took years, billions of rubles, and the back-breaking labor of hundreds of thousands of conscripted workers to contain the mess. More than 30 plant workers and firefighters were killed, most from radiation, and untold thousands more suffered health effects. A thousand square miles of territory still remain off limits due to radioactive contamination.
Over the years, a few chronicles of the disaster by Soviet writers have reached Western readers, most notably The Truth About Chernobyl by Grigori Medvedev, a former engineer at the plant, published in 1991. But aside from Piers Paul Read’s 1993 Ablaze, good reads by Western writers have been scant.
Pripyat
That began to change last year when Serhii Plokhy, a Harvard historian, weighed in with Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. But Plokhy’s work focused more on the political aftermath, including the downfall of the Soviet Union that followed just five years later, than on the details of the accident.
Higginbotham, a British journalist, takes account of the political fallout as well, but the bulk of his book is about the accident and the response and clean-up—primarily the first seven months, which culminated with the rushed completion of the concrete-and-steel sarcophagus that entombed the remains of Unit 4.
The author clearly has been captivated by the disaster for years. His interviews for the book began more than a decade ago and include some of the key surviving characters. He was also aided by the recent declassification of much archival material, especially the deliberations of the various government tribunals that managed (or, more accurately, mismanaged) the response.
Higginbotham introduces us to a few people who have never received much notice. Chief among these is Maria Protsenko, the architect of Pripyat, the city of nearly 50,000 that was built for the Chernobyl workers. Like most of the Soviet Union’s privileged atomic cities, Pripyat was a clean, comfortable place, a glorious testament to the Soviet system, and Protsenko’s job for seven years had been to make it even more glorious.
Pripyat
Her world changed in an instant when the reactor exploded. Pripyat, just a few miles away, was heavily contaminated immediately, though it took the authorities a day and a half to order an evacuation. (This was just one of many examples of Soviet officialdom’s callousness and irresponsibility in handling the disaster. Another was telling the evacuees to plan to be away for a few days; in reality, they would be gone forever.)
It’s hard not to feel sorry for Protsenko, who in the space of 36 hours went from proudly planning Pripyat’s expansion to calculating how many buses would be needed to get its residents to safety. (Precisely 1,225, as it turned out.) Ever the dutiful technocrat, she rode the last one, zigzagging across the ghost city to pick up stragglers.
It’s this kind of detail that makes Higginbotham’s book so gripping. His accounts of the “liquidators,” or clean-up workers, are especially riveting, including the “bio robots,” men who had to clean lethally radioactive debris off the roof of the plant by hand after mechanical robots failed, and the workers whose job was to enter the destroyed reactor building itself, hunting for the remaining uranium fuel in an effort to allays fears that another, potentially worse, explosion was possible.
Pripyat
No aspect of the disaster and its aftermath is ignored. Higginbotham describes how members of a hunting and fishing association were enlisted to exterminate the dogs and other pets Pripyat residents were forced to leave behind. He recounts the woeful tales of plant operators and first-responding firefighters who lived their final days in a Moscow hospital, having been so heavily irradiated during the accident that they had no chance of survival.
He devotes a full chapter to the unprecedented job of building the sarcophagus, which was constructed by thousands of workers, many of whom only toiled for a short time before being sent home, having reached radiation exposure limits. One task was almost suicidal: finding solid supports among the radioactive ruins for the massive roof beams that were lifted by crane operators working behind lead shields.
The reactor’s design flaws are by now well-known, but Higginbotham makes them understandable. Even technophobes should be able to comprehend his discussion of terms like “positive void coefficient” (a feature of the reactor that increased the risk of a runaway reaction) and of equipment like the graphite-tipped control rods that on the night of the disaster helped the reactor go out of control.
There are plenty of villains in the book, including the leaders of the country’s secretive nuclear bureaucracy, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Also known as Sredmash (a name right out of a James Bond novel), the agency is an ubiquitous presence, its tentacles slithering throughout Chernobyl—both before and after the disaster—and the book.
Pripyat
But part of the fog of Chernobyl over the years has been doubt about some of the villains—whether, in fact, they were victims. Higginbotham delves into this issue, especially the case of Viktor Brukhanov, the director of the Chernobyl plant who at the time of the explosion had been expecting to soon be honored as a Hero of Socialist Labor. Instead, he ended up in the plant’s emergency bunker, in shock and denial for days, before being arrested on charges of breaching safety regulations, tried and shipped to a prison in Donetsk.
Brukhanov can be seen as an enabler of the Soviet system, having pushed his staff for years to build what would have been the nation’s largest nuclear power plant and creating, or at least condoning, the working conditions that contributed to the accident. But Brukhanov was also a victim, one of a number of convenient scapegoats for authorities who sought to maintain the fiction that the system was all-powerful and all-capable.
With his detailing of the reactor’s many design flaws—which were long known in Moscow—and discussion of the inevitability of an accident, Higginbotham makes it clear where Brukhanov and others lie on the victim-villain scale. In a very clearly written book, it is perhaps the ultimate moment of clarity.
Henry Fountain, a climate reporter at The New York Times, is the author of the 2017 book “The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet.”
Adam Higginbotham’s thriller-like account of the disaster and Kate Brown’s study of its aftermath make chilling reading
Luke Harding Monday 4 March 2019
O
n 25 April 1986, a routine maintenance test was due to take place at Chernobyl’s reactor No 4. The idea was simple: to simulate what would happen during an electrical blackout. In the control room, the senior engineer in charge, Leonid Toptunov, began powering down.
For a few seconds everything was normal. Then there was a roar. The plant, designed to showcase the Soviet Union’s scientific prowess, began to tremble. A shift foreman watched in amazement as the reactor’s fuel caps bounced up and down. Next there was an explosion. The blast destroyed the nuclear core and blew off the plant’s concrete roof.
Adam Higginbotham
More than 30 years on, Adam Higginbotham tells the story of the disaster and its gruesome aftermath with thriller-like flair. Midnight in Chernobylis wonderful and chilling. It is a tale of hubris and doomed ambition, featuring Communist party bosses and hapless engineers, victims and villains, confusion and cover-up.
The tragedy was grimly epic. Those caught up in it are, in Higginbotham’s vivid recreation, never less than human. Mechanical engineer Alexander Yuvchenko was on duty and one of the first to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe. His friend Valery Khodemchuk was missing. Yuvchenko saw rubble, a roofless cavern and thick severed cables swaying with electric sparks.
Far worse was the “shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light, reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity”. This was the radioactive ionisation of air. The atomic contents from Chernobyl’s reactor spilled into the atmosphere. A malevolent cloud blew across southern Belarus, travelled north-west and ended up in Sweden, causing mystification and panic.
Chernobyl
The USSR’s response was wholly inadequate. Chernobyl’s director, Viktor Bryukhanov, sat at his desk in a “bewildered stupor”, Higginbotham suggests, unable to accept the radiation readings reported by his team. Ukraine’s regional chiefs refused to evacuate. And in Moscow the politburo downplayed the crisis, alarmed at losing face before the international community.
It took two days before an order was given to move inhabitants out of Pripyat, the model atomic city built next to the plant. Its citizens were bussed out. A woman came home from a weekend away to find a ghost town: abandoned washing flapping on balconies, empty playgrounds, the barking of dogs. Pets were abandoned; their fur was contaminated with poisonous dust.
An abandoned town in Belarus in the zone that was evacuated
after the Chernobyl disaster. Photograph: Victor Drachev/EPA
Amid bureaucratic incompetence were scenes of stunning bravery. Helicopter pilots dumped bags of sand into the reactor to quell its burning red core. After each trip, crews would strip off their clothes and decontaminate as best they could. When they returned to their aircraft the next day they found the surrounding grass had gone yellow.
Meanwhile, in hospital in Moscow, Toptunov and his comrades perished. They died one by one. Their deaths were agonising. Their white blood cells plunged to zero, hair fell out. Lungs racked by gamma radiation stopped working. Loved ones watched, helpless.
Prypiat
In Manual for Survival,Kate Brown doggedly investigates what happened next. Her starting point is the official death tally from the explosion: Toptunov and 53 others. At the time, international organisations, including the UN, broadly accepted Moscow’s figure. Most of those listed as casualties were workers and firefighters exposed as the plant burned.
Brown is an indomitable researcher. She drives around the affected areas, navigates potholed roads and tracks down survivors. She visits archives. She hangs out with nuclear scientists who venture into the red forest, an intensively radioactive area adjacent to Chernobyl. There they test leaves. Three decades on, pine needles still fail to decompose.
Chernobyl was built amid a vast, watery landscape made up of numerous streams and rivers. This giant swamp, the Pripyat marshes, deterred various 20th-century invaders. It was less successful at keeping out radiation. Contamination seeped into the ecosystem, affecting villagers who picked berries, drank milk from cows and grew their own food.
Brown concludes that the 1986 disaster was not a single event. Rather, she argues, it was a “point on a continuum” that included other nuclear mishaps. The USSR and the US carried out nuclear tests throughout the cold war. Both lied about the toxic consequences. They sought to reassure the public that civilian nuclear energy and the bomb were perfectly safe.
Prypiat
Higginbotham and Brown both chronicle the attempts by brave individuals to expose the truth. One of them was Natalia Lozytska, a Kyiv physicist. By measuring radioactive fallout, she discovered the accident was far worse than the state had acknowledged. She found high levels of caesium-137 and other isotopes. Villagers complained of sore throats, nosebleeds and fainting children.
In 1988, Lozytska disguised herself as a cleaning woman with a mop and sneaked into an international conference on Chernobyl’s medical effects. Soviet officials said there weren’t any. She was about to hand her report to a western doctor when the KGB grabbed her. Overall, Mikhail Gorbachev’s government used secrecy, censorship and fake news to stop information getting out. Data from health studies disappeared.
That the KGB would steal and destroy medical records is hardly surprising. More egregious, in Brown’s view, is the failure by international bodies such as the World Health Organisation to interrogate the consequences. Western experts were condescending towards Soviet doctors. And, with an eye on their own nuclear industry, lowered the numbers of children with thyroid cancer.
Radiation testing in Ukraine after the disaster. Photograph: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
There is still no definitive account for how many lives were blighted. Brown estimates 35,000 to 150,000 Chernobyl fatalities. She attributes the rise in thyroid cancers in the US – the numbers tripled between 1974 and 2013 – to half a century of nuclear testing. All of us have been exposed to low-level doses.
Higginbotham and Brown’s books are exemplary studies, written with skill and passion. They avoid the fallacy of a redemptive ending. Some recent studies have claimed that Chernobyl is now a thriving eco-wilderness. Untroubled by man, wolves, elk, bears and rare birds of prey have allegedly come back, with nature rebounding from apocalypse.
Chernobyl
Seductive but not true, says Brown. According to Tim Mousseau and Anders Møller, two biologists who have been working since 2000 in the red forest, the zone remains heavily contaminated. The data is uneven. Birch trees that shed their radioactive leaves are in better shape than pines. There are no spiders. And very few bees or fruit flies.
The bodies of mice, leaf litter and the tumours found in migrating barn swallows all tell their own gloomy story. There are, it seems, few grounds for 21st-century optimism. As Møller says: “Every rock we turn over we find damage.”
In the first chapter of this assured debut novel, two young girls vanish, sending shock waves through a town perched on the edge of the remote, brooding Kamchatka Peninsula. What follows is a novel of overlapping short stories about the various women who have been affected by their disappearance. Each richly textured tale pushes the narrative forward another month and exposes the ways in which the women of Kamchatka have been shattered — personally, culturally and emotionally — by the crime.
Lerner’s exhilarating third novel, after “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04,”rocks an emphatically American amplitude, ranging freely from parenthood to childhood, from toxic masculinity to the niceties of cunnilingus, from Freud’s Oedipus complex to Tupac’s “All Eyez on Me.” Adam Gordon returns as the protagonist, but this time as a high school debate star, and mostly in the third person. Equal portions of the book are given over to the voices of his psychologist parents, and to a former classmate whose cognitive deficits are the inverse of Adam’s gifts. The earlier novels’ questions about art and authenticity persist; but Adam’s faithlessness is now stretched into a symptom of a national crisis of belief. Lerner’s own arsenal has always included a composer’s feel for orchestration, a ventriloquist’s vocal range and a fine ethnographic attunement. Never before, though, has the latter been so joyously indulged, or the bubblicious texture of late Clintonism been so lovingly evoked.
Many of the nine deeply beautiful stories in this collection explore the material consequences of time travel. Reading them feels like sitting at dinner with a friend who explains scientific theory to you without an ounce of condescension. Each thoughtful, elegantly crafted story poses a philosophical question; Chiang curates all nine into a conversation that comes full circle, after having traversed remarkable terrain.
The Mexican author’s third novel — her first to be written in English — unfolds against a backdrop of crisis: of children crossing borders, facing death, being detained, being deported unaccompanied by their guardians. The novel centers on a couple and their two children (all unnamed), who are taking a road trip from New York City to the Mexican border; the couple’s marriage is on the brink of collapse as they pursue independent ethnographic research projects and the woman tries to help a Mexican immigrant find her daughters, who’ve gone missing in their attempt to cross the border behind her. The brilliance of Luiselli’s writing stirs rage and pity, but what might one do after reading such a novel? Acutely sensitive to these misgivings, Luiselli has delivered a madly allusive, self-reflexive, experimental book, one that is as much about storytellers and storytelling as it is about lost children.
A desolate ferry terminal on the Spanish coast isn’t a place where you’d expect to encounter sharp-edged lyricism or rueful philosophy, but thanks to the two Irish gangster antiheroes of Barry’s novel, there’s plenty of both on display, along with scabrously amusing tale-telling and much summoning of painful memories. Their lives have become so intertwined that the young woman whose arrival they await can qualify as family for either man. Will she show? How much do they care? Their banter is a shield against the dark, a witty new take on “Waiting for Godot.”
Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book — as finely paced as a novel — Keefe uses McConville’s murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga.
The English painter Joshua Reynolds just wanted to cheer up his friend Samuel Johnson, who was feeling blue. Who knew that the Friday night gab sessions he proposed they convene at London’s Turk’s Head Tavern would end up attracting virtually all the leading lights of late-18th-century Britain? Damrosch brings the Club’s redoubtable personalities — the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie — to vivid life, delivering indelible portraits of Johnson and Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edward Gibbon and, of course, Johnson’s loyal biographer James Boswell: “a constellation of talent that has rarely if ever been equaled.”
In her extraordinary, engrossing debut, Broom pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, “The Yellow House” is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. Tracing the history of a single home in New Orleans East (an area “50 times the size of the French Quarter,” yet nowhere to be found on most tourist maps, comprising scraps of real estate whites have passed over), from the ’60s to Hurricane Katrina, this is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large.
Snyder’s thoroughly reported book covers what the World Health Organization has called “a global health problem of epidemic proportions.” In America alone, more than half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner; domestic violence cuts across lines of class, religion and race. Snyder debunks pervasive myths (restraining orders are the answer, abusers never change) and writes movingly about the lives (and deaths) of people on both sides of the equation. She doesn’t give easy answers but presents a wealth of information that is its own form of hope.
Higginbotham’s superb account of the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is one of those rare books about science and technology that read like a tension-filled thriller. Replete with vivid detail and sharply etched personalities, this narrative of astounding incompetence moves from mistake to mistake, miscalculation to miscalculation, as it builds to the inevitable, history-changing disaster.
