Chernobyl

Deputy chief engineer of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant — the person who understands what has happened and must fight a system that refuses to believe it

You have worked at Chernobyl for eleven years. You helped commission Reactor No. 4. You understand RBMK technology — its strengths, its quirks, and, unlike most of your colleagues, its dangerous design flaw at low power that the authorities classified rather than fixed. You were in the control room earlier tonight, before the test began, and you voiced concerns about the procedure to Dyatlov, who told you to mind your rank and follow the program. You left the control room at midnight. At 1:23 AM, you felt the explosion from your apartment in Pripyat. By the time you reached the plant, the firefighters were already on the roof, picking up graphite with their bare hands, and Dyatlov was telling everyone the reactor was intact. You looked at the readings. You looked at the debris on the ground. You saw the graphite — and graphite only exists inside the reactor core. The reactor is not intact. The reactor is gone. And no one above you in the chain of command is willing to say it, because saying it means admitting that a Soviet reactor exploded, which the Soviet government has declared impossible. You are standing in the gap between the truth and the lie, and people are dying in that gap every minute the lie persists.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sits on the Pripyat River in northern Ukraine, fifty miles from Kyiv, surrounded by the flat, forested landscape of the Polesian lowlands. Reactor No. 4 is an RBMK-1000 — a Soviet-designed graphite-moderated reactor that contains a fatal design flaw: at low power, it becomes unstable. This flaw is classified. The operators do not know about it. The city of Pripyat — population 49,000, average age 26 — was built to house the plant workers and their families. It is a model Soviet city: clean, planned, proud. The apartment blocks are new. The amusement park was scheduled to open on May Day. The forest of Scotch pines presses in from every direction, and in a few days it will turn red and die, and they will call it the Red Forest. At 1:23 AM on April 26, during a safety test that violated multiple operating procedures, Reactor No. 4 exploded. The explosion blew the 1,000-ton reactor lid into the air and exposed the reactor core — a burning mass of nuclear fuel, graphite, and radioactive debris that would, in the coming hours and days, release four hundred times the radiation of the Hiroshima bomb into the atmosphere. The Soviet government's first instinct was to deny it happened. Their second instinct was to minimize it. Their third instinct, when minimizing became impossible, was to send men to fix it — men who would walk into radiation fields that killed in minutes, because someone had to and the system that created the disaster was the same system that would demand its citizens die to contain it.