Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl

  To improve the morale of the Latvians, the local leadership asked the Writers’ Union for three volunteers to bring books to the bored reservists in the forbidden zone. There was no rush to come forward. A writer in Riga, Marina Kostenecka, was waiting for a bus when a colleague asked if she would like to go to Chernobyl in a couple of days. Curiosity overcame prudence; she not only went to the Latvian camp, which was thirty kilometres from the nuclear power station, but persuaded the commanding officer to take her to the power station itself. On the way he showed her a birch tree on which an army medical officer had supposedly hanged himself in despair.

  Marina saw the station and, by moonlight, the abandoned city of Pripyat. Surrounded by an electrified fence to deter looters, it was eerily silent. As she stood considering that this was how the whole world would look after a nuclear war, a cat came through the fence, mewing at the sight of a human being. When she leaned over to stroke it, the colonel grabbed her arm; the cat’s fur would be highly radioactive.

  2

  As the liquidation proceeded, some of the soldiers fell ill. None suffered from radiation sickness as such, but by early June Academician Ilyn was obliged to concede that some had been treated for lesser ailments, such as nausea and fatigue. The medical commission revised its recommendations for a maximum permissible dose from twenty-five rems to ten, and for a lifetime dose from fifty rems to thirty-five. Fearing for the genetic consequences, young conscripts, whenever possible, were replaced by older reservists, known in army jargon as ‘partisans’. The danger was not just from the graphite and fuel that had been thrown out of the reactor by the explosion but from the highly radioactive dust that had fallen throughout the zone. Time and again, the liquidators had to hose down the houses in Chernobyl, Ivankov and the Pioneer camp. Some vehicles were irretrievably contaminated and had to be dumped in huge pits – not only buses and trucks, but hundreds of cars from Pripyat, bought after many years of saving and waiting. Other vehicles were decontaminated; the huge black Zils that had brought Ryzhkov and Ligachev to Chernobyl were used to ferry people to and fro within the zone.

  Contaminated topsoil had to be removed by bulldozers and buried. There was also a large swathe of forest that had been singed by the plume of radionuclides; the green conifers were now brown, yellow and red. They were felled but could not be burned, because the smoke and ash would themselves be radioactive. They were buried in vast pits that had to be lined with concrete to prevent the radionuclides from seeping into the soil.

  More immediate was the possibility that the radionuclides on the surface would be washed down into the streams and rivulets that fed the Pripyat and the Dnieper. The Kiev Sea, only a few kilometres from the power station, supplied that city with drinking water, and the waters of the Dnieper itself, on its course to the Black Sea, were used by fifty million people.

  As a precaution, in Kiev boreholes were sunk to the water table in the city’s main bakeries to ensure uncontaminated water for the baking of bread. At Chernobyl, the military engineers embarked upon two major projects: the first to build a new bridge over the Pripyat, the second to dam the river itself. Time was short; there was a forecast of rain in ten days. The most optimistic estimate was that it would take two months to dam the river, but by a concentration of all the country’s resources, it was done in little more than a week.

  The new bridge was built with comparable alacrity, as was a vast reservoir to store radioactive groundwater caught by a number of smaller dams and channelled through a network of drains. A subterranean wall was built between the reactor and the river to contain the contaminated groundwater, and three hundred boreholes were sunk so that if the water table should become contaminated it could be pumped dry. Four hundred men worked on this, coming in from camps outside the thirty-kilometre zone. They worked shifts of twelve hours, frequently changed their clothes – particularly their boots – and wore film-badge dosimeters which they could not read themselves, but which were checked by technicians when they returned to their quarters each day.

  The war against radiation was waged in the air as well as on the ground. The high level of contamination northeast of Gomel had shown how disastrous it could be when rain brought the radionuclides back to earth. Once, when rain clouds approached Kiev, planes from Professor Israel’s Committee of Hydrometeorology fired pellets in an attempt to precipitate rainfall before they reached the city, but the clouds were blown in a different direction and the downpour predicted never occurred.

  There was a constant movement of helicopters throughout the zone: Pikalov’s taking measurements within the ten-kilometre zone, Israel’s doing the same in the thirty-kilometre zone and beyond, Antoshkin’s spraying the ground with a plastic solution that subsequently solidified, thus trapping the radioactive dust. For the last purpose, huge transport helicopters were fitted with tanks holding twelve thousand litres of the polymer solution. There were still constant flights over the reactor as scientists took readings to try to learn what was going on in the core.

  Professor Ryzantzev from the Kurchatov Institute sometimes made two or three flights a day. He noticed the anxiety of the young pilots who, though their helicopters were now fitted with sheets of lead to protect them from radiation, were afraid that it might make them unable to have children. After a run over the reactor, seeing one young pilot peer up to the light to try and read the gauge on the pencil-like dosimeters, Ryzantzev asked, ‘Are you a pilot or a sailor?’

  ‘A pilot. Why?’

  ‘Then why are you looking through a telescope?’

  ‘I’m worried about the dose.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry. I’ve been working with reactors for more than twenty years, and look at me. As long as you don’t exceed a dose of twenty-five rems, you’ll be perfectly all right.’

  ‘In that case,’ said the pilot, ‘can we make another run?’

  ‘Why? We’ve just returned.’

  ‘Because if I pick up another three rems, I can go home.’

  To avoid making these repeated sorties, Ryzantzev and his colleagues in the Kurchatov Institute designed a thermocouple to monitor the reactor. Nicknamed the ‘needle’, it was ten centimetres in diameter, eighteen metres long and painted with black and white stripes. Filled with instruments of different kinds, it was to be lowered twelve metres into the reactor core and the data from the instruments transmitted through a three-hundred-metre cable – the ‘thread’. Despite the enthusiasm of the young air force pilots, their Mi-8 helicopters could not provide the stability that Ryzantzev required to lower this needle through the crust of sand and boron into the small aperture left by the dislodged biological shield. Therefore Silayev, at one time the minister of aviation, summoned a unique helicopter, the Ka-27, with double rotating blades, which had been developed by the ministry’s experimental design bureau. This could hover with great stability for long periods of time. The chief of the institute, Igor Erlich, arrived with his deputy, Eduard Korotkov, and three of his ablest test pilots, among them Nikolai Melnik.

  After several trial runs over a mock-up of the reactor, Melnik took off with the needle trailing from the cable attached to the Ka-27. At the first two attempts, the needle failed to penetrate the crust of sand, boron and lead. The third time, he was lucky; it sank to two-thirds of its length. The three-hundred-metre cable was released and fell to the ground. However, it fell on the wrong side of the reactor, on highly contaminated ground. A team of dosimetrists approached it in one of the EMR2 reconnaissance vehicles, but the cable was caught on the roof, out of the reach of its mechanical arm. Therefore they returned to the fourth unit and climbed up to a corridor where the dangling cable could be seen from a plate-glass window. They smashed the window, grabbed the end of the cable and dragged it into the corridor, where it could be connected to the network that Ryzantzev had prepared.

  The data received from the needle confirmed what was already suspected – that there was no further danger from the fuel that remained in the reactor. Already, by t
he end of June, the tunnel had been cut through the sandstone beneath its foundations and the heat exchanger – a network of water channels set in a huge concrete ‘cushion’ – completed. Academician Velikhov had returned to Moscow, and the miners and metro workers had gone home. With the temperature inside the core now down to 150°C and the original base to the reactor intact, the heat exchanger remained as a monument to the real danger of the ‘China syndrome’ during those dramatic days in early May.

  Above ground, the construction of the sarcophagus proceeded, but with considerable difficulty because of the extremely high levels of gamma radiation emanating from the reactor. To be able to approach the site, the scientists decided to build a thick concrete wall. A factory in Kiev constructed large steel tanks measuring eighteen by six by six metres, which were placed on trailers and towed into position in front of the reactor by the EMR2 reconnaissance vehicles. Soldiers then shot out the tyres with machine guns and the trailers sank to the ground.

  A relay of trucks brought ready-mixed concrete to the site, and different methods were tried to fill the metal boxes, but all proved unsatisfactory. Cranes with buckets were too slow. They tried pumping it in, but to do this the pebbles in the gravel could not be more than thirty millimetres in diameter, and this made the mix so liquid that it oozed out of the sides of the containers. Next they tried a system of conveyor belts, but the vibration separated the gravel from the cement.

  In desperation, Mayorets, the minister of energy and electrification, turned to his own All-Union Research and Development Institute for New Power Enterprises and its Department of Accelerated Methods of Hydro-power Construction, a team that developed new techniques in the construction of dams and power stations. This was led by an engineer named Robert Tilles, who had acquired considerable experience in the use of concrete when building hydroelectric power stations in Siberia.

  A small, quiet man with a strong character, Tilles was in the hospital suffering from blood poisoning when Mayorets summoned him in the middle of May. There was a conference at his bedside, and the next day Tilles, his chief assistant and one of their specialists, Igor Kravchenko, flew to Chernobyl in the minister’s plane.

  The solution Tilles proposed was to bring in equipment that had recently been acquired for $3 million from the Rotec Corporation in the United States: vibration-free conveyor belts and concrete layers. They had first used them in the construction of the Ingouri hydroelectric power station in the Georgian Republic. Galling though it was for the government commission to have to resort to American equipment, it was dispatched from a depot in Lithuania while a team flew in from the Caucasus under the direction of Igor Kravchenko and another of Tilles’ experts, Dimitry Shatalov.

  Because of the hazardous nature of the work, some of those whom Tilles invited refused to go to Chernobyl. There were also delays in supplying material. Some of the drivers delivering the ready-mixed concrete were so frightened that they drove off the road, dumped their load, and returned to their depot in Kiev. (Later the situation improved when a plant was built between Chernobyl and the Pripyat River.) Guided from a lead-lined cabin on a trailer near the site, the Rotec conveyors delivered the concrete into the sixty-ton containers, which like giant bricks built a ‘biological protection wall’. By the end of July it was completed, and work on the sarcophagus itself could begin.

  3

  The containment of the consequences of the accident was directed by the government commission. The chairmen, all deputy prime ministers, served a limited tour of duty in Chernobyl itself; Boris Scherbina was replaced by Ivan Silayev, Silayev by Lev Voronin, Voronin by Yuri Maslyukov; Maslyukov by G. Vederniko. Everyone was under the control of the commission, but beneath them during this critical period a camaraderie arose among those of different rank. All suffered in the same way from the radiation, with running noses and squeaky voices. They were bound together by their common purpose. Marshals and ministers deferred to the experts; a colonel might be found driving an EMR2 commandeered by an engineer.

  The eminent academicians, Legasov and Velikhov, and beneath them the scientists from the Kurchatov Institute and NIKYET, exercised the authority that came from their expertise. At a more practical level there was rapport between the army and the operators of the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Each group relied upon the other. At an early stage, when a possible alternative to building the heat exchanger under the reactor was simply to pump concrete into the empty bubbler pool, an order was relayed to Nikolai Steinberg and a former submarine officer, Reichtman, to survey the approaches to the bubbler pool in the bowels of the reactor and find the best place to blast a way in.

  The levels of radiation were between fifteen and twenty rems an hour, but in some places – for example, by one elevator shaft – they rose to two hundred rems per hour. Steinberg had his own intuitive dosimeter: where the level was over 135 rems per hour, he could feel it like a punch in the eye. He also knew how to dodge from behind the shelter of a pillar to that of a concrete wall. It was stiflingly hot in their respirators and rubber suits, and they were soon up to their ankles in sweat.

  When they returned to the bunker, they found a group of soldiers led by a small man with a strong, determined face. He barked out an order to Reichtman and Steinberg: the detonation to blow a hole through the wall was to take place at precisely four that afternoon, and the operation would be reported to the Politburo.

  ‘And who are you?’ asked Steinberg.

  The officer’s eyes widened at the audacity of the question. ‘I am Marshal Oganov, commander of the military engineers!’

  ‘Very well,’ said Steinberg. ‘I will show your men where to lay their charges.’

  Three holes were blown in the wall of the fourth reactor, but the way through to the bubbler pool was still blocked by pipes and machinery. A further explosion was thought too risky: it might raise a new cloud of radioactive dust. Therefore Kizima, the head of construction at Chernobyl, proposed cutting a path through the obstruction with a welder’s arc. Cables were laid to supply electricity so that Kizima’s men could begin the next morning.

  At 4.00 a.m. Vadim Grishenka saw smoke coming from the ruins of the fourth unit. The alarm was given. Fire engines came from Ivankov, and Nikolai Steinberg was summoned from his bed in the Pioneer camp. At 5.00 a.m. a helicopter flew over the unit to try to pinpoint the source of the fire, but all the pilot could see was smoke. Therefore a group of three operators – among them Grishenka and Steinberg – went through from the third unit. They found that short circuits had set fire to the electric cables, so they disconnected them and left the cables to burn themselves out.

  There had to be a scapegoat for this second fire, and the man chosen was Taras Plochy. The accident at Balakovsky was still held against him; therefore he was sent back to resume his duties there as a deputy chief engineer, while the position of chief engineer at Chernobyl was given to his friend and erstwhile protégé, Nikolai Steinberg.

  A number of hazardous sorties into highly contaminated areas were undertaken by teams of operators and soldiers. No one could be sure that Lelechenko had succeeded in cutting off the supplies of hydrogen at the time of the accident, since he had not entered his mission in the log. A manned EMR2 was sent to cut the pipes and let the hydrogen seep into the ground. Vladimir Nesterov, the deputy head of the workshop, went back into the turbine hall of the fourth unit, where the radiation was eight hundred rems per hour, to check that the oil tanks were empty.

  Towards the end of May, the KGB decided that to learn the cause of the accident it must have the Mercedes-Benz equipment that Metlenko, the engineer from Donenergo, had brought to Chernobyl for the tests on the turbines. The equipment was retrieved with two EMR2 vehicles, one driven by Pikalov himself, the other by the deputy chairman of the KGB, General Sherbak. Because their short-wave radios would not function, the two communicated with each other via Moscow on special frequencies, and managed to drag out the trailer with the precious equipment.

  Oper
ators helped the chemical troops locate the fuel that had been spewed out of the reactor and helped design a device to pick up the smaller pieces of radioactive graphite – a greased wire mesh stretched across a metal box, which was lowered by the eight-metre arm of an EMR2. While engaged in this operation, a lieutenant of the chemical troops came to a spot a hundred metres or so from the reactor where the level of radiation suddenly leaped from eighty rems to 1850. He returned to the bunker, his face pale. Steinberg and the other engineers studied the photomap made by Pikalov’s chemical troops and realized that he had come across a fragment of fuel. This was reported to the commission in Ivankov.

  At eight the next morning, three officers arrived at the bunker – a colonel, a major and a naval captain – and reported to Steinberg, the chief engineer. ‘We have been ordered to remove the fuel. Show us where it is.’

  ‘Do you know what you are dealing with?’ asked Steinberg.

  ‘Our orders are clear. If we haven’t removed the fuel by six this evening, we are to be demoted.’

  ‘That might be better than dying,’ said Steinberg.

  ‘Please show us where it is.’

  ‘Who issued these orders?’

  ‘General Malkevich.’

  ‘Who can change these orders?’