Chernobyl

By Michael Kerrigan

On 26 April 1986, the unthinkable happened near the Ukrainian town of Pripyat: two massive steam explosions ruptured No. 4 Reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, immediately killing 30 people and setting off the worst nuclear accident in history. The explosions were followed by an open-air reactor core fire that released huge amounts of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere for the next nine days, spreading across the Soviet Union, parts of Europe, and especially neighbouring Belarus, where around 70% of the waste landed. The following clean-up operation involved more than half a million personnel at a cost of $68 billion, and a further 4,000 people were estimated to have died from disaster-related illnesses in the following 20 years. Some 350,000 people were evacuated as a result of the accident (including 95 villages in Belarus), and much of the area returned to the wild, with the nearby city of Pripyat now a ghost town. Chernobyl provides a photographic exploration of the catastrophe and its aftermath in 180 authentic photos. See the twisted wreckage of No. 4 Reactor, the cause of the nuclear disaster; marvel at historic photos of the clean-up operation, with helicopters spraying decontamination liquid and liquidators manually clearing radioactive debris; see the huge cooling pond used to cool the reactors, and which today is home to abundant wildlife, despite the radiation; explore the ghost town of Pripyat, with its decaying apartment blocks, empty basketball courts, abandoned amusement park, wrecked schools, and deserted streets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amber Books Ltd
• Release date: Feb 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781838864767

Michael Kerrigan

Michael Kerrigan is a freelance writer and editor, compiler of The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen (who is dead). He has contributed articles and reviews to the Independent, Times Literary Supplement, Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday.

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Introduction

A WOUND IN THE WORLD

The Chernobyl explosion left the reputation of the Soviet Union in tatters, and created a ragged hole in humanity’s self-confidence. The crater it left was a suppurating sore from which dirty, deadly toxins were set to seep for centuries.

The blast that rocked the Chernobyl power-plant on 26 April, 1986, sent a shockwave through the Soviet Union and gave the watching world a jolt of fear. Then, with the rapidity of a chain-reaction, questions proliferated about the safety of the Soviet nuclear programme, the stability of the Soviet state, the impact on neighbouring countries and the nations of western Europe and even North America, and the future of atomic energy in general and the dangers technological progress of any kind might bring.

Not that the literal explosion wasn’t bad enough. As Reactor No. 4 melted down, its core expanded uncontrollably till, through its fissured casing, radioactive particles erupted into the sky.

Like a rainstorm in reverse, they showered upwards and formed a cloud which was then carried slowly northward on the wind from Ukraine into Belarus and beyond – only to be brought back down to earth by real rain in the days and weeks that followed, contaminating everything.

Many thousands lived in the long and sweeping arc of territory affected. The Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed some survivors for her book, Voices from Chernobyl (1997). For them, the catastrophe had acquired the character of a biblical plague, an affliction that fell down on their heads with irresistible and elemental force.

A TERRIBLE RAIN

‘There was a black cloud, and hard rain,’ recalled one young woman, who’d been six years old at the time:

‘The puddles were yellow and green, like someone had poured paint into them. Grandma made us stay in the cellar. She got down on her knees and prayed. And she taught us, too. Pray! It’s the end of the world! It’s God’s punishment for our sins!’

Being so young at the time, she guiltily remembered the new dress she’d ripped climbing over a fence, then hidden in hope of avoiding a telling-off.

That the people of Ukraine and Belarus should have seen what happened in religious terms isn’t so surprising. Orthodox Christianity had quietly flourished under communist rule. It had underpinned the people’s sense of a national identity determinedly suppressed by the state, and given them spiritual sustenance of a sort that socialism could not offer. But it made a more brutal sort of sense as well. Like God, radiation was invisible but everywhere, in everything. ‘I’m afraid of the rain,’ another survivor confessed. ‘That’s what Chernobyl is. I’m afraid of snow. Of the forest.’ All creation bore the radioactive imprint of the blast.

UNSEEN AFFLICTION

Radiation exists naturally in the environment, but too much is hazardous to the health of animals and plants alike. A level of 1 Curie per sq km is an extremely serious concern. In the aftermath of the disaster, though, large areas around Chernobyl had far, far higher levels, as this map makes all too clear.

MYTH AND REALITY

The story of Chernobyl is one of official incompetence, denial and dishonesty – though also one with more than its share of heroes. A tragedy charged with unimaginable suffering and fearful deprivation, its history has heartening aspects, too. To suggest that the radioactive cloud had a silver lining would be a gross exaggeration – an insult to the memory of the dead and the experiences of those who survived. Yet other exaggerations should be avoided too: in its wider consequences, we will find, the disaster didn’t quite rise to the apocalyptic heights anticipated. Between its scale and its symbolic resonances, it’s easy enough to understand why the story of the Chernobyl disaster should have been mythologized. It’s important, though, that we try hard to see the event and its significance in a true perspective.

This book sets out to provide a starting point.

CONTOURS OF CONTAMINATION

The whole of Europe was affected by the fallout from Chernobyl. Over 400 million people were exposed to radiation levels. But as this map shows, beyond Ukraine, the brunt was borne by Belarus and the Baltic states. Poland, southern Sweden and Finland were also badly hit.

BEFORE THE DISASTER

Lenin had told the Council of People’s Commissars in 1920: ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.’ In the half-century or so that followed, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was to give this goal the character of a crusade.

Every modern economy has needed electricity to heat and light its homes and to drive its industry, but the Soviet Union needed it in practically a spiritual way. Every modern country has liked to show itself as being absolutely up-to-date technologically but the Soviet Union wanted the world to see it as a model for the human future. Its reverence for science was the nearest thing an avowedly atheistic state was prepared to allow itself to a religion; its belief in ‘progress’ the closest it came to a sacred faith.

What Gothic cathedrals had been to medieval Europe and mosques had been to the Islamic world, steelworks, factories and power-stations had been to the USSR. Stalin’s first Five Year Plan (1928–32) had centred upon the development of coal and steel, transport and power supplies. Inaugurated in 1950, the Soviet Union’s nuclear-power programme seemed a natural continuation of that campaign.

BLOCK CONTROL PANEL, REACTOR NO. 2

A handful of technicians sit quietly, unconcerned at the thought that they’re sitting on some 12,800 megawatts of power. It’s all in a day’s work for the staff seen here in October, 1979, emblematizing the triumph of science and Soviet endeavour.

MEASURING THE SITE

June, 1971. Geodesists – experts in the size, shape and gravitational properties of the earth – survey a site that had to be laid out with an extraordinary degree of exactitude.

BUILDING THE ‘PEACEFUL ATOM’

The idea of atomic energy had first been released upon the world with the utmost violence in the bombs that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But there were, of course, possibilities for its peaceful use. Who better to realize them than the scientists, technicians and workers of the USSR?

While the capitalists harnessed