At 1:23AM Moscow time, April 26, 1986, the world’s largest and most technologically ambitious nuclear reactor - reactor number 4 at Chernobyl - went kaput. The Soviet effort to generate electricity from nuclear power materialized in 1954 with the completion of the empire’s first commercial reactor. By 1970, the Soviet Union had launched construction of the world’s largest reactor - the RBMK-type, which promised to meet burgeoning demand and demonstrate the ascendancy of Soviet nuclear technology over that of the West. But the failure of the RBM reactor at Chernobyl exposed the economic precariousness of what was thought a juggernaut. Drawing on interviews, memoirs and declassified archives, journalist Adam Higginbotham offers a comprehensive and dispassionate final word on the incident in Chernobyl. He reveals that a total core meltdown, once thought unthinkable, may have been destined to happen.
The explosion immediately entombed two operators in concrete and enveloped dozens more on site in radioactivity. Over 100 Firefighters raced to quell a landscape ablaze with the detritus of exploded fuel rods and unwittingly absorbed high doses of radiation (around 30 of whom quickly succumbed to an agonizing death brought on acute radioactive syndrome, described in horrifying detail). The neighboring town of Pripyat was blanketed in the core’s airborne aftermath. Within the plant, unbeknownst to authorities, a superheated discharge of liquified iron, sand and irradiated concrete, created by the meltdown and forced downward by the explosion, tunneled its way through the plant’s protective barrier, toward the Ukraine’s largest source. The ooze eventually congealed into a massive pock-marked blob scientists would call the “Elephant’s Foot”.
Above the plant, a Brobdingnagian plume ejected 1500 meters into the air and bearing ominously-sounding isotopes (xenon, iodine, cesium and polonium 210), raced its way toward Scandinavia. US surveillance photos detected the cloud, but Soviet obfuscation kept its true cause a mystery. It wasn’t until a technician at a Swedish nuclear facility detected traces of radioactivity on his shoes that the rest of the world was able to make the connection between rouge particles, giant cloud and explosion, and trace them back to Chernobyl.
Failures at other Soviet power plants brought to light a number of serious design flaws and lapses in operational safety that properly addressed, would benefit the development of the RBMK reactor. However, whatever lessons to be gleaned from previous malfunctions remained buried beneath a desperate need for secrecy and program to protect the reputations of party leaders who had approved the malfunctioning plants.
From the beginning of construction, Chernobyl’s director, Viktor Brukhanov, rarely received key components on time, and when he did, had to spend hours repairing them. The same was true of specified materials, which Brukhanov was sometimes forced to replace with something near enough that he managed to get his hands on. Higginbotham points out that such delays would come as no surprise given a Soviet supply chain whose problems “became so chronic that crops rotted in the fields…Soviet fishermen watched catches putrefy in their nets, yet the shelves of the Union’s grocery stores remained bare.”
Looming over a broken supply chain and a push to fulfill absurd deadlines was the implied threat to Brukhanov’s party membership and liberty. The former carried his only real hope of career advancement and afforded him privileges beyond the reach of his countrymen (after the incident Brukhanov and two others were stripped of party membership and imprisoned). That he cut corners and painted a rosier-than-justified picture to authorities about the plant’s viability should coms as little surprise.
By May 4 the fire and toxic sludge had been contained, and in December of the same year reactor 4 was encased in a monstrous 150-foot-tall sarcophagus - “a cathedral of brutalism in concrete and steel”- that bore witness to the chasm between Soviet nuclear aspiration and the realities of Soviet Communism. Today, the “radioactive garden of eden”, a 1000-mile exclusion zone where unmolested by the outside world, where flora and fauna flourish with an atomic zeal, is open to historically-minded tourists.
Although HIgginbotham is unsparing in his description of deficiencies that plagued the Soviet nuclear effort, Midnight is first and foremost a book about the catastrophe itself, and only an incidental indictment of the Soviet regime. In a narrative that at times trudges too deeply into the arcane world of nuclear science, Higginbotham casts the central planning, secrecy and cronyism endemic of the USSR as unmistakable culprits in Chernobyl’s meltdown and lets readers draw their own conclusions about the broader moral implications of Soviet Communism. Given what is acknowledged about the regime’s many horrors and incompetencies, piling on the now-dead USSR would have been easy. Higginbotham is content to detail the accident and include all material relevant to its cause. As such, Higginbotham’s stands as an exercise in both restraint and remarkable incisiveness.