Chernobyl E-Book

Michael Kerrigan

• Herausgeber: Amber Books Ltd
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 101

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

26 April 1986: CHERNOBYL

26 April 1986: CHERNOBYL

Michael Kerrigan

This digital edition first published in 2024

Copyright © 2022 Amber Books Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Published by Amber Books Ltd

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ISBN: 978-1-83886-476-7

Editor: Michael Spilling

Designer: Mark Batley

Picture research: Terry Forshaw

Contents

INTRODUCTION

BEFORE THE DISASTER

CATASTROPHE AT CHERNOBYL

THE CLEAN-UP

URBAN WASTELAND

BELARUS COUNTS THE COST

CHERNOBYL TODAY

PICTURE CREDITS

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 its destructive force – its capacity to kill and blight and spread radioactive sickness – the communists were going to turn its extraordinary power to good. The Russian word mir means both ‘world’ and ‘peace’, as the Soviets liked to point out to their western critics.

The Soviets were not the aggressors in the so-called ‘Cold War’. The Soviet nuclear programme had begun in 1950; the world’s first nuclear power plant had been built at Obninsk, southwest of Moscow, in 1954. Construction at Chernobyl had begun in 1970.

The site of the Chernobyl reactors lies approximately 130km (80 miles) north of Kiev, up against the Belarusian border of what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Nearby, the Pripyat River – a tributary of the Dnieper – winds slowly out of the Pripyat (or Pinsk) Marshes, one of Europe’s biggest and most ecologically important wetlands. The reactor site is actually about 15 km (nine miles) northwest of Chernobyl itself.

CONSTRUCTION

By July, 1975, the building of Chernobyl’s Units 1 and 2 was well underway, but a great deal remained to be done before they’d be producing power. Soviet construction could raise monumental buildings and industrial complexes with heroic speed – but could the perfect precision this kind of project needed really be achieved?

REACTOR NO. 1

Chernobyl was Ukraine’s first nuclear power station of any kind. Built with Soviet-designed RBMK-1000 reactors, it was the third plant of its type to come into commission. One near Leningrad (St Petersburg) had become fully operational in 1974; the second at Kursk, western Russia, had followed three years later.

CENTRAL BOARD

In its day, this photo represented an awe-inspiring glimpse into a sci-fi future: clean, hygienic power under fingertip control. What the picture cannot show is the water boiling round the fuel rods at enormous pressures, or the racing release of neutrons during fission in what amounted to a slow-motion explosion, carefully contained.

The construction of the Chernobyl plant obviously had a major impact on the local landscape. It wasn’t just the reactors, of which Units 1 and 2 were built between 1970 and 1977, and 3 and 4 completed in 1983 (a further two were under construction at the time of the disaster). An artificial lake, extending over 22 sq km (8.5 sq miles), was created to contain water for cooling purposes. Meanwhile, 3km (1.8 miles) away, a small city was built to service the nuclear plant.

With a population of almost 50,000, Pripyat was four times the size of Chernobyl proper. The area of Ukraine around the nuclear plant wasn’t densely populated, but this wasn’t the wilds of Siberia by any means. In all, up to 135,000 people are believed to have lived within a 30km (18-mile) radius.

COMMUNIST CONSTRUCTION

Capitalism, its critics say, is inherently exploitative. Owners can only profit by paying their workers less than the value of what they produce. It’s inherently cynical as well: it makes the product as cheaply as it can and charges the consumer the most it can get away with. Its much-vaunted ‘competition’ and ‘choice’ are an illusion and a waste: why have 15 kinds of car or styles of shoe when their supposed differences are largely down to expensive branding?

WINTER SCENE

With maximum January temperatures of -2°C (28°F), and those for December and February also struggling to reach freezing point, the winters here are decidedly long and hard. Inside, though, the plant was snug, and the reactors worked away regardless of the weather, distributing warmth and light to communities across Ukraine.

In an orderly, centrallyplanned economy, workers’ pay and conditions can be assured and production standards rigorously enforced. It’s not merely more just, but more economically effective, socialists suggest.

Only a culture force-fed advertising would generate debased desires for material goods and fashions far beyond anything that we might actually need.

All true enough, though employers have to pay enough to secure the labour that they need in an open market. Staff with important skills can command much higher earnings and, in a free society, there are trade unions to protect their rights. And if branding does distort consumers’ sense of what really constitutes ‘quality’, goods that are actually faulty reflect badly on their maker.

BLOCK CONTROL PANEL

The USSR’s achievements in culture, economics and science, said Leonid Brezhnev (Soviet Premier, 1964–82), represented a triumph for humanity at large. The Soviet people were ‘blazing the true way to the triumph of universal peace and progress’. Contemporary photos from Chernobyl (this one is from 1979) give an inspiring impression of a plant in which a high-tech future had already been achieved.

CENTRAL HALL

The square plates in the floor cover not only the fuel rods but the absorbent control rods which, raised and lowered in between to a greater or lesser extent, soak up excess neutrons as they’re generated. This allows the output of the reactor as a whole to be controlled. The vast hall we see here served all four reactors, each of which in turn had two generating turbines, driven by super-heated steam.

PRIPYAT APARTMENT BLOCKS