It would be intentionally dishonest to say that the Chornobyl Disaster of 1986 was an accident, as official party line stated. According to the nuclear scientists who analyzed the event, not only was it inevitable, but "it was just a matter of time and which power unit that would not withstand the first". The problems were present on every single level - starting from the materials used for the plant, and ending with the work protocols.
The higher-ups at Moscow not only knew that the Chornobyl Nuclear Plant was one of the most dangerous NP in ussr, and that "the radioactive danger of a potential disaster is 60 times than that of Hirosima and Nagasaki" - according to the results of the official KGB investigation; at the moment of the disaster the project managers had reports of at least 29 emergency shutdowns, 9 accidents and 68 key equipment failures that had already happened on the Chornobyl NP. The real number could be much higher but is currently unknown due to many KGB archives remaining classified.
For example:
On September th 9th 1982 at 18:18 during a trial run of the reactor of the first power unit there was a significant release of radioactive substances into the environment. The total activity of beta-emitting radionuclides exceeded natural levels by dozens of times, and in the area of Chystohalivka village, located 5 kilometres from the Chornobyl power plant, the figure was exceeded by hundreds of times. The investigation team found about 20 gross violations in the operation of the power unit. Instead of following the protocol of alerting the civillians and declaring the village a "temporarily contaminated territory", KGB implemented measures to hide the fact of an accident ever happening.
Every report of the KGB investagative teams that we have access to ended the same: taking measures to conceal the very fact of the accident occurence. It came to the absurd situations when the workers were unaware of the fact that the previous shift's team had encountered an emergency situation.
------
Source: The KGB dossier on Chornobyl - from construction to accident
Thirty-three years after the nuclear catastrophe that defined its name, Chernobyl has surged back into the popular consciousness. HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries, which dramatized the disaster and the Soviet government’s attempt to cover-up key details, is part of a string of major works that have revisited the Chernobyl catastrophe this year. In February, Adam Higginbotham reconstructed the immediate aftermath in his book Midnight in Chernobyl; a month later, historian Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival hit the shelves.
Thirty-three years after the nuclear catastrophe that defined its name, Chernobyl has surged back into the popular consciousness. HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries, which dramatized the disaster and the Soviet government’s attempt to cover-up key details, is part of a string of major works that have revisited the Chernobyl catastrophe this year. In February, Adam Higginbotham reconstructed the immediate aftermath in his book Midnight in Chernobyl; a month later, historian Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival hit the shelves.
Brown’s book offers an implicit case for why Chernobyl still resonates today: it was not an isolated accident. Although the twin explosions at the Ukrainian nuclear power plant can be traced to flaws in the design of the reactor itself, the 1986 catastrophe was far from the only example of nuclear contamination in the USSR. Brown synthesizes health records, internal Soviet documents, and interviews with environmentalists and nuclear experts to argue that Chernobyl was part of a string of nuclear catastrophes dating back to the 1960s.
Further, while the 30 kilometer Exclusion Zone outside the Chernobyl plant has long given off the impression that the catastrophe is contained, the health impacts of Chernobyl radiation have spread far into Ukraine and Belarus. As Brown notes, nuclear radiation neither stays in one place nor immediately disappears — it gets embedded in the environment. In one chapter, Brown chronicles the lives of berry pickers in forests of the Polesia region of Ukraine, some 200 miles from Chernobyl. High levels of radiation are trapped in these forests, and they filter into the berries, which are then picked and shipped to the European Union and beyond (officials say that they contain permissible levels of radioactivity).
Earther spoke to Brown about her book and why a re-evaluation of Chernobyl is happening now. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Earther: In your book, you make the case that Chernobyl was not an isolated accident but rather an “acceleration” of a trend of nuclear contamination. What made you say that?
Brown: I was working with a forester in the swampy Pripyat marshes, a good distance away from the Chernobyl accident site. And what I realized is that radioactivity in this region and this ecosystem in the Pripyat marshes predated the Chernobyl accident itself. Then I got into top-level political documents and I realized that the 1986 accident was not the first nuclear accident at that very new Chernobyl plant. There in fact had been 104 accidents and nuclear excursions at that plant in the five years before it blew.
Earther: In what ways are we still dealing with the environmental fallout of Chernobyl today?
Brown: As I traveled around with the biologists, we had this one day where we recorded really high levels of radioactivity in the Red Forest [outside Chernobyl]. And that was because there had been a fire there, and the fire released volatile radioactivity that was stored in the leafs and tree branches.
With climate change, there’s been hotter and drier summers in Ukraine. In the summers of 2015, 2017, and 2018, there had been forest fires in the Chernobyl Zone. Until something radical is done, I assume it will keep going.
There’s also been glacial melting, and that’s a big part of radioactivity from Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents. There was storage [of that radioactive fallout] in glaciers up in the polar north that has 10 or 17 times more radioactivity than elsewhere on the globe. With global warming, that radioactivity stored in glaciers is now melting, and it’s flowing into oceans and it’s been absorbed into the atmosphere and is coming down in the form is acid rain.
And so now it’s like a zombie. It’s being revisited upon us.
Earther: Where do you think the idea that Chernobyl is an isolated accident came from?
Brown: The way we tell accident narratives is to say here’s the beginning, here is it playing out, lots of drama, lots of masculine heroics, and now that the accident is over, we can walk away. We’ve solved the problem. The firemen rushed at the radioactive flames and took a hit of radioactivity, and then they fixed it all up. So the implication is it’s all fixed. And that’s a really empowering narrative because we like to think of ourselves as not bounced around by forces we don’t understand. We like to think of ourselves as in control. You see that in the HBO Chernobyl show. So to think of something that just lingers on and on and doesn’t really end, it’s not a very ennobling or inspiring narrative.
Earther: The HBO show focuses on the lack of preparedness on the part of the USSR. What do you make of that narrative?
Brown: I address this so-called Soviet incompetency in the last chapter of my book. Yes, they covered up everything that could. They had news that they released to socialist countries, and then less news that they released to capitalist countries. They certainly were duplicitous and lied about all kinds of things. But at the same time, they mobilized a massive army of cleanup workers and doctors and farmers and tractor drivers to do whatever they could to fix this problem. They tried to clean soils, clean food products. The first couple of years alone they examined 900,000 people just in Ukraine to see what the lingering health effects were. They moved 120,000 people immediately, and then, much later on towards after the Soviet Union fell apart, they had another 200,000 people removed [from towns in contaminated zones]. They sent out thousands of radiation monitors to try to keep track of this roving, powerful radioactive contaminant that spread very dynamically across the environment. So I don’t think that they were so incompetent.
Earther: Why do you think we are reflecting on Chernobyl now?
Brown: I would think the main reason is that we’re considering nuclear power as the solution to climate change. And you see this on the editorial pages of our big newspapers, in grants from the National Science Foundation, to try to figure out why Americans are reluctant to accept nuclear power. I think the fallback [on both sides] is to say, “Well, look, at Chernobyl.” The people who are pro-nuclear say, “See, Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in human history, and only 35 people died.” Or sometimes the number is 54 people died, or it’s just in the dozens [all of which Manual for Survival challenges as far too low].
Chernobyl, ironically, is used as a selling point for nuclear power, if you can say that the medical environmental consequences are minimal.
The prediction is we will need about 12,000 nuclear reactors on Earth [to fully replace all other existing energy sources] to combat climate change. There’s about 400 right now. That’s a big scale up. And we’ll be putting reactors right outside most big cities and in places that are seismically unstable, places that might be prone to flooding and big storms. If we choose nuclear as our solution, I think that we will find that the acceleration isn’t over.
Michael Waters is a freelance journalist and a student at Pomona College.
Most of the media spent the first half of this week offering you tips for your backyard cookouts and the second half of the week fretting about North Korea. But while everyone was taking some time off, tons of news continued to trickle out from different parts of the Trump administration. These are the stories from this week you might have missed.
The subject of nuclear power plants and the apocalypse is a fascinating one, and fortunately one which nuclear engineers have gone over in much detail. 1) Nothing bad would come to pass as a result of a plant's staff just not showing up to work ever again. The plant would enter a controlled shutdown and just turn off. Modern plants have excellent safety nets (even Chernobyl only happened because the Russians were intentionally fucking around with running their core too long and too hot).
2) You probably wouldn’t want to /enter/ a defunct nuclear plant, as material may have been in transit with only temporary containment, or the core may not have dealt well with the years, but as a rule defunct plants won’t poison the countryside. 3) Nuclear waste pools will be fine for centuries. There’s not going to be any contamination, or general leakage. In fact there’s a What-If-XKCD about how you could swim in nuclear waste pools (just don’t swim too close to the bottom).
4) The real problem with nuclear waste storage is the problem of millennia. If the human race well and truly loses all technology in an apocalypse, how do we make sure that our descendants don’t die horrible deaths wandering into the places where we stored our waste? (Because by then metal will have corroded, containers leaked, etc). So there are all kinds of signs and spooky ominous stuff as an attempt to make sure that even someone with no common language or culture will nope the fuck out.
And lo and behold, when our ignorant asses played at hypotheticals, @crazy-pages came and laid some truth on us. We give thanks to our science friend, and to those nerds at the nuclear plant for their foresight.
At the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine, more than 500 Russian soldiers who seized the facility in March recently have deployed heavy artillery batteries, and laid anti-personnel mines along the shores of the reservoir whose water cools its six reactors, according to workers, residents, Ukrainian officials, and diplomats. The Ukrainian army holds the towns dotted on the opposite shore, some 3 miles away, but sees no easy way to attack the plant, given the inherent danger of artillery battles around active nuclear reactors.
This is a very important video that is just one example of how russian influence has infiltrated European institutions and is actively obstructs their functioning. I implore you to watch this video with automatic translation - the subtitres are fairly decent. For those who want a short version, I have written down some of the key points.
IAEA is an independent international organization for atomic energy, working under the UN. It was created in 1957 with the purpose of cooperation and control over the peaceful use of nuclear technology. The soviet union used to be a member of IAEA, and russia has inherited its place. They have signed all the international agreements that come with their position and donate yearly contributions to the organization’s budget.
Despite the war in Ukraine, colossal international sanctions and other types of pressure, russia remains a member of IAEA. This organization still hasn’t recognised russia as an initiator of the aggression and is calling the current war “a situation” or “conflict”.
In August 2013, an explosion occurred near russian arkhangelsk. According to the official data, at least 5 people died immediately, and 2 died later due to acute radiation sickness. Four more people received extremely high doses of radiation. According to the USA intelligence, the explosion happened during the retrieval of a “Burevestnik” cruise missile carrying a nuclear engine from the seabed. A radiation release happened due to an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. Two barges, probably used for the transportation of the missle remains after the incident, were left on the seashore near the Nyonoksa village for several months. The radiation levels in the place were 14 times higher than the acceptable norm. Despite giving reports about accidents like this being a literal purpose of the IAEA, they did not comment at all about this event.
Despite the fact that IAEA is the organization that is supposed to monitor all peaceful usage of nuclear energetics in the world, they can only inspect one nuclear plant out of 37 (!) present in russia. This means that as far as independent observers, we have no idea how russian nuclear plants work or if they work at all. For all we know, they could be used for military purposes and we wouldn’t have a clue, because IAEA fails to fulfill the duties it was created for. This is because the presence of IAEA monitoring on nuclear plants can only happen under the consent from the country, which russia doesn’t give. It is true that IAEA has virtually no ways to influence russia, but as we’ll see later, they don’t even bother to use those pressure points they have.
On March 9, 2022, after the capture of the Chornobyl NPP by the russians, IAEA lost all contact with the monitoring systems installed at the station. The connection was only restored on the 11th of May. We still do not know what happened on the station during those two months. In April, during the occupation of the nuclear plant, IAEA published very limited data, claiming that radiation levels remain normal. After the deoccupation their mission entered the NPP, confirming the previous report. However, Greenpeace conducted its own research and accused IAEA of reporting false data. The Greenpeace investigative group has discovered that radiation levels in the dislocation of russian military forces was at least three times higher than stated in the IAEA report and corresponds to the level of nuclear waste.
Investigating the Chornobyl catastrophe, IAEA has ignored the report of the Commission of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine that concluded that the reason for the explosion was the construction flaw of the nuclear plant. Instead, IAEA followed the official narrative of the soviet union, blaming the nuclear plant personnel.
Currently, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant remains under russian occupation. They use it as terrorists - to blackmail Ukraine. They interrogate and torture the workers, remove the equipment and launch missles from the territory of the NP. IAEA has made no comment about this.
On May 25th, at the Davos Economic Forum, IAEA general director Rafael Mariano-Grossi stated that Zaporizhzhya NP holds “30 tons of plutonium and 40 tons of enriched uranium, suitable for manufacture of nuclear weapons”. In his statement he repeated word-to-word russian state propaganda, which had previously made the same claim. The Ukrainian side had to debunk this, stating the plutonium and uranium were never stored on the Zaporizhzhya NP. Ex-Minister of Environmental Protection and Nuclear Safety Yury Kostenko explained that the plutonium and uranium present on the plant is the fuel waste that is impossible to use for the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, since 1998 it was IAEA that has been responsible for making sure that Ukraine has no nuclear materials suitable for military use, which has been confirmed since then each year in the IAEA annual report. This means that for Mr Grossi’s statement to be true, that would mean that his organization has failed to fulfill its duty for 24 years. According to Mr Kostenko, the amount of fuel that Grossi claims Ukraine has would have been enough to create 4,000 nuclear missiles.
On March 23th, Grossi called for an urgent IAEA mission on the Ukrainian nuclear plant. The original composition of the group would have had russian citizens and was drafted by Aleksey Likachov (more about him below). On August 30th, the mission of 14 members arrived in Kyiv. No russian members were present, but also no Ukrainians were allowed to participate, as well as Americans and Britains.
In June IAEA had forbidden a representative of Ukraine to attend the conference with a report about the radiation sources in the war zone. However, russian speakers were widely represented, both as speakers and as leaders of the sections.
At least three russian politicians have influence over the decisions in the IAEA. Mikhail Chudakov, a former member of National Bolshevik Party of Russia (founded by Eduard Limonov and Oleksandr Dugin) is the Deputy General Director of IAEA and head of its department of Nuclear Energy since 2015. Before that, he worked at Rosatom - russian state corporation for atomic energy - for 20 years. Rostom takes part in the occupation of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant, and at least 11 of its members have been to it. Chudakov has access to sensitive information about the state of Ukrainian nuclear plants. It is impossible to know where this information goes and how it is used. Both Poland and Greenpeace have called for IAEA to fire Chudakov and explain his role in the agency. IAEA did no such thing, and limited itself to condemning the action of russian federation in Ukraine - without naming it as aggressor and doing anything of consequence.
Since January 2018 Mikhail Ulyanov has been a permanent representative of the russian federation at international organizations in Vienna, including IAEA. It was him who tweeted on August 19, “No mercy for ukrainians!”.
Aleksey Likachov is the director of Rosatom. He coordinates with IAEA on behalf of the russian government. On August 24the he met in Istanbul with the director of IAEA, after which released the cynical statement: “We leave the politics out of brackets, and talk only about the cooperation and safety of modern nuclear plants”. In 2018-21 Likachov was the head of the delegation of russian federation at the meetings of the general committee. In March 2022 he confirmed the presence of Rosatom representatives of the occupied Zaporizhzhya NO, and in April Rosatom has additionally sent at least 8 more people who demanded daily reports and confidential data from the Ukrainian workers of the nuclear plant. Another director of Rosatom, Sergey Kiryenko, is the curator of the temporary occupied Ukrainian territories.
