68 pages • 2 hours read
Adam HigginbothamMidnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Birth of a City”
Prologue Summary
In the afternoon on Saturday, April 26, 1986, around 16 hours after an explosion at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station in Ukraine, Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev leads a reconnaissance mission to measure the radiation levels around the grounds of the plant. As his armored vehicle draws nearer to the plant, the radiation readings rise dramatically: 100 roentgen per hour, 250 roentgen per hour, before maxing out at 2,080 roentgen per hour. Logachev yells to his driver, “We’ll all be corpses in fifteen minutes!” (4).
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Soviet Prometheus”
On February 20, 1970, construction begins on the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, 14 miles outside the tiny peasant village of Chernobyl, Ukraine. The man responsible for its construction is 34-year-old Viktor Brukhanov, who will also serve as the plant’s Director. An electrical engineer, Brukhanov has little experience with nuclear power. “But at the Ministry of Energy in Moscow, knowledge and experience were regarded as less important qualifications for top management than loyalty and an ability to get things done” (9).
As Brukhanov struggles to meet impossible deadlines handed down by the Soviet Ministry of Energy, he must cope with the economic and infrastructural challenges that come to define the Soviet Union’s Era of Stagnation. “Shortages and bottlenecks, theft and embezzlement blighted almost every industry” (12). In July 1972, exhausted and disillusioned, Brukhanov delivers a resignation letter to his Communist Party-appointed supervisor in Kiev. The supervisor tears up the letter and tells Brukhanov to get back to work.
By the Spring of 1986, Brukhanov successfully oversees the construction of four giant nuclear reactors, as well as an entire city surrounding the plant. Home to 50,000 people, Pripyat is an atomgrad, a city built to serve the needs of a nuclear power facility. With an average age of 26, Pripyat exists in an “economic bubble; an oasis of plenty in a desert of shortages and deprivation” (17). Meanwhile, the plant itself is one of the best performing nuclear power stations in the Soviet Union. As construction is set to begin on two more reactor units, Brukhanov expects promotion to a position at the Ministry of Energy in Moscow, at which point his deputy, the loyal but inexperienced Nikolai Fomin, will take over as director.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Alpha, Beta, and Gamma”
Higginbotham steps back to provide a broad scientific and historical overview of nuclear power. Until 1905, scientists believe that atoms are indestructible and indivisible. But with his e=mc2 formula, Albert Einstein posits that a mass of atoms can convert into enormous amounts of energy. In 1938, scientists in Germany successfully split the nucleus of a uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons. This discovery leads to the invention of the atomic bomb detonated above Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.
Higginbotham goes on to discuss the nature of radiation. Radiation occurs when an unstable atom with too many or not enough neutrons sheds part of its nucleus in an effort to regain equilibrium. Radiation is everywhere, emitted by the sun, but also by masonry, Brazil nuts, and even human beings. Much of this radiation is low-level and believed to be effectively harmless. But some of it is powerful enough to alter or break apart the atoms that make up living tissue.
The father of Soviet nuclear power is Igor Kurchatov, who in 1949 builds a working replica of the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki. Six years later, Kurchatov completes the world’s first reactor that uses nuclear power for civilian electricity. While the reactor only generates enough energy to power a locomotive, the feat has enormous symbolic importance for the Soviet Union. “Alongside the cosmonauts and martyrs of the Great Patriotic War, according to historian Paul Josephson, the nuclear scientists became ‘near-mythic figures in the pantheon of Soviet heroes’” (34).
Unlike in a bomb, the process needed to sustain a nuclear reactor is incredibly delicate and requires three main components: a moderator, a coolant, and control rods. A moderator substance slows down a small percentage of neutrons making it possible to harness the energy of their collisions. A coolant—generally, water—keeps the uranium fuel from melting. Finally, the control rods consist of a substance like boron that traps neutrons to slow down the reactions in a core. Extreme care is essential when inserting and withdrawing these rods, to ensure that the reactor neither slows down to a subcritical state nor speeds up to dangerous levels.
While most countries in the West invest in pressurized water reactors (PWRs) which use water as both a moderator and a coolant, the Soviet Union invests in reactors that use graphite as a moderator and water as a coolant because they are less expensive to build and more efficient to maintain. These graphite-water reactors, however, have a fatal flaw known as the positive void coefficient. This occurs when too much of the coolant water turns into steam, resulting in a runaway chain reaction that only halts by inserting the reactor control rods. If the control rods fail for whatever reason, the reactor will meltdown or even explode.
On September 29, 1957, an incident transpires that illustrates the Soviet Union’s clandestine approach toward nuclear disasters. A massive explosion occurs in the water waste tanks of the Mayak plutonium production reactors located within the perimeter of Chelyabinsk-40, a secret nuclear installation that appears on no civilian maps. With no emergency plans in place, it takes hours before the plant managers receive notification in Moscow. By that point, most of the soldiers working at the installation are in the hospital, bleeding and vomiting. Radioactive contaminants rain down on a tract of land six kilometers wide and 50 kilometers long. Over the next two years, the government permanently evacuates 10,000 peasants, wiping 23 villages off the map. While rumors of the disaster reach the West, the Soviet Union refuses to acknowledge even the existence of the installation. “Although it would be decades before the truth finally emerged, the Mayak disaster remained, for many years, the worst nuclear accident in history” (45).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Friday, April 25, 5:00 p.m., Pripyat”
Here, Higginbotham introduces the reader to some of the engineers and firefighters working the overnight shift during the Chernobyl explosion. Alexander Yuvchenko is a 24-year-old senior mechanical engineer in the plant’s reactor department. He lives with his wife Natalia and their two-year-old son, Kirill.
Leonid Toptunov is a 32 year old who, two months ago, receives promotion to senior reactor control engineer, the most demanding position at the plant. His job is to monitor and manage the Unit Four reactor’s output power minute-by-minute. Also in the Unit Four control room that night is Alexander Akimov, the 32-year-old shift foreman.
Finally, Higginbotham introduces a number of individuals who work on the Third Watch of Pripyat’s Paramilitary Fire Brigade Number Two, including its 23-year-old shift commander Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik.
Prologue-Chapter 3 Analysis
As early on as Brukhanov’s elevation to the position of plant director, factors unique to the Soviet Union begin to conspire to make the Chernobyl explosion seem almost inevitable. This is an impression shared not by only Higginbotham but a number of important individuals involved in the incident. Like many plant directors and other high-ranking individuals within the Soviet Union’s nuclear program, Brukhanov’s key qualifications have less to do with any expertise in nuclear physics and more to do with his ability to work within the labyrinthine Soviet bureaucracy to achieve the Communist Party’s goals without asking too many questions:
Although now the director and, as yet, sole employee of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, Brukhanov knew little about nuclear power. Back at the Polytechnic Institute in Tashkent, he had studied electrical engineering. He had risen quickly from lowly jobs in the turbine shop of an Uzbek hydroelectric power plant to overseeing the launch of Ukraine’s largest coal-fired station in Slavyansk, in the industrial east of the republic. But at the Ministry of Energy in Moscow, knowledge and experience were regarded as less important qualifications for top management than loyalty and an ability to get things done. Technical matters could be left to the experts (8).
While it’s reasonable to expect that management roles will require less technical expertise than day-to-day operator positions, the knowledge gap between plant directors like Brukhanov and the operators working in Chernobyl’s Unit Four Control Room on the night of the explosion will serve as an important factor contributing to the accident. Brukhanov is essentially the only point of contact between Chernobyl plant workers and the Moscow design experts at NIKIET who offer only the faintest of warnings about potentially deadly design flaws in Chernobyl’s RBMK reactors. While it is uncertain whether Brukhanov is among the plant operators alerted to these flaws, it’s reasonable to wonder whether he would have had the technical knowledge necessary to properly communicate these flaws to his operators and to implement the kind of workflow changes needed to address them.
But even if Brukhanov possessed the technical wherewithal to build and run the Chernobyl plant with an emphasis on safety, other pressures within the Soviet Union would have still contributed to the accident by way of the shoddy construction standards necessitated by the USSR’s economic dysfunction.
The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption—the start of what would come to be called the Era of Stagnation. […] From the beginning, Brukhanov lacked construction equipment. Key mechanical parts and building materials often turned up late, or not at all, and those that did were often defective […] The qualities of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building projects throughout the nation’s power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as ‘preinstallation overhaul’ (12).
As Brukhanov faces these construction challenges—and, later, the onerous power demands of Ukraine and Western Russia—Higginbotham explores the extent to which the plant director, whose decision-making before and after the Chernobyl accident leads to his 10-year prison sentence, is a product of the Soviet system. Brukhanov garnered accolades and praise for his efficiency, but he earned this efficiency by cutting critical corners and concealing workarounds.
The tendency of plant directors like Brukhanov to conceal is of a piece with the Soviet Union’s broader dedication toward secrecy over safety. The 1957 cover-up of the Mayak plutonium plant explosion would serve as a playbook for the Soviet Union’s formidable efforts in obfuscation during the Chernobyl disaster. Moreover, the fact that the public remained in the dark about the Mayak disaster prevents the Soviet nuclear industry from undergoing the kind of reforms the United States took in the wake of widespread outcry following its Three Mile Island accident—reforms which could have prevented the Chernobyl disaster.
The Soviet Union’s generally reckless attitude toward nuclear power throughout the second half of the 20th century is more than just political or bureaucratic. It involves the design of the reactors themselves. The nuclear program’s insistence on building and operating flawed, overly-large RBMK reactors as opposed to the PWR plants found throughout the West reflects all the qualities that came to define the Soviet Union during the 20th century: gigantomania, wastefulness, and a misguided trust in the Party-anointed elites to protect the Soviet citizenry. All of this is to say that the Chernobyl disaster came about not only as a consequence of poor decision-making by plant operators and potentially catastrophic design flaws. Rather, the explosion was a product of the Soviet system itself, which lends credence to Higginbotham’s theme that the accident was all but inevitable given the dysfunction that lay at the heart of the USSR.
