Wilson is impressed with the cleanliness and compact order of the turbine room, which is about half the size of a football field. The continued operation of units No. 1 and 2 is attested to by the constant screech they emit and by the digital readout that reports 2,000 megawatts are being transmitted to various parts of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Down at the far end, there is a temporary floor-to-ceiling wall that will seal off unit No. 3 until it is fully decontaminated. Unit 3 was flooded by radiation as a result of the explosion in unit No. 4. That unit at the end of the room is encased in concrete, a mummy of the modern age in its nuclear coffin. The control room is a control room. Full of switches and dials, it looks innocuous enough until one remembers that as a result of decisions in No. 4’s identical control center, 31 people lost their lives coping with a disaster they did not comprehend. The one among them most often mentioned here is the physician who took 500 rads–not the microrads the visitors had measured while riding in the van–as he attempted to save others’ lives. That was a million times the exposure the visitors endured riding from Kiev to Chernobyl. The first soldiers sent into the area to contain the blast could work the hot spots for only 90 seconds before being replaced, according to Soviet physicist Yevgeny P. Velikhov, who flew into the area the day after the explosion and is widely credited with having brought order to the chaos that surrounded the scene. Back in Moscow, during an interview that preceded the Chernobyl tour, Velikhov had played down the personal risks he endured directing the recovery. But in documentaries now being shown on Soviet television, he can be seen climbing through the wreckage when it was still hot and flying over the plant in a helicopter while the reactor’s top was open and belching radioactive material. Wilson says he has learned from Soviet sources that Velikhov received a 25-to-30-rad dose when he climbed the side wall of the damaged reactor and peered down inside to survey the damage. That exposure is on the edge of permissible risk. According to Wilson, this was not an act of bravado but a heroic action that may have saved tens of thousands of lives. “Someone had to go and see what to do next. It was Velikhov who made the correct judgment,” Wilson said. Helicopters had been dumping sand and graphite on the plant, but Velikhov’s visual inspection showed that while the fire was being smothered, other steps had to be taken to contain the radioactivity. Velikhov is the widely respected and very personable 53-year-old physicist who often accompanies Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on his trips abroad. A member of the Soviet Union’s ruling Central Committee and deputy director of its prestigious Academy of Sciences, Velikhov is probably his country’s most influential scientist. He is also one of that obviously large group of Soviets profoundly alarmed by the implications of the Chernobyl explosion. Carelessness of ‘Fools’ Velikhov concedes that the Soviets may have been too blasé about the risks of nuclear power. He is the director of the Kurchatov Institute, which designed the country’s nuclear plants and wrote their safety manuals. Although he took over after that work was done and can point with pride to the newer generation of Soviet plants that incorporate many additional safety features, including containment domes, the example of Chernobyl remains worrisome. “The next disaster will kill the nuclear industry globally,” Velikhov said. And while he believes it is possible to make nuclear power safe, he noted that the problem is the same throughout the world, that occasional carelessness is a part of an industrial situation. “The problem is it is impossible to make anything foolproof for fools,” he noted. The word fools might seem harsh, but it also fits Wilson’s assessment of what happened that night at Chernobyl: “The people who were in charge of the operation clearly did not understand the reason for the rules.” According to Wilson, the accident occurred when the people in charge committed six separate serious errors while conducting a safety experiment, including deactivating three emergency shut-off systems. “They had very much a mind-set of wanting to finish this experiment in spite of the fact that the reactor was not in the right condition for doing it. New Guidelines Issued “It was a safety experiment, of all bizarre things. It was to see how long the generators would go on generating enough electricity to power the safety systems after the steam to the turbine had been cut off. And you can only do that once a year when the reactor has been turned off, and if they failed, they would have had to wait another year.” Your support matters…

Independent journalism is under threat and overshadowed by heavily funded mainstream media.

You can help level the playing field. Become a member.

Your tax-deductible contribution keeps us digging beneath the headlines to give you thought-provoking, investigative reporting and analysis that unearths what's really happening- without compromise.

Give today to support our courageous, independent journalists.

SUPPORT TRUTHDIG
In this Article:
#chernobyl#disaster#environment#harvard#journalism#kiev#los angeles times#mikhail gorbachev#moscow#nuclear#physics#radiation#russia#science#soviet union#td-original#ukraine