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Reactor Four: The Night the Soviet Nuclear Age Ended
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At 1:23 am on April 26, 1986, Chernobyl's Reactor Four exploded — and the firefighters sent to fight it had no idea they were already dying. This is the chapter-by-chapter story of the worst nuclear disaster in history and the Soviet system that made it inevitable.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At one twenty-three in the morning on April twenty-sixth, nineteen eighty-six, the Soviet Union's most advanced nuclear reactor tore itself apart. The explosion at Chernobyl's Reactor Four was so violent it blew the roof clean off the building.
To understand why this happened, you have to go back a few hours. Reactor Four was undergoing a safety test.
The first fire engines arrived within minutes. The firefighters who climbed to the reactor roof were led by men like Lieutenant Pravik and Major Ignatenko, senior officers who went up first, who took the highest exposure, who made the decisions on the ground that their training had prepared them for.
The town of Pripyat sat less than two miles from the reactor. Thirty thousand people lived there, built there specifically to house the plant's workers and their families.
Here's something that still astonishes. The Western world learned about Chernobyl not from Soviet announcements, but from Sweden.
The graphite fire at the core burned for ten days. And for those ten days, the reactor released radioactive material into the atmosphere that spread across the Soviet Union and into Europe.
The fire was eventually smothered from the air. Soviet military helicopters dropped sand, lead, boron, and dolomite onto the burning core, thousands of tons of material over several days, in an effort to smother the graphite fire and limit further release.
Gorbachev later said that Chernobyl was perhaps the real cause of the Soviet Union's collapse. That's a significant statement.
The thirty minutes those firefighters spent on the reactor roof in the early hours of April twenty-sixth is the center of this story, not because it's the most dramatic moment in the disaster's timeline, but because it contains everything the larger story is about. Unpreparedness meeting catastrophe.
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