Chernobyl Read online

  The engineer on duty put down his cup of tea to answer the telephone. His caller had an accent, quickly explained when he said he was calling from the Soviet Ukraine. "Do you have information on controlling graphite fires in reactors?" he asked politely.

  The duty engineer that morning happened to be an Englishman; he had no difficulty in understanding the question. "Do you mean the Windscale sort of thing? Yes, I think so. That was a Wigner-effect event." He paused to see if he would be required to explain the Wigner effect. The Wigner effect is a change that takes place in the molecular structure of graphite after long exposure to ionizing radiation. The molecular structure stores energy from the radiation. This has potential dangers, and so once a year graphite moderators of that sort must be "annealed" — which is to say, heated up suffi-ciendy that the molecular bonds slacken and relax when cooled. In England's Windscale in 1957 that heating got away from its operators, causing the graphite to burn and destroy the reactor.

  "One moment," the Ukrainian said. There was a sound of muffled voices, and then the man came back on the line. "No, not in regard to the Wigner effect," he said. "I ask of control measures. Of ways for dealing with such an event if it should occur."

  "You mean to ask how they put it out?" the Englishman said. "They simply kept drenching the thing with water. Diverted most of a river onto it, if I remember aright. Wait just a moment, I think we do have some documents in the file — shall I mail you a set?"

  The voice on the phone disappeared again. When it returned it said politely, "No, thank you, we do not think that will be necessary."

  The Englishman hung up, finished his tea, and examined the pot to see if there might be another blackened cup left. That, he thought, had been a curious call. He looked through his files to see what he could find about graphite-moderated reactors in the USSR. There were plenty of them, but nothing that seemed relevant to the call.

  Still, he wanted to tell someone about it and so, after a moment's consideration, he picked up the telephone again and dialed a colleague in the United Kingdom. "What do you reckon they're up to?" he asked, after recounting the call.

  The colleague yawned; he had been sleeping in on a rainy English weekend morning. "Russkies," he said, explaining everything. "You know what they like those graphite reactors for. The things are useful to make a little plutonium on the side. They don't want to know about controlling anything, in my opinion. They're simply hoping to find some better ways of increasing the yield."

  "It could be that, I suppose," said the man in Vienna. "They've got a mass of those RBMKs going. I found a note from one of our masters, warning that the beasts were not entirely safe."

  "That would be Marshall, I expert," said the one in London. That was Lord Walter Marshall, head of the United Kingdom's General Electricity Generating Board. "That was donkey's years ago, wasn't it?"

  The engineer in Vienna said doubtfully, "You don't think I should report it to someone?"

  "Report it to whom? And what is there to report? No," said the voice from England, "I'd forget it if I were you. It's what I'm going to do myself."

  Chapter 9

  Saturday, April 26

  If Vassili Smin lived in Moscow, he might easily be one of the westernized, pampered, English-speaking, Playboy-reading "Golden Youth" whose Wrangler jeans and Gucci loafers make the disco scene in the Blue Bird nightclub. Vassili has as much going for him as any of the spoiled Moscow darlings. His father is high in the Party, as well as being the Deputy Director of an immense industrial complex. Vassili himself had been a leader in the kids' patriotism-Communism-scouting organization, the Pioneers, had moved up to join the Komsomol as soon as he reached the tenth grade in school. He has spending money almost equal to the wages of the peasant girl who lovingly makes his bed every morning and unfailingly shines his shoes. Vassili, however, does not live in Moscow. He lives in a small town a hundred and thirty kilometers from Kiev, and even in the city of Kiev the most pampered youth are less spoiled than in the capital. The other thing that makes Vassili unlike Moscow's Golden Youth is that he has a lot of his father in him. He certainly wishes to succeed. But he knows that the way to do that is, first, to make sure of getting into a first-rate college, and, second, to join the Party as soon as he can. The Party meetings will surely be boring, but there is no other way to a high position. And, although his father has the influence to get him into almost any college in the USSR, he is far from

  powerful enough to plant his boy in a leadership post for life. Vassili knows that what happens after college will depend on his grades.

  It would also, Vassili knew, be helped along a good deal by commendations from his Komsomol leaders, but that was not the only reason why, that Saturday morning, he left his grandmother's apartment and took a bus to the outskirts of Kiev. Then he stood on the edge of the Pripyat road, holding a five-ruble note in the air for passing vehicle drivers to see. He was not merely reluctant to miss a day's school, or the Saturday-afternoon meeting of the league for young Communists, the Komsomol, which would put the finishing touches on their May Day plans. He was also worried.

  A five-ruble note was statistically certain to get a ride from at least half of any random selection of truck, ambulance, or private-car drivers, but this morning it wasn't working. There was traffic in plenty, but most of it was official and all of it in a hurry. Vassili saw a dozen fire trucks, military vehicles, and militia cars go by before, at last, a lumbering farm truck pulled up beside him. "What's going on?" the driver demanded, leaning out of the window without opening the door.

  "I don't know," said Vassili, waving the bill at him. "But I have to get to Pripyat."

  "Pripyat! I'm not going to Pripyat. But I can take you fifty kilometers."

  "For one ruble, not five," Vassili bargained, and settled finally for two. Thrown into the bargain was nearly half an hour's conversation from the collective farmer, divided almost equally between complaints about the stinginess of customers at the free market in Kiev and invective against the other drivers on the road, who raced past him at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour. Nor were they the normal assortment of trucks and buses. The bulk of the traffic still seemed to be emergency vehicles, all in a hurry, and Vassili was beginning to get seriously worried.

  When at last the kolkhozist turned off onto a side road, Vassili was picked up almost at once by a soldier who was driving, of all things, a water cannon. "What, is there a riot in Pripyat?" Vassili begged, aghast at the notion, but the driver only shook his head. His orders were to go to a checkpoint thirty kilometers south of the town. He had no other information; it was all in a day's work to him, and he resented losing his Saturday to it.

  Then they came to the checkpoint.

  Vassili hopped down from the truck, frowning. There was a barricade across the road. Civilian vehicles had been turned back, and had already worn muddy ruts through the margins of a field of sunflowers as they turned around. There were soldiers there manning the barricades, and with them a rabble of young people — young people? — why, Vassili saw with shock, they were Komsomols! From his own troop! One of them his friend Boris Sheranchuk; and as soon as Boris saw him he waved him over. "Here, we've been called out to help the militiamen, so you're on duty too."

  "Duty for what?"

  "To make sure no one gets past, of course. There's been an awful accident at the power plant."

  "An accident!" Vassili cried. "Have you — do you know where my father is?"

  "I don't even know where my own father is. It's bad. People have been killed."

  For all that long day Boris, Vassili, and the other young Communists were kept on duty. It was not their job to turn vehicles back, that was work for the militiamen. For the Komsomols the task was to make sure that none of the diverted vehicles got hopelessly stuck in the sunflower field, to try to keep them from doing more damage to the crop than was absolutely necessary, and, when trucks turned up with water and food for the guards, to help serve it. It was not glamorous wo
rk. And it was not enjoyable, for no one seemed to have any hard facts about what was happening at Chernobyl. The traffic was almost all one-way going in. The vehicles that came back were generally ambulances, and none of them stopped.

  To be sure, the best source of news was the sky to the north, for there an occasional wavering dark pillar of smoke on the horizon told its own story. Vassili would not have believed there could be so much to burn. When a truck at last came from the city and stopped, Vassili was the first to reach its side. "Is the city burning?" one Komsomol demanded, but the people in the truck were only young Pioneers, twelve and thirteen years old, and they knew very little. No, certainly Pripyat itself was not on fire; what an idea! But yes, of course, the fire in the power plant was very severe, no one could say when it might be under control; and none of them had any knowledge at all of Vassili Smin's father. Or of Boris Sheranchuk's; or, indeed, of anything at all except that when their Pioneer troop had been called out to put up these signs, they had been frightened. The signs were placards with the ominous three-cornered radiation symbol in bright red, and a warning to keep out; the Pioneers toddled off in groups of three and four to hammer them into place in a perimeter that would completely surround Chernobyl.

  Surround Chernobyl? In a perimeter thirty kilometers away? Vassili could not swallow the thought.

  The sun was dropping toward the horizon, but inside his protective smock Vassili was sweating. When it got dark and another truck came up, with bread, tea and vegetable soup, he hung back until the militiamen had gotten theirs. Then he took his tin tray away to a corner under an old tree, and while he ate, he wept, staring at the ugly red glow that hung over the northern horizon.

  He stayed at his post until after midnight, when a Soviet Army truck took the exhausted Komsomols back to Pripyat.

  After the manner of boys and puppies, Vassili was ready to drop, but even so he had enough energy to be astonished at how peaceful the town was. Could it be possible that they didn't know? Of course, at midnight one did not expect much activity in the streets of Pripyat — but nothing? When he got out of the elevator and entered the sixteenth-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he thought of eating and dismissed it, thought of bathing and put that aside, too, but stood for a moment at the window that looked out toward the plant.

  He could not see the smoke in the darkness, but there were still lights there.

  He threw himself onto his bed, thoroughly shaken. His father's power station could not have blown up! It was the very latest triumph of Soviet technology, with all the safety features his father had been proud to display to him as they toured the giant plant. It was too big and too magnificent to explode! And, besides, it was his father's.

  Chapter 10

  Saturday, April 26

  At nine o'clock on this Saturday morning the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is no longer a part of the Ukrainian electrical grid. No energy flows out along the high-tension lines. Reactors 1, 2, and 3 have been tripped to zero output, and the terrible fires — the fires in the buildings, at least — have been declared out long since. It is only the hundreds of tons of graphite in the exposed core of Reactor No. 4 that continue to burn. So far only one edge of the graphite is ablaze, with a blue-white heat as painful to the eyes as looking at the sun itself, and the firemen can do nothing about it. Their hoses still play on the roofs of the nearby buildings, on the smoldering heaps of rubble, on the walls around the wreck of No. 4, but they have not been able to extinguish the graphite. It is simply too hot; the water flashes into instant steam. There is another problem with using the fire hoses. The water that does trickle away from the core and from each bit of radioactive matter, small or large, dissolves radioactive material as it flows; and then it carries that radioactivity with it wherever it happens to go.

  On that morning Vassili Smin's father was sitting in a militia car ten meters outside the gate of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, feverishly making notes. They had the windows rolled up tight in the car, and the militia colonel at the wheel was smoking a Bulgarian-tobacco cigarette, the kind that laborers bought for forty kopecks a pack. The car was filled with the heavy smoke. Smin didn't notice. He didn't even hear when, now and then, the militiaman picked up the microphone and issued commands on his radio, or when messages crackled in. Smin had pushed back the white hood of his garment because it made his face and neck itch — he was sweating, and the scar tissue could not sweat — and trying to get everything down while it was all fresh. It was a list of the things that had gone wrong because of deficiencies in training, equipment, and supplies. It was becoming quite a long list:

  Drs. not trained radiat. sickness

  Fire brigs, not trained radiat. proceds.

  No radiat. protect, garments for station

  No respirators.

  Need equip, for station + near towns, etc.

  Need reptd. drills emgcy proceds.

  Smin paused, scratching the itchy scars just below his ear and gazing blankly out at the emergency vehicles that were standing around, engines running, while the few active firemen continued to play their cooling hoses on the endangered walls. None of the things he had written, he realized, attacked the real question: what in the name of God had gone wrong? He wondered if he would ever find out. The stories he had pieced together — that one by one the operators had systematically dismanded all the safety systems, just when the reactor was at its touchiest condition — were simply too fantastic. Smin refused to believe that anyone in the Chernobyl plant could have been that arrogantly stupid. It was almost easier to accept the possibility of that word that had not been much heard in the Soviet Union in recent decades: sabotage.

  But that, too, was impossible to believe! Yes, certainly, the CIA or the Chinks, they were quite capable of blowing up a power plant simply to inconvenience the Soviets. But there was no way such a thing could have been possible without the concurrence of everyone in the main control room — and to believe that was as preposterous as to believe in simple, crass, spectacularly gross stupidity.

  And the cost of it! Not simply the ruble cost, though that was going to be heavy. Not even the cost to the Plan; it was the cost to human beings that weighed on Simyon Smin. So many casualties! Nearly one hundred of the worst already on their way to the airstrip in the town of Chernobyl, where a special plane was going to take them right up to Moscow for treatment. And two dead already! One man never found, but dead all right because he had been last seen in the reactor hall itself, minutes before the blast. The other dying early this morning in the Pripyat hospital, with burns over eighty percent of his body and terrible radiation damage as well. . and there would be more—

  He bent to the pad on his knee and wrote quickly:

  Anti-flash cream?

  Spl. burn facil. in hosp.?

  "Comrade Smin?"

  "Eh?" He looked up at the militiaman, who was replacing the microphone on the dashboard again.

  "I said the helicopter from Kiev will be landing one kilometer away, by the river, in five minutes. With the team from the Ministry of Nuclear Energy."

  "Oh, of course," said Smin, looking at his watch — nine o'clock! They'd made good time. "Would you mind driving me out to meet them?" And as the militia officer started to say of course, Smin said sharply, '"No, wait. Can you turn on that outside speaker of yours?" He was scowling out the window at the idle firemen in their white hoods and jumpsuits, clustered in knots as they watched their comrades playing water on the walls. "You there!" Smin cried into the microphone, and heard his amplified voice bounced back to him. "Get those men behind shelter! Have you forgotten everything you've just been taught about radiation?" As they turned to gaze at him, he snarled, "Do you want your balls fried?"

  It was satisfying to see them jump — but how long had they been standing in the open like that before he noticed them?

  As the militia car pulled away from the plant gate, Smin caught a glimpse through the trees of the bright towers of the town of Pripyat, prett
ily colored in the morning sun. He should, he thought, have put his message to his wife and son more strongly, so that they would keep away until things became more normal—

  If things ever would. But Smin, at least, had a pretty clear idea of what the radionuclides that had erupted from Reactor No. 4 were going to do to the buildings, streets, and soil of Pripyat, once the wind changed — were already doing, no doubt, to the little farm villages in Byelorussia, just across the border to the north.

  Smin recognized the little park by the river. It was where people swam in the summer, and the plant's football team practiced on its greensward. Now the goal cages had been torn away and the people there were not playing football. Some were on stretchers, waiting for the airlift to the larger hospital in Chernobyl.

  Smin was surprised to see Chief Engineer Varazin bustling toward him. The man was neatly dressed, even freshly shaved, though the lines on his face suggested he had not slept. "Eh, Simyon," Varazin sighed gloomily. "What a night! Wouldn't you know, the minute the Director goes out of town!" Then he brightened. "You'll be glad to know that I've made sure all our observer guests are safe, and I've made arrangements for the new ones from the Ministry."

  "Well, that's very good, anyway," Smin said wonderingly.

  "Exactly! Put the past behind us. Get on with the work ahead, right, Simyon? But I'd better be doing it than talking about it," Varazin said, and trotted away, glancing up at the sky.

  Smin shook his head. Was it possible the man thought that escorting the observers to Pripyat would do anything to ameliorate the miseries that lay ahead for him? Well, for both of them, to be sure, Smin thought resignedly; but there was no time to worry about that sort of thing now. He peered up into the sky. He could hear the helicopter approaching from the southeast, but it did not come directly to the pad. It veered away and slowly circled the Chernobyl plant. Sensible of them to take a good look at the ruin, Smin thought, and wished he could do the same.