Chernobyl. The Roar That Changed the Energy World

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Position: Professor of law at Tulane University
• Pages: 6-7

6 | THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, September/October 2021.

Copyright © 2021, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

THERE are many reasons why

nuclear power — with bil-

lions in investments and the

full-throated support of Con-

gress and the Supreme Court — has

plateaued for the past forty years, but

one thing that tipped the scales took

place half the world away: Chernobyl.

Adam Higginbotham’s 2019 book

Midnight in Chernobyl: e Untold

Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Di-

saster does just that, tells an “untold”

story. It was at rst suppressed by So-

viet authorities for weeks. When that

proved no longer possible,

facts that came to light were

buried in government les,

some of them highly classi-

ed, until the present day.

Midnight in Chernobyl is the

product of dogged detective

work, spun into a story that

takes us from one harrowing

moment to the next. A page-

turner, a thriller.

It started with a simple

maintenance test of Cher-

nobyl’s Reactor Number

Four. e hypothetical was

an electrical blackout, and it

went well for a few seconds and then

the lid blew o … literally:

“At 1:24 a.m., there was a tremen-

dous roar probably caused as a mix-

ture of hydrogen and oxygen that

had formed inside the reactor space

suddenly ignited. e entire building

shuddered as Reactor Number Four

was torn apart by a catastrophic explo-

sion. e blast caromed o the walls of

the reactor vessel, tore open the hun-

dreds of pipes of the steam and water

circuit, and tossed the upper biological

shield into the air like a ipped coin;

it swatted away the 350-tonne refuel-

ing machine, wrenched the high-bay

bridge crane from its overhead walls,

demolished the upper walls of the

reactor hall, and smashed open the

concrete roof, revealing the night sky

beyond.”

Dead silence from Moscow for

three days. en came an admission

that there had been an (unspecied)

“accident,” but the situation was “now

under control.” Meanwhile, the gov-

ernment was rushing untrained and

unprotected troops to the area to move

out the inhabitants of Pripyat — a

charming city at the time. ey were

all exposed to radiation in the air, the

soils, the milk of cows, the leaves of

plants and trees. ey started to feel ill.

e most immediate fatalities were

of the Reactor Four crew that night.

One by one they died agonizing deaths.

eir red blood cells had dropped to

zero. eir hair fell out. eir radiated

lungs collapsed, leaving them gasping

for breath. e plume of debris and

radioisotopes included strontium 90

and plutonium 239, “among the most

dangerous substances known to man.”

Tons of them headed west in a swath

30 kilometers wide to Sweden and

then south through what is present-

day Ukraine and northern Europe.

To this day there is no accurate ac-

count of Chernobyl’s mortality. Sev-

eral months after the blowup the o-

cial toll stood at (an unbelievable) 31

deaths. is gure does not include

those victims downwind, near and far.

Investigation into the causes was

hampered by the fact that much of

the problem related to the “entrenched

cronyism” of the Community Party

that had made a loyalist with zero ex-

perience no less than the deputy plant

director at Chernobyl. Apparently,

he took an evening course in nuclear

physics to take up the slack.

Years later, author Higginbotham

would discover that, beyond the gen-

eral sloppiness of the Soviet nuclear

program, there was a serious design

aw in the reactors. e rate of ssion

in nuclear reactors was controlled by

rods containing a buering agent, bo-

ron carbide. Should the reactor get too

hot, the rods were inserted to

cool it down. Unfortunately,

the Soviets had decided to tip

them with (less expensive)

graphite, which had the op-

posite eect, speeding up the

ssion. Per Higginbotham,

it was like “wiring a car so

that slamming on the brakes

would make it accelerate.”

e operators of Reactor

Four that evening were, quite

unwittingly, committing sui-

cide.

What’s left of the Cher-

nobyl plant now lies inside

a 1,000-square-mile “Special Zone”

where, in Higginbotham’s words,

“wildlife ourishes in a radioactive

Eden.” What this all leads to genera-

tions from now remains a large, if un-

intended, experiment.

What Higginbotham is quite cor-

rect in concluding, though, is that

Chernobyl sent condence in nuclear

power plummeting. France has re-

mained glued to it, with no reported

accidents, but that too has changed to

squeamishness after the subsequent

meltdown of the Fukishima nuclear re-

actor, which has unglued Japan as well.

Perhaps the most important impacts of

these disasters has been on the United

Chernobyl

e Roar at Changed the Energy World

By Oliver Houck

In the Literature

Midnight in Chernobyl:

The Untold Story of

the World’s Greatest

Nuclear Disaster. By

Adam Higginbotham; Simon &

Schuster; $20.00.