The Truth About Chernobyl.

• Author: Booth, William (English archbishop)

The Truth About Chernobyl

I will never forget my visit to Three Mile Island. Almost a decade after the accident, the cleanup dragged on. For the most part, it consisted of three men, sucking on respirators and swaddled in protective bunny suits, standing directly on top of the open reactor core. You could watch them via remote video camera.

With the helped of nothing more than pairs of fancy pliers attached to the ends of very long poles, they wer chipping away at the melted fuel rods and damaged control assembly, piece by radioactive piece. It was a dangerous, dirty, inelegant job. When I interviewed the workers later, they referred to their task a cleaning "the pot." They thought of the core as a toilet bowl; they were cleaning up a very large, very hot mess.

If the Number Two Reactor at Three Mile Island can be thought of as a commode, the Unit Four Reactor at Chernobyl will forever in my mind be "the nuclear volcano" described in Grigori Medvedev's horrifying, bitter, and passionate book about the colossal disaster that occurred on April 26, 1986, on the banks of the Pripyat River in the Soviet Ukraine.

When it comes to nuclear power, I consider myself normal. By that, I mean that I am not hysterical, one way or the other. But Medvedev tells such a tale of bureaucratic incompetence and willful ignorance, a story of such needless death and widespread contamination, it makes me pause. Especially when I think about nuclear power stations dotted across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Medvedev is in a unique position to tell the story of Chernobyl. A nuclear physicist by training who spent his career generating power in the Soviet Union, Medvedev assisted in the construction of Chernobyl in the early seventies. After the accident, he was sent back to investigate, interviewing many of the operators, turbine engineers, electricians, and firefighters before they died of radiation poisoning. He worked for and knew many of the men who sat at the control panels during the ill-fated test that led to the explosion at Chernobyl.

Medvedev tells his story in a rambling countdown to disaster, beginning with a recollection of the countryside around pre-radiated Chernobyl--a setting of primeval quiet and cleanliness. "I have such fond memories of the Pripyat River!" he writes. "If you stop rowing and scoop up some of the brownish water in your hand, your palm immediately tends to contract on account of the fatty marsh acids in the water. It was those...