Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

One man claimed to have a detector at home that he would sell us for only 150 hryvnia—about thirty bucks. The catch was that it could only detect beta radiation. Forget it, dude. Any simpleton knows that beta particles—which can be blocked by regular clothes—are nowhere near as scary or stylish as gamma rays. We walked off to another part of the market, the annoyed vendor calling after us in protest, “But beta is the best!”

Another man had been eavesdropping and now approached us. He knew of a better place to find radiation detectors, he said, just a five-minute walk up the street. He would be happy to take us there. We left Karavayevi Dachi behind and made our way up a tree-lined street of brick apartment blocks.

Our guide’s name was Volod. A middle-aged man with receding hair brushed straight back, he wore a beige coat over a striped beige shirt and beige jeans, and didn’t seem to have much more of an idea than I did of where we were going. Our five-minute walk grew to fifteen and then twenty minutes, and I became progressively less convinced that we were detector-bound.

Striking up a conversation, we soon learned that Volod had been a communications officer in the Soviet army during the 1980s and had worked in the Exclusion Zone for two weeks, starting a month after the accident.

I asked him if he had received a liquidator’s certificate. The “liquidators,” in the creepy argot of the accident, were the thousands of workers, mostly soldiers, who had spent months razing villages to the ground and covering them with fresh earth, washing off roads, even chopping down and burying entire contaminated forests. The destroyed reactor had coated the landscape with radioactive dust and peppered it with actual chunks of nuclear fuel hurled clear by the explosion. It had been critical not to leave all that waste out in the open, where it could be tracked out of the zone or blown into the air by the wind. The liquidators’ job was to clean it all up.

Many liquidators received high doses of radiation, and in consideration for their work, they were given special ID certificates that confirmed their status as veterans of the disaster cleanup. They were entitled to certain benefits, including special healthcare and preferential treatment in the housing system, but these benefits varied depending on each liquidator’s dosage, on how soon after the accident he’d gotten there, and on how long he’d worked in the zone. A new mess was created—this time governmental. The system was riddled with loopholes, inconsistent in awarding benefits, and extravagant in its opportunities for corruption.

Volod told us he had not received a certificate. He hadn’t been in the zone long enough, or early enough, he said. He didn’t want to talk about it.

We were a good half hour from Karavayevi Dachi when he cried out. He had spotted the fabled detector store at last, among a small row of shops on the ground floor of an office building. We entered at a triumphant stride.

With its zealous air-conditioning and spotless tile floors, the store was a step up from the grungy maze of Karavayevi Dachi. Its offerings, though, were even more varied. Scanning the room, I saw shelves of videophones and security cameras next to displays of construction paper, coloring books, and crayons. Behind us, an entire section was given over to a plastic oasis of elaborate garden fountains cast in the shape of tree stumps. Between this and the Chernobyl Museum, I was beginning to discern a Ukrainian national genius for eclecticism.

And they sold radiation detectors. PADEKC, said the brand name on the box. NHDNKATOP PADNOAKTNBHOCTN. The device itself was a small, white plastic box with a digital readout and three round buttons. It looked like an early-model iPod, if iPods had been built by PADEKC. It was simple and stylish, perfect for hip, young professionals on the go in a nuclear disaster zone. Leonid—the salesman—assured me that it could measure not only gamma radiation but alpha and beta as well. (Leonid was a liar.)

He turned it on. “Russian made,” he said. We crowded around. The unit beeped uncertainly a few times, then popped up a reading of 16. Sounded good to me. I coughed up far too many hryvnia and tossed the PADEKC in my backpack, and we went outside.

In front of the store, Volod asked for some money. I had been dreading his price.

“You should pay me vodka money,” he said without irony. “A good bottle will cost about twelve hryvnia.” He considered a dollar’s worth of vodka decent pay for an hour’s work. I handed him twenty hryvnia. As he started for the street, I asked him if he would tell us more about his time in Chernobyl.

He stopped and turned to us, suddenly taller.

“As a former Soviet officer, I cannot,” he said. And then he wandered off to buy his vodka.

The problem with Reactor No. 4 was not so much that its safety systems failed—although you could say they did—but that some of those systems had been disabled. Now, you could also argue that when you’re running a thousand-megawatt nuclear reactor, you should never, ever disable any of its safeguards, but then…well, there’s no but. You’d be right.

Those systems were disabled by an overzealous bunch of engineers who were eager to run some tests on the power plant and thought that they could do so without a safety net. On the evening of April 25, 1986, they began an experiment to see if the reactor’s own electrical needs could be supplied by a freewheeling turbine in the event of a power outage. This is a little bit like stalling your car on the highway and trying to use its coasting momentum to run the AC. But in this case, it involved a three-stories-tall pile of nuclear fuel.

Over the course of several hours, the reactor failed to run hot enough for the experiment to proceed, so more and more control rods were pulled out of the core to juice the chain reaction up to a suitable level. Meanwhile, the flow of water through the core had dropped below normal levels, allowing more and more heat and steam to build up inside the reactor, a condition that made it dangerously volatile. The built-in systems to prevent all this from taking place were among the safeguards that had been shut off so the test could proceed.

In the wee hours of April 26, the operators noticed a spike in the heat and power coming from the reactor and realized that, if the control rods weren’t reinserted immediately, the reactor would run out of control. It is assumed that they pushed the panic button to drop the control rods back into the core and stop the chain reaction—but panic was not enough. Not only were the rods too slow in sinking down into the reactor, but as they did so, they also displaced even more water, actually increasing the rate of reaction for a moment. The horrified engineers were powerless to stop it.

Within seconds, the power level in the core outstripped its normal operational level by a hundredfold. The water in the core exploded into superheated steam, blowing the two-thousand-ton reactor shield off the core. Moments later another explosion—possibly of steam, possibly of hydrogen, possibly an event called a nuclear excursion —punched a gaping hole in the top of the building. Bits of nuclear fuel rained down on the reactor complex and nearby landscape, setting the building and its surroundings on fire.

Inside the core, unknown to the panicking staff, the superheated blocks of graphite that formed the matrix of the reactor had also burst into flame, and the remaining nuclear fuel, completely uncontrolled, was melting into a radioactive lava that would burrow its way into the basement. All the while, radioactive smoke, dust, and steam spewed into the sky, a giant nuclear geyser that continued to erupt for days on end.