Chernobyl

The RBMK design, of which Reactor 4 at Chernobyl was the most advanced model, was profoundly flawed. The RBMK reactors were so vast, Higginbotham writes, “that reactivity in one area of the core often had only a loose relationship to that in another. The operators had to control it as if it were not a single unit but several separate reactors in one. One specialist compared it to a huge apartment building, where a family in one flat might be celebrating a raucous wedding, while next door another was observing a funeral wake.”


Portraits of Soviet leaders are covered by radioactive dust in a club in the dead town of Pripyat, April 10, 2006. The portraits were prepared for a 1986 May Day rally in Pripyat — the town that housed the Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers — but the residents were evacuated after the radioactive explosion in the fourth reactor on April 26, 1986. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukstaky)
At Chernobyl, the author elaborates, the control engineers were having to make “dozens of adjustments every minute” simply to keep the reactor functioning properly during what should have been its routine operation. They were working so hard, indeed, that even the switches governing the control rods that regulated the dizzyingly complex reactive processes “quickly wore out and had to be replaced constantly.”

The Soviet’s own NIKIET energy technology institute had established in 1980 that the RBMK reactor was so unstable that accidents were “not merely possible under rare and improbable conditions but also likely in the course of everyday operation,” Higginbotham notes. And accidents there had already been, including a partial core meltdown in Reactor 1 in 1982 that was covered up.