Chernobyl by Ian Fitzgerald

Author:Ian Fitzgerald [Fitzgerald, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781398818590
Publisher: Arcturus Digital Limited
Published: 2022-02-21T12:33:27+00:00

The original ‘sarcophagus’.

Few attendees at the meeting would have been happy with its outcome. It was clear that the Soviet Union’s nuclear industry was in urgent need of a major overhaul, but it was equally obvious that there was neither the institutional will nor the funds to do it. For now, though – and under KGB instruction – everyone involved was told to keep the details of the meeting top secret while Gorbachev’s Party leadership team agreed on the best way to frame their decisions to the Soviet people and the international community. It was almost two weeks later, on 19 July, when the state-approved television news programme Vremya announced that ‘the accident had been caused by a series of gross breaches of the operational regulations of the reactor by workers at the atomic power station… Irresponsibility, negligence, and indiscipline led to grave consequences.’ Of the RBMK reactor and its problems, no mention was made.

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With the Soviet Union’s domestic audience formally brought up to date on events, Gorbachev and his Politburo colleagues knew it would be a more difficult task to sell their story to the international community.

In the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion, Andranik Petrosyants, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Committee, had told the world’s media that a full report on the disaster would in time be presented to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna at a specially convened conference. By late August it was time to make good on that promise – and Valery Legasov was the natural choice to share the Soviet Union’s findings with the world. Not that it was going to be easy. Instead of a state-controlled media and state-employed scientists, Legasov would be facing a gathering of independent press and television reporters, along with a throng of very inquisitive and sceptical nuclear physicists.

How difficult things would be for Legasov became apparent when he received the IAEA’s agenda for the meeting. He was to be allocated just 30 minutes to make his presentation, after which the session would turn into a kind of public hearing on the dangers of Soviet nuclear engineering, for which the verdict had already been decided. The IAEA would call on the Soviet Union to close down all of its RBMK reactors and pay huge amounts in compensation to those nations across Europe affected by radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Worse still, the IAEA also intended to insist that foreign inspectors be stationed at all Soviet nuclear power stations from now on.

This was unacceptable to the Soviet leadership, and it placed Legasov in a dangerous position. He could not back out of the conference but nor could he make a case to head off the IAEA’s ambush without revealing information about Soviet technology that his superiors in the Soviet scientific establishment did not want him to make public. Efim Slavsky in particular was adamant that details of RBMK reactor design should not be shared with ‘enemy’ nations. His rival Anatolii Maiorets at the Ministry of Energy hit back

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