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Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbotham
Higginbotham, Adam. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019).
I became gripped by the Chernobyl disaster last year after consuming the first three episodes of the TV show. I formed a somewhat jaundiced prejudgement of this book based on an interview he gave the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in which he discusses his strange decision not to engage more proactively in debunking the rampant misinformation about the disaster even as he hits out at the then-unreleased TV show for not being completely accurate. I think fiction is fiction and history is history; the differences between them are obvious. But having read the book, I would venture to say that it's excellent and important despite its flaws--and I think comparing it to the TV show is a worthwhile exercise that both helps keep the cast of characters straight and illuminates both some of the profound problems of the Soviet system that the show elides as well as the ways in which narrative shapes narrative. For example, it's clear to me that debunking misinformation would have interrupted Higginbotham's narrative flow, which is a legitimate concern, but to me doing it somehow, even awkwardly, outweighs the loss of textual elegance. Similarly, I do wish there were a few more diagrams of the plant interior.
Higginbotham's essential innovation is the hundreds of interviews he conducted with experts and survivors--many of whom have died in the interim--to construct a picture of the disaster itself and the acute phases of the aftermath. Did they save the world? Well, probably. I came away with slightly more sympathy for some of the main players in the TV show in some cases and in others slightly less; my personal evaluation is that Higginbotham maybe goes slightly too far in his quasi-exoneration of Dyatlov, whose perpetually unexplained decision to conduct the planned test at 200 MW instead of the prescribed 700 is probably one of the two key proximate causes of the disaster. (The other being Toptunov's mistake in failing to set the automatic power maintenance system, resulting in the system defaulting to a maintenance level of 0 MW.) But Higginbotham is right that the disaster was conditioned by every aspect of the Soviet system, and the Soviet deputy prime minister was right when he told Gorbachev that Chernobyl was inevitably going to happen somewhere. Ultimately the fact that none of the operators understood the profound risks in the reactor's design because the flaws and the intervening lesser disasters were treated as state secrets meant that something was always going to go catastrophically wrong. And now we know that above 1 sievert, radiation does have a smell: ozone, because it ionizes the air. And it tastes of metal or sour apples.
Higginbotham does gently push back on the idea of "radiophobia" and other conditions invented to obscure the profound damage done to the people who were exposed to radiation from the disaster--though one of Chernobyl's lessons is that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki binary of "survival" and "fatality" has more gray in it than previously realized; maximum survivable doses were revised upwards thanks to what doctors learned in 1986. Which is not to say that what happened is okay, because it isn't, but it is to say that there are a lot of health problems that can fall short of killing people in the short or even medium term, and these have not been adequately surveyed because survivors' testimony has been systematically denied and downplayed, in what for me as a trained historian is an obvious red flag. But the book for this topic is Kate Brown's Manual for Survival, which I haven't read yet.
Personally speaking, I agree with Higginbotham's conclusion that nuclear power--specifically the new, much safer fourth generation thorium reactor designs--is necessary for a climate resilient future and I wish he'd stated his reasoning at greater length. I do not say this in ignorance; I grew up in New Jersey, where 50% of our power comes from nuclear plants, and as a child I lived in the kill zone for the Oyster Creek facility, which we knew had had a low-level potential incident at least once. One of my best friends in Girl Scouts lived in the kill zone for the Salem Nuclear Power Plant; her dad worked there, and it was his job to go in when everyone else was going out in an emergency, and being required to live quite close by was how they incentivized that. There are trade-offs, and we need to be clear-eyed about them. Between nuclear power and sacrificing the future of every living species on the planet, I know which I'm prepared to accept.
I became gripped by the Chernobyl disaster last year after consuming the first three episodes of the TV show. I formed a somewhat jaundiced prejudgement of this book based on an interview he gave the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in which he discusses his strange decision not to engage more proactively in debunking the rampant misinformation about the disaster even as he hits out at the then-unreleased TV show for not being completely accurate. I think fiction is fiction and history is history; the differences between them are obvious. But having read the book, I would venture to say that it's excellent and important despite its flaws--and I think comparing it to the TV show is a worthwhile exercise that both helps keep the cast of characters straight and illuminates both some of the profound problems of the Soviet system that the show elides as well as the ways in which narrative shapes narrative. For example, it's clear to me that debunking misinformation would have interrupted Higginbotham's narrative flow, which is a legitimate concern, but to me doing it somehow, even awkwardly, outweighs the loss of textual elegance. Similarly, I do wish there were a few more diagrams of the plant interior.
Higginbotham's essential innovation is the hundreds of interviews he conducted with experts and survivors--many of whom have died in the interim--to construct a picture of the disaster itself and the acute phases of the aftermath. Did they save the world? Well, probably. I came away with slightly more sympathy for some of the main players in the TV show in some cases and in others slightly less; my personal evaluation is that Higginbotham maybe goes slightly too far in his quasi-exoneration of Dyatlov, whose perpetually unexplained decision to conduct the planned test at 200 MW instead of the prescribed 700 is probably one of the two key proximate causes of the disaster. (The other being Toptunov's mistake in failing to set the automatic power maintenance system, resulting in the system defaulting to a maintenance level of 0 MW.) But Higginbotham is right that the disaster was conditioned by every aspect of the Soviet system, and the Soviet deputy prime minister was right when he told Gorbachev that Chernobyl was inevitably going to happen somewhere. Ultimately the fact that none of the operators understood the profound risks in the reactor's design because the flaws and the intervening lesser disasters were treated as state secrets meant that something was always going to go catastrophically wrong. And now we know that above 1 sievert, radiation does have a smell: ozone, because it ionizes the air. And it tastes of metal or sour apples.
Higginbotham does gently push back on the idea of "radiophobia" and other conditions invented to obscure the profound damage done to the people who were exposed to radiation from the disaster--though one of Chernobyl's lessons is that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki binary of "survival" and "fatality" has more gray in it than previously realized; maximum survivable doses were revised upwards thanks to what doctors learned in 1986. Which is not to say that what happened is okay, because it isn't, but it is to say that there are a lot of health problems that can fall short of killing people in the short or even medium term, and these have not been adequately surveyed because survivors' testimony has been systematically denied and downplayed, in what for me as a trained historian is an obvious red flag. But the book for this topic is Kate Brown's Manual for Survival, which I haven't read yet.
Personally speaking, I agree with Higginbotham's conclusion that nuclear power--specifically the new, much safer fourth generation thorium reactor designs--is necessary for a climate resilient future and I wish he'd stated his reasoning at greater length. I do not say this in ignorance; I grew up in New Jersey, where 50% of our power comes from nuclear plants, and as a child I lived in the kill zone for the Oyster Creek facility, which we knew had had a low-level potential incident at least once. One of my best friends in Girl Scouts lived in the kill zone for the Salem Nuclear Power Plant; her dad worked there, and it was his job to go in when everyone else was going out in an emergency, and being required to live quite close by was how they incentivized that. There are trade-offs, and we need to be clear-eyed about them. Between nuclear power and sacrificing the future of every living species on the planet, I know which I'm prepared to accept.
no subject
I will check it out, then, bearing your caveats in mind.
whose perpetually unexplained decision to conduct the planned test at 200 MW instead of the prescribed 700 is probably one of the two key proximate causes of the disaster.
Perpetually unexplained in the sense of no historian having an explanation, and if Dyatlov had one he didn't disclose it before he died, or in some other sense?
no subject
Perpetually unexplained in the sense of no historian having an explanation, and if Dyatlov had one he didn't disclose it before he died, or in some other sense?
It seems, as far as I can tell, that Dyatlov never said anything about this choice, which is notable given that he said a lot about just about everything else--he was the only defendant at the show trial who attempted to mount a defense or cross-examine the prosecution's statements, and after he got out he wrote voluminous articles and letters trying to exonerate himself and the operators and shift blame to the designers and the nuclear ministry (which, again, is definitely where the lion's share belongs).
As may be obvious, though, this wasn't entirely an un-self-interested enterprise, and Dyatlov made and later retracted statements that were contradicted by eyewitness testimony, such as his claim at the trial that he hadn't sent Akimov and Toptunov to open the pumps to get water to the non-existent reactor after the explosion because he wasn't even in the room at the time. (This is what killed them; Dyatlov died in 1995 and Boris Stolyarchuk, who was the pump engineer in the control room that night, lived to talk to Higginbotham for this book.) To me the fact that he seems never to have addressed this choice indicates that he may have thought, at least in hindsight, that it was the wrong one--Akimov argued with him about it on the night of the test for at least 20-30 minutes, but Dyatlov thought he knew best. In a footnote, Higginbotham cites speculation that Dyatlov may have thought the test would be safer at lower power, but the irony of the RBMK design is that it's actually most dangerous and unstable at lower power due to the positive void coefficient. On top of that, the reactor had been running without automatic safety systems for nearly 12 hours, Toptunov had failed to set the power maintenance level, and for nearly six minutes after the reactor power fell to nearly zero, indicating that the reactor was being xenon poisoned and the chain reaction was faltering, he did nothing at all. It took him and Akimov nearly 40 minutes after that to get the reactor back up to 200 MW just so they could run the test, and to do it they had to put the reactor into a highly unstable configuration with more water than usual running through the core per Fomin's changes to the test protocol (increasing the positive void coefficient). So everything is interconnected and by the time the interrogators got to Toptunov and Akimov in the hospital they weren't capable of saying anything useful. But Dyatlov definitely made choices before and after the explosion that exacerbated the damage.
no subject
Lucky reading pile!
It seems, as far as I can tell, that Dyatlov never said anything about this choice, which is notable given that he said a lot about just about everything else
Thank you for this and the rest of the information, including your opinion.
In a footnote, Higginbotham cites speculation that Dyatlov may have thought the test would be safer at lower power, but the irony of the RBMK design is that it's actually most dangerous and unstable at lower power due to the positive void coefficient.
I've encountered that suggestion: I can't remember if Chernobyl-the-series uses it or not. I have read Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997/2005), but it is ironically one of the nuclear events of which I don't have as much detailed knowledge off the top of my head, I suspect because I was alive and a small child at the time; I never studied it in the same way as the Manhattan Project or the K-19 accident. The series slightly tripped itself up for me in the final episode, but if you have not finished watching it, I did find it overall worthwhile.