Midnight in Chernobyl (book review)

Adam Higginbotham’s well-researched narrative dives into the lives of the politicians, scientists, engineers, firefighters, military, miners, doctors and families of those who caused (and were impacted) by the nuclear meltdown of Reactor Number 4 in Chernobyl.

At its heart, it is a tale of courage and selflessness of those called upon to contain the aftermath, and of incompetence and hubris of those who caused this tragedy.

The most interesting section, for me, was the day of the explosion, and we get to follow the footsteps of the engineers in the control room (there were only 3 engineers, with one supervisor), as they man a complicated control panel that monitors heat, and the control mechanism (control rods) to control the nuclear reactor.

1. This accident reminds me a lot of the recent Boeing 737 Max accident, where poor engineering decisions were made, and the operators were not informed of those decisions. In this case, the control rods that control the speed of nuclear fission, are supposed to be lowered into the reactor, and the material in the rods absorb flying neutrons, which reduces the rate of fission and can slow down the nuclear reaction. A few silly decisions were made, such that they made the lowest tips of the control rods conducive to reaction (in order to get more energy), so in certain circumstances, lowering the rods into the reactor speeds up the reaction, rather than slows it down!!!!!
2. The bureaucrat Dyatlov in my mind bears perhaps the most responsibility. He was so bent on performing a turbine test that he disregarded the objections of this engineering team of the dangers of doing so, when the reactor had already been exhibiting weird behavior.

Of course, several decades later, we saw the Fukushima disaster happen, and this raises the question of how/whether nuclear energy should be part of our energy future.

I know it’s a very efficient energy source, and countries like France get 75 percent of their power from nuclear, by I’m not in favor of it. I feel the dangers and possible disasterous consequences outweigh the benefits.