Chernobyl

Chapter 14

There is no "core meltdown" at the Chernobyl Power Station. At least that particular disaster was impossible, for uranium dioxide does not melt until it reaches a temperature of 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even burning graphite never gets much hotter than half that. When the graphite burned, it was, after all, only a simple chemical matter of carbon combusting in the presence of oxygen, not basically different from the blazing logs in the fireplace of a split-level ranch house. Although it was a real nuclear explosion that started the disaster, the nuclear reaction blew itself out in the first fraction of a second after the initial blast. So there is no longer any real danger of that famous nuclear nightmare, a core meltdown, but another danger is most ominously present. In a way it has become even worse.

As the carbon in the graphite reacts with the oxygen in the air in that fire, the smoke rises. It has no chimney, as the fireplace logs would, but it doesn't need one. At such temperatures the fire creates its own chimney, as the column of hot smoke and gases thrusts upward through the atmosphere. The column carries other gases and tiny bits of solid matter along with it. That is where the real, and most terrible danger lies. That smoke contains deadly poisons. It is not just the uranium in the core that is radioactively poisonous now. The reactor has created its

own new poisons, some of which are far more worrisome than uranium. It is inevitable that it should. Even if a nuclear reactor could start with pure, and nearly harmless materials, its purity would not last. Its own radiation corrupts it. Some atoms are broken into fragments, and each fragment is a new chemical element. Nuclei gain particles or lose them. Elements which do not exist in nature — the "transuranic" ones — are created. Many of the new elements are fiercely radioactive. This is the unique danger of nuclear accidents.

Without exception, all radioactive elements are harmful to living things — every living thing, from fungi to human beings. High doses of radiation kill quickly. Lower doses take more time. At the lowest possible concentration — a single particle striking a single cell — there may be no detectable damage at all, because the rest of the body may be able to repair or replace the cell. Or it may not; in which case the damage may not show up for decades, appearing only late in life as cancer.

Say what you would about the men from the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, Smin thought wearily, you at least had to admit they got things done. He had lost count of the number of experts — specialist doctors, engineers, construction people— who had poured into Chernobyl in the last dozen hours. Of course Chief Engineer Varazin's dacha was far too small to hold all the meetings and individuals concerned in the effort to control the damage to Reactor No. 4. Perhaps, Smin thought, it was also a bit too close to the naked core for the comfort of the experts; at any rate, a new command post had been established thirty kilometers away, in the regional Party headquarters of a collective farm village.

It was not just men the people from the Ministry had conjured up, it was materiel. A steady flow of heavy machines lumbered through the checkpoint on their way to the plant. Trucks had arrived all through the night, bearing all sorts of things that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had never had before. Everyone now carried a little aluminum pen-shaped dosimeter. Everyone, even at the checkpoint, wore coveralls, caps that came down over the neck and ears, even cloth masks to put over the mouth and nose, though at the checkpoint all of those hung loose around the wearers' throats. You could not tell a general from a laborer. In white or green, they were all covered from head to toe. It made them look like robots.

But if they had been robots, there would not now be the steady stream of casualties coming from the plant.

Almost all of the wounded now were firemen. Many suffered severe burns, but most of them also had worse than burns. Already a few of the victims had suppurating cold-sore blisters on their faces and mouths, and those were not just burns; those were the first signs of radiation sickness, and the fact that the black herpes blisters had popped up so rapidly was certain indication that the exposure had been very great.

But Rasputin, the specialist in the biological effects of radiation, had instituted tight procedures for dealing with them. Each man was carefully undressed by white-robed, white-gloved, white-hooded orderlies as he lay on his stretcher in the open air. His clothing, every scrap, went into a bin to be buried in the open field, where a bulldozer was excavating a deep trench. Then the doctors took over, first carefully washing every inch of exposed skin, checking with radiation monitors; then they redressed him in a hospital gown and poulticed the burns. A separate set of ambulances waited at the control point; when they were full, they roared away. Some ferried the patients with the worst radiation damage to the airstrip in Chernobyl town, for the plane that would take them to the special hospital in Moscow. The others were put into other ambulances to start the two-hour trip to Hospital No. 18 in Kiev.

The highway crossed a little stream at the collective farm village — it was why that spot had been chosen for the checkpoint. One fire truck was permanently posted there, its pumps constandy going to suck water from the stream. With that water each ambulance was hosed down before it went back to the plant for more of the endless supply of wounded. The ambulances from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station never passed beyond the checkpoint to the outside world. They never would.

Returning to the command post for another installment of the endless meetings, Simyon Smin saw a little two-man helicopter sitting on the ground just off the roadway. Its rotor was turning slowly, and the pilot was leaning back in his seat, gazing at the distant smoke plume from the power station. Smin ducked under the rotor and banged on the door. "Pilot! Who are you?"

The pilot blinked at him. "Lieutenant of Militia Kutsenko, at your service. Pilot to Major General Varansky."

"Of course," barked Smin, just as though he had known who General Varansky had been all along. "I have the general's orders. Take me up. I want to survey the site." And, as Lieutenant Kutsenko opened his mouth for a question, Smin snapped: "At once! Do you not understand that this accident endangers the entire country?"

Smin had never been in such a small helicopter. It bounced and swooped staggeringly, far worse than the one he had borrowed the day before, but his mind wasn't on the ride. It wasn't even on his fatigue, or the facts that his scars itched, his eyes ached, and the corners of his mouth were sore. What he was thinking about was what he had come to see.

When they were only five or six kilometers away, the plant began to come into view. The great drift of black smoke snaking into the sky seemed far thicker than the day before, even though most of the fires were long since out; it was, Smin knew, the smoldering embers that produced the pall. As they approached over the towers of Pripyat, Smin could see that the streets were full of people. Their white faces stood out sharply as they gazed up at the helicopter. "Fools," muttered Smin.

TTie pilot craned toward him. "What?" he yelled. "Did you speak?"

Smin shook his head; the people of Pripyat had to be gotten out of that area, there was no question about that, but there was nothing the pilot could do. "Up higher, if you can," he urged. "But stay out of the plume!"

The pilot nodded, and kicked and turned his controls. The machine spun and lifted, first away from the reactor, then swinging back to approach it from the windward side. They were no more than three hundred meters above the inferno. Smin could look almost directly down into it. As the pilot hovered, Smin opened his door and leaned out, staring down at the end of so many hopes and the death sentence passed on so many friends.

Even so high, the heat beat at his face. It was true that all the lesser fires were out, but he could see clearly that all the efforts of the firefighters had done nothing at all to stop, or even to slow, the terrible combustion that was going on in the graphite core of the destroyed reactor. If only ten percent of the graphite had been burning yesterday, now it was nearly a third that was aflame. The still-unburning surface of the graphite was a rubble of lumps and cracks and hillocks. The burning part was as bright and hot as the sun. Great rainbow-shaped streams of water came up from the hoses and down onto the furnace, but to no avail. Where the streams of water hit the fire, there were clouds of steam, but when the jet wavered away the fire was still burning as fiercely as ever.

On the ground Smin could see bulldozers grinding away as they heaped up berms of earth. Beside the bulldozers a pair of water cannon were blasting away at the lower reaches of the reactor shell; whether any of their water was getting through, or what good it was doing if it did, he could not tell.

The smoke billowed toward them. "Get away!" Smin shouted, pulling himself back inside and slamming the door. The pilot was already slanting away, but the vagrant gust of air was faster than he; for a moment there was smoke all around them, and a stink of burning chemicals that tore at Smin's throat. Then they were clear. Both men were coughing, and the helicopter lurched as the pilot spun it away. "Better get down," Smin managed to rasp out, and the pilot didn't even nod. He was already heading back to the perimeter post.

By the time they were on the ground the coughing fits were over. "Thank you," said Smin gravely, and got out to confront the man in the green coverall who was watching them impassively from the door of the headquarters building. Even without the insignia on his shoulderbars, Smin knew who he was. He said, "Thank you, also, General Varansky, for allowing me to borrow your aircraft."

The general didn't even smile. He only murmured, "Why should I refuse one helicopter, when you people have already borrowed half the moveable equipment in the Ukraine? But should we not go inside for the meeting?"

The general's remark was not much of an exaggeration at that. From the air Smin had seen literally scores of trucks, bulldozers, ambulances, fire vehicles, and examples of almost everything else that moved on the roads around the stricken plant.

Smin followed Major General Varansky into the meeting room. The only conference actively going on was with the special doctors from Moscow. At least these specialists knew exactly what they had to do and could get on with it. Their home base, Hospital No. 6, had been designated the center point for radiation injuries, and the first job of the task force that had flown in the night before was to screen every victim for radiation — more than a thousand so far, with nearly two hundred of them already on their way to Moscow for whatever treatment there was to give them. They were explaining this to some Party and town officials for Pripyat, who were looking glum.

Smin paused a moment at the door, where there was a rack of the pen-shaped dosimeters. He glanced around while the general went on ahead. No one was looking. Smin undipped his old one and threw it into a basket and fixed a new one to his jacket before he went in.

"I do hope," the Pripyat Party secretary was saying cheerlessly, "that you are not proposing to test everyone in Pripyat."

"Of course they will test everyone in Pripyat," Smin snapped, aware that his tone was offending the man, aware that the secretary would be writing a report on what was happening— aware, most of all, that none of that mattered. Smin wrinkled his nose at the faint smell of animal manure that permeated the meeting hall; the cow barns were only a dozen meters away. "It is not all that has to be done," he said, "in the town of Pripyat. "Those people's lives are all at risk. They must be evacuated."

Two of the Moscow doctors nodded, but the men from Pripyat looked thunderstruck. "Impossible!" cried the Party secretary. "What are you saying? We do not want panic!"

"It is better that they be frightened than dead," Smin said flatly.

"I refuse," the man said. "This very morning some panic-mongers in Pripyat came to the Party headquarters with the same ultimatum. It was almost a demonstration! We taught the ringleaders a lesson, I assure you."

"If you put them in jail in Pripyat," said Smin, "you will teach them a final lesson, because they will die there. Everyone in the city will die if they remain there long enough. They must be taken away at once."

"Taken to where?"

"To sleep in the fields if they must," Smin cried, "because that is better than dying in their flats! If you won't do it on your own authority, then call Moscow. I will talk to them myself. I insist — oh, what is it now?"

The biological-effects man, Rasputin, was standing in the doorway, next to a doctor who was holding a glass vial of water. Hydrologist-engineer Sheranchuk was beside her, looking as weary as Smin himself, but he spoke first. "It's the stream," he said. "The one where they get the water they are using for the wounded, and to wash the vehicles. It is showing radioactivity now."

Leonid Sheranchuk did not just look weary. He was sodden with fatigue. He had not slept at all — for, what? He had lost count. More than forty-eight hours, at least.

He could have gone home when the militia and fire brigades and emergency workers of all kinds began to show up in strength, because they no longer needed amateur rubble-shifters and stretcher-toters. But then he remembered that he was a highly trained expert in hydraulic flow, and hydraulic flows were the only things that were keeping all the rest of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station from joining the stricken reactor in flames. It was Sheranchuk who managed to get some of the station's primary pumps working to provide pressure for the hosemen and give a little relief to the straining fire trucks, Sheranchuk who directed the pumper intakes to the deepest and least sedimented parts of the cooling pond…

And Sheranchuk who, watching the streams of water running down the sides of the building and spreading across the sodden ground, thought to wonder where that water was going.

When he found Rasputin and expressed his fears, the man from the Ministry responded at once. He commandeered one of the doctors and set out. The radiation detectors gave the answers. The clear, purling waters of the brook by the command post were registering radioactivity.

It wasn't an immediate problem. The brook water was still good enough to wash down the trucks. That was not important, anyway. In any case there were the wells of the collective farm ready to supply the need for drinking water and to clean the wounds of the injured.

The problem was that the brook did not stop flowing at the highway.

That brook came from near the Chernobyl Power Station. It wasn't just picking up radiation from the fallout of soot from the fire. It was the conduit — one of the conduits — for the wastewater from the firefighting. Millions of gallons of water were being pumped out of the Pripyat River and the plant's cooling pond to pour onto the fire. What did not turn into steam ran away into the ground and across it, into that brook and every other nearby — into the Pripyat River itself, sooner or later.

"And," said Sheranchuk grimly, "the Pripyat River flows into the reservoirs that supply the city of Kiev."

He looked directly at the Party secretary, who frowned back. After a moment he said, "Yes?" And then, raising a hand to keep Sheranchuk from answering, "I see what you are implying, but surely that is not important — the hose water from a few fire engines, against a reservoir?"

"That hose water," said Smin wearily, "is full of radioactive material. What do we do, Comrade Plumber?"

"We must dam up the overflow," Sheranchuk said at once. "We must dike every stream, every little river that flows near Chernobyl. The cooling pond, it must be diked off from the Pripyat. Sewers, drains — they must be diverted or simply stopped up."

The Party secretary stared at him. "Stop up the sewers?"

"Exactly," said Rasputin. "Just as Sheranchuk here says. We don't have a choice."

"Or else we will poison the people of Kiev," said Sheranchuk.

Smin sighed, and stood up and said, "Let's go, Comrade Plumber. Show me where you want to build these dikes."

But in the long run, of course, it wasn't Sheranchuk who decided where the dikes should go. It wasn't Smin, either. It was the men from Moscow. By the time Smin and Sheranchuk got back to the command post, someone had produced a hydrological map of the area — Sheranchuk's eyes were bulging;

he had not even known that such a map existed — and the dikes and trenches and diversions were already being marked.

Smin knew that it was all out of his hands now. Higher authority had taken over. Higher authority listened, spoke, looked at some plans, then picked up a phone and issued instructions. Higher authority did not have to bribe or wheedle to get what it wanted. It simply gave an order, and somewhere in the Ukraine or Moscow or Byelorussia someone began calling workers in to load a truck with whatever was required and send it speeding to Chernobyl.

They did not send Smin away, though he was reeling with fatigue. They did not object when he appeared at one of the endless meetings to plan for the implacable future while, simultaneously, dealing with the catastrophic present. They even listened courteously when he spoke. But that was not often, for higher authority knew its resources better than he did. He listened and marveled.

To Rasputin, explaining to the head of the Pripyat hospital that the reason his clinic had been evacuated was not only that it was better for the patients to be farther away, but that his staff was simply not adequate to the problems. "Your doctors are diagnosing burns, shock, heat exhaustion, even heart attacks — but where is one diagnosis of radiation sickness?"

To Lestilyan, patiently reasoning with the general commanding the fire brigades. "We must use other methods." The fire in the core was not out. It had not even slowed down; the supply of burnable graphite was endless, and every atom of it hungered to unite with the oxygen in the air. The terribly hot core was a massive reserve of heat. Even if they cooled the surface a bit, the vast interior store reheated it and kept the temperature of the graphite blocks well above the ignition temperature.

"Exactly. So water is no good," the fire chief complained. "It boils right off."

"Of course. So we must smother it. Cover it with sand, maybe. Something that will keep the air out."

"Sand through hoses?" said the fire commander. "What nonsense! I have never heard of such a thing."

"Not through hoses," Lestilyan said patiently. "In some other way, and quickly. What is it now, six hundred micro-roentgens an hour in Pripyat? And more all the time!"

"I know nothing of micro what-you-said," the fire commander said stubbornly. "I know only what to do with fires." He meditated for a moment. Then he said, "Well, then. Can we get helicopters to drop it in? Or do you want my men to carry the sand there in their helmets?"

"Of course," said Lestilyan, nodding. "Helicopters." And picked up the phone to call the Air Force.

To everyone. Smin listened carefully to all of them, and spoke little. And that was the day, one emergency falling on top of another, no time to solve one problem before the next arose. At least the Air Force promised helicopters would be on the scene by nightfall. At least a crane was brought from Pripyat to the burning reactor and an operator found brave enough to try dumping dirt, broken rocks, slabs of cement onto the blazing reactor even before the heavy helicopters got there. At least the medical problems were now being dealt with by experts. At least—

At least, Smin thought grimly, his wife and younger son were out of it. He had passed them through the checkpoint himself, in their own car, not twenty minutes before the order had come to let no more vehicles through.

But nearly fifty thousand other people were still in the town of Pripyat.

When someone thrust a plate of bread and Army soup in front of him, Smin realized that it was well past noon and he had eaten nothing since he arrived at the control point, well before daybreak. He wished he could put his head down, just for a minute, close his eyes—

But it would not be a minute. The aching weariness in every bone, the sullen throbbing that was beginning between his temples — no ten-minute nap would heal those. So Smin did not put his head down. Instead, he got up from his meal he had picked at and walked out the door, because he had heard the sound of a helicopter approaching.

Could it be the Air Force, arriving so quickly? It wasn't. It was a little two-man craft, like that of the major general of militia, and the man getting out of it was the Director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, T. M. Zaglodin. He spoke deferentially to Istvili, the man from the Ministry, before he turned to Smin. "Well, Simyon Mikhai-lovitch," he said angrily. "I am called away on business for a few days, and a fine mess you make!"

What the Director had to say meant nothing to Smin. In any decision-making sense, he no longer mattered. He had not been present when the first decisions had to be taken, and now that the men from Moscow were on the scene, nothing he, or Smin, decided would be final without ratification by them. Smin ignored him. "Comrade Istvili," he said, "I request a decision on the question of the urgent evacuation of all unnecessary personnel from Pripyat."

Istvili raised his hand. "The buses are already on the way," he said, but he didn't seem interested in the subject. He was peering curiously at Smin's face. He said soberly, "Comrade Deputy Director, I think you will have to leave these matters to us now."

— Smin scowled, and the sudden, sharp crack of pain at the corner of his mouth informed him what Istvili meant better than any words. He touched the spot. When he brought his finger away he was not surprised to find it damp with the fluid from a broken blister.

Istvili had already turned away to order an ambulance for Deputy Director Smin. "Ambulance?" Smin protested. "There is work that I must do here! Why do I need an ambulance for a blister?"

"Not for the blister," Istvili said gently. "For what caused it. What you will do now is what the doctors will tell you to do, in Hospital Number Six. You're relieved of your duties, Deputy Director Smin." He turned to Zaglodin, his face hardening. Then he paused, looked back at Smin and added, "Good luck."