The history of the 20th century for our country is a kaleidoscope of events, among which there are both great triumphs: the Great Victory over fascism, the flight of the first man into space, and huge tragedies that affected millions of people. One such tragedy is the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986. It would seem that a lot of time has passed since then, but the Chernobyl battle is far from over. The fact is that this is not just a man-made catastrophe that led to a mass of negative consequences that are still manifested to this day, but it is also a special problem that laid bare the mechanisms for the development of social relations at the last stage of the existence of a huge country called the Soviet Union. According to the most conservative estimates, about half a million Soviet citizens took part in the battle against an invisible enemy. And about 100 thousand people from this huge number - Soviet servicemen from privates to generals, who, no matter how pathetic it may sound, did everything in their power to save the world from the spread of the black infection that was killing all living things.
The Chernobyl disaster can be called the last large-scale battle fought by the Soviet Union. And if in classical wars heroes received orders and awards, then here instead of awards and recognition of their merits, they received radiation traces, leading to fatal diseases that could affect not only themselves, but also their future offspring. Not every serviceman, and even more so not every civilian, was awarded significant awards for the feat that they performed in 1986.
The exact number of people who died as a result of the accident has not yet been established, there are still several versions about the reason for the explosion (up to the version of a carefully planned operation of foreign special services), there is still no exact number of people whose health in This large-scale catastrophe influenced one way or another. It is these gaps in the information field that make people all over the world be skeptical about the very possibility of a person to control atomic energy (whether it be nuclear weapons or stations for the generation of electrical energy so necessary for mankind). The same gaps force us again and again bit by bit to collect materials that could shed light on the causes and consequences of the tragedy, not only in order to be able to avoid repeating bitter mistakes in the future, but so that people who gave their health and even lives to eliminate the consequences of the accident did not turn into the dust of history, were not forgotten.
An operation to test safety systems was planned for April 25-26, 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The safety of one of the reactors was going to be tested during the introductory "Unexpected shutdown of the power supply system." This situation automatically led to the fact that the water needed to cool it would cease to be supplied to the RBMK-1000 reactor (high-power channel reactor).
Often in the press there is information that the director of the Chernobyl NPP, Viktor Bryukhanov, entrusted the testing to a shift under the leadership of Alexander Akimov, whose work was to be supervised by the deputy chief engineer of the power plant Anatoly Dyatlov. However, the tests themselves began even before the replacement of Akimov, which included engineer Leonid Toptunov, took over the post. At that moment, when Akimov and Toptunov continued testing, at the 4th power unit there were, according to various sources, from 13 to 15 people. It was on the replacement of Akimov that the most serious burden fell, since the tests entered, let's say, an acute phase.
Much depended on the success of the tests: firstly, the reliability of the RBMK-1000 would be confirmed, to which by that time certain complaints had already arisen in terms of the complexity of their maintenance, and, secondly, the station itself could receive a high state award in the form of an order Lenin. After that, the Chernobyl NPP would have to wait for an increase in capacity and, accordingly, state funding. In addition, after successful tests, the plant's management had to go up: in particular, the deputy chief engineer Dyatlov was to become the director of the ChNPP-2 plant under construction, the ChNPP-1 chief engineer Fomin would receive the post of plant director, and the director Bryukhanov should have take a higher post, having received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. According to some reports, these changes were already actively discussed at the NPP, and therefore were considered a settled matter.
It is for these reasons that the tests were started according to the plan and without any additional testing of the occurrence of emergency situations at the tested power unit.
The first serious problems began after Akimov's shift workers during the test were unable to withstand a sharp drop in power at the power unit. The reactor stalled due to a sharp power drop. Engineer Leonid Toptunov, who was the youngest specialist in the shift, following the instructions, suggested stopping the reactor immediately so that an irreversible reaction would not start.
There are several versions of the development of the situation.
The first version
The young Leonid Toptunov, who graduated from the Obninsk branch of MEPhI in 1983, was not allowed to complete tests of security systems (in particular, tests of a turbine generator) Anatoly Dyatlov, who, according to many employees, was a very tough and uncompromising person. The shift was given to understand that it is impossible to stop in the middle of the journey, and it is imperative to accelerate the reactor again.
Second version
Dyatlov himself received the order to bring the tests to the end from the station's chief engineer N. Fomin, who completely ignored the possibility of a threatening situation in the event of a new attempt to increase the reactor's power.
In recent years, more and more often information has been circulated in the press from people who were closely acquainted with Anatoly Dyatlov, that Dyatlov, due to his professionalism, simply could not give such a criminal instruction to engineers, which was the instruction to continue testing the reactor at a critical minimum power.
Whatever it was, but the power, contrary to all the instructions, again began to increase from the minimum values, which began to lead to a complete loss of control over the RBMK-1000. At the same time, the engineers were well aware that they were taking an unjustified risk, but the authority of the leaders and their rigid guidelines, apparently, did not allow them to stop the operation on their own. Nobody wanted to be tried, and disobeying the leaders at such a strategically important facility could mean nothing other than a court.
The temperature in the reactor after the continuation of the tests began to rise steadily, which led to the acceleration of the chain reaction. The very same acceleration of the reactor was provoked by the fact that the change decided to remove steel rods with a high boron content from the core. It was these rods that, when introduced into the core, held back the activity of the reactor. But after their withdrawal of RBMK-1000 to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, nothing was holding back. There were no emergency shutdown systems at RBMK-1000, and therefore all work in an emergency was entirely on the shoulders of the employees.
The engineers made the only decision possible at that time - to reintroduce the rods into the core. Shift supervisor Akimov presses the button for inserting the rods into the reaction zone, but only a few of them achieve the goals, since the channels through which the rods should fall into place were by that time heated to the melting point. The material of special pipes for inserting rods simply began to melt and blocked access to the core. But the graphite tips of the boron steel rods reached the target, which led to a new surge in power and the explosion of RBMK-1000, since graphite provokes an increase in the pace of the reactor.
The explosion at the fourth power unit occurred on April 26 at 01:23. Immediately after the explosion, a strong fire started. More precisely, there were several hotbeds of fire at once, many of which were inside a dilapidated building. Internal fires began to extinguish the employees of the nuclear power plant, who survived the explosion of the reactor.
The firefighters who arrived at the scene of the tragedy poured tens of tons of water into the fire, receiving lethal doses of radiation, but it was not possible to extinguish all the centers of the fire for a long time. At a time when the fire brigades were trying to cope with the external pockets, the same change of Alexander Akimov was fighting inside the nuclear power plant, doing everything possible to cope with the fire.
After the accident, the names of Akimov and Toptunov, as well as the deputy chief engineer Akimov, began to appear among the main culprits of the tragedy. At the same time, the state prosecution did not try to take into account that these people actually found themselves on the forefront of the struggle against the uncontrolled RBMK-1000, and the work itself on the study of emergency conditions was not even started in their shift.
After numerous investigative proceedings, Anatoly Dyatlov was sentenced to 10 years in prison under Article 220 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (improper operation of explosive enterprises). Engineers Akimov and Toptunov managed to avoid trial. The reason for this is terrible and banal - the death of the suspects … They died from acute radiation sickness a few days after the explosion at the 4th power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, having received huge doses of radiation during the extinguishing of the fire.
The director of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Viktor Bryukhanov, was first removed from office, then expelled from the CPSU, and then the court sentenced this man to 10 years in prison. The chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Fomin, was awaiting the same article and the same charges. However, none of them served their full sentences.
After the announcement of the verdicts to Anatoly Dyatlov and other employees of the Chernobyl NPP, statements began to be heard more and more often that the designer of rectors of the RBMK-1000 type should have appeared in the dock, and this, no less than Academician Aleksandrov, who stated that such reactors are so safe, that they can be installed even on Red Square, while their influence in terms of the degree of negativeness will not be greater than the influence of an ordinary samovar …
The Chernobyl "samovar", which took off on April 26, 1986, led to catastrophic consequences and huge costs. In one of his interviews, Mikhail Gorbachev states that the USSR treasury, in connection with the need to eliminate the consequences of the Chernobyl accident, lost, according to the most conservative estimates, about 18 billion rubles (the then full-weight Soviet rubles). But at the same time, the ex-leader of the country does not speak about how many lives were given at the mercy of the fight against an invisible terrible force. According to official statistics, only a few dozen people died in the first days after the tragedy, the victims of the accident. In fact, out of 500 thousand liquidators, at least half received a large dose of radiation. Of these people, at least 20 thousand people died from diseases caused by exposure to radiation.
People were sent to places where the radiation levels were simply astronomical. In particular, one of the "dirtiest" areas was the roof of the power unit, from which 20-30-year-old servicemen called up from the reserve dumped graphite pieces, clearing the site from debris. The radiation level here was about 10-12 thousand Roentgens / hour (exactly a billion times higher than the normal value of the background radiation). At this level, a person could die within 10-15 minutes of being in the zone. The only thing that saved the soldiers from radiation was the costumes of "bio-robots", which consisted of rubberized gloves, a jacket with lead inserts, lead "underpants", plexiglass shields, a special hat, a protective mask and goggles.
General Tarakanov is considered the developer of such suits, as well as the deadly operation to clean the roof.
The soldiers literally ran out onto the roof of the power unit in order to catch a couple of shovels with debris of highly radioactive graphite from the roof in the 1-2 minutes allotted for them. According to the testimony of those who performed such tasks at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, several exits to the roof led to dire consequences, as a result of which young healthy people turned into decrepit old people. Ionizing radiation led to dire consequences for human health. Many of the liquidators who climbed onto the roof of the power unit did not live even for several years after completing the task assigned to them. For the execution of the order, the soldiers were awarded a Certificate of Honor and 100 rubles each … For comparison: after the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant in Japan, only those who were promised super-impressive payments went to eliminate the consequences; hundreds of people, including workers at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, simply refused to take risks. This is the question of comparing mentality.
Experienced pilots called from Afghanistan hovered over the destroyed power unit so that the soldiers could drop sandbags into the "cauldron" first, and then lead ingots, which were supposed to become a plug for the reactor. At an altitude of about 180 meters above the reactor emitting radiation, its level in April-May 1986 was at least 12 thousand Roentgens / hour, the temperature was about 150 degrees Celsius. In such conditions, some pilots made 25-30 sorties a day, receiving doses of radiation and burns incompatible with life.
However, even this height seemed great. The helicopters had to be literally entered into the mouth of the exploded reactor, since often the sandbags did not reach the target. In addition to sand and lead, helicopter pilots dumped a special decontamination solution onto the reactor. During one of such maneuvers, the Mi - 8MT helicopter caught on the cable of a tower crane and crashed directly onto the destroyed reactor. As a result of the disaster, the entire crew of the helicopter was killed. These are the names of these people: Vladimir Vorobiev, Alexander Yungkind, Leonid Khristich, Nikolai Ganzhuk.
The servicemen were involved in eliminating the consequences not only at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant itself, but also in the so-called exclusion zone. Special detachments went to villages in the thirty-kilometer zone and carried out special decontamination work.
As a result of titanic work and truly unparalleled courage of the liquidators, the famous reinforced concrete sarcophagus was not only erected, but the contamination of large areas of the territory was also prevented. Moreover, the liquidators, which included miners who dug a chamber for a cooling device under the reactor that had not yet been installed, managed to prevent a second explosion. This explosion could have occurred after the combination of uranium, graphite and water, which firefighters and station staff poured into the fire. The second catastrophe could lead to even more monstrous consequences. According to nuclear physicists, if the second explosion became a reality, then the life of people in Europe would be out of the question now …
To commemorate the erection of the sarcophagus at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the liquidators hoisted a red flag on its top, giving this event the same significance as hoisting the banner of victory at the Reichstag in 1945.
However, the construction of the sarcophagus did not completely solve the problem. And now, more than 26 years after the tragedy, the level of radiation in the immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant remains high. In addition, radioactive isotopes remained in the ground and water in the vast territories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. At the same time, it is surprising that this problem is systematically hushed up, and if it is touched upon, then they speak of the Chernobyl accident as an event of bygone days. But people who know firsthand about the tragedy in Chernobyl, who themselves were directly involved in the elimination of the consequences, can tell a lot about how terrible the threat is.
In this regard, I would like to hope that the lessons of Chernobyl were not in vain (although the 2011 accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant testifies, rather, to the opposite), and people who claim full control over atomic energy are not engaged in complacency and wishful thinking. … In addition, I would like to think that the authorities (and not only the authorities of modern Ukraine) are ready to do everything to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening.
Whether in this case a complete ban on the use of nuclear power plants in the world is a way out of the situation is unlikely. And a complete rejection of the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is a step backward. Therefore, the only way out is to systematically increase the level of operational reliability of modern reactors; raising to a level at which any threat in its work would be leveled out by a multi-stage protective complex that reduces the risk of human error to zero.
