Customer Reviews

The Truth About Chernobyl

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As the book claims- a minute by minute account of the great tragedy. Being a fan of nuclear psysics this book has taught me a lot not only about physics but of the Russian culture, secretive cover-ups and human suffering. If you want to know everything there is about this Chernobyl and not be bored, then this is the book to get.

As a native Russian, I want to thank the author, Grigory Medvedev, for a honest and professional overview of Chernobyl disaster. His incredibly deep insight of human characters who were in touch with Chernobyl fire filled my heart with a great sorrow because they paid a high price of their health or lives. The book made me reevaluate my vision of our 20th century where still exists a nuclear power. Who will be the next victim of whose deadly mistake? Who must step in to shield others? What kind goverment promoted Chernobyl?

This book is essential for anybody to read in order to help all nations in organization of a prevention mechanism against such deadly mistakes.

This book describes the accident and events leading to the accident in great detail. Anyone interested in human factors as they relate to loss prevention should find this book an excellent resource. The accident was caused by a long series of very serious human errors. The author also compares the Chernobyl accident to the Three Mile Island accident. In spite of the difference in design of the two nuclear plants, the sequences of events leading to the two accidents were strikingly similar

This book is an excellent account of the accident. Besides being personally knowlegable, the author quotes NUMEROUS eye-witnesses to the disaster. He goes minute-by-minute (sometimes second-by-second) with virtually all the individuals who were present during the accident, and the politicians who, before and during the accident, made things worse.

However, in order to fully appreciate this book, some prior knowlege is needed. For example, terms like roentgens (a measure of radiation exposure) were never explained in laymen's terms - although even a layman can understand that, as the author points out, an instrument whose scale only goes up to 3.6 roentgens is inadequate to measure radiation in the range of 20,000 roentgens! Thus, most of the most important facts are fairly easy to deduce from context, although a glossery of nuclear terms would have been helpful.

Because the author has such a detailed knowlege of the subject, his account can occasionally loose the forest for the trees. For this reason, I say that it is an EXCELLENT second book to read about the disaster. If you already know the outlines of the events and have had the major terms defined for you (the "forest") by some other book, you cannot find a better book to explore every "tree" in detail. You don't need a physics doctorate, just some basic background.

But, even without any prior knowlege - my situation - the author's writing style is excellent. He captures the drama and the heroism with crackling intensity. He jumps from person to person, all around the plant, but he keeps the context, so the reader can see all these diffenerent groups and individuals working desperately in lethal conditions. And his pacing is excellent. Every person's experiences are described in detail, yet no one's account is sacrificed for anyone else's.

In conclusion, go get some basic background first, then READ THIS BOOK.

I read this in 1988 or 1989--well before it was published in the old Soviet Union, likely even an early draft. The copy I read nearly 20 years ago was smuggled out of the Soviet bloc, and circulated around the US nuclear industry, where I used to work. I have since misplaced my originals in moves, and plan to buy this book this week.
The paper brings you to great awareness, and lets you understand what really went on before-hand, as well as the containment of the accident. The paper lists the radiation units in Sieverts, so you have to do some conversions to be able to understand/relate to western standards, exactly what the levels of exposure were. Very harrowing, and makes you have tremendous respect for those who died to secure the reactor site.

Chernobyl is an interesting example of technological failure because it went so much further than anyone involved in the social structures which thought of nuclear reactors primarily as a source of power could imagine or even understand while the accident was happening in April, 1986 or still burning in May, 1986. What was going on in the core of Unit No. 4 in the midst of a sudden surge in the energy level ultimately assumed the significance of a question raised by Arnold J. Toynbee in the first paragraph of Part V. The Disintegration of Civilizations of his A STUDY OF HISTORY (Abridgement by D. C. Somervell, Oxford University Press, 1946), "Is disintegration a new problem on its own account or can we take it for granted as a natural and inevitable sequel to breakdown?" (Chapter XVII. The Nature of Disintegration, p. 360). The assumption of those who were operating nuclear power plants was that conditions would never exceed a point at which the core became too hot for whatever cooling system was in contact with the reactor core to continue to function.

There is an interesting paragraph in THE TRUTH ABOUT CHERNOBYL by Grigori Medvedev, Translated from the Russian by Evelyn Rossiter (Basic Books, Inc. 1991) which describes the problems in the cooling system when pressing the AZ button to shut down the reactor caused a power surge:

"The increase in reactor power had the following effects: the hydraulic resistance of the core sharply increased; the water flow fell even farther; intensive steam formation occurred; there was film boiling*; the nuclear fuel assemblies were destroyed; the coolant, which by now contained destroyed fuel particles, came violently to the boil; and pressure rose abruptly in the fuel channels, which began to fall apart." (p. 76, which also includes a note):

`* "Film boiling" is a most undesirable condition which occurs when bubbles at the surface of the boiling water in the fuel channels are replaced by a film that prevents the heat of the core from being transferred to the water. A safety margin is required at all times.--Trans.'

That does not sound as hot as a temperature or level of radiation which would cause the water molecules to breakdown to hydrogen and oxygen elements that would rise from the heat only to recombine in a cooler fire at a higher level, but the physical destruction caused by explosions made the attempt to feed more water to the core by opening valves worse than useless. "Akimov was convinced that the water from the functioning feedwater pump was traveling along these pipes and into the reactor; whereas in actual fact it was going nowhere near the reactor, but merely pouring into the lower compartments, flooding the cable housings and switching gear underground, and making an already bad situation worse." (Testimony of Viktor Grigoryevich Smagin, shift foreman in No. 4 unit, p. 133).

Grigori Medvedev is a Soviet nuclear engineer. In the Author's Preface to the American Edition, he admits the failures of nuclear bureaucrats who attempted to describe nuclear power as safe. "It now seems hardly surprising that Chernobyl marked the final, spectacular collapse of a declining era." (p. ix). It took a year to gather the information in this book, and knowing all that, to attempt "a picture of the full horror of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, to revive the dead and the maimed, and have them return to the control room to relive those tragic hours." (p. x).

The problem at Three Mile Island is discussed in the first chapter. As temperature and pressure rose in that overheating reactor, "Through the pilot-operated relief valve on the pressurizer, a mixture of super-heated water and steam began to be discharged into a special tank. However, once the water pressure in the primary loop had dropped to the normal level of 2,275 psi (160 kg/cm-squared), the valve failed in the open position, causing pressure in the tank also to rise above the normal limit. The emergency membrane on the tank disintegrated, sending about 97,700 gallons (370 meters-cubed) of hot radioactive water onto the floor of the containment building (into the central chamber)." (p. 12).

"In the opinion of experts, shortly before the emergency core cooling system was switched on, or perhaps soon afterward, at least 20,000 fuel rods out of a total of 36,000 (177 fuel assemblies each containing 208 rods) were left without coolant. The protective zirconium cladding around the fuel rods began to crack and fall apart. Highly radioactive fission products started to leak from the damaged fuel rods. The water in the primary loop became even more radioactive." (p. 13)

The temperature in the reactor was higher than 752 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees C) so the computer recording the "temperature in the core began to display only question marks and continued to do so for the next 11 hours." (pp. 13-14). Pages 16-19 list nuclear "Precursors of the Disaster" from 1951 to 1986 in the United States and from the September 1957 spontaneous nuclear reaction in spent fuel at the reactor near Chelyabinsk ("livestock was destroyed and buried in pits" p. 18) to a steam release on June 27, 1985 which killed fourteen people in No. 1 reactor of the Balakovo nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. The attitude which is criticized in this book most harshly is the official detachment which dismisses problems as unavoidable or imagines that problems will be handled much better in future reactors. At the time of the accident at Chernobyl, such people displayed an inability to grasp the situation.

I really enjoyed this book. As a teenager with a morbid interest in nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, Medvedev gave a perfect amount of detail and information while making his account readable. This book is very well-written, which I didn't expect when I checked it out. It reads almost like a novel rather than like a non-fiction book. However, like others have said, it doesn't give a lot of definition for things like nuclear measurements (I must admit, I looked for a glossary when I saw the word "roetgen").

All in all, a great book and a pleasant surprise.

I found this report a fascinating insight into the safety of the nuclear power industry in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. Mr Medvedev is actually pro nuclear but he makes it clear we have to take responsibility for the massive potential for destruction that this technology entails - even during everyday operations. Mr Medvedev in turn provides detailed technical analysis, describes the psychology of the individual's involved and the inervating affect on decision making of a bureaucratic culture that rewarded cronyism and did not want to know about problems. The technical details took me a couple of reads to grasp sufficiently to understand the unfolding disaster, but this was offset by the human story and emotional response of the author to the disaster and its aftermath.

I becamed interested in the Chernobyl disaster several years ago mainly because of all the secrecy surrounding the meltdown. For years the truth was not known; those involved were either dead from radiation posioning, sent to prison, or censored by the goverment. With the fall of the Soviet Union however the truth began to emerge. This is not the most interesting book I've ever read, mainly because the author is a scientist first and a writer second. The translation is difficult at times and it is impossible to follow the major characters with their impossibly long Russian names. But this criticism is all about icing on a cake; the cake itself is very tasty. Medvedey obviously knows his fission and he tries to explain the complexity of the failure in Reactor #4 so that even a layman with no background in Physics can understand. Everyone concerned about the future of nuclear energy should read this book and understand that with the bonus of almost unlimited power comes the onus of potential death and destruction. The Chernobyl accident was covered up for years and only now are authors like Medvedev exposing how close the world came to melting itself down. Unless we learn the truth from such incidents we will never be sure that we won't repeat them.

This book has fantastic first person accounts of the Chernobyl disaster by people who watched it happen, and was written by a man intimately familiar with the power plant, the people involved and the response to the disaster. It gives great insight into the personalities that shaped the events leading up to the disaster, and opens the door to places and events we would otherwise be ignorant of. What this book doesn't have is a solid narrative, illustrations to assist with descriptions of the plant and it's environs or good explanations of the technical aspects of nuclear power - even when an understanding of such matters would be crucial to comprehend what he is describing.
Mr. Medvedev did a great job in creating this account but it possibly should have been modified for consumption by those of us without a deep understanding of Soviet political and scientific personalities of the late 1980's. Also, it often reads as though it was translated from Russian rather than into English - a better translation would do wonders.