On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine suffered the worst nuclear power leak in human history.
Ironically, the nuclear accident originated from a test to test "safety performance".
The Chernobyl NPP uses second-generation RBMK-shaped reactors, each unit is equipped with three additional large diesel generators, ensuring that the cooling water pump can always be turned on in the event of an emergency power outage, preventing the core from overheating and avoiding meltdown.
But there is a problem with these diesel generators, it takes at least a minute to go from turning on to running at full power.
So the management of the nuclear power plant wanted to conduct a safety test -
When a nuclear power plant loses power, can a steam generator feed the electricity generated by inertia idler to a water pump to fill the 60-second gap required for the diesel generator to start?
If this test is successful, it will not only solve the safety hazard and correct the name of the RBMK reactor, which has been internationally criticized, but also increase power generation and save energy, which is simply killing two birds with one stone.
This test, which was of a political mission, was carried out three times between 1982 and 1985, but all of them failed, so the fourth test was very important.
The shutdown test was originally scheduled for the evening of April 24, but it had to be postponed due to the temporary demand for electricity from the Kyiv power grid.
Now that all the preliminary preparations have been completed, including shutting down the emergency water supply system and reducing the reactor's power to 50% of the normal level, these procedures are particularly cumbersome and time-consuming, so the engineers thought of being lazy and did not recover, but let the reactor run at half power.
They thought that it would take two days before and after, and there would be no problem with someone watching the control room.
The engineers didn't know they were playing with fire, and disaster struck when people lost their reverence for nuclear reactors.
In the early hours of April 26, the nuclear power plant received a notice from the Kyiv power grid that it could shut down.
At this time, the on-site staff had rotated several shifts, perhaps because the handover was not in place, and the novice operators who had just taken the shift even thought that the shutdown test should have been over a long time ago.
When Deputy Chief Engineer Dytlov asked him to test, the novice operator was stunned, he had not been trained much, and he couldn't operate it at all.
But under the pressure of the leadership, he still stubbornly went up, and the time was one o'clock in the morning.
The first step in the test was to keep the reactor power at 700MW, so he added control rods to the reactor to reduce the power from 1,600MW to 700MW.
It has already been said that since the reactor has been operating at 50% power for quite some time, a large number of derivatives Xenon-135 have gathered in the core.
Xenon-135 has a property, it will continue to absorb neutrons, so that the output power of the reactor will continue to decrease, and in severe cases, it will even make the reactor unable to start the reactor, this phenomenon is also known as "reactor poisoning".
The reactor was already running at a low power, and it could not produce enough neutrons to counteract the effects of xenon-135, and the crew had to add control rods to its head to reduce the power, adding fuel to the fire.
As a result, Xenon-135 won a big victory, devouring more and more neutrons, and the reactor power soon dropped from 700 MW to tens of MW.
The experienced director of the shift, Akimov, judged that the reactor should have been poisoned, so he suggested to Dyatrov to stop the test immediately, and when the xenon-135 was exhausted, the power would be increased little by little.
Ignoring the advice of the duty officer, he stressed that the above was urgent, and in order to complete the KPI assessment, he threatened to fire the two and asked the operator to restore the power to 700MW as soon as possible and continue the original test.
Amid the shouts and scolding of the deputy chief engineer, the young operator hurriedly ran the program and pulled out the 211 control rods in one go to only 6, far below the 15 required by the red line.
After this "magic operation", the power was pulled back, but due to the "poisoning" of the reactor, it could only mention about 200MW, which was still 500MW short of the test requirements.
Gatlov didn't even bother and let the operator continue the test.
It should be fine, right?
After a few tricks, the reactor, which was only bound by 6 control rods, became extremely unstable, and a large amount of xenon-135 was consumed, and there was nothing to restrain it.
A few minutes later, the reactor's power soared dramatically, from triple digits to four digits and directly to more than 5,000 MW.
Seeing that the situation was not good, the duty director decisively pressed the emergency control button.
This is a safety device for emergency braking, as long as you press it, the machine will insert all the remaining control rods into the reactor to suppress the positive reaction of the reactor and make the machine stop quickly.
But the worst thing is that the control rods used in the reactor are very strange, and the bottom filling material is graphite, which will exacerbate the positive reaction of the reactor.
If the reactor is running steadily, it doesn't really matter if you use this control rod.
But if the reactor goes crazy, the panic button, which was originally used to save lives, will instantly become an accelerated detonator.
When the duty director pressed the emergency button, the reactor not only did not stop, but became more and more frenzied, and finally directly exceeded 32,000MW, which is 10 times the normal power.
Two seconds later, with a loud bang, Pile 4 exploded, killing two crew members near the core.
And the disaster began.
As the roof of the reactor building was blown through, the core was directly exposed to the air, constantly releasing soot containing large amounts of radioactive particles.
About 50 tons of nuclear fuel are sprayed into the atmosphere as gaseous and continue to spread outward at a value of 30,000 roentgeniums per hour, and the average person absorbing more than 400 roentgenium is enough to be fatal.
A few minutes after the reactor exploded, a nearby fire brigade arrived.
Although they knew that there had been an explosion at the nuclear power plant, the firefighters did not know that the core had exploded, so they rushed into the fire wearing only improvised protective equipment, and they climbed to the roof of the reactor while using a tap to extinguish the fire.
With their heroic rescue, the fire on the roof was brought under control in less than an hour.
However, due to the impact of nuclear radiation, it didn't take long for the 28 firefighters present to develop symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, and general fatigue, and were sent away by the ambulance that arrived.
By 3:30 a.m., almost all of Kyiv's fire brigades had been transferred.
Although everyone felt that this was not an ordinary fire, they still fought bravely and quickly extinguished the fire around the reactor, one firefighter fell, and the other followed, which was very tragic.
Of the 108 people involved in extinguishing the fire, 28 died of acute radiation sickness within the following three months. In order to prevent nuclear leakage, the bodies were sealed in special metal coffins before they could be buried.
Some people may say, why not just cremation? Because the body is a source of high radioactive contamination, cremation will only lead to stronger radiation contamination around it, so burying the metal coffin on the spot and then pouring cement is the best solution.
Even after the explosion, Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatrov did not check the reactor, believing that the water tank had exploded and that it was not a big deal.
Therefore, he reported to the chief engineer and the plant director that "the reactor is safe and sound" and that "everything is normal and controllable".
The two leaders were in sync, and did not further verify it, so they "truthfully" reported it to Moscow.
After receiving the report, Moscow felt that this was not a big problem, and only replied with the phrase "inject water into the reactor for cooling".
In layers of negligence, the nuclear radiation of Chernobyl was further exacerbated.
Unaware of this, the residents of Pripyat town went to work, Xi, ate and played normally under the severe excess of nuclear radiation, for a day and a half.
In fact, the reaction of the Soviet top brass was not slow, and when they saw the reports sent by the nuclear power plant every hour, which still said that "the situation is still under control", you knew that there was something wrong with it.
On the morning of April 26, the Soviet Union set up a "Provisional Committee for Emergency Response", and Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Serbina, who was in charge of energy, rushed to Chernobyl with a group of officials and experts from the Academy of Sciences.
Before arriving at the reactor, the expert group did not associate it with the direction of the reactor explosion, because the nuclear fuel of the nuclear power plant is low-enriched uranium, which is not the highly enriched uranium used to build an atomic bomb, just as low-concentration beer will not be ignited.
But after the investigation team's field trip, which measured the most realistic radiation values, and then saw the graphite scattered all over the ground, they had to accept the worst fact of the core explosion.
The next question is how to deal with the aftermath.
The amount of radiation in the air has reached 600,000 times the normal value, and at the rate of diffusion, if the Soviets do not evacuate the inhabitants of Pripyat as soon as possible, the entire inhabitants of the town will be buried with them.
Under the persuasion of academicians of the USSR Academy of Sciences Legasov, Velykhov and other experts, the deputy prime minister signed an emergency evacuation order.
On the afternoon of April 27, the government's evacuation operation officially began.
The Prime Minister of Ukraine prepared more than a thousand buses and trucks in advance and assembled in Pripyat.
With only two hours to pack their bags, residents were asked to travel light and were allowed to bring a small amount of necessities.
Most of the Soviet people were not flustered, they thought it was just a small matter, and one couple even brought a bunch of empty cans to the car, wanting to take them to their mother who lived in Kiev.
But I didn't expect that this time would be eternal, and they would leave their homeland forever.
The smooth evacuation of the population is the first step, and the second step is how to deal with the No. 4 reactor.
If left unchecked, it will continue to release massive amounts of radiation and turn the entire European continent, including the Soviet Union, into an uninhabitable area of nuclear contamination.
After repeated calculations, Soviet scientists decided that the most reasonable solution would be to drop a mixture of borax, limestone, and iron sand into the reactor.
Hundreds of helicopters flew 200 meters above the reactor, where soldiers threw 80-kilogram sandbags with their bare hands.
The pilots had only time to do simple radiation protection – wrap their seats in lead skin, put on masks, and work in an environment that radiates more than 1,000 roentgeniums.
This is a "suicide" mission.
In just a few days, helicopters flew more than 3,000 sorties, pouring 5,000 tons of special sand and gravel into the reactor, and the fire was slowly brought under control and the temperature was lowered.
Pilots who completed their mission were immediately rushed to the hospital, where they would eventually be greeted with death in agony amid a series of symptoms of radiation infection.
At the same time, the tragic relief efforts were carried out simultaneously on the ground.
Due to the large amount of debris after the explosion of the No. 4 reactor, all of which were scattered on the roof of the No. 3 reactor building, if not cleaned up as soon as possible, the consequences would be unimaginable.
In this environment of high radiation intensity, even the most advanced working robots sent at that time could not bear it, and all of them were short-circuited and paralyzed.
So I had to rely on manpower to clean it up.
More than 3,000 soldiers went up to the roof of the house and shoveled the blasted graphite and nuclear fuel into the reactor pit in an environment of radiation of up to 10,000 roentgeniums per hour.
In the 2019 drama "Chernobyl", the soldiers were described as "poor creatures who don't know the truth".
In fact, the soldiers had already known before they set off that this mission would be more dangerous than any battlefield they had been to before, but they used the most primitive tools to quickly dig up several tons of nuclear waste.
In addition, in order to prevent the intrusion of magma containing large amounts of radioactive material into the groundwater system, tens of thousands of miners were gathered in Chernobyl.
They had to dig a 150-metre tunnel from Pile 3 to Pile 4 and then dig enough space under Pile 4 to install a cooling unit.
Because the temperature under the core exceeded 50 degrees Celsius, the workers could not wear breathing masks, so they had to dig day and night under conditions with zero protection.
According to statistics, one in four miners dies of illness before the age of 40.
By August 1986, the Soviet Union had recruited a large number of "cleaners" to tidy up the site and built a "sarcophagus" on the No. 4 reactor to seal off the accident site.
At this point, the disposal of reactor No. 4 has finally come to an end.
But the tragedy of the nuclear accident has only just begun.
According to statistical reports released by the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, as of 2005, the death toll caused by the Chernobyl accident was between 4,000 and 90,000, and the subsequent casualties could reach more than 200,000.
Because there are so many people who have been harmed by radiation.
Radiation sickness is not fatal instantly, and may even experience a period of recovery in between, and then the situation will take a sharp turn for the worse until the organ fails and dies.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of residents living in Chernobyl and Pripyat, the radioactive fumes have spread to a small half of Europe, with Ukraine, Russia and Belarus being the most contaminated, with many suffering from lifelong health effects and even passing on to the next generation.
"The Chernobyl accident is a terrible war, you have nowhere to hide, underground, in the water, in the air. 」
This accident caused more than $200 billion in economic losses to the Soviet Union, and almost caused the crumbling Soviet tank to fall to the ground.
It is no wonder that some people say that the Chernobyl bombing indirectly blew up the Soviet Union.
The foundations of trust in the Soviet Union have been shaken, and people in Ukraine and Belarus live in constant fear.
Alekseevich wrote an example in "The Prayer of Chernobyl" where a boy did not give up his seat to the old man on the bus, and the old man said that when you are old, others will not give up your seat to you, and the boy said that he will not be old, because we are all dying.
Along with this, there is suffocating regional discrimination, and the soldiers who participate in the rescue operation are classified as "Chernobyls" and shunned like the plague gods.
Returning to the Chernobyl accident itself, who actually caused this tragedy?
At the beginning of 1987, the director of the Chernobyl NPP, Bryukhanov, the chief engineer, Fomin, the deputy chief engineer, Dhatlov, and three other staff members were tried in Pripyat and sentenced to 3-10 years in prison.
Gatlov insisted that there was no problem with the operation of those present, that it was the reactor that was in problem and that it was a flaw in its design that led to the disaster.
Indeed, the RBMK reactor has fatal flaws in the design of the core, containment and control rods, and the official report from the International Advisory Group on Nuclear Safety (INSAG) also gives the hammer -
"The lack of a safety culture led to this accident, which was a structural problem not only for the Chernobyl power plant, but also for the design, operation and supervision of nuclear power in the Soviet Union. 」
But to be honest, in addition to objective factors, human subjective factors are more serious.
First, the engineers did a perfunctory job in the early preparations, and then when the key tests were carried out, it was Gatlov, who had a background in coal plant management and did not know much about nuclear power technology, who was in charge of the site, and the staff in charge of operation was still a novice.
Even after the disaster, the top management of the nuclear power plant did not certify, but gradually concealed it, deceived the upper and lower levels, and made the disaster irreparable.
This is a Soviet ethos that rots from top to bottom.
In an interview, Mr. Gorbachev recalled that a group of experts had been telling him in his ears all day that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was so reliable that it worked "no different than making tea at home," even if it was built on Red Square.
This reflected that the Soviet Union was already terminally ill at that time, dogmatism, corruption and bureaucracy were rife, and the Chernobyl disaster was almost inevitable.
But it is undeniable that the Soviets showed amazing courage and dedication in the accident.
In addition to those involved in the disaster, according to Russian official statistics, about 500,000 "clean-upers" were involved in the removal of pollutants in the years following the disaster, and all of them were exposed to large amounts of high doses of radiation.
It can be said that they used their blood, sweat, health and even their lives in exchange for a drop in radiation pollution within 30 kilometers of Chernobyl.
Without these warriors, the whole of Europe might no longer be fit for human habitation.
On the other hand, the Western media disparatively refer to them as "biological robots", presenting part of the truth and concealing part of the truth.
The American Discovery Channel produced a documentary called "Rescuing Chernobyl" in 05, which contains a video about General Valentin mobilizing soldiers and personally leading the rescue of reactor No. 4.
During the mobilization, General Valentin said, "There is death on it, but there is nothing to fear. 」
The Caption given by Discovery Channel reads, "There's nothing to be afraid of on it. 」
"Chernobyl", which claims to restore the historical truth, has carried out "artistic transformation" of many facts, such as portraying the "clean-up people" as a money-driven group, and deliberately delaying the evacuation of the people of Pripyat by the Soviet Union until April 28.
As the drama emphasizes, "We can't tell the truth if we hear too many lies."
But what is a lie, and what is the truth?
While Europe and the United States were concerned about the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident 30 years ago, they turned a blind eye to the nuclear sewage that Japan discharged into the Pacific Ocean.
A disaster is a disaster, and I have no intention of whitewashing or covering up anything, but I just want to make one point:
It is also a seventh-level accident, and the Chernobyl incident has become a historical term, completely eliminating the hidden danger of subsequent leaks.
The core of the Fukushima nuclear power plant continues to melt to this day, and the Japanese government can hold the world accountable by directly discharging the nuclear wastewater, and it will be responsible for bowing and apologizing.