The Truth About Chernobyl

Rating:
Summary: Amazing picture of a world disaster
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Tragic Detective Story
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Very detailed on technical, human, and medical factors
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent, detailed account of the accident and its cause
Review: 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