Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
by Adam Higginbotham
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham is a 2019 history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that occurred in Soviet Ukraine in 1986.
The Chernobyl disaster was an accident that began on April 26th, 1986 with the explosion of a reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine. The explosion destroyed the reactor’s containment building, which led to the spread of radioactive contaminants. The emergency response involved more than 600,000 personnel to deal with the contamination and to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from the surrounding area. It is estimated that 134 of the workers who got closest to the exposed reactor core were hospitalized as a result of acute radiation syndrome. 28 of them died within three months from it. It is considered the costliest disaster in human history with an estimated cost of $700 billion USD.
This is a very important event in human history. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, believed that the Chernobyl disaster was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. He believed that the disaster exposed weaknesses in the Soviet government. He also said that the disaster made it clear how important it was to continue the policy of “glasnost”, which was a policy of openness and transparency. The politics and culture of secrecy, propaganda, not challenging authority, and keeping up appearances are discussed in detail in the book.
This book takes a historical event that previously felt distant and abstract to me and brings it to life. Reading this book reminded me that this was a real event with massive consequences to human life and to the environment. It shares the grisly details of the tragedy to let us really see the consequences of this disaster. It lets us see the mistakes made during this time in order to learn from them.
The book describes how the plant was developed in the Soviet Union’s quest to be the world’s leader in nuclear technologies. It describes the people who were charge of building and operating the plant: their educations, their ambitions, their families, their pastimes, their personalities. It describes the town built around the plant, and the idyllic nature surrounding the workers there. These details helped humanize this piece of history to me and made it feel real, and not just a cold list of lifeless events.
The book immerses us in the plant as it walks us through the hours leading up to the explosion. It describes the inherent design issues in the plant that made this runaway catastrophe possible. It shows us how, under pressure to meet deadlines while running a test, the engineers and operators overlooked warning signs and pushed the reactor beyond its limits. The book allows us to see how the reactor's instability spirals into chaos.
The book then describes the explosion that took two lives and severely burned two others. It describes the hellish forces unleashed from this Pandora’s Box of science and engineering, and the efforts to quell the radioactive pollution. We learn about the horrifying effects of exposure to such high levels of radiation as people are hospitalized with radiation sickness. We learn about the tough decisions leaders had to make about sending people into these extremely dangerous areas knowing they would be permanently damaged from radiation. We learn about efforts to contain the pollution, like dumping massive tonnages of sand from helicopters on top of it and building structures around the reactor core to contain it. We learn about the forced evacuations and the efforts to de-contaminate the surrounding areas.
We learn about the efforts to hide this disaster from the West in the midst of the Cold War. We learn about the attempts to blame the operators rather than the management of the plant to avoid confronting possible flaws in the design and larger problems in the culture. The book shows us how cost-cutting, design oversights, and political pressure created conditions that led to the disaster. The book discusses a system that prized obedience and loyalty over truth and competence. It discusses a system that silenced dissent and ignored warning signs in order to keep up appearances.
This book covers some of the science of nuclear energy and radiation. It covers some of the engineering involved in building and running a nuclear power plant. I had some difficulty following all of the details, but it definitely sparked my imagination and curiosity. It made me much more curious in thinking about the various sources of energy we have and the power plants all around us in modern times. I thought about the workers there, the science and engineering involved, and the politics behind it all. It is one of those things that illuminates how interesting everyday, seemingly mundane things are. I started wondering about all of the power plants near me and what all goes on there everyday.
After reading the book, I also decided to watch the 2019 HBO drama miniseries Chernobyl. The series brought even more life to the history for me. Seeing the explosion and fire from distant apartment windows, the nuclear burns and radiation sickness, the fully masked workers running in and out of the contaminated zones, and workers hunting contaminated dogs and cats really let me dwell on the tragedy of the history. It is a dark and depressing watch, but very well done.
The series does take some liberties with the actual events for the sake of making a more compelling dramatic narrative though. One of the main characters in the show, Ulana Khomyuk, was created to represent a composite of scientists. The scientists are depicted as the heroes of the story on a quest to uncover the truth of the disaster (although the nuclear scientists were apparently well aware of the problems beforehand). The plant management and many Soviet officials got turned into villains. There is a big courtroom scene full of drama that the show took artistic liberties with. These are understandable choices though for making an interesting drama, and overall the series does a great job bringing this historical event to life.
After reading this book I was curious to know what Chernobyl is like decades later. The surrounding area is still mostly abandoned since being decreed as an exclusion zone, but apparently there are people who illegally stayed or moved back to their homes. The radiation distribution is patchy, meaning there are some areas that largely escaped radioactive fallout. Other areas are heavily contaminated with radionuclides like cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-241 and will remain uninhabitable for millennia. The wildlife population has exploded without people around. In the highly contaminated areas, you see phenomena like the “Red Forest”, where organisms show many negative effects and developmental abnormalities. Experts have said it will be thousands of years before the exclusion zone is considered habitable for humans again. Here is a peek into what the exclusion zone looks like decades after the disaster:
I highly recommend this book. It brings to life an important piece of history that has shaped sentiments about nuclear technologies and the Soviet Union. This book illuminates Soviet life, politics, and culture during the Cold War. It covers some of the science and engineering behind nuclear technologies and covers some of the science of radiation. It is full of human drama and tragedy. It is a worthwhile read that stimulated my curiosity and my understanding of an important historical turning point.