Disaster at the nuclear power plant in the USSR. Chernobyl: the biggest bluff of the 21st century

Thirty-two years ago, one of the power units of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suddenly experienced a strong explosion. Since then, the history of these events began to become overgrown with myths and by now it has become so densely overgrown with them that few people today remember the causes and consequences of those events. Let's try to restore them using the documents.

Why did the reactor explode?

Most often, the cause of the explosion is called an “experiment.” They say that at a nuclear power plant they experimented with turning off the cooling, and so that the automatic protection would not interrupt the experiment, it was turned off. In fact, on April 26, 1986, scheduled maintenance was underway at the station. And each such repair for a reactor like RBMK included tests of operation in abnormal modes, and during these tests the automatic protection was always turned off. Since “experiments” were carried out often, and they led to a disaster only once, it is clear: the experiment was not the cause of the accident.

Photo: © RIA Novosti / Vitaly Ankov

The latter figure has been criticized on two sides. Greenpeace criticizes it for being too small and offers its own figure - 92,000 people. However, unfortunately, he never even tried to substantiate it or report by what method it was obtained. Because of this, no one takes her seriously. No studies could find traces of the congenital deformities of newborns repeatedly promised by the organization. When asked where Greenpeace gets information about such deformities, representatives of the organization bashfully remained silent.

However, scientists also criticize the figure. As they rightly point out, the estimate of 4000 may be greatly overestimated. She relies on hypothesis about the non-threshold harm of radiation- that even negligibly small doses increase the likelihood of cancer and other diseases. Critics of this hypothesis note, that it has never been proven by any factual data, that is, in fact, it is an unsupported assumption. They remind: in places of very high radioactive background - close to Pripyat in the first years after the accident - there is no evidence of an increased incidence of cancer. On the contrary, in the Iranian city of Ramsar, where the highest natural background level on Earth (radioactive water), cancer less common, than on the planet on average.

However, we would recommend ignoring such criticism. Yes, there is no scientific evidence for the idea of ​​no threshold harm from radiation. And perhaps it cannot be, since it is generally difficult to find confirmation of ideas that clearly contradict observations (in the same Ramsar). But still, 4,000 people are the only existing estimate of the potential number of victims (fortunately, no one takes Greenpeace’s version seriously, including its authors). Therefore, it is precisely this figure that is worth starting from.

Exclusion Zone

People tend to be afraid of everything big and incomprehensible. Everyone thinks they know how a car works, but not a very large part of the population can handle a correct explanation of why a plane flies. Therefore, there are few people who are afraid to ride in a car, but there are many aviophobes. And it is completely useless to tell them that the probability of dying in a car is an order of magnitude greater. The facts in such cases are subjectively unimportant, but what is subjectively important is that a person is afraid of everything big and incomprehensible.

The same story happened with the nuclear power plant. Everyone thinks they know how a thermal power plant works, but far fewer people have an idea of ​​how a nuclear power plant works. Naturally, this does not include politicians. Therefore, the people who made the decision to evacuate had no idea that the radioactive contamination zone became relatively safe after the decay of the shortest-lived isotopes. And they had no time to delve into all this - the shock from the world’s first nuclear power plant accident was too great. But politicians, according to the stories of the military, very highly appreciated the power of nuclear weapons.

Therefore, the decision to evacuate was made with a large margin. As shown 2016 study, out of 336 thousand evacuees, only 31 thousand lived in the threatened zone, where evacuation was actually required - those who were closest to the emergency reactor.

Photo: © RIA Novosti / Igor Kostin

Chernobyl: nuclear power's gravedigger, nuclear power's justification

As you know, after the accident, the construction of nuclear power plants around the world began to decline and has not yet recovered to its previous level. And it will not recover - radiophobia is strong and, just like the fear of airplanes, is invincible by any reasonable arguments. You should just accept this and not try to change anything. The current virtual abandonment of nuclear energy by most developed countries of the world is not the first irrational decision in the history of mankind and certainly not the last.

However, from the point of view of a future historian, the Chernobyl accident is a very important marker. It shows how dangerous nuclear power really is. And these indications are quite unexpected. Taking into account Chernobyl, nuclear power plant give 90 deaths for every trillion kilowatt-hours produced. A country like Russia consumes a trillion kilowatt-hours per year.

There are also more dangerous types of energy. The most lethal radionuclides released from a reactor are very short-lived, their half-lives do not take very long. And these heavy elements settle with the first rain. But the micrometer-sized particles produced by the combustion of fossil fuels are too small for rain to quickly remove them from the atmosphere. A person passes 15 kilograms of air through his lungs per day - many times more than he eats and drinks. Therefore, thermal energy constantly and in large quantities saturates our lungs with such particles and they cause many diseases - the heart, blood vessels, lungs, and also cancer.

52,000 people are buried annually. A little more than one Chernobyl per month. No one, of course, is organizing demonstrations against this, because they don’t talk about the monthly Chernobyl on TV, but science articles Nobody reads about this topic.

Thus, nuclear energy is the safest of all existing ones, with the exception of large-scale solar generation. And if you choose from power plants with continuous controlled generation, it is generally the safest.

However, this is not at all a reason to run and protest against this or that country’s abandonment of nuclear power plants. That is, of course, you can protest, but there is no point. People make decisions the way the PR people of the 1996 election campaign in Russia recommended. So to speak, they “vote with their hearts.” It is useless to show numbers to the heart.

The Chernobyl tragedy is a sad lesson for humanity. The most monumental man-made disaster occurred on April 26, 1986, at the 4th block of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in a small satellite town called Pripyat. An incredible amount of deadly radioactive substances ended up in the air. In some places, radiation levels were thousands of times higher than standard background radiation. it became clear that after the explosion there would be a different world here - a land where you can’t sow, rivers in which you can’t swim or fish, and houses... in which you can’t live

Already an hour after the explosion, the radiation situation in Pripyat was obvious. No measures were taken due to the emergency: people had no idea what to do. According to instructions and orders that have existed for 25 years, the decision to evacuate the population from the affected area was required to be made by local authorities. By the time the Government Commission arrived, it was already possible to evacuate all residents of Pripyat, even on foot. But no one decided to take on such responsibility (for example, the Swedes first of all took all the people out of the area of ​​their power plant, and only then began to find out that the emission did not occur at their plant). Since the morning of April 26, all the roads of Chernobyl were flooded with water and an incomprehensible white solution, everything was white, all the roadsides. Many policemen were brought into the city. But they didn’t do anything - they just settled down near the objects: the post office, the palace of culture. People were walking everywhere, small children, it was very hot, people were going to the beach, to their dachas, fishing, relaxing on the river near the cooling pond - an artificial reservoir near the nuclear power plant.

The first talk about the evacuation of Pripyat appeared on Saturday evening. And at one o'clock in the morning an order came out - to prepare documents for evacuation in 2 hours. On April 27, a directive was published: “Comrades, due to the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the evacuation of the city is announced. Bring with you documents, necessary things and, if possible, food for 3 days. Evacuation begins at 14:00.” Imagine a convoy of several thousand buses with burning headlights, moving along the highway in 2 rows and taking the entire population of Pripyat - women, old people, adults and newborn babies - out of the radiation zone. Columns of buses were traveling west, towards the village of Polessky, Ivanovo districts neighboring Chernobyl. So Pripyat turned into a ghost town

View of the destroyed Chernobyl

The evacuation of Pripyat was carried out in an organized and precise manner; almost all evacuees showed restraint. But how can one describe the irresponsibility shown towards the population, when during the day before the evacuation they said nothing and did not forbid children to walk the streets. And the schoolchildren who ran around unsuspectingly on Saturday during breaks? Was it really impossible to save them, to prohibit them from being on the street? Would anyone really condemn politicians for such reinsurance?

Is it surprising that in such a situation of hiding information, some people, succumbing to rumors, decided to leave along the road leading through the “Red Forest” near Chernobyl. Witnesses recalled how women and children moved along this road, practically glowing from radiation. Be that as it may, it is already clear that the mechanism for making the most important decisions directly related to the preservation of people has not withstood a serious test

It was later revealed that the USSR intelligence services were aware that after the disaster, 3.2 thousand tons of meat and 15 tons of butter would be stored in the Chernobyl radiation zone. The decision they made can hardly be called anything other than criminal: “... the meat is subject to processing into canned food with the addition of clean meat. ... sold after long-term storage and repeated radiometric control through the public catering network.”

When processing livestock from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant release zone, it turned out that part of this meat contained radioactive substances in huge quantities, significantly exceeding the maximum standards... And in order to avoid a large accumulation of radioactive substances in the body of people from consuming contaminated food products, the USSR Ministry of Health ordered as much as possible to disperse this meat more widely throughout the country... to master its processing in meat processing plants in remote regions of the Russian Federation (excluding Moscow), Moldova, Transcaucasia, the Baltic states, Kazakhstan and Central Asia

Later it turned out that the KGB controlled everything. The intelligence services knew that defective Yugoslav equipment was used during the construction of Chernobyl (the same defective equipment was supplied to the Smolensk nuclear power plant). Several years before the explosion, KGB reports pointed out flaws in the design of the station, cracks in the walls and delamination of the foundation...

In 2006, the American research organization Blacksmith Institute published a list of the most polluted places on the planet, in which Chernobyl was in the top ten. As you can see, four places in the top ten are cities of the former Soviet Union

Another major accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which few people have heard about until now. Meanwhile, it was this accident that served as the final impetus for the Ukrainian authorities to decide to completely shut down the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and decommission the station.

As in the case of the 1986 tragedy, as a result of the 1991 accident, radioactive substances were released into the air (albeit in much smaller quantities), and the cause of these events (just like in 1986) were the power units of RBMK reactors. As they later wrote in reports on the investigation of the disaster, the cause of the accident was “an initial event not foreseen in the design of the nuclear unit, which was accompanied by failures of security systems".

So, today’s post contains a story and unique photographs from the 1991 Chernobyl accident, which you probably haven’t heard anything about.

02. First, a little background. After the 1986 accident and the implementation and work of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, it continued to operate as normal - as much as is generally possible at a station with one damaged power unit and a local “exclusion zone” in the former work area. After the 1991 accident, an early decision was made to immediately shut down the Second Unit (where, in fact, the accident occurred), as well as to gradually decommission the Third.

What happened in 1991? On October 11, 1991, the Second Power Unit of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was put into operation after a major overhaul. When reaching the set power level one of the turbine generators of the power unit turned on spontaneously, this happened at 20:10 Kyiv time.

03. How could it even happen that one turbogenerator suddenly started working on its own? An investigation into the causes of the accident established that a significant defect was made during the construction of the station - the signal and control cables were placed in one cable tray, which is categorically unacceptable. Due to the loss of insulation between the two cables, the turbogenerator spontaneously turned on.

The turbogenerator managed to work for only 30 seconds, after which it began to collapse from the resulting loads - the turbogenerator shaft bearings were the first to “fly”, the installation depressurized, as a result of which a large amount of oil and hydrogen was released, and a fire started. The Chernobyl fire brigade was the first to extinguish the fire in the turbine hall:

04. Due to exposure to high temperatures (tons of machine oil were burning in the engine room), the roof above the burning turbogenerator collapsed. This is what the fire scene looked like the morning after the accident, behind the wall on the right is the reactor hall itself, and in the background you can see the famous ventilation chimney of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

05. The worst thing was that the collapsed roof elements damaged equipment important for controlling the reactor. Under the worst circumstances, the reactor of power unit number two could go into an uncontrollable state and then explode - this would be a repeat of the 1986 disaster. The reactor of the Second Power Unit was immediately shut down, but it was still necessary to properly cool it down - and this was not so easy to do, since the water pumps were damaged due to the fire and the collapse of the roof.

06. During the process, another design flaw of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant surfaced - the emergency water circuit make-up pumps (so necessary for cooling the reactor) and conventional feed pumps were located in the same room, and as a result of one event - a fire - the reactor was virtually deprived of all high-pressure feed sources. The reactor was cooled down, in fact, only using one main circulation pump, which operated at only half the required power, and during this cooldown there was a non-zero probability that the reactor could explode from overheating.

07. Did radiation levels increase during the 1991 accident? Yes, it happened. The main reason for this was radioactive aerosols that were formed during the burning of roof elements with traces of the 1986 accident. All liquidators who dealt with the consequences of this accident worked in the necessary protection. The photo shows the dismantling of the collapsed roof structures in the turbine room.

08. The scale of the accident was quite serious - during the fire, 180 tons of turbine oil and 500 cubic meters of hydrogen burned out, almost 2500 meters of the roof of the turbine hall collapsed, the mass of the collapsed structures exceeded 100 tons.

09. Elimination of the consequences of the accident was somewhat reminiscent of Chernobyl 1986 in miniature. Liquidators again had to find highly active waste, collect it in special bags and containers and take it away for disposal.

10. 63 participants in the liquidation of the consequences of the 1991 accident received increased radiation doses - however, relatively small ones - from 0.02 to 0.2 rem. If it were not for the coordinated actions of firefighters and competent actions of the personnel to cool down the reactor, the accident in 1991 could well have led to overheating and explosion of the reactor at the Second Power Unit, and the phrase would now not mean radar antennas at all, but would have a completely different meaning...

All photos: Igor Kostin.

This is the accident that happened in Chernobyl in 1991. Admit that you haven't heard anything about her.

For some, Chernobyl is a lost homeland. For some, it was a war zone, where to survive it was necessary to precisely control time, and to work, one had to forget about the fear of death. For some it’s a dystopia

“We were woken up by the sound of a fire siren.”

City of Pripyat, 1978.

“The spring in 1986 was very warm. Gardens bloomed, fields were plowed and sown. On Friday, April 25, we fell asleep peacefully, and at night we were awakened by the sound of a siren. A convoy of fire trucks was walking along the highway towards Pripyat. We realized that something terrible had happened. Nevertheless, in the morning people went out into the fields, some even went to work in Pripyat, because there were no official messages, he recalls Tatiana Rudnik. “Then government cars began to arrive in the city of Chernobyl: ZILs, Chaikas, Volgas.”

“We have patronage, we visit sick and lonely people: we wash them, cut their hair, buy groceries. They erected a monument to the heroes of Chernobyl and opened a museum. Now we are seeking reconstruction of the Square in memory of the heroes of Chernobyl. We organize funeral services,” said Tatyana Rudnik.

There are cities where Chernobyl survivors complain about insufficient attention from the authorities. “Of course, they provide us with help, but not enough,” says, in particular, Alexander Gadush from Volgograd.