Andrew Leatherbarrow

Examines the events and aftermath of the 1986 nuclear reactor explosion in Chernobyl and its long term effects.

23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster

Chernobyl 01

Bri Billaney

I have a weird obsession with Chernobyl, so this was great at sating that obsession.

Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear disaster, forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands and crippled the Soviet Union. This book, the result of 5 years of research, presents an accessible but comprehensive account. The historical narrative is interwoven with the author's own journey to Ukraine's abandoned city of Pripyat.

Shay

This is a fantastic account of what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. Probably one of the better books I've read on the subject. Leatherbarrow doesn't shy away from the technicalities of what happened and talking about the reactor in depth, but he also doesn't come across as a textbook using jargon only students of nuclear chemistry would understand. This book is very much right down the middle.

The first half of the book is focused on recounting what happened in 1986. What exactly went wrong, why did it get as bad as it did despite the safeguards in place, how did the scientists and crew at the plant not realize what was happening, what happened to the people who were tasked with cleaning up the disaster, what happened to the town of Pripyet? Leatherbarrow goes over so much in a short amount of time. It's very concise and straight to the point. It's also very clear Leatherbarrow has done his research and knows what he's talking about in relation to the reactor, from how he describes the inner workings of the reactor to how it blew apart from the pressure of the steam build-up (not from a nuclear explosion.) That was something that I really appreciated seeing. 

It might be difficult to understand if you don't know anything about RBMK reactors or what happened because a lot of the content in this book is a step up from the very basic stuff. My best advice is, read this anyway. And if you find yourself struggling to understand the details when he starts talking about the reactors, go watch a few youtube videos that break it down visually so you can see with your eyes what he's talking about. It's worth the extra effort. 

The second half of the book tells the story of Leatherbarrow's trip to Pripyet and the Chernobyl power plant, including very haunting pictures and stories of the cleanup. Understanding the technical side of it and then following it up with a sort of journalistic exploration of these places so many decades later really works to put the scale of this tragedy into perspective. 

This was a very well written book on the Chernobyl disaster, and I expected no less after learning that Andrew wrote this book for himself, to simplify the technical jargon in a way he could understand. This book made it's rounds on reddit amongst people familiar with the disaster (i.e. nuclear chemists, historians, etc.) prior to being released, and was edited based on feedback from those people. And I think that really shows when you look at the details in this book. 

This is by far the best book I've read on Chernobyl. You can get more technical if you want to start looking into scientific analyses of what happened, but as a book, this is the best one I've read.

Ale ♡

5 stars.

my tumblr review 


  “Those whose bodies were recovered are buried in welded zinc coffins, to prevent their radioactive remains from contaminating the soil.”


Here is a collection of pictures taken by the author that can help to have a perspective of how's Chernobyl these days.

Chernobyl is an event that caught my attention a lot back in 2017 and I started to research in depth about various aspects of the subject: how a damn nuclear reactor works (I had no idea how exactly nuclear physics works, and I still have some problems), what kind of mistakes (both mechanical and human) led to the catastrophe, how this impacted the people who were on duty at the nuclear power plant at that time, the firefighters, the people who were evacuated, the doctors and nurses attending people, the people in charge, and above all, the earth itself. However, this last topic (with several more) I will cover in the review of the other book I read accompanying this one.

The HBO series also helped to get a little more perspective on the subject.

This book explains how a nuclear reactor works, its components. Although it also mentions more nuclear disasters and background to nuclear power plants: weapons and how they decided to use radium, uranium and plutonium to turn them into weapons and death. How this has affected millions of people and led them to death or made them suffer from chronic diseases such as cancer, malformations and congenital diseases that are not always external.

As someone who has a deep passion and zeal for history and for the various universal historical events that have had a great impact on humanity, I could not pass up the opportunity to read this book. It is worth mentioning that I had to look for extra information about certain people, places, accidents, events and elements that I did not know until today, but that helped me to have a better understanding of what really happened in the nuclear plant and how an RBMK reactor works, or at least those that had been built at that time and were in operation.

Certain things really caught my attention, and mainly it was the brutal honesty with which the author of the book criticized the way in which real and relevant data was covered up and lied to a population that had no idea of what was going on; also the cheap way in which the Soviet government dealt with the situation and the few funds they actually invested in the construction of the RBMK reactors, despite knowing the technical failures they suffered from.

While this nuclear disaster that affected the world's population is a mixture of human and mechanical errors, I think I prefer to focus more on the human ones. I do not deny for any reason that mechanical errors played a major role in the disaster, but I still struggle to fully understand how nuclear power works and some aspects of nuclear physics that I will never fully understand. From my point of view, human errors are a bit easier to explain (mind you, explain, not justify).

The creation of nuclear power plants for clean energy was a discovery that revolutionized the world and basically said that it was a "clean" way of obtaining electricity. However, I wonder, is it really a viable way? And although not everything about it is bad, we have clear examples of human-caused accidents where it shows that this is not always the case. In any case, once this viable way of providing electricity to cities with millions of inhabitants (more if the cities are huge) was discovered, reactors of all types began to be built (I will not mention much beyond the RMBK because I do not know them and I do not know how they work; sorry, I am not a nuclear physicist and I barely know the periodic table, lmao) and in some countries, after studies and tests, it was proven that they were not harmful to human health... Or at least not as we think.

I was surprised to see the author mention that for the creation of the RMBKs, or for the Chernobyl plant specifically, cheap uranium was used. I don't know the actual cost, or of that time for that matter, of the materials to build and operate a nuclear plant, but I assume they shouldn't be cheap, as they are gambling a little more than a fire in some room or near some reactor. We are talking about a situation that would cost millions of dollars to assemble properly, to do the necessary tests and to prove its effectiveness.

The stinginess to save more money sentenced the nuclear power plant in the first place. The design of the RMBK was a cost-cutting policy, since the complexity of the RMBK required double the costs and the omission of certain elements that the reactor was required by law to have, contributed to the catastrophe we know today. Such an incomplete reactor should never have been designed, built, let alone approved.

My doubts arise from all this: did they never believe that any failure or accident was going to happen? Did they think they were invincible? Did they really believe that a poorly tested machine would work? The USSR made a terrible mistake in letting this go, even when there were 444 active reactors at the time. I don't know if man's arrogance got the better of him enough to stupidly decide that an incomplete and cheap project would actually work and not fail. Invincibility is not a characteristically human trait. Although some Soviet ministers were informed of the deficiency before the choice of reactor type, they decided to select the RMBK.

Men. Foolish. Stingy. Arrogant.

"The widespread belief at the time was that the RMBK could never cause a major accident because industry safety standards were always going to be respected. Extra safety measures, they decided, were not necessary."

You know, I love the word decided. Because decided implies that someone in charge ignored the sense of logic and threw THOUSANDS of people into the void who either lost their lives very early or suffered the long-term consequences of it. Someone else sentenced them, and apparently did not care, or at least did not believe there would be catastrophic repercussions.

Before the Chernobyl accident in 1982, another serious accident related to the RMBK design occurred at the Leningrad nuclear power plant in November 1975. At the end of 1983 in Lithuania RMBK reactors were tested and immediate failures were found, something the Soviets must have already known about, but for some reason beyond my comprehension chose to ignore.

Diatlov's stubbornness in denying what was happening, even when the reactor had already exploded and the alarms were sounding, seems incredible to me. It is unbelievably stupid that of all the culprits and the punishments they could have received, many officials were simply dismissed and fired, expelled from the Communist Party and after trials, a few were sentenced to 10 years in prison or less. It makes me angry, because for these foolish, stubborn and renegade people, thousands and millions paid the price.

Nuclear weapons will never be the solution to absolutely nothing. No military or political conflict (I have always categorized these as man's stupidity and arrogance in not being able to resolve conflicts peacefully, or simply because he chooses to display his weaponry) is worth the lives of millions of human beings.

That the USSR hid the real information from the Soviet people was a colossal mistake, as well as Briujanov and Fomin deciding to say that it was just a fire or a minor explosion and assuring the big politicians in Moscow that everything was fine, when there were already hundreds exposed to radiation.

All this and more could really have been avoided if there was a little common sense.

In retrospect, it is an extremely interesting book and contains a lot of digestible information and it is written by someone who visited the exclusion zone and wanted to explain in a simpler way the events of what happened on April 26, 1986 at Chernobyl.

I don't know if I'm wrong in something, and if I do, please feel free to correct me nicely!

Chernobyl 01 23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster

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