He charged me with developing the measures for liquidation; in other words, what to do. But then we did one thing. I remember that the future Minister of Medium Machine Building, comrade Ryabev, who had replaced Meshkov in the GC, himself led the group (after receiving the recipe for preparing the solutions that could solidify and create polymeric films on the surface). For example, at the Kola NPP when the main pipeline, the most important pipeline, was welded in such a way where the welders, instead of doing it normally, just put an electrode inside and lightly welded it from above. There were no new areas that I was responsible for. But the author of this article, an American, criticized the French, said that they shouldnt be doing it (for political reasons, economic reasons). Now the maximum temperature thereactivity still continues; not the reactor but its remnants are activeis somewhere around 60-70 degrees Celsius. [5] These ideas were quickly quashed by the authorities. Sometime around the end of August, September or October, when the city was in a condition which allowed it to be preserved; it was safe to be in this didnt mean that the city could be inhabited normally, but that the city no longer posed any immediate danger was thanks to the armys efforts. If there is a danger of a person receiving a dose of 25 rem immediately or within a certain amount of time, then the local authorities have the right tohave the right to but are not required tocarry out an evacuation. In September, the work of the substitute Government Commission had ended. The thing is that, as far as I know, and it is logical, there is no concept of a science supervisor or chief designer in the developed industries in the West and the Soviet Union. This work was very meticulously organized. The journey was gloomy. But traditional reactor engineering somehow did not interest me much, and it was not assigned to me, and it seemed rather boring. The amount of dropped lead grew from day to day. Legasov: Sometime after the 2nd of May, they started to evacuate them. Formally however I had to be replaced in Silaevs team by Eugeny Petrovich Ryazantsev - deputy of the director of our Nuclear Energy Institute. Sidorenko Viktor Alekseyevich, who also was a member of the Government Commission from Gosatomenergonadzor, insisted on an immediate evacuation of the population. The heating up could continue and some vertical movement of this fuel mass may occur. In the accident, no one was killed or exposed to radiation. Today, this number can be called a reliably established number so that numbers like in tens of tons or kilotons, etc dont go around. It was considered bad because of economic reasons. Thats why the most precise information about the state of the reactor was gathered from the ratio of short-lived and long-lived isotopes of iodine-134 and -131. Something has happened but we, as always, will handle it. and went on with his report. But what should those actions be? Starting from the entrance to the station, its external signage, personnel training. However, there were some issues. They left me. And I repeat that it should be based on the work we have previously done so that we refer to our own sources and not someone elses. This device did not have any mechanical rods (mechanical, well, it could work well or it could work badly) or other safety systems that would be independent of the operator, and would work solely based on the state of the zone. And mainly, the chronology of the events themselves was not presented. This is what I said to Mikhail Sergeyevich on the 6th of May, not knowing that on the same day a session of the World Health Organization, specially assembled about this issue, had come to the same conclusion. Try to move aside and do something different than what was done before you. And I remember running around with this caricature, showing it to Meshkov, Slavsky, Aleksandrov; presenting it as a question that was very serious. They rushed to their cars to evacuate themselves and, in the process, 17 people died in cars. Radioactive emissions were still going on but, of course, getting lesser and lesser until about the 20th of May. But the iron shot that we found at the station was contaminated with radioactivity. Their actions were rational. The headquarters were in the City party committee building. And the radioactive impact of the Red Forest on the city and its surroundings sharply decreased after the said operations were carried out. Altogether this was like a victory speech. And yet, the gate valve that needed to be opened to determine if there was water inside the bubblers, was opened by one of the station workers in very difficult conditions. He told me that he had issued appropriate orders, but I think those never got executed. An enormous amount of work had been done and as a result, outside the 30-kilometre zone, we were receiving more and more precise maps that showed the degree of contamination of various areas. We drove through Chernobyl. And didnt go near that Three Mile Island station for three years. Especially after I saw the Loviisa station in Finland which was built according to our principles; it was basically our station. But lets get back to the Chernobyl events, from which I have deviated so far. Say, even if a robot had sufficiently reliable electronics, it could not overcome obstacles, that were the result of a large amount of wreckage of reactor number 4, and stopped. The graphite started burning, Adamovich: [Inaudible] judging by these notes that I, Legasov: The graphite started burning around the 26th or 27th, Adamovich: No, hold on. Nuclear energy in the Soviet Union has not emerged from the energy sector but from, as it were, the nuclear industry; where highly trained and disciplined personnel were used, where special military acceptance was in place for every piece of equipment; and consequently the reliability in this sphere of nuclear industry, both from personnel and equipment point of view, was very high. It had high temperatures which meant that we could use it in metallurgy, chemistry and oil refining. But this reactor was not considered bad because of safety reasons. They selected people, agreed on the time, arranged the needed tools, and decided the sequence of carrying out the procedure. From a safety point of view, it even stood out as being better, as I understood from the discussions. He was assigned to compile a report for the International Atomic Energy Agency about the causes and aftermath of the accident. It was scary to see such a situation. Valery legasov was a nuclear physicist. Whatever I touch - everything is ruined: no one needs anything! All the crews always tried to do the assignments, no matter how difficult or complex the task was. And above that article, there was a lousy illustration, in which in front of a half-wrecked cooling tower, a young moustached Frenchman is trying to explain to a Russian bear how to build those cooling towers, while the bear has put a finger in his mouth and hardly understands that the quality of the cooling tower is as essential to the quality of a nuclear station as the reactor itself. He was against it, objected to it together with the experts, but then went on to meet the stubborn requirements of State Planning Committee and the Ministry of Energy, that stations can be built without containments. The level of fuel enrichment had to be changed, every time something Well, altogether, from the moment it was launched, there were constant changes and alterations. Decontamination of the interior, cleanup of the area, and of the roof, all this was done very actively and in difficult conditions, all while ensuring that not one of the soldiers or officers received [radiation] doses exceeding 25 rem . We got into the cars and set off. But during that period it created quite a tense situation. Because waiting for it to arrive would mean that we would have to stabilize the temperature on a much higher level when we wanted to do that on a lower level. [28], Some in the scientific community were still displeased by Legasov and his legacy. But even DT-5 was not there in sufficient quantities when we arrived. A more effective solution was put forward to the Minvodkhoz: to surround the entire contaminated territory with approximately 1450 wells, some of which would be measuring wells in which the radioactivity of the water flowing through wouldbe continuously measured; then, if necessary, contaminated water could be pumped out using special devices, preventing it from reaching the groundwater. All this work was done by the Soviet Ministry of Water and by the Ukrainian Ministry of Waterdone within a remarkably short time. But RBMK, there was only the Leningrad station initially and, yes, Chernobyl and thats all. Yes. Which button to press, how long to wait, what to do. [7] He opposed a plan to extend the underground cooling system outside the reactor 4 building, as well as other projects he considered to be redundant. Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress: Evil 1.10: The Influencer A powerful, frightening Evil 1.10 - befitting the Fall finale of the new series - and an episode that really lifted Evil into a higher, more harrowing level of story, which of course also befits a series with . "He wasn't meant to be. Like scarecrows all of them were hung. This is not an abstract statement and not in the sense that we had begun to lower the general technical culture. These tunnels were to be used to construct that concrete bed which had a cooling feature. They can be regarded as the directions work should take. Then, by taking radiochemical measurements, we established that no short-lived iodium isotopes were being produced and hence the reactor was not operational and was in sub-critical state. And Pripyat appeared, at the time of the explosion, it appeared to be clean. Basically, it was uncomfortable for him to refuse this money, but at the same time, the cash form of the prize itself did not really please him. Maybe, at a glance, to figure out a contradiction one had to do additional work. As a result, essentially sound projects, when developed, turned out to be overly expensive, cumbersome, and not accepted for execution. This meant that the graphite fire had to be extinguished first and foremost. This also was visible at the stations. Legasov: Because 2,500 degrees is the melting point of the uranium dioxide pellets, and the main radioactivity sits inside these pellets. Having done that, they closed the entire thing and for three years, no one even went near the station. Because the dosimetry service By the way, here I will take a detour and say that dosimetry was poorly organized. Legasov: So, on that day and the following days, there was regular communication with Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov and Vladimir Ivanovich Dolgikh. This organizational aspect should also be described. The knowledge existed; the experts, however, were not unanimous. The system for warning the Ministry of Energy about an accident was adopted beforehand, long before the accident. This was a sort of combination of the Western experience with our own, with the level of the machine-building industry in the Soviet Unionwhich cannot fulfill certain requirements. But then it turned out that the sidewalls of the reactor were wrecked. He instructed Meshkov to gather a group of specialists, to be called from Moscow if needed, and investigate the cause of the accident. Methods to hold the concrete in place had to be thought of. As usual, he praised the atomic energy program and the progress that had been achieved. This by no means was an easy operation. Not every work progress was documented, whether it had been completed or not. And we had to know whether those bubblers were empty or not. A personal pistol remained in a drawer, but the professor chose to hang himself. This, as it seems to me, should be recorded because it would be foolish to say that everything is already fully apparent to us, fully clear. But fortunately, nature itself acts in a way that silt holds the individual particles of radionuclides quite firmly. Because in our Kurchatov Institute itself, the author of the development, Professor Feinberg Savely Moiseevich, now deceased, was advocating the possibility of a reactor without containment, particularly RBMK. Legasov: Armen Artavazdovich, a good man. To such as extent that I could not imagine the scale of this accident from the available information. And this wasnt because there was no such knowledge. Simultaneously, the military continued to do all the necessary recon operations. Because such a belief prevailed that we have enough Donbass coal and that we dont need to develop nuclear energy. This means that a rapid expansion of steam, constantly thermally heated, led to the damage that was witnessed. For example, different groups in June provided different estimates of the radioactivity that had escaped reactor number 4. "[5] That afternoon, he briefly visited his daughter. I cannot vouch for my memory. Once a magazine called Business Week fell into my hands. They started the work. Subsequently, there were a few days of active emission of radioactive particles, fuel, mainly due to the graphite burning. And this was preventing the creation of acceptable radiation conditions. At that time, the entire protection system was copied, probably from [TAPE ERASED] that existed in the industrial reactors and was using accumulated military experience. Mass hysteria has begun. about the accident at the station "Trimayalen", Show that most likely the reason that led to the accident, has nothing to do with, the events in Chernobyl because of the fundamental difference in the design of, In Kiev, when we got out of the plane, the first thing that caught our eye was the, cavalcade of black government cars and the disturbing crowd of Ukrainian, leaders headed by the Chairman of the CM of Ukraine, Comrade. But the problem is that they were put in such a situation. Do you understand? So I went to the institute;but before I reached, my car phone rang and one of Scherbinas subordinates told me that as per a request by Silaev to the General Secretary, I needed to go back to Chernobyl because Velikhovs unilateral actions were, for some reason, worrying Ivan Stepanovich. After that, all three of us signed that note and sent it to Gorbachev. I have to start the part where I create my memoir. But when we returned to Skazochniy and measured them, they turned out to be more contaminated than the ones we were wearing. Where the first cloud had carried off around 1000 curies of radioactivity a day, by the date of my second departure from Chernobyl, on May 12th, it was 100 curies a day and falling. Adamovich: [weakly and hardly understandable] But what did Gorbachev ask youtell you. All these were some unusual questions that complemented nuclear energy. But because of panic. Such were the conditions. But the degree of risk in my own projects was quite high. But at 11 am, it was already fully official. But since this philosophy of mandatory containment was not adopted by the leadership of nuclear energy of the time, the RBMK reactor did appear. They said that things were probably bad. In this case, they had received the following signal: "1-2-3-4"; which means that an event had occurred at the station that involved nuclear hazard, radiation hazard, fire hazard and explosive hazard, that is to say, all possible types of hazard. These decisions were targeted solely to deal with the situation faster, lessen the consequences. It had already been decided to assign the construction of the sarcophagus to SU 605, a department in the Ministry of Medium Machine Building; and that a thorough assessment of the internal condition of reactor number 4 had to be carried out, of the structural soundness of its remaining building, so that the project could rely on some analysis, on some verified data. So it was impossible to load it into the helicopters, first of all. This is what led them, and directed their actions. This kind of equipment was not available at the time. And finally, the last but, from my perspective, the most important section. I wont lie. ", "Responsabilites Occidentales Dans les Consequences Sanitaires de la Catastrophe de Tchernobyl, en Bielorussie, Ukraine et Russie", "Western responsibility regarding the health consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe in Belarus, the Ukraine and Russia", "Chernobyl scientist's suicide described", " - .. He went, had a look, and said that everything was in order and that the information was wrong. In fact, because of ecological reasons, and many people do not understand this, it is impossible not to develop [nuclear energy]. Something else will happen. That the accident did not pose any threat to the people in Western Europe and other countries. These circumstances need to be explained. He wrote a doctoral dissertation and later published a book at approximately that time, in which he proved the impossibility of having nuclear stations without containments, no matter the type, VVER or RBMK; that it was dangerous and criminal. But these are such personal things. Anyway, I called the experts with the drawings of the reactor and all the information that could be gathered. Many of the regulations, requirements and rules were complicated and very confusing; in some parts, contradictory. It didnt take long for a confirmation of the correctness of my understanding of these words. When I arrived there for the first time, I witnessed a grim scene because the first proper dosimetric posts were set up there. This, as far as I can remember, was the only article that had a helpful, calming effect on others. Legasov: Then they were destroyed, of course. Legasov: Hope this isnt confusing to you. I liked him from the very beginning. [1] Bencana Chernobyl [ sunting | sunting sumber] But this talk of the reactor smouldering, emitting radioactivity in considerable amounts, were so strong that orders were given to manufacture various types of covers for it. We waited for him. 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