Chernobyl

Chapter 20

The control point for fighting the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is no longer at the collective farm. There are far too many people now to be held in a farm village, and so it has been moved to the town of Chernobyl itself, thirty kilometers away. The evacuation of the town of Pripyat has been expanded to include every community within that thirty-kilometer ring. Where more than a hundred thousand people lived seventy-two hours earlier, there is now no living person except firefighters, emergency workers, and medics. Two squadrons of heavy-lift Soviet Air Force helicopters have joined the damage-control forces, and day and night they load up sandbags and nets filled with bars of metal, take them on the five-minute flight to the reactor, dump them into the white-hot glow, and return for another load. The helicopter cabins have been lined with sheets of lead, which seriously cuts down the loads they can carry, and their pilots are working twelve-hour days. The crews battling the accident on tne ground are allowed only three two-hour shifts out of the twenty-four. Even so, each man is stuck twice a day to yield a blood sample so his white corpuscles can be counted, and when the count is down, he is out of business entirely.

Sheranchuk understood the reason for the two-hour shifts

perfectly, but no one told him what to do in the six-hour

stretches when he was forbidden entry to the zone. What he did, mosdy, was try to sleep. When that failed, he ate, and smoked feverishly, and made a nuisance of himself.

He knew that he was being a nuisance, because he had been told so when he visited the Chernobyl town hospital to see how his wife was getting along ("Well enough, my dear," she told him, "but really, we're very busy here."), and when he tried to call the hospital in far-off Moscow to check on Deputy Director Smin. ("His condition is being carefully monitored; he is conscious; and, please, don't tie up our telephone lines at this time!") He couldn't help it. He missed Smin. All these new experts and volunteers from all over the USSR were well enough, but after all, the graphite core was still burning, was it not?

He was pacing back and forth, scowling at the distant smoke on the horizon, when the armored personnel carrier pulled up outside the Chernobyl town bus station. He jumped in to join the fourteen others ready to take their turns.

It was a half-hour ride to the plant, and none of them spoke much. On the way they all pulled on their radiation coveralls, checked one another's dosimeters, made sure the hoods were fastened. As soon as the personnel carrier came to a stop, Sheranchuk trotted right to the closed-circuit water system to check the Bourdon-gauge pressure readings.

Overhead he heard the choppers flutter in and swoop away. One came in just overhead. It looked like an airborne whale, with a rotor on top and the revolving flukes of the tail assembly. He could see someone kicking a bag of something— sand, no doubt — out of the door.

Then he was at the pipes, and he didn't look up at the helicopters again, not even when he felt a rusdy patter of dust on his helmet and knew that one of the bags had come apart as it was dropped. It was only loose sand, after all. If he had been hit by one of the bags, or by one of the falling sacks of lead shot, he would not need to look up. He would be dead — as had happened already to at least one of the firemen whose work kept them closer to the drop point.

That was the good part of Sheranchuk's immediate task, which was to free the great water valves to the steam system. They were in a sheltered location that kept him out of the direct range of the helicopter dumps. The bad part of the job was that the valves didn't want to be freed. The electric motors that were meant to drive them had shorted and burned themselves out when applied, because something inside the valves was jammed. The control wheels outside failed to move the giant leaves within. When Sheranchuk reached the scene, he saw that his relief crews had tried a different tack. They had drained the system of cooling water from the pond in order to attack the valves with crowbars; but that hadn't worked, either, because the steam system had run so hot that there was little liquid water in the pipes. It was now nearly steam all the way through; no one could work in that heat, and so they had to open the dikes and let the cooling water in again. By the time Sheranchuk got back with the new crew, the action had shifted to the external valve wheels again.

Sheranchuk saw that the previous shift chief had rigged up a system of crowbars interlocked in the wheels, and the crew was trying doggedly to move the valves with the added leverage.

Sheranchuk saw at once that it was risky. The great danger was not only that it probably wouldn't work, but that if too much force were applied, it might merely snap the shaft, sturdy forged steel though it was. So when Sheranchuk took over, he urged the crew to be gentle: "No battering-ram stuff, now! A steady push — go! Keep it going! All your weight—" And when that effort accomplished nothing, he tried backing the wheel off a little for another attempt. It almost worked. The wheel moved, grudgingly, a few centimeters of a revolution; and back and forth, back and forth, they kept up the hard work, sweating inside their coveralls, in the noise of the helicopters overhead and the rattle of dropped sand and metal bars, and the rumble of fire pumps and the hoarse cries of the men.

Sheranchuk was astonished when someone laid a hand on his shoulder. He blinked up at his relief. Had two hours gone by already? And what had been accomplished?

He knew the answer to that one, anyway.

At least now they were no longer alone. It wasn't just the forces of the Chernobyl Power Station that were fighting the accident, not even just those of the region or of the whole Ukraine. Help came in from everywhere, by every means possible. By road, convoys of trucks pounded toward Chernobyl from every quarter of the compass. By air, there were planes to the little field outside the town of Chernobyl and helicopters besides. Barges came into the port at Chernobyl town, trains chugged into the Yanov railroad station — and these were not just ordinary goods trains, with a packet or two for the firefighters; they were dedicated trains, their cargoes reloaded into expendable flatcars at the edge of the evacuated zone and pulled back to the plant itself by locomotives that would never leave. Doctors, firemen, engineers, militiamen, soldiers — half the Soviet Union seemed to be descending on the Chernobyl Power Station in its agony.

It was a truly impressive effort. The only question in Sheranchuk's mind was whether it was going to be enough.

They were ordered to shower without fail every time they came in off duty, and as often as possible in between times, just to make sure. As soon as Sheranchuk was out of his protective clothing and had allowed another few drops of his blood to be siphoned out, he headed for the showers, rubbing the inside of his elbow. The medics were finding it harder and harder to pick a spot on his arm not already sore from taking the blood samples. They looked tired too. So was Sheranchuk. He pushed his way through the other tired, naked men waiting their turn and let the cold water pour over him. He soaped well, wondering what load of radioactive poison was in the water itself. But that was a useless worry. They had to shower, anyway. And besides, those moments under the shower were the only ones he had to relax and think about his wife and his son. The last word from Tamara was that Boris was already on his way to a Komsomol camp on the Black Sea with twenty other young people from Pripyat. Sheranchuk took consolation in those good thoughts. At least his family was out of danger…

If — thinking of the cloud of gases that blew helter-skelter across the face of the earth — anyone in Europe were out of danger. Or anyone in the world.

The pleasant moment had turned sour.

Sheranchuk got out of the shower and dried himself on a pair of his own undershorts — towels were among the niceties no one had yet thought to truck in to the control post. He pulled on a cotton shirt and a pair of work pants and felt slippers. As dressed as he needed to be, he shuffled down the length of the improvised dormitory, past the rows of bunks, some of them with men snoring away, and the tables where other men were talking or playing cards, to his six o'clock conference.

That was the bad side of the good fact that so many Soviet citizens had hurried to help. Meetings. With more than two thousand men and women deployed to fight the explosion and its consequences, the people in charge had to keep in almost constant conference to coordinate their efforts.

In the meeting room there was a table with an unshaded light hanging over it, and half a dozen men were waiting for his report. He gave it quickly: "The valves won't open. They're trying to force them now, but I think they'll just break."

Looking around the table, Sheranchuk realized that he was now nearly the highest-ranking person left on the scene from the peacetime — he corrected himself, the pre-explosion time — of the Chernobyl Power Station. Smin was in his hospital in Moscow, fighting for his life. After the Director had arrived, he had insisted on taking charge of the emergency effort just long enough to be removed from it. Where he was now was easy to guess, and the Chief Engineer along with him. Others were in Hospital No. 18 in Kiev, or evacuated with their families, or simply run away. The people around this table now were all from outside the district, from Moscow and Kiev and Novosibirsk and Kursk. Most of them wore military uniforms under their coveralls.

The person chairing the meeting, however, was the civilian from the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, Istvili. He was no longer as dapper as when he first arrived, but he was still energetic as he received Sheranchuk's bad news. He did not seem surprised. He only said, "The plenum has to be drained." The plenum was the reserve of water under the reactor itself, built there so that in the event of a rupture of a single tube the steam would bubble through the plenum and cool back down to water instead of bursting the containment shell. Of course, against what had actually happened at the plant it was useless— worse than useless, a danger.

The general of fire brigades stirred restlessly. "I don't see why we can't just leave it alone," he said.

"Because, Comrade General, we don't want water down there, we want concrete. We need to isolate that entire core from the world outside, top, bottom, and sides."

"You're talking about work that will take months!"

"I hope we can do it just in months. In any case, we don't know how much strength there is in the structures that hold the core; if it should fall into the plenum, it would be serious."

Serious! It was already serious enough for Sheranchuk, who put in obstinately, "Nevertheless, I don't think those valves will open."

Istvili nodded. "Then what do you propose?"

"Attack it from another direction," Sheranchuk said, throwing his cigarette on the floor to free his hands. "Here, let me show you." He quickly sketched the outlines of the ruined reactor and the water-filled chamber below it. "If we cut into the tank from another side, we can pump it dry. Here. Where it approaches the plenum for Reactor Number Three. Pump that one out, then people can get in to cut through."

Istvili studied the sketch, unsurprised. "I approve. Also, I think, we should try digging another shaft from — here. It will be longer, but easier to cut through, perhaps."

"My men aren't moles," the fire general barked.

"We won't need your men for that, Comrade General. A team of miners from the Donetsk coalfields is already on its way. Now. As to the fire in the graphite itself?"

The fire brigade commander said, "The helicopter drops are helping. Another fifty tons of sand are needed, though, at least."

"Comrade Colonel?"

The Air Force officer rapped out, "Of course. We have requested another squadron of men and machines; they should be here in the morning. With them, we will continue the drops on schedule."

Istvili looked at the fire brigade commander, who shrugged. "If that is so, then perhaps we ought to have more volunteers to fill the sandbags. Also my men can't get through the rubble near the reactor building."

"Have it bulldozed away!"

"To be sure, Comrade Istvili," the fireman said mildly, "but to where? Some has already been dumped into the pond—"

"Good God, man," Sheranchuk cried. "Not the cooling pond! We've poisoned enough water already."

"So I have said, but then, where?"

Since no one else spoke, Sheranchuk said, "There's a foundation dug for another reactor on the other side of the station. I doubt it will ever be built now; can't you shove everything in there?"

"Do it," said Istvili, turning to gaze at Sheranchuk again. He asked the meeting at large, "Is there anything else we need our hydrologist-engineer for at this time?"

Sheranchuk said quickly, "There is something I need the meeting for, at least." "And what is that?"

"It is simply impossible to accomplish anything in a two-hour shift a couple of times a day. I request permission to work for longer periods." "How long?"

"As long as I have to! Four hours at a time, at least." Istvili drummed his fingers on the table, looking around. "How are your white-blood corpuscle readings, Comrade Sheranchuk?"

"Who can tell? They simply take it and go away somewhere. At least they have not told me I am in danger."

Istvili nodded. Then he sighed. "Permission granted," he said. "Now let us see how we stand for materiel. . "