Chernobyl

Chapter 2

Leonid Sheranchuk is forty-two years old and looks like an ice hockey player, which he was for a time twenty years ago. He has two steel teeth in front as a result. Still, he is a handsome red-haired man. Women are attracted to him. As far as his wife, Tamara, knows, he does not respond even when their interest is made apparent, but all the same she wishes they could take their vacations together. She is a doctor on the staff of the hospital in the town of Pripyat itself. The town almost touches the grounds of the power plant, but its facilities are separate. This means that her vacations are at the summer resort of the hospital, four hundred kilometers south on a pleasant lake; his are taken at the resort of the power plant, on the Black Sea. She would like to be transferred to the medical staff of the power station, so they could^-be together, but the pay is better there, too, and the summer accommodations much nicer, and the competition for such posts is acute. Still, she knows that they are lucky. They have been in Pripyat for only a few months, since Smin recruited her husband into this much better post. She is aware that they have a good life. With Sheranchuk's three hundred rubles a month and her one eighty they are well-to-do. Their sixteen-year-old son is a dancer, an honor student and a Komsomol. Sheranchuk himself has a shelf of medals from his ice hockey days as well as all the diplomas and

certificates of merit that made him qualified as a hydrologist-engineer in the Chernobyl Power Station. For he is, after all, not a "plumber." Nor would he smile at anyone who called him that, or at least not at anyone but Deputy Director Smin.

Sheranchuk left Smin in the baths. Feeling thoroughly refreshed the hydrologist-engineer decided there was no need to wait until morning to get at some of his paperwork; the evening was young and his wife would not mind that he was working overtime.

No one forced Sheranchuk to do that, least of all Deputy Director Smin. Sheranchuk imposed it on himself. As a senior engineer, he was scheduled to work management hours — nine to five-thirty on five days of the week. But he knew he had Smin's trust. He wanted to keep it, and spending an evening at home was less important than making certain that the trust was deserved.

So, long after five-thirty, Sheranchuk was back at his desk, in the office he shared with two assistants and the plant's sports director, writing notes to himself about what he wanted to do when Reactor No. 4 was at last down for maintenance. The experiment in getting extra power from the turbines then did not affect him. What he particularly wanted was to get a look at the inside of the great pump that forced the condensed water back out of the heat exchanger and into the plenum under the core of the reactor. According to the records he had inherited, that pump had been long since dismanded and checked by his predecessor, but Sheranchuk wanted to see for himself.

Going over the files on each component, Sheranchuk paid particular attention to the delivery dates of the parts. A valve fitting that had arrived at Chernobyl in the first week of any month, for example, had probably been turned out by its factory in the last week of the month previous. That was a warning signal. The last few days of any month were the frenzied, comer-cutting days of "storming the plan," the days when all shifts went on overtime in a last-ditch effort to meet the month's production goals that determined whether or not the workers would get a monthly bonus. Half of any month's production in a factory might easily come in the last few days of the month. Those were the days when machinists rushed their work and inspectors looked the other way, and the brand-new parts that arrived at their destinations might have to go right into the scrap pile because they could not be made to fit. Worse, they might be installed anyway.

Of course, the previous head hydrologist-engineer at Chernobyl had known that as well as Sheranchuk. Every part had been calipered for tolerances before it was fitted into place; all the equipment had been taken apart and, when necessary, reground or rebored or simply replaced with new parts. Sheranchuk knew this. All the same, he wanted to see for himself.

With a list of fittings to be checked in his hand he went to see if Deputy Director Smin had perhaps returned to his office. He was not there. The office was dark, as were most of the other offices he passed — though not that of the First Department. That didn't surprise Sheranchuk; Khrenov's Personnel and Security people were always somewhere about. He thought about going home, where his wife might, by now, be wondering what had happened to him, but went up to the main control room for Reactors 3 and 4 instead.

Smin wasn't there either, but Khrenov was, smoking a cigarette and chatting with the shift chief about how the football practice had gone. Behind them was the long, arced wall of instruments that displayed the condition of every part of the power station's systems. Most of the display, flashing lights and oscilloscope traces, had to do with things that did not much interest Sheranchuk, but automatically he checked the readings on the water and steam-pressure systems. The steam system was normal, the recirculation pumps were operating at normal pressure — all satisfactory enough, except that the pumps were under direct operators' control. The automatic systems were still switched off.

Sheranchuk scowled and looked around. Standing by the door, looking dissatisfied, was an operator Sheranchuk recognized, the half-Lithuanian one named Kalychenko. When Sheranchuk asked Kalychenko civilly enough if the automatic systems should not be switched back on, the operator said crossly, "How should I know? I'm not on this shift. I'm simply wasting my time standing here."

Khrenov looked up sharply, then came to join them. "Ah,

Kalychenko," he said, ignoring the hydrologist. "Are you still here?"

"Where else would I be? This is really too bad! I'm on the midnight shift, and here I've been ordered in early for this experiment that isn't going to take place. When am I supposed to sleep?"

"You could sleep," said Khrenov silkily, humorously, "in your own bed for a change, instead of spending half the night in some other bed."

Sheranchuk saw that the tall, pale man flushed, as though Khrenov had touched a sensitive point, but it was none of his business. "Excuse me," Sheranchuk said, "I was pointing out that the automatic pumping system is still switched off."

"Yes, yes," said Khrenov. "I'm sure the Chief Engineer is well aware of that."

"The directives say it should be left on at all times, except for special circumstances."

"You are very diligent in your work," Khrenov said, his tone admiring. "But these are special circumstances, you see. Chief Engineer Varazin is in charge. He has decided that at least that part of the experiment which is to observe how the pumps can be kept in order manually can be proceeded with, at least. Do you understand that? If you have criticisms to make of his procedures, I suggest you make them to him."

Sheranchuk gritted his steel teeth. It was not Khrenov's business to lecture the hydrologist-engineer on technical matters. It was only a way of reminding Sheranchuk, as well as anyone else around, that the Personnel man was well informed on every aspect of the work of the power plant even if he had nothing to do with running it. Sheranchuk shrugged, and kept silent.

Khrenov gazed at him affably for a moment, then turned to the shift operator. "Now, Kalychenko," he said, "since you're not on duty here at the moment, I suggest you get some rest. Alone, for a change, if you don't mind. So that you will be ready for your regular shift."

Sheranchuk did not linger to see how Kalychenko would reply. He turned and left the room.

He thought that probably Kalychenko wouldn't respond at all, in spite of the fact that his pale face was turning crimson and his scowl was ferocious. Sheranchuk sympathized with the operator. It was, after all, no business of the Personnel man's if Kalychenko was anticipating the privileges of marriage before the actual ceremony with one of the town girls.

The question was not so much where Kalychenko slept as whether Khrenov slept at all. Sheranchuk knew the man had been there at six that morning. He seemed always to be in the plant somewhere. Did he have a home? Did he sleep there? Did he, perhaps, have a cot in his office, and take short naps there from time to time, emerging to patrol the plant with those eyes that missed nothing?

That was a possibility, but no one outside the First Department was likely to know it. With any other boss, there would be a secretary or a file clerk to whisper the boss's secrets to some other secretary, and thus it would become common gossip in the plant.

Not with Khrenov.

Khrenov was First Department. It was called "Personnel and Security," but what it was, of course, was the organs of the state. The secretary to Gorodot Khrenov would not whisper to anybody, but if a whisper of any kind came to her ear, Khrenov would certainly hear it within the hour, and by the next morning it would be on a piece of paper in a dossier in a file in Dzerzhinskaya Square, Moscow.

As Sheranchuk left the reactor building, jamming into his pocket the list of parts to be checked, he was surprised to see lights on the top floor of the office block. That was where the special reception rooms for important functions were located— most of all the dining room for ceremonial occasions. It could mean only one thing, Sheranchuk thought as he showed his pass to the guard at the plant gate. The observers for the experiment had not gone away after all. The Chief Engineer was stuck with the job of feeding them dinner, and keeping them somehow entertained until, presumably, the weekend was over and Reactor No. 4 could at last be shut down for the experiment they had come to watch.

He put the visitors out of his mind. Entertaining visiting dignitaries was not among his concerns. Sheranchuk's concerns were pipes, pumps and valves that circulated water in the Chernobyl Power Station.

There was that much truth to the friendly nickname Smin had given him. Sheranchuk's principal responsibility was plumbing. That is to say, almost everywhere that water flowed in the plant, Sheranchuk was in charge. He did not trouble himself with whatever water flowed in the baths and the toilets and the kitchens; he had assistants to deal with such minor things, and already he had made them understand that they would regret any complaints he received on any such score. Sheranchuk's direct concern was the waters that circulated in and around the generators and the cores. There were two main systems, kept quite separate.

One was the flow of water into the plant from the cooling pond at its border: that water was pumped in to condense the steam once it had left the turbines and was pumped out again, now a little warmer, back into the outside pond; there were not many problems with that. The other circuit was more complex and more critical. Its water came out of the condensing tank and was forced by mighty pumps into the plenum under the reactor core and thence up via hundreds of narrow pipes through the graphite and uranium of the core itself. There the heat of the nuclear reaction flashed it into steam. As steam the pipes converged into drying tanks, where the droplets of water were purged out of the steam, and thence used to turn the huge turbines themselves.

Thereafter the spent and cooler (but still very hot) steam entered the condensation tanks, where the looped pipes from the cooling pond turned it back into liquid water. Not one molecule of that water ever reached the outside world. That system was completely closed — and a good thing for everyone nearby, since in their passage through the core those molecules of water dissolved out particles of metals from the pipes, and many of those particles were radioactive. Only the radioactively clean waters from the sealed cooling circuit went back into the pond — and sometimes, when it overflowed in spring thaws and autumn rains, into the Pripyat River and the drinking-water supplies for millions of Ukrainians as far south as the city of Kiev.

Sheranchuk's responsibilities ended with the circulating water systems. His concerns, however, did not. He took Deputy Director Simyon Smin as his model, and what Sheranchuk did was what he thought Smin would have done in the same circumstances.

For Sheranchuk admired the Deputy Director more than any other man alive. It was not only that he owed Smin gratitude for rescuing him from a dead-end job on a peat-burning power plant almost at the end of its life. Watching Smin, he had seen how a skillful and determined man could overcome all obstacles and find a way around all problems to make this complicated network of systems called the "Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station" fulfill its obligations. He had learned a lot from Smin, and not the least thing he had learned was that the whole plant was the concern of everyone who worked in it.

It was a fact of life with the RBMK-1000 reactor that it was given to fluctuations in its power output. When they happened, they needed to be controlled. There were three basic ways of doing that. One was to thrust into the mass of uranium and graphite that was the core of the reactor rods of a metal that would soak up neutrons and slow down the reaction. That was the classic, time-honored way. More than forty years before, Enrico Fermi had controlled his first ever nuclear pile in Chicago in just that manner. Another was simply to flood the reactor with additional water to slow it down, or cut down the flow to speed it up; water, too, soaked up neutrons, and the more of it that was present, the fewer atoms would be fractured to release the heat that made the steam.

The third method was more subtle. Inside the thick containment shell of the RBMK, the graphite bricks, fuel rods, and water pipes that comprised the reactor itself were surrounded by an artificial atmosphere composed of two gases, helium and nitrogen. This was done for two reasons. One was that the helium-nitrogen mixture kept out the oxygen of the air, and therefore the hot graphite bricks could not catch fire. The other reason was part of the control system. The gases did not conduct heat in the same degree, so that by adding one or the other, the heat transfer capacity of that atmosphere could be changed, up or down as desired; the reactor would obediently run a little hotter or a little colder, and so the small glitches in performance could be smoothed out.

Usually.

Of course, no human being could watch the instrument readings carefully enough and calculate the necessary measures fast enough to take the right action every time.

It is the same with modern, high-performance aircraft. If the pilot takes his hands off the controls of a conventional light plane, the thing will continue to fly itself reasonably well, for a while at least. If he takes his hands off the controls of a modern fighter, it will crash. Even if he stays on the controls, he can't fly the plane by himself. That is simply not possible. Too many things must be done too rapidly, and the human brain doesn't work fast enough to do the job. A computer flies the plane, the pilot only tells the computer what he wants it to do.

It was the same with the RBMK. The human operators only told the cybernetic system what they wanted. The built-in computers dealt with the moment-by-moment fluctuations. The operators could read the instruments, and they were wonderfully sensitive devices, most of them imported at vast expense from Western suppliers, but in any emergency the instant responses would have to come from the computers — which meant, really, that they were the ones upon whom the performance of the entire immense complex depended. Many others could help to make it succeed. But it was only they, and the handful of operators in the control room itself, who could, at any moment, make it catastrophically fail.