Chernobyl

Chapter 8

A Saturday in the Soviet Union is not quite like a Saturday in London or New York. The Soviets do not work a five-day week. Schools are in session. The working force works. But a Saturday is still, after all, part of a weekend, even in the Soviet Union, and those who are in a position to get away for some relaxation generally do.

In Moscow this Saturday, for instance, the telephone rang from Chernobyl. The duty officer at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy heard the voice say, "This is Vitaly Varazin, Chief Engineer at the Chernobyl Power Station," and the officer exploded.

"At last! What has been going on? We had a call that there had been a serious accident, nothing more, and no one answers your telephones?"

"Yes," said Varazin, "Quite a nuisance that was. Communications have been interrupted because of a fire in a generating unit. But emergency crews responded at once."

What the duty officer responded was not quite audible. It was definitely obscene, for he had spent a nasty hour in the middle of the night trying to track down his superior. Unfortunately his superior had left the night before for his dacha at Peredelkino, and so the duty officer had been forced to act on his own. He groaned as he thought of what those actions had been. "The situation is under control, then?" he demanded. "Quite under control, yes."

"Then tell me something," the duty officer snarled."What are you going to do with the planeload of experts in the special commission that is even now on its way to Kiev?"

There was a pause on the line. "A special commission?" Varazin asked.

"Twenty-four people," the duty officer said grimly. "All woken up in the middle of the night on the basis of the first report from Chernobyl. Their plane left Moscow at six."

"I see," Varazin said faintly. The duty officer waited him out, drumming his fingers on the desktop.

"Well," Varazin said at last, "it was quite a serious fire, to be sure. Certainly we can use guidance from the Ministry."

"Certainly you are going to get it," snapped the duty officer, "because the first echelons will be helicoptered to your plant in the next hour or so."

"Thank you," said Varazin softly, and hung up.

His voice sounded unhappy to the duty officer, which gave the officer some satisfaction. Actually he was feeling much better. His worst fears were allayed, responsibility for the twenty-four man commission was off his back, and now he lifted the phone again and called off the search for his chief. It would be time enough to disturb the highest authorities, he decided, when the full report was in. And with any luck, he'd be off by then, anyway.

In Novosibirsk, at the headquarters of the All-Union Ministry of Power Plant Structures, they took the call more seriously — until they found that the Yemeni visitors had left before it happened. At least, they reassured one another, there had not been the embarrassment of seeing one of their plants wreck itself in the presence of three potential foreign customers.

In Kiev it was another matter. The load dispatcher was shocked. "Yes, all right, two of your units are damaged. Naturally they can't generate power — but, really, why must you shut the other two down as well? A precaution? Precautions are very good, but do you have any idea what sort of trouble that makes for me?" And when he hung up he was swearing; Chernobyl was the plant he could always count on, and where on a Saturday morning was he going to find three or four thousand megawatts of electrical power to replace it?

When the phone rang in the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna it might have caused more action, except that this particular call was not to give information but to ask for some.

The engineer on duty put down his cup of tea to answer the telephone. His caller had an accent, quickly explained when he said he was calling from the Soviet Ukraine. "Do you have information on controlling graphite fires in reactors?" he asked politely.

The duty engineer that morning happened to be an Englishman; he had no difficulty in understanding the question. "Do you mean the Windscale sort of thing? Yes, I think so. That was a Wigner-effect event." He paused to see if he would be required to explain the Wigner effect. The Wigner effect is a change that takes place in the molecular structure of graphite after long exposure to ionizing radiation. The molecular structure stores energy from the radiation. This has potential dangers, and so once a year graphite moderators of that sort must be "annealed" — which is to say, heated up suffi-ciendy that the molecular bonds slacken and relax when cooled. In England's Windscale in 1957 that heating got away from its operators, causing the graphite to burn and destroy the reactor.

"One moment," the Ukrainian said. There was a sound of muffled voices, and then the man came back on the line. "No, not in regard to the Wigner effect," he said. "I ask of control measures. Of ways for dealing with such an event if it should occur."

"You mean to ask how they put it out?" the Englishman said. "They simply kept drenching the thing with water. Diverted most of a river onto it, if I remember aright. Wait just a moment, I think we do have some documents in the file — shall I mail you a set?"

The voice on the phone disappeared again. When it returned it said politely, "No, thank you, we do not think that will be necessary."

The Englishman hung up, finished his tea, and examined the pot to see if there might be another blackened cup left. That, he thought, had been a curious call. He looked through his files to see what he could find about graphite-moderated reactors in the USSR. There were plenty of them, but nothing that seemed relevant to the call.

Still, he wanted to tell someone about it and so, after a moment's consideration, he picked up the telephone again and dialed a colleague in the United Kingdom. "What do you reckon they're up to?" he asked, after recounting the call.

The colleague yawned; he had been sleeping in on a rainy English weekend morning. "Russkies," he said, explaining everything. "You know what they like those graphite reactors for. The things are useful to make a little plutonium on the side. They don't want to know about controlling anything, in my opinion. They're simply hoping to find some better ways of increasing the yield."

"It could be that, I suppose," said the man in Vienna. "They've got a mass of those RBMKs going. I found a note from one of our masters, warning that the beasts were not entirely safe."

"That would be Marshall, I expert," said the one in London. That was Lord Walter Marshall, head of the United Kingdom's General Electricity Generating Board. "That was donkey's years ago, wasn't it?"

The engineer in Vienna said doubtfully, "You don't think I should report it to someone?"

"Report it to whom? And what is there to report? No," said the voice from England, "I'd forget it if I were you. It's what I'm going to do myself."