This is only a specific example. This resulted in a considerable reduction of radioactivity spreading from reactor number 4 to a wider area. Many young people arrived. So this issue was somewhat resolved. The worm of doubt gnawed at me because, in my professional area, I felt that I should always do things differently. He was not in Moscow at the time but in another region where he was leading a Communist party asset meeting. This colossal task was organized; even now it is hard to imagine how. This is how the idea of channel type RBMK reactor with graphite blocks, etc came about. But they went in the direction of increasing the coastdown time of the turbine, when, at this time, there already were diesel generators that could output at the required electrotechnical levels two to three times quicker than those installed at the Chernobyl station. The same is with Velikhov, for example. It simply shocked me. I was shocked by the speed and scale at which all the needed materials were delivered to fulfill this operation. Unfortunately, the place where the iron shot was kept had been affected by the initial outburst of radioactive particles and was contaminated, rendering it completely unusable. The Chief Designer, not wanting to do, so to say, quick, additional work, was in no hurry to change the Protection Control System. Valery Alekseyevich Legasov ( Russian: ; 1 September 1936 - 27 April 1988) was a Soviet and Russian inorganic chemist and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Yes, and I also wanted to talk about the administrative systems. When I arrived there for the first time, I witnessed a grim scene because the first proper dosimetric posts were set up there. So this was indeed true, but nevertheless Anatoly Petrovich insisted that Kokoshin must write an article refuting these views. I remember the time when the Government Commission was still in Pripyat, we didnt have enough respirators, personal dosimeters called TLDs, and even somewhat reliable pencil dosimeters, that would show some measurements. From talks, from documents, I knew that the original position was this. First of all, start the design of the covering that would later come to be called the sarcophagus. Some personal impressions of the time . This was during Silayevs time when he has already arrived. Legasov: which exist. He always listened to our scientific discussionswhat we would talk about, what we would needand reacted instantly. Legasov: He was not there. Firstly, the 3rd block was ordered to shut down. There was a break at 12 oclock as I remember it now. Only it should have happened, in my opinion, not at Chernobyl but at the Kola station, and a few years earlier; when it was discovered that in the main pipeline that carries the coolant, the welder, to get a bonus and to finish faster, just put electrodes inside and lightly welded them on top instead of welding the valve in the most critical spot. And then, from the position of Vladimir Mikhailovich Novikov, state that the level of device that we currently have is probably sufficient to ensure that Chernobyl does not happen again. This is the level of document preparation for a facility as serious as a nuclear station. So Ivan Stepanovich Silayev had to tackle all these issues. So on the same day at 4 p.m., I flew out of Chkalovsk and once again arrived at Chernobyl where I continued my work. Such and such things have been implemented. The decision has been made and what can we say about it now. But nevertheless, they were minimized thanks to the actions of the military centre, that worked in collaboration with scientific organisations of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Nuclear Energy and Kiev research organisations. Then, Shcherbina, after returning from there, smashed his deputation badge with a hammer before our own eyes. Because we needed that information immediately, a first attempt to measure the gamma and neutron fields was made. But the iron shot that we found at the station was contaminated with radioactivity. Not only were the decontamination tasks performed incredibly quickly, the construction of the new residential villages, where the evacuees were moved, was also incredibly quick. Was Shcherbina calling Moscow with you? Since we were late by 10 years in the development of nuclear energy, Adamovich: [CLARIFICATION ON FEINBERG'S LAST NAME]. The operators had tried to cool it down, but unfortunately, two people had already been killed. It was necessary to immediately work on zone-wise decontamination, following the guideline of going from the most contaminated areas to the less contaminated ones. And this part is tragic, confusing and incomprehensible. All this had a reassuring effect. This is what led them, and directed their actions. Science, like art, does not tolerate intermediate links. It began quite successfully. Nevertheless, various organisations were doing such things, creating such projects for an external shell that, if installed, would only complicate subsequent work on the construction of the shelter, and would not have had any effect on the release of aerosol radiation. Speaking of such impressions, of such observations, I cannot leave unsaid that on the very first day of my stay at Chernobyl, I was struck by two things. Moreover, the designer to this day If the designers of the RBMK reactor or my colleagues from my own institute heard me now, they would tear me to pieces because they think that I dont understand the philosophy of safety. This is why the firefighters' actions were not only heroic but also very professional, thoughtful and correct. But preparing proposals on what to do fell on my shoulders. This also was visible at the stations. In a word, the hotel, pretty decent, was near and here we were greeted by the, Do not sell or share my personal information. ", "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", " - .. Watch all. For example, the head of the district executive committee, Plyushch, had to make preparations for the evacuation. During this break, Slavskys First Deputy, Meshkov Alexander Grigorievich, his First Deputy who was later fired because of this accident. But even DT-5 was not there in sufficient quantities when we arrived. What is the real situation there? In response to this, I outlined the situation for him; that basicallyas it was after the 2nd of May; the call was around the 4th or 5th of Maythe radiation emissions from the destroyed block have ceased, and the situation is currently under control. On the other hand, the materials that needed testing were sent to the departments of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. That was one group of tasks. As we were carrying out these operations to stabilise the temperature and create the filter layer, Boris Veneaminovich Gidaspov, a member of the Science Academy who had come to help the scientists that worked there (this was later, around the 10th of May), proposed an operation to suppress dust formation. Preferably information obtained from multiple sources and there were cases when the military had provided information that was different from what the civil services had given. It was, of course, not because we were taking part in liquidation of the consequences of such a tragic event. But this is not for publication yet because they will take both your and my head off; mine first and then yours. The Legasov Tapes Featured August 16, 2019 Tape 1 side A Aym96/Wikimedia In all my life, it never occurred to me that I would have to start this part of my life. I must say that all physicists, especially Viktor Alekseevich Sidorenko, felt that the conditions would only change for the worse, and insisted on the mandatory evacuation. Legasov: Check that. Had the philosophy of safety been correct, then our experts would have, without a doubt, found technical solutions conforming to this philosophy. And this value is already quite controllable and allows, with proper fast protection devices, to manage any processes. I tried to explain to him that there was no possibility of dropping iron shot because of the reasons I mentioned earlier. For example, dolomite. The information was not enough, we were, preparing for some unusual work and therefore the, with long pauses and, in general, everyone was in suspense and each of us, Remembering this road now, I must say that it never occurred to me then that we, are moving to meet an event of a planetary scale, an event that will probably go, down in the history of mankind like the eruption of famous volcanoes, for, example, the death of people in Pompeii or that do not be close to this. But not everyone is in a hurry. I understood, I must tell you honestly, that I understood that the city was being evacuated permanently. It is now sometimes said that many of those firemen received needlessly high radiation doses, because they were stationed in various places to monitor the situation and prevent the appearance of new fires. There were 2500 tonnes of graphite in the fourth block, so the mass could continue to burn for 240 hours, accumulating radioactivity that could potentially contaminate a lot of territory through the spreading of the smoke. They told me about their complete helplessness. Therefore, the fewer nuclear power plants and the more coal and oil ones we have, the higher the radioactive pollution will be under normal circumstances. 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. In this context, I want to state an opinion, of which I am fully convinced, but which, unfortunately, is not shared by my colleagues, and leads to friction between us, sometimes quite dramatically. Legasov is portrayed by Ade Edmondson in the BBC docudrama Surviving Disaster (2006), by Adam Curtis in his documentary series Pandora's Box (1992), and by Jared Harris in the Sky/HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019). Lev Alekseyevich Voronin, who was in charge of the GC at that time, quickly understood me. The number of people staying at the site was increasing day by day because each group required new assistants, who came either with devices, or with documents, or with work tools that were needed to perform a task. Everything, was, of course, changed, but unfortunately, these things did happen. A temperature at which a vapour-zirconium reaction could begin, accompanied by the generation of hydrogen was, in principle, unacceptable, be it routine work or technical conditions. A lot of dams was constructed, dykes, that were meant to hold the contaminated debris, foliage and all that had contaminated the surface of the water and prevent radioactivity from spreading along the Pripyat and the Dnieper. This internal contamination had happened because of the ventilation intake. All this was delivered to relatively dirty rooms, and was prepared for eating in the same place with bare hands. Legasov: Well, how should I put this. Yu. This fact should be noted. Legasov: He remained there, buried in the sarcophagus, while the second one did actually die from chemical burns because a fire broke out in an area. Additionally, Celites were added into the bodies of damsCelites, shipped from Armenia and Georgia, had a high sorption capacityto capture all the microparticles and all the components of radioactive elements that were in the water and to prevent them from spreading further. On the other hand, people were contaminated; and their things were contaminated. Soon after, the working quarters were organized. A storm of indignation. They had an accident worse than this but everything remained inside the containment. He was in shock all of the time. And when Nikolai Ivanovich Rizhkov in a politburo meeting spoke his words about how nuclear energy was inevitably moving towards a grave accident, immediately all these facts, accumulated over many years, somehow aligned in my mind, and his words highlighted that it really was so. Adamovich: Another thing is that Sakharov came [Unclear]. The ministerial cadres grew up and acquired their own extensive engineering experience. This was quite unexpected. But the fight against these dangers was being fought on a case-by-case basis. At 11 a.m., we were officially informed that the whole city would be evacuated by 2 p.m.. All the transport had been gathered; all the routes had been identified; and at around 2-2:30 p.m. the entire city was empty. Sometime around the 9th of May, it seemed to us that reactor number 4 had stopped living, breathing, burning. So as to not limit the plans to introduce new nuclear power capacities and considering the overload of the machine building industry, create a parallel branch in nuclear energy that would allow building sufficiently powerful reactors without using the shell concept, without burdening the machine building industry with the complex technology for manufacturing highly reliable reactor shells that are required for VVER reactors. This is why I am such a confusing figure; because, on the one hand, I know the questions of safety in their overall philosophical form, how they should be posed and solved, I know the nuclear fuel cycle and its external parts, and [on the other hand] I was an observer of the reactor saga. Until such time as something was being thrown out of reactor number 4, redundant projects kept appearing, like creating a sort of a skull cap over reactor number 4. It was used for such cases when, say, key decisions were taken like whether to make the RBMK 1500, or whether to introduce a heat exchange intensifier to this reactor. A few hours later, we got to Chernobyl. After all this study and based upon our conclusion, 2,400 tons of lead were dropped by helicopters, with high precision and great skill. The work was like a well organized science team. He discovered. The visible light, reflected in the sky, was the glow of hot graphite - that is how powerful it was. So you can calculate. This was obvious and Komsomol themselves wrote many papers about it. But, money being limited, no investments were made for 10 years. I liked him from the very beginning. The water would immediately evaporate, leaving pure ammonium nitrate. So after it became clear that casualties of this accident were like hundreds of people, while tens were heavily injured and all the rest were curable - our main problem was to make sure the population safety around the Dnieper basin. But as is evident from the Chernobyl disaster, this organisational superstructure couldnt actually improve the state of the nuclear energy industry because its authority was not defined properly. It would melt there, absorb the heat and also act as a protective shield to some extent. As soon as we start to actively use the Kansk-Achinsk basin, we will start to saturate our own lungs with radioactive dust along the roads on which this coal is shipped and also when we burn it. The second one. This was the period when we dropped the vast bulk of our decided-upon materials into the reactor. This text is for comrade Novikov Vladimir Mikhailovich, Dyomin Vladimir Fyodorovich and Sukhoruchkin Vladimir Konstantinovich. Before conducting the experiments, there were no simulations of possible situations, that is the situations were not walked throughwhat will happen if there is a protection malfunction; what will happen if the process does not execute as planned; how should the staff react in one situation or the other; can the reactor be left running when the steam supply to the turbine is stopped; and if this is done, what could happen; what will happen if the main circulation pumps are switched on. The levels of radioactivity in that water were quite high, up to a curie per litre in some places and at certain points in time. But the most demoralizing part, which makes one worried and sick, is that the measures needed are known. But how they did it, how they made it happen, I still cannot imagine because I only know the result of their work. But the refueling itself took only 18-19 days, while for us it takes around a month and a half, and upto two months at times. But the growth was not qualitative but quantitative. When I looked at this device, I was confused by, for example, an unusual and, in my opinion, insufficient construction of safety systems, that would work in extreme situations. He wasn't threatened or bullied by the KGB, he wasn't thrown out of his office or anythin. During the flight, our conversation was nervous. Because it is a chain that links to itself allowing operation of stations without an external localisation shelter. 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. This work was very meticulously organized. Punishing the direct culprits of this disaster is correct because the actions did not meet regulatory requirements and showed inconsistency with the job requirements of the people who were acting in this situation. Vehicle decontamination sites had to be organized and it had to be ascertained if they could even be fully decontaminated . The operative group held regular meetings where it was reported to about the radiation levels at each measurement point, all the details about the tasks being performed. The third groupimplementers, not researchers; these were mostly the army divisions began decontaminating the rooms in the 1st and 2nd block, and also prepared for the construction of the sarcophagus, because the design was already in progress in Moscow. In other words, this issue was constantly under his control, as were all the other issues related to the Chernobyl accident. This general downfall of Soviet technology, the reasons for which can be discussed extensively and for a long time, it was simultaneously the beginning of Chernobyl. The 9th of May celebrations were ruined and we decided to drop another 80 tons of lead inside the crater. Legasov: I think, yes, from Sweden, but Im not sure. But Legasov's daughter claimed to Moskovskij Komsomolets. And each one accumulates experience and mistakes, and all of it belongs to all humankind. Judging by the quantity and dynamics of the radioactive exhaust from reactor number 4 our actions were quite effective. Unfortunately, there was no local broadcasting network to announce this. Work was the man, almost the only meaning of his life. The responsibilities were distributed in such a way that everything that was outside of the 30-kilometre zone was controlled both from the air and from the ground by the Goskomgidromet [State Committee on Hydrometeorology] led by member-correspondent Yury Antonovich Izrael. Their actions were rational. That is why the calculations had to be very precise accounting for all the measures that were taken. That was it. All the effort of decontaminators needed to be focussed on fully normalizing the conditions in the 3rd block and also on cleaning the construction base. This had to be changed on the go. We also spotted an increase in radiation levels in Kiev and other cities which were quite some distance away from Chernobyl. And here, an unpleasant moment occurred. He was very angry with, say, Makuhin, the First Deputy Minister of Energy and Electrification, who, it seemed to him, was working slowly; and he even made a quick decision to fire him. Like the original translation, this version of the text, in whatever shape it currently appears, is published under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. He had arrived and then unexpectedly Eugeny Pavlovich Velikhov appeared in this group, I dont even know on which command. These problems were what we were worried about. And local authorities were a part of the Government Commission. Perhaps it was not Sweden. He already knew about the disaster and that they had received a very serious alarm signal from the station the night before. Were there conversations between Shcherbina and Gorbachev? That is because Iodine fell out first. These solutions were meant to bond the dust particles together, but at the same time let moisture through, thus allowing the subsoil to exist normally. Where did this come from? Given that there are 2,400 tons, the burning would have continued for 2,400 hours. The fact is that, as you know, the Soviet Union was the founder of nuclear energy. Well, so as to not use [TAPE ERASED]. On the contrary, I myself went to the dangerous areas of the 4th reactor building several times, to clarify reconnaissance data or to estimate the amount of work remaining for certain operations, and always had to take soldiers with me for help. This was a difficult task which was fulfilled heroically by the station personnel. And the cavalcade of black cars, Chaikas and others, that were going there also reflected how little we knew and understood that day. There was zero information; well, it only confirmed what had been obtained by other simpler and more reliable methods. Two people had died, others were in hospital and the radiation conditions in the station were rather complex. All this is what I say [will happen] unless the necessary measures are taken. New approaches were not welcomed. Sidorenko and I, when we had moved to Chernobyl after spending a week in Pripyat, went to a shopwe were supposed to be the expertsto buy ourselves at least something, new underpants, undershirts, shirts. [7] This resulted in huge resources being allocated to Chernobyl. the building of the city party committee, located in the central square of the city. What to do next? russell 2000 rebalancing. These tunnels were to be used to construct that concrete bed which had a cooling feature. He replied: Yes, you will stay here and continue your work. The level of document preparation for a facility as serious as a nuclear station speed scale! 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