Chernobyl: a tragic story of human folly, courage, and dignity
I ran into this curious story yesterday on Hacker News, which immediately piqued my curiosity:
The “Elephant’s Foot”, seen in this picture, is radioactive lava from the 1986 Chernobyl accident, made of corium — a toxic mix of nuclear fuel, graphite, concrete, sand, and anything else that was in the way — supposedly the most toxic stuff on the planet. Why would anyone take a picture of himself near this stuff?
It turns out that the man who took the picture was Artur Korneyev. I will not recapitulate his story from Atlas Obscura, which has a nice explanation for the strange visual artifacts in the picture, but it is easy to see that he was a very brave man with a strong sense of duty, and had a dark sense of humor to back it up with. After years of exposure, he had developed cataracts (apparently one of those well-known deterministic effects of radiation, unlike the stochastic impact of cancer), and is now barred from entering Chernobyl anymore. Nevertheless, he still joked: “Soviet radiation is the best radiation in the world.”
This bring us to where he is now. Nobody in “The West” probably knows, but he was last interviewed in the New York Times about “The Arch,” which was an international collaboration designed to safely contain for the next 100 years the leaking and now dangerously decrepit concrete sarcophagus — built back in 1986 in order to contain the molten core of Reactor #4 — in exchange for the Ukranian government to shut down all reactors. Probably all of us are aware that some radiation had leaked into and got carried by the atmosphere, but most of it is underground, and may be at risk of contaminating underground water supply.
While learning voraciously about all of this, I ran into the YouTube channel of this very intelligent yet crazy woman who has taken videos of herself visiting the Chernobyl incident over and over again, even to the point of getting bitten by radioactive ants, and explaining why she was not “insane” to have eaten apples from the area.
The saddest documentary I have yet watched on the subject is simply called “Chernobyl.3828,” produced by the Ukranian government, and which tells the story of the extremely brave 3,828 largely unknown soldiers who had to manually clean up extremely dangerous radioactive debris from the hole in the roof of Reactor #4, with its glowing core visible from helicopters which had dumped materials over many days to try to contain the radiation. There are too many sad stories in there for me to recount here, and I will let you watch the documentary, but I learned that the 3rd most serious nuclear accident was hidden at its time.
It was sadly an accident that resulted from the combination of unsafe engineering and an unsafe operating culture, one that could probably have been avoided. I can’t remember where I read this, but apparently Gorbachev learned about the seriousness of the accident from the Swedish who had picked up the radiation, and he was very angry at his subordinates for hiding this from him. Also, as recounted in “Chernobyl.3828,” when the Russians had ordered a robot from the Germans to help with the cleanup, a few people had lied about the true radiation levels, causing the robot to fail almost immediately even after a few soldiers had braved exposure to radiation after trying to dislodge it when it was stuck on the rooftop of Reactor #4.
I had read about Chernobyl when I was a child, often accompanied by horrifying pictures of the devastating effects of radiation on other children. Now I understand better what had led up to it, and how thousands of brave Russians had volunteered, for better or worse, to clean up after the mistakes of others at the risk of their own lives. Many rescuers had died slow, agonizing deaths, and it is unknown to this day exactly how many civilians also paid the price. God bless those souls, and we will honor them only by learning from this mistake, and never allowing it to happen again.
