Some stayed in the villages they were evacuated to, others immediately got tickets and went to their relatives. For areas with higher temperatures that were located lower, we needed to deliver the metal, but then it would generate additional energy because of overoxidation. It was all tangled up. Like scarecrows all of them were hung. Part of fuel can get into the barboteurs, be it lower or upper one and we did not know at that time whether there was water or not. Many young people arrived. An unexpected problem occurred with, for example, specimens lowered into the Finnish station Loviisa. And so the design of the new city of Slavutych began; the city that would replace Pripyat as the permanent residence for the power engineers. This is the level of document preparation for a facility as serious as a nuclear station. At points, he would pause to criticize a chairman or a specialist for higher rates of workplace injuries, or poor financial performances, or for improper executions of technical operations within our ministry. What they collected, what was published, of course, is of tremendous importance from a historical and archival point of view as live documentary material. From these telegrams, I immediately realised that no one [in the world] was prepared for this kind of accident. So they directed all their efforts towards harmonizing these speeds to make a dry channel. The next operation was applying a special layer to the already-cleared ground and concreting it. He had arrived and then unexpectedly Eugeny Pavlovich Velikhov appeared in this group, I dont even know on which command. They lost 17 people there, the Americans. Legasov: Hope this isnt confusing to you. But this reactor was not considered bad because of safety reasons. On the roofs of the engine room and on station territory graphite blocks were scattered, some intact and some in pieces. But, in practice, the effort to put this needle in the right place from a helicopter was huge; and nearly no information was received from it. This was evidence that the temperatures were still high there. Completely. But resources in the form of buildings, staff, funding allocated to this field were certainly not comparable to the money that went to. Since when has this mistake begun to be corrected? With the same . The meaning. Then I was called to the Politburo meeting on the 5th of May. But here, suddenly, there was a crimson glow in half the sky and white smoke streaming out of the reactor. It was clear that the firemen who had extinguished the fires in the engine room had done it very quickly and professionally. For example, a scientific supervisor for aviation. Here, the measure of our ignorance, the measure of our misunderstanding of what had happened was expressed in such instances. But there was a nagging sense of anxiety. It has become clear now that none of the almost 50,000 civilians of Pripyat, that were not at the station after the accident, had received any considerable amount of radiation. Comrade Voronin was replaced by Yury Nikitich Maslyukov, and during his time a lot of work was done to build new premises, new villages for the evacuees. And at that moment, Mikhail Sergeyevich asked me to write a personal letter to him. And then stopped the development of nuclear energy. Ofcourse, water contamination measurements were carried out constantly. really knew about the accident, informed me that an alarming a serious signal, encrypted according to the order established in, In this case, there was a signal of 1; 2; 3; 4, which meant that the station, had a situation with nuclear danger; radiation hazard; fire danger; and an. Legasov: But after the 2nd of May, there were traces of a glow a few times in some spots. Tape 1 A Deeper Dive A Deeper Dive Legasov also describes how stress he was on the way to Chernobyl and how tense the Tape 2. I was struck by the time this station put into carrying out a refueling. There, led by Liashko, the head of the Ukrainian Government, was a huge crowd of black limousines. 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. in Law, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Graduated 2022) 3 y Related Especially after I saw the Loviisa station in Finland which was built according to our principles; it was basically our station. But some simple, repetitive tasks could have been done by small crewless, radio-controlled aircrafts. First of all, start the design of the covering that would later come to be called the sarcophagus. Legasov: Well, how should I put this. [5] During 1953, he proposed reforms to the Komsomol committee to address what he perceived as indifference and passivity of its members. Adamovich: And he was not there on the 26th? 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. It was Ivan Silayev who introduced the system of monetary rewards for doing the most dangerous tasks. [5] Legasov was not religious but very interested in religious history and heritage. Overall, the situation was getting so complicated that it became clear that the scale of the operation had to be increased. A number of technological instruments had been replaced with either Swedish or their own, and ours had been taken out of operation. General Berdov led this work, and also organized the task of informing the public so that they dont come out of their houses. There is a lot of confusion in the international press, for example, that Velikhov was measuring something on the roofs around the 26th, Evgeny Pavlovich [Velikhov]. The ministerial cadres grew up and acquired their own extensive engineering experience. Any pause in the subsequent construction of the sarcophagus was frequently interpreted as some sort of catastrophe, as a collapse of some structure, as the appearance of new emissions, or as proof that the reactor is suddenly working again, etc. The graphite started burning, Adamovich: [Inaudible] judging by these notes that I, Legasov: The graphite started burning around the 26th or 27th, Adamovich: No, hold on. On the whole, this extraordinary situationnot a trivial situation, a tragic situation, a difficult situation of immense magnitudehas shown that it requires not only the mobilisation of considerable communication resources, but also a very creative and skilful use of these resources, to ensure that the population receives information in the needed sequence and quantity, who can refer to the information with complete confidence, and most importantly, be able to use this information for practical purposes; or to indicate when to worry, and conversely, when to stay calm so that it is quite regular and not sudden. And you, chemists, are now making him almost a great martyr And in Chernobyl he screwed up enough - the shelter of the fourth unit turned out to be far from optimal. And so I and the Government Commission had to take these decisions, come up with the action plan, get a clear understanding of the situation. [7] Legasov and Anatoly Alexandrov described the meltdown scenarios, and Legasov agreed with the plan to tunnel under the reactor to provide cooling. [14] At some stage, Legasov experienced face injuries and minor scarring as a result of chemical experimentation. The question arose about what to do with the 5th and 6th blocks. But the operational staff there is considerably smaller than in our stations. But, since the world understands that maximally does not mean 100 per cent and that there is always a chance of a technical component failing, even the most reliable one, or of a person doing something, by malice or ignorance or by accident, the third element is introduced. This all had some psychological effect on Ivan Stepanovich Silaev and he authorized the works. Although the power plant is called Chernobyl Station, it is situated 18 kilometres away from this regional city. [7] Legasov reassured Gorbachev by phone that scale of contamination was understood and the reactor was not a continuing threat to other countries. It would be an organisation that would be responsible for the developmental strategy of aviation. In particular, the corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Viktor Alekseyevich Sidorenko in his doctoral thesis, and later in his book based on this doctoral thesis, was proving by all means available to him at the time, that containments were necessary. I also remembered the Ministry with its strange concerns. However, his effort was mainly directed towards managing these situations: firstly, by organisational means; secondly, by a system for improving the documentation that must be at stations and with the designer; thirdly, he was quite concerned about creating supervisory bodies that would control the situation. The question arose that there are no cases, nuclear energy has to be developed, and then comrade Slavsky, the Minister of Medium Machine Building comes up with a proposal, in parallel with the VVER reactors, Adamovich: [QUESTION INTERRUPTS THE NARRATION ASKING TO EXPLAIN THE VVER ABBREVIATION AND DIFFERENCES FROM RBMK]. Hello people! I was able to organize systematic studies related to the types of stations that should be built, their intended purpose, how they should be used wisely, whether they should only produce electricity or other energy sources [as well], in particular, hydrogen. He demanded military acceptance; he demanded an improvement in the quality of equipment and so on. All the power and all the responsibility must be in the same hands. He left without punishment, so to say. And the caesium emissions that caused so much trouble in Belorussia, they were forming up until the 22nd, maybe even the 23rd of May. There will be a major chemical accident in Dzerzhinsk. On April 26th, 1986, a nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl power plant rocked the area near the Ukrainian town of Pripyat, spreading giant clouds of radioactive material across 77,000 square miles of land. What to do next? Different techniques for the artificial absorption of radionuclides on surfaces were tested. Anyway, I called the experts with the drawings of the reactor and all the information that could be gathered. This is how the ideology of RBMK reactor appeared. Of course there was no basis whatsoever to carry out such a work because we more or less knew where most of the radioactivity was distributed around each reactor zone. This was sort of the main task in that period. We would need around 2000 tons of lead to be dropped into the crater of the reactor. And so the main purpose of our actions boiled down to not reaching 2,500 degrees. Because his laboratory was a kind of cell that posed questions and formulated them physically; while the answers to these questions were given by specialists, not only from the various departments of the Institute but also from different institutes. 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. But two weeks later, it happens in America, a phosphorous accident in two weeks. The Government Commission worked from Pripyat for the first few days. I left the meeting immediately, called for a car and went to my university to find someone from the reactor team. Somewhere in the middle of 1987, in the summer of 1987, finally appeared robots made by our own Soviet hands. And didnt go near that Three Mile Island station for three years. 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