The untold story of the disaster at the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant Lenin

In their 1992 book Ecocide in the USSR, Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr. stated that “no other industrial civilization has poisoned its land, air and people so systematically and for so long”. A well-known example of the precarious and dangerous state of environmental protection in the USSR is the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986. The nuclear disaster revolved around reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. What most probably do not know is that this nuclear power plant proudly bore the official name of the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant (Чернобыльская АЭС им. В. И. енина) in honor of the founder of the communist state. It was only after the accident that Chernobyl became a synonym for the general “dangers” of nuclear energy and not for the environmental dangers rampant in socialism.

In his final, 560-page work, Midnight in Chernobyl, British journalist and author Adam Higginbotham shows that the world’s greatest nuclear disaster was a direct result of endemic problems at almost every level of the Soviet economic system. This fact is clear from the moment the construction of the facility begins. “The most important mechanical parts and building materials were often late or not at all, and those that did were often defective,” writes Higginbotham. “Steel and zirconium – essential for the miles of tubes and hundreds of fuel assemblies that would run through the heart of the huge reactors – were both in short supply; Pipelines and reinforced concrete for nuclear use often turned out to be so poorly made that they had to be thrown away. “

The roof of the turbine hall of the power plant was covered with easily flammable bitumen, although this was against the regulations. The reason: the more flame retardant material that was supposed to be used wasn’t even made in the USSR. The concrete was broken and the workers lacked power tools – a team of KGB agents and informants at the plant reported a constant string of construction defects. When the plant’s fourth reactor was about to be completed, a time-consuming safety test on the block turbines had not yet been completed by the Moscow completion date on the last day of December 1983.

Investigations in the Soviet Union after the accident confirmed that the RBMK reactor type did not meet modern safety standards and that it should never have operated beyond the borders of the USSR before the accident. “The accident was inevitable. . . . If it hadn’t happened here and now, it would have happened elsewhere, ”admitted the Prime Minister of the USSR Nikolai Ryzhkov.

The Soviet authorities first tried to cover up the full extent of the accident, just as they had covered up a long chain of previous accidents in nuclear power plants. As one of the twelve founding members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Soviet Union has had an obligation since 1957 to report every nuclear accident within its borders. Nonetheless, none of the dozen dangerous accidents that occurred in Soviet nuclear facilities in the decades that followed were ever mentioned to the IAEA. “For nearly thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR had the safest nuclear industry in the world,” notes Higginbotham. In contrast, the comparatively harmless accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979 was used by Soviet officials as an example of how unsafe nuclear power plants are under capitalism.

After the accident at the Vladimir Lenin nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Soviet officials maintained the cover-up, claiming that the cause of the disaster was nothing more than human error. In a high-profile show trial, some employees of the power plant were convicted. When one of the defendants, Anatoly Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer of the nuclear power plant, put twenty-four written questions that he put to the experts at the trial about the specifications of the reactor and whether it complied with the regulations of the USSR State Committee on Nuclear Safety, the judge simply asked the questions without further ado Declaration declared inadmissible.

Valery Legasov, deputy director of the Soviet Atomic Energy Institute, finally concluded that Legasov blamed “the profound failure of the Soviet social experiment, and not just a handful of ruthless reactor operators” for the disaster. ”In an interview with the literary magazine Novy Mir, he warned that another Chernobyl disaster could happen at any other RMBK nuclear power plant in the USSR.

The expert, plagued by illness and desperation about what had happened, who had dealt more intensively with the accident and its causes than probably anyone else, recorded his memoirs on tape shortly after his death in Pravda.It was the culmination of Mikhail Gorbachev’s freedoms Glasnost, granted to editors of the party-controlled media in early 1986, was developed in the USSR over many decades, ”Legasov says in the September 1988 article. “It is my duty to say this.”

The causes were so ingrained in the structure of the planned economic system that efforts by Soviet politicians and scientists to change things after the disaster were unsuccessful. An internal report to the Central Committee of the CPSU, drawn up a year after the Chernobyl accident, found that in the twelve months since the disaster, 320 equipment failures had occurred in Soviet nuclear power plants, 160 of which resulted in emergency reactor shutdowns. All this – like the numerous previous accidents – was kept quiet.

Adam Higginbotham, Chernobyl Midnight: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster.

Rainer Zitelmann is a German historian and sociologist.

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