Anyway there is reference made to recordings made by the chief scientist who oversaw the disaster mitigation, Valery Legasov. I was looking for the recordings he is said to have made, and only found them in russian which of course I don't speak. So I copied it through Google Translate, and here is the result. They come from this site http://samlib.ru/p/panchenko_g/kassetylegasowa.shtml , which according to this source is an *abridged* transcript from Pravda. Here it is thanks to Google Translate, and due to it's 5000 character translation limit, I've put the pipes symbol '|' where there is a "seam" between consecutive translations so that it's clear.
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Valery Alekseevich Legasov: "About the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant"
Valery Alekseevich Legasov
About the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
annotation
The text of the five cassette tapes, dictated by Academician Legasovym V.A.
Valery Alekseevich Legasov
About the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
Academician V. Legasov
(text from cassette N1)
All the same, all my life I did not think that I would have to, at least at the age at which I am now, having just survived my fiftieth anniversary, turn to essentially a memoir of some part, and a part of it is tragic, in many respects confusing and incomprehensible.
But such events happened, of such scale and such participation of people of conflicting interests, mistakes and victories, successes and failures, and there are so many different interpretations here because what happened and how it happened, then, to some extent, my duty to say what I know As I understand, I saw the events taking place.
April 26, 1986 was a Saturday, a beautiful day, I wondered if I should go to my department in the University in order to finish it for the department, but I could not care for everything and go with Margarita Mikhailovna, my wife and friend, to rest where not, or go to the party economic asset, which is scheduled for ten in the morning in the Ministry, which owns the Institute of Atomic Energy. Kurchatov?
But, naturally, according to my character’s attitude, by a long-term habit of upbringing, I called the car and drove to the party economic asset.
Before it began, I heard that at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant there was some kind of unpleasant accident. This was reported to me by the head of the 16th Main Directorate, Nikolai Ivanovich ERMAKOV. Owned under this Head and this man was our Institute.
He reported this as calmly enough, albeit with vexation.
The report of Minister of SLAVSKY Efim Pavlovich began. The report was, frankly, boring, standard. We are all accustomed to the fact that this elderly, but demagogically very active and actively loud confident voice for an hour sets out how our department is wonderful and beautiful. All indicators are good in his presentation: the most good state farms, the most good enterprises, all the planned tasks we carry out, well, in general it all had the character of such triumphant reports.
At certain points that deserved it, he stopped and scolded some of the managers, specialists, either for the fact that there was a high injury rate somewhere, or for some financial omissions, or for some specific, technically not precise operation carried out in a particular place. of our ministry.
As always, this time, singing the hymn to the nuclear power industry, great success in building which was achieved, he quickly said that now, however, there was an accident in Chernobyl.
The Chernobyl station belonged to the neighboring Ministry, the Ministry of Energy. Well, as a patter said that, here they have done something, some kind of accident there, but it will not stop the development of nuclear energy.
Next, the traditional report, which lasted a total of two hours.
At about 12 o'clock a break was announced, I went upstairs to the room of the scientific secretary Nikolai Sergeyevich BABAY, but in order to have a break in the break the main positions of the report. Immediately Alexander Grigorievich MESHKOV looked into this room, - the First Deputy Minister informed that the Government Commission for the Chernobyl Accident had been created, that I was also included in its composition and that the Government Commission should meet at the Vnukovo airport by four o'clock in the afternoon. Immediately I left the asset, got into the car and drove to my Institute. I tried to find someone from the reactor there.
With great difficulty, I managed to find the head of the department who developed and conducted stations with RBMK-type reactors, namely, such a reactor was installed at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Alexander Konstantinovich KALUGINA, who really knew about the accident, told me that anxious came from the station at night a serious signal, encrypted in the order established in the atomic energy industry, when, with any deviations from the norm, the station informs the Ministry of Energy or the Ministry to which it belongs, in a ciphered manner, about what happened.
In this case, the signal came 1; 2; 3; 4, which meant that the situation at the station had a nuclear hazard; radiation hazard; fire hazard; and explosive danger - that is, all possible hazards were present.
It would seem that the most difficult situation, but at the same time, he told me that the team, which, depending on the type of accident, should immediately assemble, or remain in the field, direct the personnel’s actions at the facility or fly to the site. That the corresponding team was assembled at night and about three-four hours flew to the scene. But while they were flying there, signals began to come in from the station that the reactor, and this was the reactor of the 4th unit of the Chernobyl NPP, is generally managed. Operators are trying to cool it, although it was already known that | one or two people have already passed away. And one died of mechanical damage under the rubble of destroyed structures, and the second died from thermal burns, that is, from a fire. About radiation injuries were not reported and there was little clear in this information. But she did bring some comfort.
Having taken all the necessary technical documents and from Comrade KALUGIN, having received some idea about the structure of the station, about possible troubles that might be there, I jumped in to my home. At this time, the driver brought my wife, as we agreed, with her work, we had to dock there to somehow solve some of our family problems, which, of course, were not resolved. I briefly threw to her that I was leaving for a business trip, the situation is incomprehensible, as far as I go, I do not know and flew to Vnukovo.
Vnukovo I learned that Boris Yevdokimovich SHCHERBIN, Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, was appointed Head of the Government Commission - Chairman of the Bureau for the Fuel and Energy Complex. He was outside of Moscow, was at that time in one of the regions of the country, spending there party economic assets. We learned that he was flying on an airplane from there and as soon as he arrived, we would load into an already prepared plane and fly to Kiev, from where we would go to the scene by car.
The first approved by the Government Commission, I now speak from memory, included, besides Comrade Shcherbina, the Minister of Energy MAIORETS, Deputy Minister of Health Evgeny Vorobyev, who also came from another region of the Soviet Union to Vnukovo, a little earlier than ShchRBIN. The Deputy Chairman of the State Nuclear Power Authority, Viktor Alekseevich SIDORENKO, a long-time employee of our Institute, correspondent member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, was included in the Government Commission. Apart from us, Comrade Soroka, Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR, and Fedor Alekseyevich Shcherbak, head of one of the important divisions of the State Security Committee, was included in the Government Commission, and the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Ukraine was also included in the Government Commission. on the spot, Comrade. NIKOLAEV and Chairman of the Regional Executive Committee Comrade. Ivan Ivory. Here is the approximate composition of the Government Commission, which I remembered first.
As soon as Boris Evdokimovich flew to Vnukovo, he immediately moved to a prepared plane and we flew to Kiev.
In flight, the conversations were disturbing. I tried to tell Boris Evdokimovich an accident at Trimayalen station, which occurred in the USA in 1979. To show that most likely the cause that led to that accident has nothing to do with the events in Chernobyl because of the fundamental difference between the designs of the devices. Here in these discussions, an hour flight has passed.
In Kiev, when we got off the plane, the first thing that caught my eye was a cavalcade of black government cars and an alarming crowd of leaders of Ukraine, led by the Chairman of the CM Ukraine Comrade. Lyashko Alexander Petrovich. They all had alarming information; they did not have accurate information, but they said that it was a bad thing. Since we did not receive any specific information here, we quickly plunged into cars and I was just in the car with Comrade. Ivy Let's go to the nuclear power plant. It is located 140 km. from Kiev. Evening road was. There was little information, we were preparing for some kind of unusual work and therefore the conversation was so sketchy with long pauses and, in general, everyone was in suspense and each of us wanted to quickly get into the place, understand what actually happened and what scale the event with whom we must meet.
Remembering this road now, I must say that it didn’t even occur to me that we move towards meeting an event on a planetary scale, an event that will probably go down in human history forever as an eruption of famous volcanoes, say - the death of people in Pompeii or that don't be close to that. On the road, we did not know this yet, we just thought about the scale of the work waiting for us. It will be simple or difficult to be there, on the spot, in general, all our thoughts were directed towards what awaits us.
A few hours later we reached the city of Chernobyl, although the nuclear power plant is called Chernobyl, it is located 18 kilometers from this district city, very green, very pleasant, so quiet, rural - he impressed us when we drove through it. It was quiet, calm, everything is like in everyday life.
We turned onto the road leading to the city of Pripyat, but the city of Pripyat is already a city of power industry, the city in which both the builders and the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant lived. I will tell about the station itself, the history of its construction, operation, a little later, so as not to interrupt the chronology of events. Here in Pripyat there was already an alarm, we immediately went to the building of the city party committee, located on the central square of the city. In short, the hotel, quite decent was located nearby and right here we met | etili heads of local authorities.
MAIORETZ was already there, he flew there earlier than the government commission. There was also a group of specialists who arrived there on the primary alarm.
The first meeting of the Government Commission was arranged immediately. To our, or, at least, to my surprise, the Government Commission did not report on any situation that existed at the station itself and in the city.
It was precisely reported only that it happened on the 4th block of the ChNPP during the freelance testing of the work of the turbogenerator of the 4th block in the free run-down mode. During this experiment, two explosions occurred successively and the buildings of the reactor building were destroyed. Suffered a significant number of staff. The figure was not yet accurate, but it was clear that on the scale of hundreds of people received radiation injury. They also reported that two people had already died, the rest are in the hospitals of the city and that the radiation situation on the 4th block is rather complicated. The radiation situation in the city of Pripyat was significantly different from the normal one, but did not represent yet how much of a danger to the radiation damage of people in Pripyat.
The Government Commission, whose meeting was very energetic, in the manner characteristic of him, was conducted by Boris Evdokimovich SHCHERBIN, immediately distributed all the members of the Government Commission to the groups, each of which was to solve his task.
The first group, headed by Alexander Grigorievich MESHKOV, who was also a member of the Government Commission. This group was supposed to begin identifying the causes that led to the accident.
The second group, led by Comrade. ABAGYANOM was to determine and organize all dosimetric measurements in the station area and in the city of Pripyat and surrounding areas, and then civil defense groups. And at this time General IVANOV appeared, who headed the civil defense service of that region and should have begun preparatory measures for the possible evacuation of the population and primary decontamination work. General BERDOV, who headed the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the republic, had to act in terms of determining the order of people in the affected area.
I myself entered and headed a group, the purpose of which was to work out measures aimed at localizing the accident that had occurred.
Evgeny Ivanovich VOROBYEVA's group was instructed to deal with the sick and the whole complex of medical events.
Already when we were approaching the city of Pripyat, it struck the sky, eight or ten kilometers from Pripyat. A crimson, or rather crimson, glow stood above the station, which made it quite different from a nuclear power plant. It is known that at a nuclear power plant with its facilities, with its pipes, from which usually nothing visually leaks, are very clean and very neat facilities. And the nuclear power plant’s eye is always an object that does not have any gases. This is its distinguishing feature, if not to speak about the specific design features of such stations. And here it is suddenly - as a metallurgical plant or a large chemical enterprise, over which there is such a huge crimson glow in half the sky. This worried and made the situation unusual.
Immediately it became clear that the leadership of the nuclear power plant and the leadership of the Ministry of Energy, which was present there, behave contradictory. On the one hand, most of the staff, the station managers, the management of the Energy Ministry, who arrived at the scene, acted boldly, were ready for any action. For example, the operators of the first and second block did not leave their posts. Operators and all those working on the third block did not leave their posts, and the third block was in the same building as the fourth block. In readiness there were various services of this station, that is, there was an opportunity to find any person, there was an opportunity to give any command, any assignment. But what commands to give, what instructions to give and how to determine the exact situation before the arrival of the Government Commission ?!
She arrived 26 at 20 o'clock. 20 minutes. There was no clear and deliberate action plan by this time. All this had to be done by the Government Commission. Well, first of all, the third unit received a command to shut down the reactor and to cool it down. The first and second units continued to work despite the fact that its internal premises already had a fairly high level of radiation contamination, measured in dozens, and at individual points in the hundreds of millirentgen per hour.
This internal pollution of the premises of the first and second blocks occurred due to the inlet ventilation, which was not immediately immediately turned off and contaminated air from the site through the inlet ventilation got into these rooms. And people continued to work there. And so, on the initiative of Aleksandr Yegorovich MESHKOVA, the first team that went there, was to immediately begin a dampening of both the first and second units. This command was given precisely by MASHKOV, and not by the management of the station and not by the management of the Ministry of Energy. Team | started running immediately.
Yuoris Yevdokimovich Scherbina immediately called the chemical troops, who arrived quite quickly, led by General PIKALOV and helicopter units located nearby in the city of Chernigov. The group of helicopters arrived led by General ANTOSHKIN, who was chief of staff from the relevant unit of the WWES. Began flights, inspections of the external state of the 4th unit of the Chernobyl NPP.
In the first flight it was clear that the reactor was completely destroyed. The upper plate, the so-called "Elena", sealing the reactor compartment, was almost in a strictly vertical position, but at a certain angle, that is, it was clear that it was opened, and for this you needed a pretty decent effort. So the upper part of the reactor hall was completely destroyed. On the roofs of the machine room, on the site of the territory, there were pieces of graphite blocks, either one-piece or destroyed. There were quite large elements of fuel assemblies. Immediately, as for the nature of the damage, for example, I could see that a volume explosion occurred and the power of this order explosion, as well as from experience from other works, as I could estimate, is from three to four tons of trinitrotoluene - so in trotyl equivalent it could be evaluated.
Such a white, for several hundred meters column of combustion products, apparently, of graphite, constantly flowed out of the reactor vent. Inside the reactor space, a powerful crimson glow was visible in separate large spots. At the same time, it was definitely difficult to say what caused this glow — red-hot graphite blocks that remained in place — because graphite burns evenly, emitting the whitish products of an ordinary chemical reaction. And the visible light, which was then reflected in the sky, was the glow of red-hot graphite. Such a powerful glowing graphite blocks.
Radiation powers were quickly determined at various points in the vertical and horizontal planes.
It was obvious that the activity of the 4th unit was quite numerous, but the first question that worried us all was the question of whether the reactor or part of it is working or not, that is, the process of producing short-lived radioactive isotopes continues. Since it was necessary to quickly and accurately establish, a first attempt was made by military armored personnel carriers belonging to the chemical warfare, sensors were installed, which have both gamma measurement channels and neutron measurement channels. The first measurement of the neutron channel showed that supposedly there is a powerful neutron radiation. This could mean that the reactor continues to operate.
In order to figure this out, I had to go to the reactor myself on this armored personnel carrier and find out that in the conditions of those powerful gamma-fields that existed on the object, the neutron channel of measurements, of course, doesn’t work as the neutron channel powerful gammapol, in which this neutron channel as a meter is simply inoperative.
Therefore, the most reliable information about the state of the reactor was obtained by the ratio of short and long relative to the living isotopes of iodine 134 and 131 and, by radiochemical measurements, quickly enough to make sure that the production of short-lived isotopes of iodine does not occur and, therefore, the reactor does not work and it is in a subcritical state.
Subsequently, over the course of several days, repeated appropriate analysis of the gas components showed the absence of expiring short-lived isotopes. And this was for us the main evidence of the subcriticality of the fuel mass that remained after the destruction of the reactor. Having made these initial estimates that the reactor is not operating, the following questions began to concern us. This is the fate of the population, the number of personnel that should be at the station and that should, even in this position, serve - the first questions. Prediction of the possible behavior of the fuel mass, which remained after the destruction of the reactor, the determination of the geometric dimensions and all sorts of possible situations and the selection of the mode of action.
By the evening of the 26th, all possible methods of the core bay were tried, but they gave nothing except for a rather high vaporization and distribution of water along various transport corridors on the neighboring block. It was clear that the first night firefighters eliminated fires and fires in the engine room, then they did it very quickly and accurately.
Sometimes they think that a significant part of firefighters received high doses of radiation because they stood at certain points as observers didn’t have new fires and condemned them for this, believing that this decision was illiterate, wrong.
This is not so, because in the engine room there was a lot of oil and hydrogen in the generators and there were many sources that could cause not only fire but also explosive processes that could lead to the destruction of, say, the third Chernobyl NPP unit. Therefore, the actions of firefighters in these specific conditions were not only heroic but also | competent, correct and effective in the sense that they provided the first accurate measures to localize the possible spread of the incident.
The next question arose before us when it became clear that a fairly powerful stream of aerosol gas radioactivity was being carried out from the crater of the destroyed fourth power unit. It was clear that graphite burned and each particle of graphite bears on itself a sufficiently large number of radioactive sources. So, we faced a difficult task: - speed, the usual burning rate of graphite somewhere is ton per hour. In the 4th block about two and a half thousand tons of graphite were laid. Therefore, 240 hours, with normal burning, this mass could burn, carrying away with the products of its burning that radioactivity which it could gain and extend to large territories.
At the same time, the temperature inside the destroyed block would most likely be limited by the burning temperature of graphite, that is, in the region of one and a half thousand degrees or slightly higher, but it would not rise above. Some such balance would have been established. Consequently, the fuel, uranium oxide tablets, could melt and not provide an additional source of radioactive particles. But this multi-day removal of radioactivity with products of combustion would, of course, lead to the fact that huge territories would be intensively contaminated with various radionuclides. Since the radiation situation suggested some effective actions, it was possible to make them possible only from the air and from a height of not less than two hundred meters above the reactor, the corresponding equipment, which would allow, say, traditionally with the help of water and foam and other means to complete the extinction of graphite did not have.
We had to look for unconventional solutions and we started thinking about these unconventional solutions. It must be said that our thoughts were accompanied by constant consultations with Moscow, where, for example, Anatoly Petrovich ALEKSANDROV was constantly at the HF apparatus. A number of employees of the Institute of Atomic Energy, employees of the Ministry of Energy actively participated in our reasoning. Each service, for example, firefighters, for their part, kept a proper connection with their Moscow organizations. Already on the second day various telegrams and proposals were sent. From abroad, various types of effects on burning graphite were proposed using various mixtures.
The logic of the decision was this. First of all, it was necessary to introduce as many boron-containing components as possible, which with any movements of the fuel mass, in any unexpected situations, would provide a sufficiently large number of effective neutron absorbers in the crater of the destroyed reactor. Fortunately, a sufficiently large amount (forty tons) of boron carbide was unpolluted in the warehouse, which was primarily thrown from helicopters from the top into the mouth of the destroyed reactor.
Thus, the first task - the task of introducing a neutron absorber of maximum size and quantity was performed quickly and efficiently.
The second task is the task associated with the introduction of such means that would stabilize the temperature, forcing the energy released during the decay of a powerful fuel mass to be spent on phase transitions. The first proposal, which, say, came to my mind, and which I suggested, was to throw the maximum amount of iron shot into the reactor. At the station it was a fairly large number. This is an iron shot that is usually injected into concrete during construction to make it heavy, but it turned out that the warehouse where this iron shot was stored first of all was covered with a passing primary cloud after the explosion and it was almost impossible to work with heavily infected shot. Secondly, we were not aware of the temperature at which it is possible to stabilize, for example, let's say that the mass-average temperature there would be substantially lower than the melting point of iron. Then the introduction of iron in this sense, well, would not be enough. At least because we would miss the moment of possible stabilization of the temperature at a lower level. Therefore, as such temperature stabilizers, two components were proposed and after numerous consultations and discussions: two components were selected: lead and dolomite. The first is clear - it melts at a low temperature. Firstly - low-melting metal. Secondly, it has some ability to extract radioactive elements. Thirdly, it is capable, while freezing, relatively in cold places to create a protective screen against gamma radiation, and therefore this solution is the right one. Of course, there was a danger that temperatures are significantly higher, then a significant part of the lead can evaporate somewhere at an ordinary temperature of 1600-1700 degrees and then in addition to radioactive contamination lead pollution of the area can occur and, on the effective side, this component will not play. Therefore, a group from Donetsk, belonging to the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine, was given in | e disposal. They had Swedish firm (firm "Ada") appliances, thermal imagers, began a constant overflights of the fourth block, fixing the surface temperature. The task was not easy because the sensors in these thermal imagers are semiconductors and it was necessary to contrive to correctly interpret the result, bearing in mind that the powerful gamma radiation entering the semiconductor substantially distorted the measurement results. Therefore, I proposed, along with such thermal imaging measurements of the 4th unit temperature, made from air, to supplement these measurements from the ground with direct thermocouple measurements.
This operation was carried out by Evgeny Petrovich Ryazan with the helicopter pilots. Thermocouples were lowered on long falls. It was also a difficult job - to measure the surface temperature.
And finally, since the burning of graphite continued, I suggested to take samples at various points of the destroyed reactor and send them to Kiev to determine the components of CO and CO2 and their ratio, which, although not very accurate, could still It was to judge the maximum temperatures in which the destroyed 4th block is located. The totality of all the data led us to the fact that in the reactor zone there are, but small areas of high temperature, the maximum that we were able to detect, was two thousand degrees. Well, and the main surface manifested itself in the temperature range not exceeding three hundred degrees Celsius. Therefore, in this sense, lead casting could be effective. After such assessments, an appropriate decision was made and 2,400 tons of lead in its various forms were introduced with high precision and with great skill by the helicopter services.
The amount of lead injected increased day by day. I was amazed at the pace, the scale with which all the necessary material was delivered for this operation.
But, considering that there were high-temperature areas, it was decided to use carbonate containing rocks, in particular, dolomite, the purpose of which was the same. Where it was possible to stabilize the temperature by expending energy on the decomposition of dolomite components, say, Magnesium OA remained - oxite, which conducts heat quite well and, like lead, in place, expanding the heat radiation zone, heat transfer to all metal structures. But magnesium oxides is certainly not metal. Its thermal conductivity is non-corrosive and more, and the formed oxides in nature violated the oxygen concentration in the combustion zone and contributed to the cessation of combustion. This whole group of metals, according to this approximately logic, was introduced into the zone of the destroyed reactor.
Anatoly Petrovich ALEXANDROV strongly advised us to start introducing clay, which are not bad sorbents for the released radionuclides. Introduced clays and a large amount of sand just as a filtering layer can delay the case that goes there, if uranium dioxide tablets melt all the same, the radioactive components begin to be released, so that some of them at least delay inside the reactor.
It is clear, of course, that dropping any objects from 200 meters in height created a difficult situation around the 4th block, because each weight drop weighing more than 200 kg. from a height of 200 meters, a cloud of dust rose after impact and this dust carried a lot of radioactivity with it, but at that time the formed particles rising to the top agglomerated, coarsened and fell somewhere in the zone of the 4th block or at least at the station site. And in this sense, even the cloud itself played the role of protection in order that small aerosol particles would not move much more significantly than the zone of the station itself. Judging by the nature of the removal of radioactivity from the zone of the 4th block, both in magnitude and in dynamics of this removal, all these measures turned out to be quite effective and a significant part of the activity was localized, did not spread over long distances, except, say, some amount of cesium and strontium - most low-melting components of the fuel.
So, in general, in the sum of measures, it allowed something to block the fourth block, create a filtering layer, prevent melting of the fuel itself due to the possibility of carrying out a sufficiently large amount, that is, not carrying out the natural passage of a sufficiently large number of endothermic reactions. And all this made it possible to limit in a noticeable way the zone of radioactivity spreading from the area of the 4th power unit to the most remote areas.
These are activities related to localization. These decisions, according to this scheme, were taken on 26 in the evening, and they were implemented from April 26 to May 2, inclusive.
Here is the main period, when a very intensive casting of all materials was carried out. After May 2, the casting was discontinued, there was a pause for several days, then somewhere after May 9, when a flaming spot was found when circling the 4th block. This means either a graphite stack, or some kind of metal construction of a sufficiently high temperature. 80 more were dropped there | tons of lead. This was the last massive discharge of materials into the zone of the 4th reactor.
In addition to such materials that were assigned to stabilize the temperature inside the 4th unit, or to create the necessary filtering layer, in the zone of the 4th reactor, at the suggestion of Boris Veneinovich GIDASPOV, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences who arrived to help the group working there (it was already later, somewhere after 10 May) the operation was carried out on dust suppression. The corresponding solutions containing dust-forming materials were poured into plastic bags, thrown into the reactor zone, where they fell when falling, the solution covered a significant surface of the destroyed block and cured, hardening there too. Additionally, such a filtering layer was created on materials capable of dusting and further distribution. All these were activities scheduled, I repeat, on April 26 in the evening. In general, in its entirety, it lasted somewhere until May 12, May 15, and the loading of basic materials was completed, as has already been said, on May 2nd.
Here is the accident localization line. Naturally, these events were accompanied by constant air casts on filters and the number of radioactive components removed from the 4th unit and the dynamics were visible. If the initial amount of activity, I do not mean the first primary radioactive cloud rendered at the time of the explosion, and the removal of radioactivity in stationary conditions was 1000 curies per day, then say, at the time of my departure from Chernobyl, the second departure, on May 12, this value already did not exceed 100n curie per day and then it decreased more and more.
There was, of course, a lot of controversy over accuracy, accuracy of sampling, accuracy and accuracy of measurements and calculations that were made on the basis of the measurements made. All this indicated that even simple dosimetric measurements of high culture at all points at which they would not be carried out were not. But a few words will be said about this experience a little later.
So I described the work before and after the localization of the consequences of the accident, but an even more essential element of the decision of the Government Commission on April 26 was the question of population.
Immediately after the decision on cooling down the 4th block was taken, a decision was made to discuss the issue of the city of Pripyat. On the evening of the 26th, the radiation situation in it was still more or less prosperous. Measured from milli-rtengens per hour to maximum values - tens of milli-rtgens per hour, of course, this is not a healthy situation, but it still seemed to allow some sort of reflection.
Here, in these conditions, on the one hand, repeated radiation measurements, on the other hand, in conditions where medicine was limited by established procedures, instructions, according to which evacuation could be started if there was a danger for the civilian population to receive 25 biological x-rays per person for a period of time while staying in this zone and such evacuation would become mandatory only if the threat of 75 biological x-rays per person to while in the affected area.
And in the range from 25 to 75 roentgens the right to make a decision belonged to local authorities. It was in these conditions that there were discussions, but here I must say that physicists, especially Viktor Alekseevich SIDORENKO, sensing that the dynamics would not change for the better, insisted on making the evacuation decision, but also, that means the doctors here, chtoli, conceded to physicists and somewhere at 10 or 11 pm on April 26, Boris Evdokimovich, having listened to our discussion, made a decision on mandatory evacuation.
After that, representatives of Ukraine: Comrade. IVY and comrade. Nikolayev began the immediate preparation of the evacuation of the city the next day.
It was not a simple procedure, it was necessary to organize the necessary amount of transport. It was called from Kiev. It was necessary to scout accurately the routes along which the population was led, and General BERDOV took the lead in identifying and alerting the population so that they would not leave the stone houses.
Unfortunately, this means that the information went by verbally informing through entrances to the entrances, hanging all kinds of announcements and apparently did not reach everyone, because in the morning of 27 you could see mothers in the carriages of their children, moving around the city and generally some, so to speak signs of such an ordinary Sunday life.
At eleven o'clock in the morning it was already officially announced that the whole city would be evacuated by 2:00 pm All the necessary transport was fully assembled, the routes were determined and straight at two, two and a half hours, almost the entire city, with the exception of the staff, who was also determined, only that was necessary for the functioning of the municipal services of the city and for those people who were connected with station, the rest of the population left the city.
The staff that was supposed to serve the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was moved to a summer camp "Skazo" | chny ”, located ten kilometers from the city of Pripyat. All this evacuation was carried out quite accurately, quickly and accurately, although it took place under unusual conditions.
Separate punctures, inaccuracies, unfortunately were. Well, for example, a separate group of citizens appealed to the Government Commission with a request to evacuate in their own cars, and there were several thousand of them in the city, well, and after some reflection, such permission was given. Although, probably, it is wrong, because some of these cars in which people were evacuated were contaminated, and the necessary dosimetric posts checking the quality of cars, their level of contamination, all this was organized a little later.
Thus, in the city, things that people took with them (although they took minimal quantities, hoping that evacuation for a short time — a few days) carried the pollution beyond Pripyat. But I repeat that the evacuation took place at a time when the level of pollution of the city itself was not yet high, therefore the level of pollution of objects taken out by people, the level of pollution of the people themselves were not high. Practice then showed that none of the civilian population of the city of Pripyat, who were not at the station itself at the time of the accident, and this is almost 50 thousand people, no one received any significant damage or exposure.
It was the second line - the protection of people. Then they began to be more carefully organized by the services of the State Committee on Hydrometeorology and the services of General PIKANOV, the station services and the services of physicists, which, on our call, appeared at the station. Conducted more and more careful monitoring of the situation, has already been studied more carefully isotopic composition. It must be said that, of course, the dosimetric services, the military, did a good job, but we received the most accurate information from the radio institute laboratory, which was deployed in the affected area, whose group was headed, who came here first. PETROV. For example, here is the dosimetry activity of NIKIET, whose service was headed by comrade. EGOROV, here they gave us, of course, the most accurate data both on the isotopic composition and on the nature of the distribution of activity, and on their data we were based to make certain decisions.
It was clear that all the first days, due to the changing nature of the movement of air masses, due to dusting in the area of the 4th block itself, accompanying the discharge of objects and masses into the reactor, all this changed the situation and the area of radioactivity propagation due to wind transfer and dust carry over, HIS BREAK.
A few words about the conditions under which the Government Commission worked, a few personal impressions of that period of time.
First of all, I want to say that the choice of Boris Yevdokimovich Shcherbina as Chairman of the Government Commission was probably successful. Because it possesses such a quality as the obligatory appeal to the point of view of specialists, very quickly grasps these points of view and is immediately capable of making a decision. He is not peculiar to slowness, timidity, in making certain decisions. It was just noticeable in an emergency.
I will give just one example of this, when, through complex reasoning about lead, for example, by what we say when ALEXANDROV spoke to me, he did not understand for a long time why and why we needed lead. I explained to him that it was not possible to introduce an iron shot for the first time, due to the reasons I have already mentioned, but to wait for the appearance from the station, this means going to stabilize the temperature at a very high level in advance, but we wanted to stabilize it to significantly more low level. According to my first estimates and estimates, a batch of 200 tons was ordered, but I told Boris Yevdokimovich that 200 tons did not solve any problems. In fact, it would have been scary to call the figure of 2000 tons for placement in the womb of the destroyed reactor. He listened to me (this figure seemed to me to be very large and difficult for the state - to deliver such an amount in a day or two) and, as I later learned, he immediately ordered 6,000 tons of lead, because he believed that we could be mistaken in the calculations and believed that it was better to have an excess and not to experience a shortage in the material than not to complete the work as it was necessary to complete it. This is only a private example.
Surprise caused the staff of the station. Very controversial views left
I have already spoken about this a few words. We found people ready for any action in any conditions. Later, in individual films, in separate memoirs, in stories, I read that there were people, including those from the station, who deserted, left their jobs. But the situation was difficult. Especially after the evacuation, many people did not know where their children, mothers are, because they evacuated people in different directions.
Someone remained in the villages and townships to which they were brought, and someone immediately took out tickets and went to visit his relatives6 but to what and where. This all psychologically complicated the picture and, | less all the plant workers from the most ordinary and high-ranking, the employees of the Ministry of Energy were ready for the most active, the most violent, how to say, desperate actions.
But what actions were needed, what should have been done in this situation, how to plan and organize this work, in this regard no understanding of the necessary sequence of actions was found for the owners of the station and the management of the Ministry of Energy, and I did not find out in advance in such a presentation and studied form, say in variants who would have been born right here, this function of defining the situation and conducting the necessary actions had to be taken over by the Government Commission.
Such confusion even in trifles attracted attention. I remember the first days, when the Government Commission was still in Pripyat, there was no necessary number of protective respirators, individual dosimeters, the so-called TLD and even not very reliable pencil counters, which would show.
All this was not enough and was not enough for everyone involved in the work. In addition, most of them were either not charged, or people were not instructed how to use them exactly at what point in time the corresponding dosimeter should be recharged. That was quite unexpected. There you could bite your elbows, because at the station there were no external dosimetry machines that would give automatic telemetry information around the radiation environment in a radius of, say, 1, 2, 4 - 10 km. Therefore, we had to organize a large number of people to carry out intelligence operations. There were no, say, radio-controlled airplanes equipped with dosimetric instruments, and therefore a fair amount of pilots had to be used and helicopter pilots were used for measurement purposes for reconnaissance purposes. It is clear that a person is irreplaceable in cases when some technological work was to be carried out. The discharge of cargo or the implementation of some other operation associated with large-sized devices, delivered on board the helicopter. Here people are necessary, but the simplest and often performed operations would seem to be performed by unmanned small-sized radio-controlled means, aircraft.
This equipment was not available. So, there was no elementary culture. In the first days, at least, because in the city of Pripyat, in a room in which April 27, 28 and 29 were quite dirty, they brought the necessary amount of food, well, there sausage, cucumbers and tomatoes, bottles of pepsicola, fruit water , all of this was delivered to the rooms, and then it was cut with bare hands, eaten. Those. even such a hygienic culture in the early days, for proper eating, was not. This is only later, after a few days, when the corresponding canteens, tents, and appropriate sanitary and hygienic conditions appeared and organized less and less. The truth is quite primitive, in which at least you could control the hands of people who took food and quality, in terms of contamination, the food itself.
In the early days, all this was certainly not organized and it all amazed. These are the everyday episodes.
The government commission for the first few days worked in Pripyat. The headquarters was located in the city committee of the party. Night, if you managed to spend it, people spent the night in a hotel located next to the city committee of the party. When the evacuation was completed, the Government Commission was still in Pripyat for a couple of days, and then it moved to the district committee of the Chernobyl city party, as a place of work in one of the military units in the barracks. After some time, she had the living conditions created for work. Here is the household part - housing for the Government Commission was located in the city of Ivankov, which is already 50 km away. from Chernobyl.
But it was clear that with such movements there were no out-of-town control points there were no expanded points where management could be conducted in such a difficult situation, nothing was prepared and it was necessary to invent all of this together, successfully and unsuccessfully.
On the second day or the third, I suggested immediately organizing an information group within the Government Commission. He invited to it two or three experienced journalists who would receive technical, medical, radiation information from specialists to the extent it was necessary - in full or in part, limited form, but in partly limited form when we ourselves there was complete clarity that there were no inaccuracies of any kind and that they were issued daily, or maybe several times a day, the relevant press, which could be transmitted to TASS in newspapers on television. What and how is happening, what is the situation, how to behave to the population.
This was not rejected, but, so to my mind, until today, such a press club has not been created.
On May 2, the Government Commission was already located in the city of Chernobyl. Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov and Yegor Kuzmich appeared in the zone l LIGACHEV. Their trip made a big difference. The government commission on the eve of their arrival decided to continue evacuating the population not only from the city of Pripyat but also from the 30-kilometer zone surrounding the Chernobyl NPP. Based on the intelligence work, the prediction of the spread of radioactive particles, such a decision was made on the eve of the 2nd of May.
When our high leaders arrived. And they started the trip with the locations of people who had already been evacuated. On May 2, they held a meeting in the Chernobyl District Party Committee, along with Comrade. Scherbitsky (it was his first appearance in the disaster area).
Prior to this, the entire government of Ukraine was very successfully and actively represented by the Deputy Chairman of Ukraine SM NIKOLAEV. This meeting was substantial. First, from our reports, and as a speaker, I had to speak. They understood the situation, understood that it was not a particular accident, that it was a large-scale accident that would have long-term consequences and that there would be a lot of work to continue localizing the destroyed block, that it was necessary to prepare for large-scale decontamination work, what to design and build a shelter for the destroyed 4th unit, carefully assess the situation at the station itself, assess the possibilities of commissioning the 1st, 2nd and 3rd block s. To assess the possibility of continuing construction work on blocks 5 and 6.
Then all these questions loomed. In addition, on the 1st and 2nd of May, the background values and radiation levels in the city of Kiev and other cities, which is quite far from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, increased.
All this was very worried by the leaders of our party and the government and they came to deal with all the cases on the spot, but after the reports, after we explained the situation as we understood it, coordinating decisions were taken that determined the order of organization and the scope of this work for the rest period. The scale of this work, the attitude to it of all departments, enterprises, leaders of our country.
An Operational Group was created under the direction of Nikolai Ivanovich RYZHKOV, and practically all the industry of the Soviet Union was connected.
From this point on, the Government Commission became only a concrete managerial mechanism of that enormous state work, which was conducted under the control of the Operational Group of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. The task force met regularly and reported on all the details and the state of the radiation situation at each point that was observed and assessed, all the provisions for certain activities. In general, I did not know of a single small or major event that would not be in the field of view of the Politburo Task Force. In addition to Nikolai Ivanovich RYZHKOV and Yegor Kuzmich LIGACHEV, the operational group included comrade. Shchebrik, Comrade. Vorotnik, Minister of Internal Affairs Comrade. VLASOV, Vladimir Ivanovich Dolgikh - Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, who directly on behalf of the Central Committee was engaged in monitoring all activities carried out in the Chernobyl NPP area and in the nuclear power industry as a whole. He was engaged in this business every day, it seems to me, without discarding the need to carry out all the other works that were assigned to him.
I have to say that on several occasions, at the meetings of the Focus Group, its meetings and its decisions were very calm and restrained. They tried their best to rely on the point of view of specialists, but in every way comparing the points of view of various specialists. In general, for me it was such a model of properly organized work. You know, I initially could not assume that such volitional purposeful decisions could be made there to ensure that the situation could be dealt with as quickly as possible, somehow diminished, maybe the meaning of what had happened - there was nothing like that. The work was organized as in a good scientific team.
The first is a careful study of information, preferably from information obtained from various sources, and there have often been cases when information issued by the military differed from information obtained by other civilian scientific services. This was especially true of the amount of activity emissions from the 4th block. Different research groups provided different information in the early stages.
For example, different scientific groups assessed the amount of activity ejected from the 4th block as early as the month of June.
For example, from GEOHI them. Vernadsky, on the basis of her measurements in a report approved by Academician Velikhov, presented data according to which more than 50% of the contents of the reactor jumped out of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. They gave a colossal zone of plutonium prevalence, for example, on the territory of the Soviet Union.
The second group of specialists, who worked on the instructions of Lev Dmitrievich Ryabeva, consisting of specialists from the Radiation Institute of Minsredmash, carried out measurements simply on the basis of the total activity exhibited at various hydrophysical points around the fourth block, distributed the fuel in proportion to the activity shown by different sections | ami
Of course, this was wrong, because self-absorption and many other processes were not taken into account. Nevertheless, it was not the basis of such a primary review of the situation that they concluded that, about the same, half of the fuel is in the reactor shaft, and the rest is outside this reactor.
Finally, the third group of specialists, who thoroughly examined all the maps that the Goskomgidromet gave, integrated all the activity, which was recorded by ground and aerial reconnaissance, comparing with the data that began to come to us from abroad, they could not detect more than 34% of the activity located outside the fourth block. And this information came to my subgroup and had practical value from the point of view of how to act and what efforts should be made for burials and decontamination work.
I had to create such a commission and ask Anatoly Petrovich to be an arbitrator. Search for errors. In the end, it turned out that the GEOHI group was inaccurate, since the measurements of plutonium were carried out under conditions such that plutonium and weapons-grade origin of the period of nuclear explosions were tested. These inaccuracies have been clarified. But the approach was not entirely accurate.
In the end, all came to a single figure: 3.0 - 3.5 - 4.0 percent of the ejected fuel outside the 4th block. But at that time it created a rather nervous atmosphere. But the Operational Group itself didn’t show any nervousness. She simply insisted on additional dimensions, on additional refinements and tried her best to understand the true state of affairs.
At the same time, in my decisions, the Operational Group, I repeat, that I would be a witness, tried to go all the time along the path of maximally protecting the interests of people, based on possible pollution options, to establish the amount of monetary compensation that would be required for evacuees. They made all sorts of decisions solely in favor of the people affected by this accident. This concerned every case.
The task force struck me by the fact that it did not show a desire to conceal earlier decisions. For example, decisions were made of some sort, let's say about the start date of the first and second block and for the time of completion of the construction of the sarcophagus or about works on the 5th and 6th blocks, or which primary decisions were planned to preserve immediately the city of Pripyat. And such decisions were made. But if new experimental data suddenly appeared, which showed that the city of Pripyat could not be mothballed, that when the situation became calmer, it could be deactivated and partly populated, of course, for living and in some part it is possible to organize normal tracking. the city, under the action of its communal services, the Task Force changed its earlier decisions and did not see any crime in it.
Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov has repeatedly visited the Chernobyl NPP. It was necessary for the Task Force to make more than once decisions and on accepting or not accepting the foreign assistance that was offered during this period of time.
I just wanted to say aloud about this, but now, returning to those May days, I have to say that after Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov and Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev visited the disaster areas, assessed the situation, the team arrived: replace it with a second one.
Boris Yevdokimovich remained the head of the Government Commission, but it was decided to conduct further work on the site with duplicate trains and the first group left for Moscow, and a duplicate staff appeared at the scene, headed by Deputy PredSovmin Ivan Stepanovich SILAYEVY.
The whole group of the first Government Commission flew away, but SHCHERBINA suggested that Comrade and I should stay too long. SIDORENKO to complete the work: SIDORENKO to find out the causes of the accident, and I to complete the work on localizing the accident on the 4th block. But formally, in the team of SILAEV, Yevgeny Petrovich RYAZANTS, the deputy director of our Atomic Energy Institute, was to replace me. He came to this group and suddenly Evgeny Pavlovich VELIHOV appeared in it - I really do not know which team.
Here I must say a few words.
Evgeny Pavlovich VELIHOV, apparently, after watching the movies “Chinese Syndrome”, arrived with apprehension, which I reported to the same RYZHKOV and LIGACHEV, which, in principle, we are concerned about the uncertainty of the geometric position of the reactor residues. It is clear that the heat release from this mass of fuel continues. Heating continues and some vertical movement of this mass and fuel can be observed. At the same time, we were worried about two circumstances: could this movement lead to the fact that a critical mass would be created again in some local area and short-lived isotopes would again be produced. First of all, this worried us, but somehow we hoped that a large amount, about 40 tons, of boron was introduced and we hoped that it was fairly even | but they were mixed with this mass, but still it was impossible to completely eliminate the threat of local reactors. The first problem. But we were also worried that temperatures could be quite high in these heat-generating masses. Some design elements of the lower part of the reactor can not withstand. Can not withstand high temperature concrete. Some of the fuel may get into, say, the brobaters, in the upper or lower, we did not know by that time if there was water there. They were afraid of powerful vaporization. If some noticeable mass of hot fuel goes there, then powerful vaporization, which will carry an additional amount of aerosols, will break and contaminate additional territories.
These problems worried us. Therefore, Ivan Stepanovich SILAEV, who replaced SCHERBIN, decided: first, to find out if there is water in the lower brobarter. It was a difficult operation, which the staff of the station heroically performed. Then it turned out that there is water. The necessary operations for its removal were arranged. Again, I repeat that the removal of water was carried out in order to prevent major evaporation. It was already clear that the explosion of any second powerful steam could not occur, and could just happen intensive vaporization with the removal of radioactive particles.
Therefore, just in case, the water needed to be removed and, if necessary, the introduction of cooling, when the mass had already gone into these rooms, the water could be reintroduced into these rooms — a cooling factor.
These are the decisions that were made and recorded. But at this time Evgeny Pavlovich appeared and began to talk about the possibility of the Chinese syndrome, that these brobaters - lower and upper - would be melted down and that some part of the fuel could get into the ground and further, melting the ground, could reach the aquifers. .
The aquifers under the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and in this sense it was very unsuccessfully placed, at a depth of 32 meters and, of course, even if some part of the fuel would get there, there would be a threat of contamination of a large basin that feeds a significant part of Ukraine with radionuclides located in this mass of nuclear fuel.
The probability of such an event seemed extremely low, but nevertheless, as preventive measures, after some hesitation, it was still accepted, although most experts certainly doubted the need for large-scale work of this sort and, nevertheless, Evgeny Pavlovich insisted that the bottom tray of the base plate of the reactor was built. For this, the miners were very active, led by their Minister, who was actively and desperately working there. Minister of Coal Industry Comrade. Shadrin and specialists, led by his Minister Comrade. Brezhnev from Minspetstyazhstroy, who conducted work on the creation of appropriate tunnels for foundations under the foundation slab of the 4th block, so that later on these tunnels could be laid concrete slabs, and concrete slabs with the possibility of their cooling. All this was designed and made in a relatively short period of time, but of course it turned out to be useless because no fuel ever went there and never had to be cooled.
Somewhere around the 10th of May, VELIKHOVA, Vyacheslav Dmitrievich SVETLYY appeared on a call with a suitcase of various samples of materials that were simulated, laser or molten mass burned for deep distances. All this, psychologically, as it were, had an effect on Ivan Stepanovich SILAEV and he allowed these works.
But, in general, of course, these works were redundant. But at that time it was possible to understand that this was still a preventive measure, just in case, and suddenly, some kind of mass would break. She and psychologically quite significantly acted on the population, as an event protecting the groundwater. But, from my point of view, why I was not an active supporter of her or actively opposed to these works. Because they allowed to concentrate a large number of equipment at this stage. It was clear to me that there was a huge amount of unusual work to be done on the construction of the shelter of the 4th block.
To do this, it was necessary to work out the delivery of concrete and determine which equipment was successful and which was not successful under these working conditions. Create points of washing equipment and determine: whether it is washed, and with what safety factor you need to deliver, and in what conditions can there be people working on this site. And, since the projects, and the design of the sarcophagus itself was just beginning, it was still only in the first stage of the project and it was unclear what equipment is required, how much this technology is needed.
And how to construct the basement plate was more or less clear. It seemed to me very important at this, in general, this, of course, preventive, chtoli stage, began to debug the mechanism of supplying people, to solve everyday issues of their accommodation, to gain experience in organizing such large-scale construction works. Therefore, in this sense, probably, all decisions were made correctly.
Another thing | that when Yevgeny Pavlovich proposed already under the collapse of the 4th block outside the building and it seemed to him that there was a lot of fuel, to build another such slab, and for this it would be necessary to bring there about ten thousand metro-builders to carry out such work, here I, of course, could not stand it and, together with Anatoly Petrovich, wrote a sharp letter, which categorically objected to the completely unnecessary excessive involvement of metro builders, who would have received high dose loads, constructing a second protective plate. At the same time, of course, there was no reason to carry out these works, because they knew more or less precisely the distribution of radioactivity in various zones of the reactor.
But water protection has become one of the urgent problems. Somewhere in the May days, right away. Since Pripyat already in itself represented a noticeable water basin. She fell into the Dnieper. But what is the Dnepr say no. I repeat that the subsoil waters were shallow under the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And after that it became clear that the number of victims of the accident was limited to a few hundred people, and dozens of people were seriously injured, the rest were curable, the main problem was to protect the population living along the Dnieper basin.
It was such a central and very urgent task. Of course, measurements were made of the level of pollution of the water itself.
(Cassette No. 1, side "B", section 2. over.)
The text corresponds to the audio:
Investigators of the investigation team
Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation
Senior Counselor of Justice xxxxxxxxxxxx
1st class lawyer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Academician V. Legasov
(text from N2 tape)
Immediately, all these days, various solutions were offered.
The first solution that was proposed, which was attended by many experts from the State Committee for Hydrometeorology and control organizations, and the organizations of the Ministry of Water Resources played such an active role, of course, the first solution was to create a wall in the ground, that is, the entire territory polluted by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and dig the necessary trenches, concreting them and making some kind of cube that would limit the possibility of the release of active water outside this industrial site.
For this, originally Italian machinery was even purchased, which would allow to carry out relevant work with high intensity. But then more accurate studies, more accurate assessments of the radiation situation on the water, migration of radionuclides in the water, showed, along with testing the Italian technology itself and evaluating its performance, that this solution was not justified and the Ministry of Water Management suggested a more effective solution due to the fact that surround the entire dirty area with sufficient quantities - these are about 1,450 wells, some of which would be reconnaissance wells, in which the radioactivity of water coming in well Then, if necessary, with appropriate devices, radioactive water, if it appeared there, should be pumped out, preventing it from passing to the side of the subterranean water.
Practice then showed that this was the most correct decision, because all the wells were built and no, according to reconnaissance wells, there was practically no penetration of radioactive water into the depths. Therefore, for example, until today I don’t know that at least once I had to pump water because of its pollution. Therefore, in the ground the wall was built only on one site, the most polluted and limited to this. Wells that are, are observed and are in working condition. Since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant prudholaditel, since after release some radioactivity got into the water, the next measure to protect, say, the Dnieper Sea and the entire water basin was the construction of protective dams, which included cyoliths, that is, substances capable of absorbing radioactive particles and radionuclides, if if they appeared on the water on all small and large rivers.
Such protective dams were built and they played their positive role. So that water pollution has never exceeded the maximum allowable concentrations.
At the same time, we must say directly that the Ukrainian comrades initially came up with the project of creating a bypass canal at all, which would lead all the waters of Pripyat away from the Dnieper Sea. This is a billionth cost construction and such a channel was supposed to pass through the territory of Belarus. It would have to be very expensive. But of course he would guarantee that no polluted water would enter the Kiev Sea. But, again, a commission was carefully set up with the commander VOROPAEV at the head. She carefully assessed the situation. Even before the work of this commission, I was instructed to make an assessment of this project, on the basis of the simplest assessments that I was able to do, it turned out that this exercise is redundant, since the well system, the dam system, and therefore, the exchange of activity between water and silt is natural, being at the bottom should not create | any serious threat to the Dnieper Sea. But then the commission conducted all these works more thoroughly and came to this conclusion. Therefore, the application was not accepted and the practice has shown that this event would not be economically feasible and would not bring any additional benefits in terms of the protection of the Dnieper basin.
Kievans at this time took the right measures. They began to prepare for the possibility of using another water source from the Dniester to power the city and in every way developed work on the creation of additional artesian wells. In this case, if the Dnieper waters were contaminated with radionuclides above the allowable concentrations so that the city could feed on other sources of water, all the prep work went very quickly, very organized. It was prepared. But practically it was not necessary to use it. Since neither before the spring flood, nor after it, the waters of the Dnieper basin did not contain pollutants exceeding the maximum permissible concentrations that would threaten the health of people. From these words it follows that in general no pollution occurred in the river basin.
The first days in some parts of water basins up to 10 minus eight degrees of curie per liter contained in individual water samples, it must be said, the silts were polluted secondly, including in the Dnieper basin. The silts were most heavily polluted in the pond cooler near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, but also further downstream of the Pripyat and downstream of the Dnieper. The content of radionuclides in silts has been significantly increased today. But fortunately, nature has arranged so that the radionuclides are separate particles in the silts are kept quite firmly and now a thorough study is being conducted of the questions: does any part of this radioactivity, fixed in the silts, get into living organisms living in rivers. Such work is underway. It will be kept for quite a long time.
The first conclusions are that the bottom fish of course carry some part of the radioactivity in themselves, but no alarming symptoms are found. And the second circumstance: the protection of the coast and small and large rivers, the coastline, from the removal of the thawed waters of various debris contaminated with radioactive elements: chips, needles, which fell in the contaminated forest, could lead to fairly significant radiation damage. Therefore, the problem of protecting the rivers from getting these dirty objects was a big problem, and here the Soviet army played a big role in minimizing the possibility of these contaminated items in the rivers and the problem of cleaning and collecting such contaminated sites. She was a serious problem and was solved by the army with great intensity.
Kohl I had already started talking about the army, I must consistently say that from the moment when the Soviet Army was entrusted with the organization of work, the range of work was very large, but the introduced chemical troops, above all, had to be engaged in work on the exploration and determination of the contaminated area. The army was entrusted with work at the station itself and at 3 km. decontamination zone of villages, towns and roads. They did a great job. If some researchers suggested different formulations for dust suppression, in the summer of 1986 it became one of the main problems - to prevent the spread of contaminated dust over long distances. To do this, a large range of chemical compounds that could have been produced were tested, to close contaminated sites, while passing water through themselves, but not allowing noticeable dust removal and creating such compositions, testing them and organizing their introduction over large areas. All this work fell on the shoulders of the army. This work was organized very carefully. The army did a great job in decontaminating the city of Pripyat. Somewhere around the end of August, September, October, when the city was in such a state that it could be preserved, one could be in it. This does not mean that the city could be inhabited normally, but the fact that this city no longer constituted a special danger, it was the September and October operations of the army that led to this state.
Of course, the decontamination of the premises of the first and second blocks in preparation for the launch - these are also army units - they took an active part. Decontamination of the internal premises, cleaning of the territory, cleaning of the roofs, were carried out extremely actively and under difficult conditions, observing such requirements that not one of the soldiers participating in this work or officer would receive a dose load exceeding the original 25 rem. Then this dose was reduced both in general and in general. This was observed and performed. Although, of course, there were such annoying and funny and bitter cases that I had to observe with my own eyes.
Among such annoying cases was, for example, the situation in which, say, a group of working soldiers had only one of their chief officers or officers a dosimetric device and the number of dose loads that a particular soldier received was determined by his team | dirom. These were not frequent, but rare cases, but they were. When the commander, a well-working soldier put more dose loads, as an incentive, to work and as an opportunity to end his stay in this zone faster, and to a poorly working person, he put less dose loads. But when it was possible to observe such cases. There was a scandal. Everything, of course, changed, but such cases, unfortunately, were.
I have never been able to witness any case when specialists called in to the SA or simply any citizens of the USSR somehow tried to mount their works or felt themselves forcibly involved in difficult and dangerous jobs. Maybe there have been such cases somewhere, but I have never been able to observe them. On the contrary, I myself had to go several times to quite dangerous sections of the 4th block in order to clarify intelligence data or to imagine a possible front of work for certain operations and I always had to take soldiers to help. I always asked when a group of soldiers was brought to me, I explained the conditions in which they would work and asked that I would like only with those who can voluntarily help me go to work and have never had any cases, and the number of such cases was great when anyone, as they say, remained in the ranks and did not take a step forward.
In order to enter our scientific team and help us in carrying out a variety of, and sometimes really difficult work. And here the soldier did not differ from the civilian who participated in these works.
At the suggestion of General DEMYANOVICH, a military center was organized fairly quickly in the area of the accident zone, where military specialists organized the military units to deactivate and measure and to perform any operations that the army did not act on the base, not by trial and mistakes, and more consciously, the military center was organized, which was engaged in the selection of the appropriate measuring equipment, the most adequate situation and the choice of the route, the development of technological methods for carrying out ivatsionnyh works. The presence of such a military center played a large positive role in the fact that the work proceeded fairly quickly and with minimal dose loads, although in general the integral dose loads were of course quite large due to the huge amount of work, due to the huge number of people involved in this work. But still, they were minimized through the activities of this military center, which worked in collaboration with scientific organizations of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Atomic Energy, and Kiev research organizations. So, here this center played its big role. Not only the decontamination work went amazingly fast, the construction of new residential villages, where evacuated people moved, went amazingly fast.
The construction of the village "Green Cape" was amazingly fast, where the ChNPP employees of the first and second units were supposed to work, who were forced to work on a rotational basis. The work proceeded not only quickly, but it was tried to be carried out and in a sufficiently high quality and I would say, with taste.
Here in this place I would like to say that, especially the first period of time, in spite of the tragedy of the situation, in spite of such despair, I would say - the lack of technical means, the lack of proper experience in dealing with accidents of this magnitude, confusion and uncertainty could easily arise in some decisions, but that was not the case. Somehow, regardless of posts, regardless of the tasks that people solved, all this was a well-tuned team, especially in the early days. The scientific part of the collective, on whose shoulders lay the responsibility for the correctness of the decision making, made these decisions without the support of Moscow, Kinev, Leningrad. Support in the form of consultations, in the form of any experienced checks, the immediate arrival to the place of any specialists called there. When we came to some reasonable scientific decisions, the leadership of the Government Commission had the opportunity, instantly with the help of the Focus Group or some of its members, to get for some fantastic short time, literally days, and sometimes hours, all the necessary materials that we needed for carrying out the relevant work.
So I remember that I worked when Ukraine was part of the Task Force, located on the site in Chernobyl, Chairman of the State Planning Committee of Ukraine, Vitaly Andreevich. It was an amazingly calm person. Vigorous. Which caught literally from half-word. He always listened to our scientific conversations, what we were discussing, what we needed and would react instantly. We needed liquid nitrogen to cool the unit and when we came to the conclusion that we were dealing with a cyst, he smiled and said that the required number of trains had been ordered. The same is true for all those materials, say, magnesium, carbon-containing oxime, it’s still from the metallurgical plants of Ukraine, or somewhere else it got all this huge amount | materials. It is difficult to overestimate the work of the supply group, which, on behalf of Vitaly Andreyevich SOLOV, the chairman of the State Planning Committee of Ukraine, was engaged in the chairman of the State Tax Committee of Ukraine, who was sitting in Kiev, showed miracles there to ensure all the work that was carried out on Chernobyl with all the necessary material, although the amount needed certainly fantastic big.
Both according to the technological and simple materials, it was necessary to have a huge army of people brought into the zone to feed, water, clothe, change clothes, organize laundry, wash, control. It was a colossal work that was organized even now it is difficult to imagine how, of course, it all reminded me of a wartime period, as I remember from my childhood memoirs from military memoirs I remember that this work is rear, organizational work it certainly mattered neither a little less, and maybe even more, than the work of those people who were on the front line and carried out the decontamination itself, measurements, diagnosed, something they did. Here is the job of providing all the necessary materials, living conditions. She played the most important role there.
Speaking simply about such impressions, about such comments, I can’t keep silent about the fact that I was struck by two circumstances on the very first day of my stay in Chernobyl:
I am used to treating people working in the State Security Committee as people who keep state secrets, organize control of those people who are admitted to especially secret and especially important works. Organize services that allow you to save all documents, technical documentation, correspondence, which ensure that state secrets are kept. From this point of view, I mainly knew the KGB, but I also knew from stories and literature about that part of this committee that is engaged in intelligence or counterintelligence work.
In Chernobyl, I had to deal with highly organized with very clear young people who best performed the functions that were laid out on them. And they lay down the functions, in general, are not simple: the first is the organization of clear and reliable communication. This was done within literally 24 hours. On all channels, moreover, quietly, calmly, very confidently, and I saw a circle of young people who were headed by Fyodor Alekseevich Shcherbakov, who was also working there. But all this was done simply amazingly clearly and quickly. In addition, care was taken on their shoulders so that the evacuation problem would pass without panic, that there would be no panic moods, some excesses that would interfere with normal operation. And they did such work, but how they did it, how they did it, I still cannot imagine, because only the result of this work was known. Indeed, there were no manifestations interfering with the organization of this, in general, not ordinary, difficult work, and in this I was simply delighted with the technical equipment and culture of the literacy of this group.
The direct opposite of the activities of this group was, say, the Civil Defense in the structure in the structure in which they acted in the first days. It just struck me. Here it would seem that we all often learn, retrain, a huge amount of brochures are produced, time in all enterprises is a huge waste, but it means taking power in all those issues that fall within the scope of Civil Defense, General IVANOV, who initially commanded this business, mine simply did not succeed, they did not know what to do, and even if they received direct instructions, some channels of influence, control levers, and the ability to correct the situation, they were not manifested. I do not want to say all the time that these are personal impressions. That's how much they felt, for example, in an inconspicuous way, but the work of the KGB was felt, how much it was not felt that the positive was not visible, but the negative helpless part of the work of the Civil Defense was visible in the first days of these events. But not to mention this, I would say, could not.
In the early days of the Chernobyl tragedy, the defect of our information service was very noticeable. Despite the fact that we also have Atomenergoizdat, it used to be Atomizdat, there are medical publishers, there is a knowledge society, it turned out that ready-made literature, which could quickly be distributed among the population, explain which doses to humans are extremely dangerous, how to behave in conditions when a person is in a zone of increased radiation hazard. A system that could give the right advice: what to measure, how to measure, how to behave with vegetables, fruits, the surface of which could be contaminated with betta, gamma, alpha emitters, all this literature was completely absent.
There were a lot of books for specialists - thick and correct, literate, who were in libraries, but just such brochures, leaflets, such as the Japanese, accompany their equipment - watches, voice recorders and video recorders - that's what you need.
In this or that situation, what button to press, how long to wait, what to do - there was practically no such literature in the country.
I have already mentioned that I proposed from the very beginning to create such a press group at the Government Commission and which would correctly inform the population about the events taking place. I would give the right advice - for some reason this was not accepted.
After arriving in the disaster zone RYZHKOVA and LIGACHEV journalists were admitted. And a big army appeared there. But you know, even we are now hard to say. Probably good that it was allowed, but bad that it was not organized properly. Why? Journalists come. Various. Most very good journalists. For example, the Pravda team and the well-known head of the science department GUBAREV, ODINETS, many good Ukrainian journalists and documentary filmmakers appeared there. But I saw with my own eyes how they ran up to the most famous people who were there, took a button and took some kind of private interview on a specific issue. Sometimes they managed to ask the chairman of a government commission or some member of the commission on some particular issue.
Most of the time they spent the course on the ground. We talked with people who were evacuated, or with people who conducted work on the 4th block, on decontamination and this information was broadcast. What was collected by them, what was printed, of course in the historical, in the archival sense, has a colossal significance, as a living documentary material. And it is necessary and mandatory.
But at the same time, due to the fact that each time the information was submitted in a kind of private form, the whole picture was daily, and maybe even at least weekly due to the state of events - the country did not receive such a solid picture. Because the information was received: there are such, separate blocks: the miners heroically work there. But there was no information: what is the level of radiation where they work, and what happens next in the Brest region, and how and who measures it, and therefore, along with very many very accurate descriptions and observations, for example, there were many inaccuracies.
For example, the press devoted a lot of time to the so-called needle, which they were busy with for a long time. It was an integral device that was supposed to be supplied in the womb of the destroyed 4th unit and give constant information about the temperature there, about the radiation fields and some other parameters.
But, practically, the efforts expended on bringing this needle to the right place from the helicopter were enormous, and practically no information was obtained from this needle.
There was zero information, but it confirmed only what was obtained by other simpler and more reliable methods.
This episode of the installation of the needle was painted very carefully and very, so to speak, in detail. At the same time, when the tremendous work of dosimetrists, the modest work of children, say, from the Kurchatov Institute headed by SHEKALOV or BOROV or VASILIEV, the work of the Ryanovsky group, led by PETROV, the work of KOMBANOV, who was there many times, tested his compositions, which would allow to carry out dust suppression. This means that the logic of all the works, the analysis of the projects that were made — all this was not described properly, but mainly such a consistent dynamics of the events themselves were not described. In such situations, there are many people who have heard and exaggerated rumors were born. Naturally, about the number of people affected by radiation sickness and levels of pollution, for example, the city of Kiev and the extent of the affected area. Any stoppage during the subsequent construction of the sarcophagus was often interpreted as some kind of disaster, like the collapse of some kind of construction, like the appearance of new emissions, as evidence of the work of the reactor there, which started again suddenly and so on and so forth.
Here on these issues such proper systematic information was not delivered and it certainly gave rise to all sorts of wrong and panic, and sometimes, maybe not panic, but misconceptions.
The state of emissions of the 4th block was debated for several months and even in scientific circles. The fact is that the specialists had exactly (specialists working directly at the station, specialists from Hydromet) measured emission dynamics.
The first, the most powerful release, which millions of curies of activity in the form of noble gases and iodine were thrown out at a high altitude, and practically all countries of the world felt this release. Then a few days of active emissions of radioactive particles, fuel, mainly due to the combustion of graphite. Then, the cessation of emissions of these fuel particles, somewhere from the second of May, then heating of the fuel due to the cushion, which was there and the separation of already separated particles, such as cesium, strontium and their distribution until about 2022 May with known areas of distribution and known areas of pollution and constant decline, starting from May 34 to May 5, of the total level of activity emitted from | 4th block.
But, since the previously discarded activity, a huge amount of equipment, which on its wheels spread activity across different areas, dust transfer to a dry summer, it increased a certain number of affected zones, all this was due to the fact that the reactor lives and continues to throw radioactivity from itself into increasing quantities. This created, so to speak, a nervous mood for those who worked there, who carried out decontamination work. Until then, while from the 4th block, redundant projects emerge, such as: put the tube bead on the 4th block. The project I struggled with since May is a completely meaningless project, however, various organizations carried out such work, created various projects of such an outer shell that, if it were delivered, would only complicate the subsequent works on shelter construction and there would be no effect in terms of the removal of aerosol radioactivity.
But these conversations were so strong, because all the same the reactor “chadit” - releases radioactivity in appreciable quantities, then commands were received for the manufacture of various kinds of such coatings. They were created, tested, but the matter ended with the fact that one of the latest constructions, lifted by a helicopter, immediately fell to the ground during the tests and was completely removed. We have abandoned these projects.
Under the influence of rumors, inaccurate information, these projects were born and tried to be implemented and, God forbid, if they were implemented - he would only have made it difficult to work. That is, the ability to combine. I remember how during the war there were two types of information5 daily that appeared in our newspapers - the TASS report - where we won the points occupied by the Germans, where we retreated, where we took a large number of prisoners, where we suffered some kind of private defeat - it was accurate, official information that gave an idea of the happy or bitter events at the front. It was accurate TASS information, and at the same time there were many journalistic essays about specific battles, about specific people, about heroes — rear workers, and so on.
So, our press gave a lot of second-class information about people, their impressions, what was happening there, but very little information was given like TOSSovsky - regular, what happened today, what has changed. That is, mine, and there was a defect in the information system, first and secondly there were few scientific speeches by scientists.
I recall, perhaps, the only statement by Professor IVANOV from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, a large article of which was placed where he simply tried to explain what these rem, milli-tergens are, at what level they represent a real threat to human health, at what level they are do not constitute a real threat how to behave in conditions of some kind of heightened, any kind of heightened radiation background. This was perhaps the only, if I did not forget, an article that had a useful, sober effect on others. But the number of such articles could of course be increased.
It seems to me that it was unnecessarily modestly and carefully written about what happened in the station itself, why the accident happened, what was the reason and whose fault and reactor was bad or some kind of personnel actions were out of the ordinary. Of course, much has been written about this and I myself was involved in the description of the events that preceded the accident. But in fact, a complete picture of what, why, how it happened, it seems to me more than one person still does not really know.
In general, this emergency situation has shown that not a trivial situation - a tragic situation, a difficult, large-scale situation - it requires not only the mobilization of large information resources, but also a very creative, very competent use of these resources in order to get in the right order and in the right direction. volume, the population received information about what was happening, which would relate to information with full confidence and, most importantly, with the ability to use this information for some practical actions, or to show there You need to worry, and where it is necessary, on the contrary, calm down, that it would be rather regular and not unexpected. In general, all these were extremely important questions.
Sometimes it even seems to me that an event of this magnitude could have both a special television and newspaper heading consisting of two parts. Chernobyl: a part of this heading should be purely official - from the government commission to give there exact information, by the time this heading comes out; and the second part is the emotional part, descriptive with personal points of view. In general, this is a serious question: how, on what scale, to cover such large, very unpleasant and difficult events affecting and disturbing practically the entire population of the country, and not only of our country.
As I touched on a little information, touched the reactor a little, then maybe | This is the moment when it is possible to express some personal impressions about how sideways I got into this story, how I was connected with it, how I understood the history and quality of the development of nuclear energy, and how I understand now. Few of us really frankly and accurately spoke on this subject.
I graduated from the engineering physics and chemistry faculty of the Mendeleev Moscow Chemical and Technical Institute. This faculty, which trained specialists, mainly researchers, who had to work in the field of the nuclear industry, that is, be able to separate isotopes, be able to work with radioactive substances, be able to mine uranium from ore, bring it to the required standards, make nuclear fuel out of it , be able to recycle nuclear fuel that has already been in the reactor, containing a powerful radioactive component, so as to highlight useful products. Hazardous and harmful components also highlight. To be able to compact them somehow, to bury them in such a way that they could not cause harm to a person, and some part of radioactive sources could be used for the national economy, medicine, maybe. Here is a group of special questions that I was trained on.
Then I graduated at the Kurchatov Institute in the field of nuclear fuel reprocessing. Academician KIKOEV tried to leave me in graduate school because he liked my thesis, but my friends and I agreed to work for some time at one of the plants of the atomic industry to have some practical skills in the field that then becomes the subject of our research. I was sort of an agitator for this idea, and therefore I could not accept the offer of graduate school and I went to Tomsk. In one of our closed cities, where I had to participate in the launch of one of the radiochemical plants. It was very interesting. Live period of entry into the practice of a young man. I worked at this factory for about two years, and then I was dragged out, with the consent of the party organization (I was a communist from the institute’s time), for postgraduate studies at the Kurchatov Institute.
Candidate exams, under the influence of my friend and comrade Vladimir Dmitrievich KLIMOV, who worked there, I passed there at the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute and left with candidate examinations for candidate work. My first candidate's work - I was offered to address the problem of such a gas-phase reactor, which would contain gaseous uranium hexachloride and some of the problems, namely, the interaction problems at high temperatures of uranium hexachloride with structural materials, I investigated these issues. And having received a lot of data, I wrote a large report that could be the basis of the dissertation work, and maybe it was a ready dissertation work.
But at that time, my friend, graduate student Viktor Konstantinovich POPOV informed me that Professor BARBITOM in Canada had done an excellent, amazing imagination of chemists, work on obtaining a true xenon compound (one of the noble gases). This message captured my imagination and I devoted all my subsequent professional work to synthesis, using various physical methods, such unusual compounds that would be powerful oxidants, had a number of unusual properties that I enjoyed working on and on the basis of which it was possible to build a whole a number of technological processes.
And in this respect my professional activity went on, which created opportunities for me to defend consistently: my candidate’s, then my doctoral dissertations, then, during the development of these works, they were evaluated during my election to the Academy of Sciences. The scientific part of the work was evaluated by the State Prize of the Soviet Union. The applied part is rated Lenin Prize. This was my own professional activity to which I managed to attract the most interesting young people who, with taste, with good education and understanding, are still developing this interesting area of chemical physics from which, I am sure, many very important for practice, for cognitive process event
"A" side finished (3)
Successful activity in this area attracted the attention of the director of the institute and he brought me closer to him, made him deputy director of the institute. Scientific functions were limited to my own scientific work. According to the distribution of responsibilities that we had at the Directorate, and even now they still exist, I wrote down: the task of chemical physics, radiochemical physics, and the use of nuclear and plasma sources for technological purposes. This is the circle of those professional affairs that I was engaged in.
When Anatoly Petrovich ALEKSANDROVA was elected President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, he made me the first deputy director of the institute, entrusting a wide range of issues on managing the institute, but did not change my scientific responsibility. Not appeared, nor new topics for which I would answer.
As before, for the largest piece of d | the activities of the Institute of Plasma Physics and Controlled Thermonuclear Synthesis — Yevgeny Pavlovich VELIKHOV answered completely. Vyacheslav Dmitrievich WRITTEN began to answer for laser technology. Lev Petrovich FEOKTISTov, an intelligent and talented person, was also responsible for the questions of nuclear physics, its special applications. Anatoly Petrovich had a deputy in nuclear power - first Yevgeny Petrovich Ryazan, before him Viktor SIDORENKO worked as a director of the nuclear reactors department, now he is PONOMAREVSTEPNO first deputy director for nuclear power, who were involved in reactor engineering.
I, of course, rotating in this circle, chose my task. I was just wondering: what proportion of nuclear power and for what reasons should be present in the Soviet power industry. I managed to organize such system studies related to: what type of stations should be built; by purpose; how they should be used wisely; should they only produce electricity or should they produce other energy carriers, in particular: hydrogen. Here hydrogen energy has become an area of my scrutiny. All of these were unusual questions that complement the nuclear power industry.
Since Anatoly Petrovich himself was a reactor engineer, the creator and participant in the creation of many reactors, he needed me not as a reactor engineer, but a person who can give some unusual advice from outside, to find non-trivial solutions, but all these decisions and advice did not concern designs of reactors, which I have never done, but related to possible areas of use of all those components contained in a nuclear reactor.
Since the safety issues of nuclear energy are the most acute in various areas of international public opinion, it was just interesting for me to compare the real dangers, the real threats that the nuclear power industry carries with the threats of other energy systems. It was with this that I enthusiastically dealt with it, mainly finding out the dangers of other alternative energy sources to nuclear energy.
That's about the range of issues that I had to deal with professionally. Well, to help Anatoly Petrovich, in an active form, given his employment in the Academy of Sciences, in the affairs of the Institute’s management: in planning the work of the Institute, in some mode of its work; I tried to create a lot of such elements that would unite the institute - the general Kurchatov Council, the general institute seminar, the publication of various publications that would fit the table of researchers on their orders, so that they could quickly get new items from their fields; tried to somehow organize such opportunities for comparing different points of view, different approaches to general physical, energy problems. I did this quite a lot and with passion.
As for the physics and technology of reactors, this was a forbidden area for me, both in my own education and in taboos, which was imposed by Anatoly Petrovich ALEXANDROV and his subordinates working in this field. They were not very fond of intervening in their professional affairs of outsiders.
I remember once Lev Petrovich FEOKTISTOV, who just started working at our institute, tried to analyze conceptually the issues of a more reliable reactor, a more interesting reactor, which would exclude (then this problem excited) the developments of such fissionable materials that could be removed from the reactor and used in nuclear weapons. But his proposals were greeted with hostility. As well as the proposals that came to the Institute of Viktor Vladimirovich ORLOV about a new, safer type of reactor. They were somehow not perceived by the established reactor public.
As I did not have any administrative authority over this division, I generally understood many specific details of what was happening and although I was worried that I began to offer engineering and not a physical approach to solving problems to the reactor environment, but somehow the picture I naturally could not.
And Anatoly Petrovich had such a humanly understandable and even attractive feature, namely, reliance on people with whom he worked for many years. Here he somehow trusted to certain people occupied by naval apparatuses, occupied by station apparatuses, special apparatuses and very much disliked the appearance of new faces there who could somehow disturb him or make him doubt earlier decisions. That's about it and went. And scientifically, I chose an interesting area for myself, which I have already mentioned, chemical physics related to the creation of unusual substances, the creation of systems that would allow to obtain hydrogen in one way or another, to bind to nuclear sources the places of hydrogen production and with passion , with the involvement of external organizations engaged in this area.
She took a very small part in the Institute, both in monetary and in human relations. People there were active, interesting.
But many offered such unusual solutions that provoked discussions, so it seemed that quite a lot of attention was being paid to this, and in fact it was the activity of new people who had entered the new industry. And the resources, in the form of buildings, employees, financing, that went to this area, they were certainly not measurable with the costs that went to ... (the recording was erased).
I was a member of the Scientific and Technical Council of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building of the USSR, but I was not a member of the reactor section of this Council, so I did not know many details, specific discussions. At the Scientific and Technical Council of the Institute, conceptual issues of the development of atomic energy were often discussed, but very rarely - technical aspects; the quality of a particular reactor; fuel quality; the problems that were standing. These issues were discussed either at the reactor sections of the Ministry or at the scientific and technical councils of the relevant departments.
But, nevertheless, the information that I had, she convinced that not everything was well, as it seemed to me, in the development of atomic energy, because with the naked eye it was obvious that our devices differed little from the Western ones, say, in their concept , in some questions even surpassing them, but they were painfully depleted by good control systems, they were extremely poor in diagnostic systems.
Generally, let's say, the very fact, when I learned that the safety analysis of nuclear power plants by the American RAMSOMSON (he consistently looked for possible sources of some kind of trouble leading to accidents, systematized them, conducted probabilistic evaluations of one or another event, assessing with what probability This event may lead, say, to the release of activity outside) that we learned from foreign sources. I have not seen a single team in the Soviet Union that has little to competently raised and considered these issues.
Viktor SIDORENKO spoke most actively for the safety of nuclear energy, but I thought his approach to safety was serious, because he really knew the picture of the operation of the station, the quality of the equipment produced, and the problems that sometimes occurred at nuclear power plants. stations. But his efforts were directed mainly at coping with these surprises: first, organizational measures; secondly, the system of improvement of documents that must be located at the stations and at the designers; Thirdly, he was very worried about creating oversight bodies that would control the situation. All this he called such organizational measures.
He and his supporters were very concerned about the quality of the equipment supplied at the station. Recently, we all began to worry about the quality of training and preparedness of personnel who design, build and operate nuclear power plants, because the number of facilities has increased dramatically, and the quality of personnel involved in this process has decreased and decreased before our eyes.
Here, around these questions, I would say that Viktor SIDORENKO was the leader of the people who showed concern. He did not receive adequate support in our Ministry, every document, every step was given with painful work and the same, psychologically understandable, because the department in which we all worked was built on the principles of the highest qualifications of people performing any operation with the highest responsibility.
And, indeed, in the hands of qualified people, who are doing their job well, our vehicles seemed both reliable and safe to operate. In this circle, concern about additional measures to increase the safety of nuclear power plants seemed to be a far-fetched question, because it was an environment of highly qualified people who were used to relying and were convinced that safety issues are resolved solely by the qualifications and accuracy of instructing the personnel who conduct the process. Military acceptance to a large extent was present in our industry, therefore, it means that the quality of the equipment was of a rather high level.
This was somehow reassuring, and even scientific work aimed at resolving the most important issues of further improving the stations, both in terms of safety and in terms of efficiency, did not enjoy support.
An increasing amount of resources was spent on the creation of objects that are not directly related to nuclear energy. Capacities for the production of players were created, metallurgical and metallurgical plans were created. A large number of construction resources was spent on the creation of objects that are not related to the subject department. Began to weaken, not strengthened scientific organizations.
They gradually, being the most powerful in the country, began to lose the level of equipment with modern equipment. The staff began to grow old. Younger began to appear less. Not very welcome new items. |
gadgets Gradually, imperceptibly, but it was, all the same happened. There remained the usual rhythm of work, the usual approach to solving various problems.
I saw it all, but it was difficult for me to intervene in this process purely professional, and the general declarations on this subject were perceived with hostility. Again, because a non-professional’s attempt to introduce some understanding of their work could hardly be acceptable.
All the time new buildings, new stands, new people were needed to perform the work, because the number of objects increased. But the buildup was, however, not qualitative, but quantitative. Moreover, the newly coming specialists, by their qualifications, repeated the level of design organizations: they often practiced there and considered a good specialist reactor as one who mastered the design of this reactor, who was well able to count, say, an area that knew all the emergency cases that occurred he knew how to come to any object and help him in his physical and energy start-up, quickly find out what was going on there, report back to the leadership of the institute or to the Ministry.
And so, the large-scale generation of engineers has grown up, who qualified their work, but were not critical of the devices themselves, were not critical of all the systems providing them with security, but mostly knew these systems and demanded increasing their number.
This situation was not normal for the science center. At the same time, numerous conversations about how to strengthen design organizations of this kind with specialists and such kind of approaches sounded at the institute, at professional and at party levels for a decade and a half, but practically design organizations did not strengthen, except for one, but remained at the same habitual the level of performance of the initial assigned duties.
Therefore, the picture is this: it seems that everything is all right and you just need to increase the number of known stands, increase the number of people working according to a known algorithm, and everything will be in order.
The worm of doubt gnawed at me, because in my professional field it seemed to me that it was always necessary to do wrong. It is always necessary to do something new, be very critical of what has been done before you, try to step aside and do something different than what was done before you. It was possible in this case of course risk
And I risked quite strongly, but for my life, not very short, not very long, I had to lead ten projects at the level of, say, the world. And here I must say that five projects of them failed. I brought on these failed projects about 25 million rubles. damage to the state. These projects failed not because they were initially wrong.
They were attractive, interesting, but it turned out that the roofing felts did not have the necessary materials or the materials scientists did not want or failed to make them, there was no organization that would undertake the development of a nontrivial compressor, a nontrivial, say, heat exchanger, again with reference to the absence of the necessary material or experience.
As a result, initially attractive projects, with their design study, turned out to be very expensive, cumbersome and not accepted for execution. Here out of 10 projects 5 were failed. Two of these ten projects, I am afraid, expect the same fate and, approximately, for the same reasons.
But the three projects turned out to be very successful where we found good partners and where we laid out as best we could, using the highest echelons of power, using the authority of Anatoly Petrovich, the Central Committee of the party. And in the end, only one of the three works that took place, on which we spent 17 million rubles. began to bring annual income - 114 million rubles.
Four years the corresponding industry, the equipment is already working. More than 0.5 billion rubles. it brought income to the state, which more than covered those 25 million rubles. costs that have not ended positively today. But the degree of risk in my own work was quite high. Well, either 30 or 50 or 70 percent of the risk is certainly a high percentage of risk. But then he gave a striking effect, then when the work could be brought to completion.
I didn’t see anything similar in reactor directions and therefore attracted my attention: high-temperature helium (cooled reactor), molten-salt reactor, which seemed to me to be some kind of new word, although not entirely new because both of the reactors were already tried by the Americans. Were, for example, tried gas-cooled reactors by the Germans. These reactors found their great advantages: from the point of view of efficiency, and from the point of view of the potential water consumption for cooling the reactor, and from the point of view of the width of the zone of use of such reactors in technological processes. Here they seemed to me a new word and, by the way, these reactors seemed to be safer than traditional ones.
Therefore, some kind of patronage, well, within the framework of the Directorate of the Institute, which I could render these directions, I rendered. And moreover, in some professional work of his own, he took some kind of complicity in these areas. But I was not interested in the traditional reactor construction industry, well, and it was not entrusted to me, and it seemed rather boring.
Of course, the extent of its danger (at that time period), the scale of the danger that is inherent in these old devices, I did not imagine. But that feeling of anxiety sucked. But there were such whales, such giants and experienced people that it seemed to me that they would not allow anything unpleasant.
And, since the literature (the most selected) was Western, then, comparing the western apparatuses with ours, this allowed me in some books and articles to draw conclusions that, although there are many problems related to the security of existing apparatuses, they are still smaller than the dangers of traditional energy with its large number of convexogenic substances emitted into the atmosphere, with radioactivity released into the atmosphere from the same coal seams. And, so to speak, I paid more attention to this (to this side).
Certainly, I was annoyed by the situation that developed between the leadership of the Ministry and the scientific leadership. She was wrong. According to the stories, according to the documents, I knew that the starting position was this: The institute, for example, ours, was not part of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. He stood next to him as a separate independent organization and had the right to dictate his scientific requirements, his scientific positions. And the Ministry, evaluating, of course, the scientific proposals, was obliged to technically accurately execute them.
Here is a partnership.
The scientific proposals, which were not limited by the influence of the authorities of the possessing people, and the full opportunity for the execution of this proposal, which, say, from the engineering point of view, the leadership of the Ministry liked, was right.
Then the story came to the fact that science was subordinate to the Ministry. The ministerial cadres have grown, they have accumulated their own large engineering experience. It seemed to them that they themselves already, in scientific terms, understand everything. And so, the scientific atmosphere and scientific spirit in reactor engineering - he gradually began to submit, as it were, to such engineering will - ministerial will.
I saw this, it also worried me, and this complicated my relations with the Ministry when I tried to speak out on this occasion, not very carefully. And I could not win these problems because I was a chemist for ministerial reactor workers and this allowed them to not listen very carefully to my point of view, but to the proposals: to treat them as some kind of fantasy.
Such is the general background on which all this work took place.
As for the RBMK reactor. You know, we have this reactor, in the circles of the reactor workers, was considered a bad reactor. Here Viktor Alekseevich SIDORENKO repeatedly criticized him. But this reactor was considered bad after all not for security reasons. From a security point of view, he was even more likely to stand out (as in the discussion, as I understood them) for the better. It was considered bad for economic reasons, firstly; for greater fuel consumption, for large capital expenditures; on a non-industrial basis of its construction. It was disturbing that this was a certain, dedicated, Soviet line of development.
But, indeed, on water-water, corps apparatuses, more and more world experience was accumulating that could be exchanged: operating experience; used technical solutions; software (as it was possible to share, adapt to this).
As for the RBMK reactors, the whole experience was our domestic one, but of course, if we take the accumulated statistics, the statistics on the operation of the RMBC reactors were the smallest when compared with the WWER apparatus. That, of course, was just as disturbing.
As a chemist, I was worried about the enormous potential of chemical energy in these devices. There is a lot of graphite, a lot of zirconium, water, and in some abnormal situations (in normal situations, graphite is in contact with an inert environment, this is ensured by appropriate technical solutions) the temperature at which the reaction can start, accompanied by hydrogen evolution, in principle and by maintenance, technical conditions - was unacceptable.
But, all the same, potentially, the stock of chemical energy in this type of apparatus was maximum, relative to, say, any others with which one could compare it.
This too was a matter of concern. I was embarrassed, for example, when I looked at this device: an unusual and in my opinion insufficient construction of a protection system that would act in extreme situations - because the protection of the device in case of some elements of its abnormal behavior, say, there is a positive reactivity coefficient - This device, if it began to develop, make itself felt, then the operators and only the operator could enter the safety rods, or they could be automatically entered from the feed | and (on command) of one of the sensors (there were several such protection systems), or manually, with the special button AZ5, reset the emergency rods.
Mechanical rods, which could somehow (mechanics - well, it could work well, could work poorly) and other security systems that would be independent of the operator, which would work solely on the state of the zone of the device, were not in this device. This, of course, somehow, an uncomfortable situation created. But, nevertheless, the practice has already been accumulated, experts have shown confidence in these issues. The speed of the introduction of protection was seemingly inadequate. I heard that the experts, in particular: Alexander Y. Kramerov, discussing these problems with Anatoly Petrovich ALEXANDROV - made a proposal to the designer about changing the emergency protection system (CPS), about improving the CPS of this device and they were not rejected, but were developed somehow So slow.
Moreover, by that time, the relationship between the supervisor and the chief designer had developed - well, quite tense.
In relation to any new projects, new ideas, this design organization fully recognized the authority of the Atomic Energy Institute, and willingly consulted with it, and maintained all contacts. But with regard to this particular apparatus, they considered themselves to be kakby full authors, masters and, without violating the formal order, in which the scientific leadership remained at the Institute of Atomic Energy, - in fact, this leadership was, to a large extent, well, nominal in nature and used for such cases when, say, well, the fundamental decisions were made: whether to make the RBMK reactor a thousand and a half; whether to introduce a heat exchange enhancer into this reactor; for example, when it was necessary to make a proposal that the share of the RBMK apparatus in the nuclear power industry be increased, then the support of Anatoly ALEKSANDROVA was required in this regard.
These questions were somehow discussed with the supervisor.
And questions of a specific technical policy, questions of improving this apparatus, in general, somehow, the designer did not readily accept the point of view of the Institute, - not considering him to be a sufficiently developed partner so that he would be useful to the designer in his activities.
In this sense, I would like to express a point of view, one in which I am absolutely convinced, but which is not shared, unfortunately, by my colleagues and causes friction between us, sometimes, even dramatic ones.
The fact is that in the West, as far as I know, and even according to the logic of things, in aviation, in our Soviet Union, there is no (in developed industries) concept of a Scientific Director and Designer. I myself understand this, scientific management is a problem. For example, the scientific leadership of the problem of aviation, although this is probably not, but I could imagine it. This is an organization that would master the development strategy of aviation: how many small planes; how many big ones; what to prefer: comfort when loading passengers or speed of moving the device from point to point; whether to give preference to hypersonic airplanes or flying airplanes with sound speeds; what is more important, from the point of view of safety, ensuring comfortable reliable operation of ground services or the activities of personnel on board the aircraft; share in aviation of various types of aircraft ...
Such a scientific leadership of aviation would seem to me acceptable. But when it comes to aircraft design, the aircraft, then he must have one owner. He and the designer, he and the designer, he and the scientific director of this aircraft - this is all the power and all the responsibility - they should be found in the same hands - it seemed to me an absolutely obvious fact.
At the moment of atomic energy generation everything was reasonable, since it was a completely new field of science - nuclear physics, neutron physics. The concept of scientific management was reduced to the fact that the designer was asked the basic principles of constructing the apparatus and the supervisor was responsible for the fact that these principles were physically correct and physically safe. But the designer has already implemented these principles every day, practically and constantly consulting with physicists: whether some of the physical laws of this device are violated.
At the dawn of the nuclear industry, this was all justified. But when the design organizations grew, when they had their own design, physical departments, then the existence of such a system of dual power over a single apparatus: there is also a scientific director and designer, but in fact there is a tripartite - because the General Directorate or some other deputy appeared. Minister, who had the right decisive word on a particular technical solution.
Numerous Councils (interdepartmental and departmental), created, in general, the situation of collective responsibility for the quality of the apparatus. This situation continues today. She, in my opinion, is wrong. I am still convinced that Scientific Ru | The leader, the organizations of the Scientific Director is an organization that examines various projects, chooses the best from them, and therefore determines the development strategy of the nuclear power industry. This is the function of the supervisor, and not the function of creating a specific apparatus with the specified properties. This whole confusion, it led, in general, to great irresponsibility, as shown, say, by the Chernobyl experience.
But one way or another, the system of multi-authority, the system of the absence of one personally responsible for the quality of the apparatus, with all its infrastructures - in general, it was absent, of course. And this caused a corresponding concern among professionals in the technical sense, in the engineering sense. Of course, it was difficult for me to assess the dignity or disadvantages of this or that apparatus. But the only thing I managed to do was to create such an expert group that would conduct an expert comparison of various types of devices: and on their cost effectiveness; and on their universality; and on their safety issues.
The first two consecutive such expert works turned out to be interesting. The idea of creating such an expert group and carrying out such work belonged to me. I organizationally helped this activity, and the actual work was conducted specially for these purposes by the laboratory of Alexander Sergeevich Kachanov, who organized the work, in my opinion, perfectly. Because his lab was some kind of cell: asking questions; physically formulating these questions, and the answers to the questions were given by specialists, not only in different departments of the Institute, but also from different institutions in general. And as a result, a basis appeared that could be widely discussed, criticized, supplemented. And this work, unfortunately, was suspended at the very beginning, initially: - Alexander Sergeyevich Kachanov’s serious illness and the impossibility of finding an equivalent substitute for him; well, and then the subsequent Chernobyl events.
And on April 26, 1986, the Institute of Atomic Energy found itself in a rather strange position when, with the approval of the director of the institute with his full support, the first deputy was engaged in organizing system-wide studies on the structure of the nuclear power industry, which was of little interest to the Ministry and went solely on the support of Anatoly Petrovich ALEKSANDROVA it has a taste. Here it was already possible to choose the correctness of various technical solutions.
At the same time, I was able to create a laboratory of safety measures, which, compared with other types of energy, evaluated various hazards of nuclear energy.
For the first time, there were specialists who occupied ... (the record was erased).
... soon it was necessary to ensure the correctness of the implementation of all technological regimes, literally with a fight. Already here, quite recently Alexander Petrovich and Vyacheslav Pavlovich VOLKOV, the director of the first Kola, and then the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, told me this episode when a group of his comrades visited the Kola station and made sure that there was complete disorder, from his point of view, in the organization of the process.
Well, what examples did he give: let's say the duty officer replaced, filled out all the logs in advance, all the parameters in advance, even before the end of the shift, then looked at the ceiling until the end of the shift and practically did nothing. Well, only SIUR (senior reactor control engineer) can, sometimes get up from his seat in order to carry out some operations. And so silence, calm, no careful monitoring of the indicators of the devices; no attention to the condition of the equipment before the scheduled preventive repairs.
That is, here is his friend, - having arrived to familiarize himself with the work of this station, he showed that everything is wrong there, and the director of the BRYUKHANOV station directly says: "What are you worried about? - when VOLKOV phoned him, - yes, the atomic reactor is a samovar - it is much simpler than a heating station and we have experienced staff and never have anything happen. "
Well, he was very alert. As he told me: he called the Ministry of Energy and VERETENNIKOV in the Ministry of Energy, and, behold, Shasharin, and got to the DISABLED comrade MARYIN about the Central Committee of the Party reported about it.
But to him, they said something like this: "Do not put your nose into your business." ONLY THE READY said: "If I leave, I will see." I went and looked and said that everything was alright there and that he had incorrect information. And it was not long before the Chernobyl accident.
I think that if I could see the work of other branches. So I had to visit various chemical plants. I was especially horrified at the Chemkent region phosphorus processing plant.
A phosphorus plant is something terrible, both from the point of view of the quality of technology management, and from the point of view of the saturation of the diagnostic equipment of this enterprise. The wildest working conditions. Just the absence of many managers who should be in the staffing table, but which simply did not exist.
The plant is very difficult and very dangerous was essentially given some free flow about | costs It was done scary when you had to get acquainted with such situations.
Therefore, I broadly understood the words of our Chairman of the Council of Ministers that the matter is not in the specifics of the development of nuclear energy, which has reached such a state, but this is a specific feature of the development of the national economy that led to this.
Not long I had to wait for the confirmation of the correctness of my understanding of these words, because, after a few months, it really means: - the collision of the Nakhimov ship and such a severe accident with the same carelessness and irresponsibility; then methane explosion at a coal mine in Ukraine; the collision of trains in Ukraine - all this in a short time.
All this reflected a kind of general serious technological deproduktivnost and indiscipline in all the most responsible areas of our activity.
And now, when the situation has really developed such, as here at Lev Nikolaevich TOLSTY the story is such - “There is no guilty in the world”.
When you look at the chain of events: why did one do this, another tact, and so on, and so on, you can’t name the only culprit - the initiator of some unpleasant events that led to the crime. Because it is the circuit that closes.
Operators made mistakes, because they needed to complete the experiment - they considered it a matter of honor. All this led them and guided their actions.
The plan for the experiment was drawn up very poorly, not very detailed and not authorized by those experts who had to be authorized.
Here I have in the safe somewhere stored the record of telephone conversations of operators on the eve of the accident. Frost on the skin tears up when you read such records. One operator calls another and asks: "Valera, it’s written here in the program what needs to be done, and then much of what is written is crossed out, how can I be?" The second interlocutor on the wire: - "And you act on crossed out." Do you understand?
Here is the level of simply preparing documents on such a serious object as a nuclear power plant, when someone crossed out something, the operator could interpret the crossed out as correct or incorrect and could perform arbitrary actions.
But again I want to say. It would be wrong to place all the burden of blame only on the operator, because someone also had a plan and someone struck in it, and someone signed it, and someone did not coordinate it. And the fact that the station could independently carry out some actions not authorized by professionals is a defect in the relationship of professionals with this station. The fact that representatives of the State Nuclear Power Authority were present at the station, but were not aware of the experiment being conducted, not in the course of this program - this is not only the fact of the station’s biography, but the fact of the existence of the system’s employees’s biography.
These are all the thoughts that come to mind in connection with the Chernobyl accident.
But now let us return again to the Chernobyl events, from which I deviated so far to the side. In my opinion, I finished the story on the fact that I was struck by the clarity of the work of our KGB services, which were not very noisy, with very small numbers doing a lot of work on establishing connections, on establishing order in the disaster zone.
Similar words can be spoken to the service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, both Union and Ukrainian, because: both the evacuation process, and the fast cordoning of the zone, and the fast guidance of the regime and order, as much as possible, all the same they did to mine not bad, although of course there were separate, it must be said, separate facts of looting, separate facts of penetration into a closed zone with the aim of stealing property, but the number of such attempts was small and they were quickly suppressed.
The air forces — helicopter groups — worked very well. It is simple, I must say, an example of high organization and neglecting every danger, working very carefully, clearly, all the crews tried to always carry out tasks, no matter how difficult and difficult this task was.
The first days were especially difficult. The command was given: to fall asleep sandbags. For some reason, the local authorities could not immediately organize a sufficient number of people who would prepare the bags, prepare the necessary sand so that the helicopter pilots would have only one operation - bring it to the place and drop the bag.
(end of side "B", cassettes 2. Section 4.)
The text corresponds to the audio:
Investigators of the investigation team
Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation
Senior Counselor of Justice xxxxxxxxxxxx
1st class lawyer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Academician V. Legasov
(tape recording N3)
He saw with his own eyes how the commanders of the crews, young officers loaded bags with sand, loaded these bags into helicopters, flew, installed, went on target, dumped, returned and carried out this work again.
Approximately on April 27 or 28, these two days, neither the Ministry of Energy, nor the local authorities could organize the work, such a forum | rsirovannuyu, clear, for the preparation of those items that required throwing into the shaft of the reactor.
Somewhere on the 29th this order was organized. The necessary careers were established, the lead went. People were already set up, and after that things went smoothly. By that time, approximately, the helicopter pilots found their very effective way of action, having placed an observation point on the roof of the building of the district party committee in the city of Pripyat. From there, they directed the crews that were above the fourth block.
I have to say that this work was generally not safe, because it was necessary to hang, lose more weight, leave on time, without receiving excessive doses of radiation and, most importantly, hit the target. All this has been worked out. If my memory serves me right, then the numbers were the following: tens of tons were dropped on the first day, hundreds of tons later, they went on the second and third days.
And finally, Major ANTOSHKIN, he somehow told us, the Government Commission, in the evening that 1100 tons of material had been dropped in one day. In general, such a forced, active action of all the people who delivered the materials and discharged these materials led to the fact that by May 2nd, the reactor was practically blocked. And since that time, the release of radionuclides (however noticeable total release of radionuclides) from the womb of the reactor has decreased.
At the same time, military units continued to conduct all necessary reconnaissance operations.
The work of the Government Commission in the early days was as follows. Early in the morning, Boris Evdokimovich SCHSHERBINA gathered the members of the Government Commission. All those responsible for certain operations were invited. The meeting began, as a rule, with the report of General PEKALOV, who showed the state of the radiation situation in the station zone and adjacent zones. Of course, all these days, every day, the situation became more and more complex, because the areas already studied gave a higher (day after day) level of radiation and the number of such areas increased. It increased because the scouts went to new facilities, and old facilities received a large number of radioactive nuclides that fell on them.
In general, the situation was so complicated that it became clear that the scale of the operation had to be increased. Even at the time of the conglomeration of processes, the first decontamination operations immediately began in the fourth block.
But what did they boil down to? I remember how the future Minister of Medium Machine Building, Comrade Ryabev, who replaced MESHKOVA as part of the Government Commission, headed the group himself (having received a prescription from experts about how to prepare formulations capable of forming polymer films when they freeze) sites of the city of Pripyat team that was engaged in the preparation of such solutions.
Then they themselves walked in a group and the surfaces most contaminated covered with these solutions. At the same time, the group I called up, under the direction of Comrade Schupak Alexander Fedorovich from our Institute, was studying the methods of introducing such components into the soil and onto its surface, which could absorb the most mobile radionuclides to which cesium was attributed.
That's when phosphate compounds appeared. The Novosibirsk group telegraphed to me about the need for wider use of tuffs, Celites, which means we installed Transcarpathian, Armenian deposits of this material and ordered it with compositions.
The use of such celite-containing materials has proven useful. It is useful even very much, as when entering into the soil for keeping radionuclides, and for introducing into the body dams that have already begun to be built along rivers, small and large.
I must say that, of course, there was a lot of stupid in this work. Not everything was accurately documented what has already been done and what has not been done. Teams were given. Verification of the execution and accuracy of the execution of commands is sometimes delayed until later.
So, after a while, when I arrived at the site, I found that in the storm sewer area the sorbents simply fall asleep, while when it was necessary to make the appropriate trays, which could be used as the sorbents were saturated with radionuclides, quickly and simply change one pallet on the other, and made just mechanical backfill.
Lev Alekseevich VORONIN, who at that time commanded the Government Commission, quickly understood me. He showed me that he gave the appropriate commands, but to mine these commands didn’t come to fulfillment in the long run.
In addition, the change in the composition of the Governmental Commission, which is periodically carried out, led to the fact that - one composition would order some quantity of regents, sorbents, necessary materials, - and the other team of visitors starts to operate according to a slightly different scheme and a large number of them accumulate on reception routes. unloaded cars.
Such material and economic issues began to arise, a separation statement emerged | This is due to the fact that everything that is carried out in the standard tested mode - these materials are taken by the army and used in decontamination works, and all that should be tested, all this had to go to the organizations of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. They had to pre-test the materials and give an appropriate opinion on them, and only after that could they be handed over to the army for serial use.
A lot of materials were used: our Soviet domestic ones were offered, but, in general, everything, in the end, reduced to the fact that the most effective methods were dust suppression and protection were reduced to the following operations: first, in the most polluted areas, this is of course first and foremost mechanical collection of the most infected particles.
This mechanical gathering with different attempts to use, say, robots purchased, including in Germany, was unsuccessful, because all the robots that were tested in the first period of time - they turned out to be either mechanically inoperative in conditions of collapse, in large irregularities on the surface. They simply could not mechanically overcome obstacles, and on flat surfaces, in conditions of large radiation fields, the electronics, as a rule, the control refused, and these robots could not act.
Therefore, ultimately, the most successful way turned out to be remote-controlled bulldozers, or simply bulldozerskrepers. Such is our usual technique, the cab of which was reliably leaded and the driver defended himself while in this cabin. It was at the first stages that this turned out to be the most efficient way, when using the usual equipment, but with reliable protection of the person operating this equipment, it was possible to collect and bury the dirtiest particles, the most dangerous contaminants.
The next operation was concreting of already cleaned land with a preliminary underlayer. This is such an operation was carried out. Powerful vacuum cleaners were put into action, before concreting a sufficiently large amount of contaminated dust was produced and cleaned.
Concreting, removing various lacus, which sometimes turned out to be unsuccessful. Then chemical compositions. The most interesting of these were the compositions proposed by Corresponding Member Viktor Alexandrovich KABANOV, previously tested in areas of dust storms in Central Asia. Compositions that were able to fix the soil particles, but at the same time allow moisture to pass through and allow the subsoil to live a normal life. These tested formulations were successful. Viktor Alexandrovich Kabanov, with the help of the leaders of the Ministry of Chemical Industry, managed to organize sufficient production of these funds in Dzerzhinsk and they are generally quite extensive use of these funds and they are generally included in widespread use.
The most trivial methods of cleaning were of the same great importance: the constant washing of roads, the creation of decontamination points for equipment and people — all this, as events developed, became more and more widely used and more and more organized.
I started talking about how the work of the Government Commission was organized. She started her work very early, somewhere at 7 or 8 in the morning, the first meeting was held, under the guidance of the Chair, at which the relevant dosimetric situation in various regions of the region was heard. The corresponding tasks were given. Checked the implementation of the previously done. Then all the specialists started their tasks and somewhere late in the evening (at Shcherbina, it was at least somewhere around 10 pm) the results were again summed up: the radiation situation, the state of the dam construction, the wells, and the necessary equipment for new data on the construction of the sarcophagus.
All this information was listened to, and operational decisions were made there. On a regular basis, several times a day, comrades consistently spoke with the leadership of the Government Commission: LONG Vladimir Ivanovich, comrade Ryzhkov Nikolai Ivanovich. It was a must every day.
After arriving at the place of events RYZHKOVA and LIGACHEVA, I already, in my opinion, spoke about this, but I repeat - the Governmental Commission of the first composition left. At the same time, it was announced that it would be a permanent Government Commission, and that it would be replaced by duplicate compositions. But SIDORENKO and I were left in order for me to finish the decontamination work, and SIDORENKO continued to carefully analyze the role of the National Power Management Committee, in what happened in what is happening now.
Late at night, on the 4th of May, Ivan Stepanovich SILAEV (very calm, very efficiently conducting his work) was already in charge there. On his orders I was found. It turns out that they called me to Moscow at a meeting of the Politburo on May 5th. The first plane I flew.
I flew to the Institute where I was met, washed, washed, cleaned, as much as possible. Here, I jumped home, saw my wife, of course, very upset, well, and by 10 o'clock I arrived at the Politburo, where | consistently comrade. SHCHERBINE, Comrade. Ryzhkov and I had to give an explanation to all that is happening.
Mikhail Sergeyevich GORBACHEV, who presides over the Politburo, immediately warned that now he is not interested in the problem of the guilt and causality of the accident. He is interested in the state of affairs and those necessary measures, still additional, necessary for the state in order to quickly cope with the situation that has arisen.
At the conclusion of this meeting of the Politburo, Mikhail Sergeyevich, referring to no one to whom, but apparently to the Ministers of BREZHNEV and CHAZOV, who were present, asked the comrades to return to the site and continue their work.
After the Politburo meeting, I went into Boris Yevdokimovich Scherbina’s office and asked: does this request apply to me, or do I need to stay, like the entire Government Commission here in Moscow to continue my current work?
He said, "Yes, you stay here and continue your current work." I went to the Institute, but before arriving at the Institute, they called me from the Scherbina in the car and said that all the same, at the request of SILAEV, with whom he addressed to the Secretary General, I need to go back to Chernobyl, because the unilateral actions of VELIKHOV, who remained there for some reason, disturbed Ivan Stepanovich.
Well, on the same day, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I flew from Chkalovsk by plane and again found myself in Chernobyl, where I continued to work.
The work proceeded approximately in the old plan, that is, it went in three directions:
1. Observation of the state of the 4th block, because the main backfills have already run out, and various probes were introduced, with the help of which it was possible to measure the temperature, radiation fields, control the movement of radionuclides in the 4th block;
2. clearing the territory of the industrial site of the Chernobyl NPP itself;
3. work on the construction of tunnels under the foundation of the 4th block and the fence of the 30-km zone, the continuation of the dosimetric work, and the start of decontamination work.
At the same time, the army allocated builders, regional organizations allocated builders for the construction of villages in which evacuees could live.
The work was huge, demanding, and the movement of the masses of people, and the creation of the necessary access system, and immediate on-site preparation of a work organization plan.
On these days, somewhere on the 9th of May, it seemed to us that breathing, living, burning, the 4th unit ceased. He outwardly was calm and we wanted to celebrate our Victory Day, on the 9th of May, sometime late in the evening, solemnly celebrate, but, unfortunately, it was on that day that a small but brightly glowing crimson spot was found inside the 4th block, which indicated that the temperature there is still a high place there; it was difficult to determine whether the parachutes are burning, on which lead and other materials were dropped. In my opinion, it was not very similar to this, most likely it was a red-hot mass, as later I understood much later, a red-hot mass of sand, clay and all that was sketched.
We were, of course, grieved. The holiday on May 9th was spoiled and it was decided to add 80 tons of lead to the mouth of this reactor, which was done. After that, the glow stopped and the celebration of the 9th of May we celebrated more in such a calm and normal atmosphere on the 10th of May.
I cannot fail to note what a big role Marshal AGANOV played there, with his engineering troops, because very often problems arose. In order to get to one mark or another, pull this or that hose. It was necessary to punch holes. Moreover, each time a task was solved, say, to punch this hole with the help of military engineering means, that is, to shoot, for example, from cannons of a corresponding caliber, then each time there was a danger - would the remaining structure not collapse. It was necessary to make the appropriate estimates, estimates. And all this work, Marshal Aganov and his subordinates were extremely clearly, extremely organized, collected and very accurate.
Even then, in these difficult and difficult days, we still had some, paradoxical, seemingly high spirits. It was certainly not due to the fact that we were present at the elimination of such a tragic event. Tragedy, of course, was the main background on which everything happened, but some elevation created how people worked, how quickly our requests responded, how quickly various engineering options were calculated, and we already there on site began to calculate the first options for building a dome over the destroyed by block.
Subsequently, this work was entrusted to the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Comrade BATALIN, who took the management of the design work in his hands. And subsequently the building itself was entrusted to the Ministry of Medium Machine Building.
Somewhere on May 910, at this time, after talking on the phone with Mikhail Sergeyevich GORBACHYOV, in which he asked me personally to give him a certain chronology of events, a description of what was happening as he was preparing to speak on Central Television in front of the Soviet Union, I proceeded to writing the corresponding note where and | I laid everything that by that time I knew: how events had developed; how the destruction of the 4th block occurred; what works have already been done; what a large amount of work to be done.
I showed this note to Evgeny Pavlovich Velikhov, he did not make any additions to it, and Ivan Stepanovich SILAEV, who made a number of organizational remarks, after which the three of us signed this note and sent it to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. It was partially used in it (the text is erased).
Apparently, I wanted to say that the Institute was first formed, it was possible to assemble a group of specialists who looked at nuclear energy as a system, all the elements of which should be equally economical, equally reliable and, depending on the size of one or another element of the system, its quality In general, the atomic energy system could be more or less optimal.
These are the works just started. I always thought it was the right approach. Understand what proportion of energy should be given in the form of nuclear energy in the assignment, along with the energy commission of Anatoly Petrovich. Then, look at what quality energy is needed, replace it with nuclear sources, then look at which regions to do it most appropriately and then formulate requirements for devices that could best match the tasks that flowed out of the country's fuel and energy balance. And having chosen the appropriate devices, we are already working on them in an engineering way so that they would meet all international safety criteria.
I had this group of questions ... Well, I was involved in it, at least in the formulation of the problem, in the development of these works. It began quite successfully. But with the illness of Alexander Sergeevich KOCHINOV and with subsequent events, everything changed. Now a purely engineering approach has been resumed, where the apparatus and the apparatus are simply compared.
Each specialist who has come up with either some kind of improvement of the existing apparatus, or a fundamentally new one, proves its advantages. There is no unified system, assessment criteria. Maybe now they are trying to create it.
In recent months I no longer know what is happening because I once formulated the nature of this work, how it should flow, but then it turned out to be excluded from the work itself. What is happening there now is hard for me to say.
In the overall composition of the working group there are of course smart specialists, maybe everything will fall into place.
At a meeting on June 14, Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov, in his speech, said that it seemed to him that this accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was not accidental, that nuclear power engineering with some inevitability was heading towards such a difficult event. Then these words struck me with their accuracy, although I myself was not yet able to formulate this task like that. But he formulated - in this way.
I really want to understand those numerous stops, the case, for example, at the Kola NPP, when the main pipeline, the most responsible pipeline, along the weld, instead of performing welding in a normal way, the welders simply laid the electrode and then welded it lightly on top and Of course, this could be a terrible accident - the rupture of a large pipeline of a VVER apparatus is the largest accident with complete loss of the coolant, with the core melting, etc.
It’s good that the staff, as Aleksandr Petrovich VOLKOV, director of the Kola NPP, told me later, was so schooled to be attentive and precise, because you’ll see the first one that was noticed by the operator and you won't see it in the microscope. The room was noisy, you could not hear the same sound signals, - nevertheless, the operator was so attentive that he noticed an anomaly in this main weld.
The proceedings began. Found out that it was just trash. Responsible pipeline carelessly certified. Began to watch the documentation. There seems to be a signature. When checking the documentation, it turned out that not only the signature of the welder is, that he had welded the weld qualitatively, but the signature of the gamma defectoscopist who checked the weld was a weld that did not exist in nature. And all this was done, of course, for the sake of increasing labor productivity. More seams to cook. And such a quickie, which just struck, I remember, our imagination.
This was then checked at many stations: the same areas, the same welding seams - and not everything was all right. Frequent shutdowns of devices, frequent fistulas of responsible communications, not successfully working valves, failing channels of RBMK type reactors — all this happened every year.
It means that a decade of talk about simulators, which are becoming more and more successful, in large quantities and of better quality, was set up in the West, and which, as before, we did not have in the Soviet Union.
Five-year, at least, talk about creating a system for diagnosing the state of the most critical equipment — nothing has been done.
It was recalled that the quality of engineers and any other | The personnel who operated the nuclear power plant gradually decreased. But also every person who has been to the construction sites of a nuclear power plant, was amazed at the possibility of working there, at such responsible facilities to work, you know, like at the very last hack building.
All this, as separate episodes, was in our heads, but when Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov said that atomic energy was approaching this, then this whole multi-year picture created before my eyes. The specialists of my own institute stood before my eyes, and they were very concrete, very familiar with everything that was happening in the field of construction of nuclear power plants.
I remembered the Ministry, with its somehow strange, generally speaking, worries - this is not the Main Board that led us, this main board that really made ends meet, got money, got money, transmitted information from the stations to the higher level, sent people to pickups
And I began to recall that there is not a single person, not a single group of people who would carry out purposeful work on analyzing the situation in the nuclear power industry, on changing the practice of building stations and supplying equipment — although some such sparodic movements took place.
For example, the longstanding struggle of Viktor Alekseevich SIDORENKO, supported by Academician ALEKSANDROV, was crowned, for example, by the decision of the Government to create the State Committee for Energy and Radiation Safety, a state committee whose representatives should be at each station, at each enterprise that produces critical equipment for nuclear power plants, should, so to speak, give or permit or stop work, depending on its quality.
The same GosATOMENERGONADZOR had to thoroughly review all regulatory documents and improve them, and verify compliance with all regulatory requirements during practical work. This, let's say, question has been resolved.
But it was decided by a wonderful somehow. Like, you know, as it is now Gospriyomka. Well, there was a large number of specialists, good specialists, distracted from specific engineering practical and scientific activities.
They sat down at the tables. Began to beat out a house, tables, positions. Some additional, of course, temporary complications in carrying out certain operations began, but as you can see at the very beginning of this Committee’s work, as the Chernobyl accident showed, this organizational superstructure, due to the lack of forethought of the actual mechanisms for influencing the quality of nuclear energy, in general or this committee did not have time to show itself, and may never show, in terms of improving the quality of our nuclear energy.
And the requirements they formed were not ideal, not such that they should be in order for the nuclear power industry to be safe, but in their own requirements they somehow proceeded in general from the real situation we had, using some western experience, such a combination of western experience, our experience, prevailing ideas, the level of engineering production of the Soviet Union, which cannot or does not satisfy these or other requirements — and all this left quite such an impression of a cleptic picture — not slim, not false.
Many regulations, rules, requirements were so complex, confusing. In some parts contradictory. Perhaps, at first glance, in order to understand that this contradiction does not exist, it was necessary to carry out some additional work.
Everything that seemed to be in normal mode should simply be stored on one or two diskettes on a personal computer located next to the operator, and he could clarify something for himself at any moment.
All this was kept in old, battered books, for which one had to go, one had to study, look at greasy pages - all this, of course, made a rather poor impression.
But it seemed to me that very few people experienced the impression of this wretchedness, the severity of this. I did not see my supporters.
Somehow, I got into the hands of the magazine "Businessuvit" - this is also mine in 1985, in which there was an article criticizing the French for their active cooperation (for trying to actively cooperate) with the Soviet Union in the field of nuclear technology.
Well, it was assumed that we are increasing the supply of natural gas to France, and in response to this product the French supply us with nuclear technology, bearing in mind: robots that would facilitate repair work, unloading and handling operations, a number of diagnostic systems and a number of devices that make technology in reactor construction and in the operation of nuclear power plants is more modern.
But the American author of the article criticized the French for not doing it in vain (for political reasons, they say - for nothing, for economic reasons - for nothing).
But this article was written clearly and clearly: firstly, that the physics of the reactor and, so to speak, the physical fundamentals of nuclear energy, the Soviet Union created such as all over the world, are in no way inferior, but techno | the logical gap, the implementation of these physical principles is huge and there is no need for the French to help the Russians to overcome this technological gap.
And before this article there was such a lousy, in general, the picture was drawn when, against the background of a dilapidated cooling tower near a nuclear power plant, French, such a mustache, a young specialist, tries to explain with a pointer to how to build a cooling tower for a Russian bear, who put his finger in his mouth and hardly understands that the quality of the cooling tower is as integral to the quality of a nuclear power plant as the nuclear reactor itself.
Such a wicked caricature was. So I remember that with this caricature I ran through different cabinets: I showed it to MESHKOV, SLAVSKLMU, Anatoly Petrovich ALEKSANDROV and showed him as a question, in fact, very serious.
This is a question of the gap between the physical concepts of what a reactor should be; between low-quality fuel fabrication; and the whole amount of technological operations, many of which seemed small, and which are practiced at our stations.
You know, I didn’t meet with understanding in one place, but rather the opposite - Anatoly Petrovich ALEKSANDROV called KOKOSHIN - Deputy Director of the Institute of the USA and Canada (Dr. KOKOSHIN is an interesting person, young) and asked him to write an anti-article - to expose, means the author of this article, that there is nothing like that, that the Soviet nuclear power industry is at full level, and so on and so forth.
Although the article argued that the Soviet nuclear power in terms of input capacity, is indeed not at the world level; that the reactor concepts adopted in the Soviet Union are physically correct and valid, that Soviet reactor builders are good.
But, that technological support - of this complex cycle - is very backward, therefore: a lot of people work at the station, a lot of bad devices, a lot of inaccuracies in the work of the systems serving the station, etc.
That is, the truth was written there. But, no, - Anatoly Petrovich insisted that KAKOSHIN write an article as such, which means, well, exposing these points of view.
But KOKOSHYN had enough wisdom or not enough time for such an anti-article to appear. For if she appeared, she would appear just in Chernobyl days.
On this episode, I wanted to emphasize that I was the only one, perhaps, well, from the circle of people with whom I had the opportunity to communicate acutely feeling this problem. The rest, much better than me, knowing the situation at nuclear power plants, but somehow they were calm about this.
Once I heard from Nikolai Nikolayevich PONOMAREVASTEPNO (we have such a deputy director for nuclear energy, the first deputy director today). He was engaged in a high-temperature, solar-cooled reactor, and we always considered this reactor as a reactor with better technological capabilities for the national economy, having a higher temperature, which means it can be used: in metallurgy, in chemistry, and in oil refining.
That is, they were considered not as a competitor to the nuclear power industry, but as an addition to it.
But once in conversation he said that VVER reactors are very dangerous. And this is true. In this sense, of course, not an addition, but, in fact, an alternative to today's energy industry.
It was from the reactors I first heard this way, in a calm, true manner, the spoken words, but very serious, that our modern nuclear power at VVERs and RBMK is equally dangerous and requires taking some additional serious measures.
By my own character, I began to study this issue more carefully and to take more active positions and say that the next generation of safer nuclear reactors is really needed and, say, a TTER reactor or a molten salt reactor tried to demonstrate as the next step a safer reactor.
But this caused an exceptional storm in the Ministry. A storm of indignation.
Especially the Minister of SLAVSKY, who just barely kicked at me, when he said that these were different things, that I was an illiterate person, that I wasn’t doing the right thing, and that it was impossible to compare one type of reactor with another.
That was such a difficult situation.
Slowly worked on alternative reactors. Slowly, they were striving to improve the existing ones and, what is the saddest thing, could in no way establish a serious objective scientific analysis of the true state of affairs, build the whole chain of events, analyze all possible troubles, find means to get rid of these troubles.
I tried, as I said, to create a laboratory of security measures. Then she joined the nuclear energy safety department.
But, since it was headed by SIDORENKO (this department), then all of this was subordinated to him, all the same, again, to the development of standards, documents, procedures that improve matters at today's nuclear power plants.
But to a serious theory, to a serious analysis, to serious concepts | it did not work and, in general, it was quite disturbing.
The more nuclear power plants were built, the more real, of course, there was the danger that somewhere, once there could be trouble.
It became somehow felt by people, but still the struggle against these dangers was conducted as a struggle with each specific case: a steam generator would fail at some station — that is why decisions are being made to change the design of the steam generator, and, of course, sooner or later to seek improvement. .
Then something else happens: at the RBMK the channel will somehow break, - so, they are starting to investigate - why the channel has stopped - whether the matter is in zirconium; in station operation mode; in some other circumstances.
Well, the quality of the manufactured zirconium and the quality of the manufacture of pipes from it are improved, the mode of operation is improved - and now they calm down until the next one, the next case.
Everything seemed to me that this is not a scientific approach to the problems of the safety of nuclear energy, but again, due to the fact that my professional studies were in another field, and here I was an observer integrating all sorts of such information that could not be discussed in The Ministry is absolutely - because there they are used to very specific engineering conversations: how to replace steel with steel, change this or that technological system.
All conceptual conversations, all attempts of such a scientific, consistent approach to this problem to implement, they were not perceived in any way.
So, on the eve of the Chernobyl events, so it all developed.
Moreover, the number of enterprises entrusted with the manufacture of various elements of the equipment of nuclear power plants has increased the same.
They began to build Atommash, many young people reappeared, as our press wrote, the plant was built very poorly.
The quality, of course, of specialists who still had to master their professions, desired much better. All this was evident, about this the Komsomol members, who organized a headquarters at the Central Committee of the Komsomol, helping to develop the nuclear power industry, wrote a lot of documents. It was visible at the stations.
I was especially disappointed after visiting several western stations.
Especially when I looked at the Lovisa station in Finland. The station was built according to our ideology. Our station itself.
Only it was built by Finnish builders.
Just threw all our automated control system and put the Canadian. A number of technological tools were replaced, - ours were excluded from operation, and either Swedish or their own were supplied. The procedures instituted at this station differed sharply from ours, starting from the entrance to the station, the external order on it, personnel training, because at this station there was a normal simulator where all the staff underwent periodic training and played out possible situations that could be on the reactor.
I was amazed at the time during which the overload took place at this station. Very interesting, the station staff had 45 people, if my memory serves me, the staff of people who were involved in the operation of preparing the overload, that is, they planned who should participate in the overload of people who do not work at the station. Picked up the staff. Agreed on time. Agreed on the tool. Agreed on the sequence of operations. It took about half a year, approximately, a very thorough development of the overload procedure.
But the most overload took 1819 days, while with us it takes a month and a half there, sometimes two months.
But the operational staff there is significantly less than ours. External cleanliness station. Equipment of station laboratories. All this is strikingly different from what we have in the Soviet Union.
Yes, I would also like to say about control systems.
As soon as you remember how our atomic energy was controlled: the Ministry of Energy, with its main departments; Minsredmash, with its domes; Chief Designer; Supervisor; at all levels, specialists (from the head of the laboratory to the director of the institute) could request information, interfere with the work of the station, write reports, suggest and present such numerous departmental councils, at which something was discussed and all this was not very harmonious, not organized, and did not constitute a single natural working process, and each time it was a response to some technical proposal, or to some accident, or to some pre-emergency situation.
All this created an impression of some kind of carelessness and of mass movement in unorganized work in the field of nuclear energy.
This, by the way, I felt less acutely because my own functions boiled down to determining in the energy commission the pace of the introduction of nuclear power plants over time, the course of events, the structure of nuclear energy. This, all the same, were promising questions.
And I dealt with current activities indirectly, due to the fact that this was not my profession, the more | I was not charged more.
But everything, the more I learned what was happening there, the more disturbing it became.
Well, that's why, when Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov on the Politburo said the words that the nuclear power industry inevitably went to a serious accident, all these accumulated over many years, the facts somehow lined up in one line, and his words shone that so it really was.
And in general, all the specialists - scientists, at least, each at different times and from different stands, on separate fragments, testifying that we are on the road leading to a difficult accident, said:
- said Anatoly Petrovich ALEXANDROV, repeatedly citing striking examples of negligence in the installation of nuclear power plants;
- spoke SIDORENKO, speaking about the unrest in operation and documentation;
-said young professionals; and
-sayed people who were engaged in materials science.
The problem arose unexpectedly with the fact that, say, it turned out that the sample witnesses dropped into the same Finnish station Lovisa showed that the life of the reactor vessel could not withstand the given design parameters, there for 3040 years, and it can work significantly less.
Immediately, desperate studies began, proposals that have now been worked out - how to cope with the situation (ending party "A", part 5) how to extend the service life of the corps.
All of this here wore such a sort of sparodic, suddenly arising, character. But on the one hand, this could be explained by the youthfulness of this branch of technology, and to some extent this is so, but, on the other hand, it was reflected and somehow, in general, the wrong style of work in general.
That's when Nikolai Ivanovich said these words, when all this was retrospective, like a searchlight, I highlighted - all the preceding events - I understood that these were the right words. But I also understood another thing - that this is not the specifics of atomic energy, that this is all a consequence of the organization of work in general to create, especially the fast creation, of a new technology that the national economy needs.
Here is a way of organizing work on construction sites: inconsistency of different types of production (production, say, fuel elements); engineering equipment; builders' unwillingness to accept this equipment on time; debris construction sites; the constant is such a kind of incomprehensible dynamics in the number of working construction personnel (construction, I mean, at nuclear power plants) —this very much, then very little; then, so to speak, the work at the station unfolds, then suddenly it stops, because there is no equipment of one kind or another ...
All this, taken together, was very unpleasant, and, at the same time, was hardly exclusive and specific only to nuclear energy.
Therefore, the words of Nikolai Ivanovich RYZHKOV should have been taken, probably, much wider. And for myself, after visiting the Chernobyl station after the accident, when I became acquainted with everything that is happening there - for myself, I personally made an accurate and unequivocal conclusion that the Chernobyl accident is an apotheosis, this is the pinnacle of all that wrong management which was carried out in our country for many decades.
Of course, what happened at Chernobyl has not abstract, but specific culprits. We already know today that the protection management system (CPS) of this reactor was defective and it was known to a number of scientists and they made suggestions how to remove this defect.
The designer, not wanting, so to speak, quick additional work, was in no hurry to change the protection management system. In this case there are specific, of course, the perpetrators.
What happened at the Chernobyl station itself for a number of years: here, conducting, so to speak, experiments, the program of which was compiled extremely carelessly and carelessly. Before the experiments there were no draws of possible situations, that is, situations were not played out:
-What will happen if suddenly this defense refuses;
- what will happen if the process does not go as the program suggests;
-how staff should act in one way or another;
-and is it possible to leave the reactor at power when the steam supply to the turbine is stopped;
-and if this happens, what can happen in this case;
- and that will give the connection of the fourth pumps MCP (main circulation pumps).
This, it would seem, from the point of view of any common sense, should have been played out before the experiment and this or any other.
But nothing of the kind, of course, happened. The neglect to the point of view of the Constructor and the Scientific Director was complete. With the fight it was necessary ...
(record erased)
By the way, about conversations with Mikhail Sergeyevich GORBACHYOV. Three times I had to talk with him on the phone there while in Chernobyl.
All this was rather strange. He called, of course, the second chairman of the Government Commission, comrade SILAEV Ivan Stepanovich, maybe he called SHCHERBINA and talked to him, but that was out of my presence. But | when we were at SILAEV, calls from GORBACHEV were heard. Ivan Stepanovich gave him his information, and then, when it came to any more detailed specific, professional questions, he asked: "To give the phone, VELIKHOV or LEGASOV?"
Here in the first conversation, he said: "Let's take a legazova". I began to talk to him. Here he, Mikhail Sergeyevich, said three or four minutes: “what is being done there, I’m very worried about this problem, the name of GORBACHYOV is beginning to beat the world over, due to this accident, and it means that such a mass psychosis has risen in the world. position?"
In response to this, I described to him the situation, which basically, since it was already significant after the 2nd of May, somewhere the call was on May 45, that basically the main emissions from the destroyed block were stopped, that the situation is currently controlled. The scale of pollution and areas adjacent to the Chernobyl station and the extent of pollution throughout the world, in general, are more or less clear to us. It was already clear to us that those who suffered from radiation damage, except for those who worked during the accident at the Chernobyl station, are unlikely to expect that population monitoring is carried out carefully, that if there are countries with some radioactive fallout due to the accident, the correct informational and sanitary measures, there will be no real consequences for human health.
I said this to Mikhail Sergeyevich on the 6th of May, most likely still not knowing that on the 6th of May, the Session of the International World Health Organization, specially collected on this issue, came to the same conclusions. She also came to the conclusion that the accident did not bear any threat to the population of Western Europe and other countries.
Well, talked about the specific situation: where the heavy sites associated with high levels of pollution; where the situation is less favorable; how is work going
He was satisfied with this conversation.
The next day, during the same time we spent with Ivan Stepanovich SILAEV, his bell rang again and this time he asked for Evgeny VELIKHOV to pick up the phone.
He began to ask him about the reasons, all the same, for the accident, but Yevgeny Pavlovich began to give some confusing ones, which means explanations and immediately said that Valery Alekseevich would tell about this better, and the pipe was given to me and I may be too detailed , but gave the reasons for the accident.
And at this moment Mikhail Sergeevich asked me to write a personal letter to him, and, what surprised me, it was to me that a letter came to me that how it happened there and what needs to be communicated. Well, I immediately sat down to write this letter and then, after some revision of Ivan Stepanovich SILAYEV, it went off the same night in the name of GORBACHEV, signed by SILAEV, VELIKHOV and my signature.
Ivan Stepanovich SILAEV, as part of his shift, paid the most attention, in the process of work, to construction work, the organization of concrete plants, or the organization of concrete supply, because it was very clear that it was necessary to concrete around the 4th block.
He was very angry at, say, First Deputy Minister of Energy and Electrification MAKUKHIN, who seemed to him to work sluggishly, and there he even hurried to make a decision that I was taking you off work. This decision, which then did not take place, but such words were pronounced.
It was Ivan Stepanovich SILAEV who introduced a system of material incentives for carrying out the most dangerous work. And the most dangerous work, during his tenure, was the definition: is it located or not, is there water in the upper and lower barbaters located in the rooms under the reactor hall, because it was important.
We were also afraid that some of the molten fuel would get there and perhaps such powerful vaporization would bring additional activity out.
And here it would be necessary to know: are these barbaters free, and then, whether to leave them empty means that they may be poured over with concrete, perhaps, with special marks. This is the whole group of questions that Ivan Stepanovich SILAYEV took over.
It was rather difficult to approach these boaters because the adjacent corridors were filled with water from the moment the reactor was tried to be cooled with water. The water level, its activity was high - water activity reached individual curies per liter at certain points of time.
Pumping devices turned on, this water was downloaded, and yet, it means that the valve, with which it was possible to open and, with the help of which, it was possible to understand: is there any water in the water-boaters? conditions and in the evening, Ivan Stepanovich solemnly thanked and handed over a package with a thousand rubles. He received permission to do so.
And I saw the face of a man who, on the one hand, was very proud that he managed to do this difficult work under difficult conditions. And on the other hand, it was evident how he squeezed this money bag, not as a reward, generally speaking, he and | It was inconvenient to refuse this money and at the same time the monetary form of the reward itself didn’t make him very happy, because really, at that time, especially people there struggled with the accident, tried to give it all, do everything what is possible, without thinking of any incentives, either material or moral.
All worked as a team, trying to find the most correct solution.
During this time, it was scary to look at Comrade Conv. This is the chief engineer of the project of the station - Hydroproject, because he, mine did not sleep for a minute, and it is natural to look for certain approaches to various premises. All the time they addressed: either to his drawings, or simply to his memory, to his experience.
Here I have to remember such many annoying episodes, because you look at the drawings, say: there must be a free corridor. On this corridor you start the movement - it turns out the corridor is blocked by some kind of wall. A wall apparently arisen, created for some engineering reasons after the completion of the project. This should not have been in the project, but it exists and is not reflected in any drawings.
There were reverse situations when, say, in accordance with the drawings there should be a blank wall, and in fact there was a doorway. We faced the same.
It was especially difficult for miners, because it turned out that a huge amount of pipes and slabs were buried in the ground on the station’s territory, and therefore, when they carried out their work using shield tunneling or some other way, considering the drawings of underground utilities, it would seem he is free, but starting practical work, they very often ran into obstacles that were not reflected in the working drawings.
There was a lot of this inconsistency between the documentary part, which was located at the station and the actual state of affairs at various levels of the station and underground structures, and all this of course gave the impression of tremendous inattention and tremendous carelessness in managing such a documentary economy and at each point in time describe the state: and building structures, and passages, and electrical communications.
There are, unfortunately, quite a lot of such messy elements.
At the same time, I would like to draw attention to the fact that although such facts are annoying in everyday life, but at that point in time people’s actions were so purposeful, everyone wanted to finish their own part of work so quickly that all these numerous facts preceded carelessness somehow did not cause a special cry, noise, and all this receded into the background, regarding the desire to cope with the task as quickly as possible.
The number of people staying on the site increased all the time because each group demanded new assistants for themselves: visitors either with instruments, or with documents, or with working tools that were required to perform the operation.
This increase in the number of people required new ways of organizing the case, because it was really so simple - it was impossible to give one-on-one specific instructions and confine them.
Therefore, when the main problems were solved (the main problems I call the problem of protecting people from immediate danger and localization of the accident itself), the question arose of how to manage all those numerous teams that, at the suggestion of the Government Commission, by the decision of the Political Group of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, in increasing amounts, together with equipment, to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
It was necessary to organize at the same time a whole series of works completely dissimilar in their content. First of all: to carry out the design of the shelter, which then received the name "sarcophagus" in everyday life. This design should have taken place simultaneously on the site itself and in those design organizations that were located in various cities of the Soviet Union, mainly in Moscow and in Leningrad.
It was necessary to immediately engage in decontamination in the zone, according to the principle: from the most polluted areas to no less polluted areas. It was necessary to carry out reconnaissance of the territory, to continue this exploration and to clarify the nature of the spread of radioactivity already distributed by wind transport, already distributed by equipment.
It was necessary to solve the problem of revision of the equipment of the 1st and 2nd blocks, the revision of the building remaining and the equipment of the 3rd block.
It was necessary to assess the state of all of the premises, territories, sections of the Chernobyl station itself, its surrounding areas, transport highways.
It was necessary to prepare a place for the location of military units arriving to help in this situation, the location of construction organizations, to organize a clear management system for research, design, and executive work on completely different projects. | the performance of this performance itself.
The control system of this complex mechanism was created gradually.
The first two groups: she, led by Boris Evdokimovich Scherbina, the second, led by Ivan Stepanovich SILAEV, were exclusively engaged in solving the most urgent, most operational issues.
The appearance of Comrade VORONIN on the site has already led to the beginning of the appearance of the organization of all the works. An order has already arisen for ordering certain materials; sequence of performance of those or other tasks, instructions. It became clear that one group of researchers was engaged in the territory, another group of researchers was engaged in the 4th unit itself, the third group, no longer researchers, but the performers it started (this mainly military units started) to decontaminate the rooms of the 1st and 2nd unit and began preparations for to the front of construction work on the construction of the sarcophagus, because at that time design work was going on in Moscow.
Comrade VORONINA was replaced by Yuri Nikitich MASLYUKOV and during his stay very active work began on the construction of new premises, new settlements for evacuated people, the processing of roads began and the front of the fourth block for the construction of a sarcophagus began to be prepared.
The sarcophagus itself was not built, but the approaches to it were concreted, the most polluted areas on the site were either removed or concreted so that builders could begin work on the construction of the sarcophagus.
When Comrade Gusev appeared on the site, with his team, the main design decisions were already drawn: it was already decided that the construction of the sarcophagus should be entrusted to SU 605 by the organizations of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, and it was necessary to conduct a thorough investigation of the 4th block internal state its designs, so that the project could rely on some experimental, some verified data.
And when comrade VEDERNIKOV, with his team appeared on the site, he replaced GUSEV, then at that time the construction of the sarcophagus began.
Moreover, it was under Comrade VEDERNIKOVA, with the participation of the head of the Atomic Energy Institute group, Comrade TUTNOV, a decision was made to facilitate the pace and construction of the sarcophagus, because initially the project was supposed to erect a completely concrete dome over the ruins, but estimates showed that the construction of the sarcophagus can be significantly reduced, if the concrete dome, the reliability of which has been questioned (whether the structure will withstand it), will be replaced by the so-called pipe run-up, then the system pipe to the next roof, which would cover the sarcophagus from the possibility of radioactivity of dust and, at the same time, of course, some amount of radiation through this top cover of the sarcophagus would go away, but it would be comparable and even less than the total activity from of what was on the site.
The correct decision was made during the work of Comrade VEDERNIKOV. And so consistently, so loomed the structure of the organization of work.
It came down to the fact that the research group of the Institute of Atomic Energy, together with the specialists, should have been (the Atomic Energy Institute group was successively headed by various specialists such as Yury SVINTSEV, Anatoly Mikhailovich POLEVOY, TUTNOV, as I have already said, then Comrade KUKHARKIN Nikolai Evgenievich. A great deal of work was carried out in that period when Comrade POLOGIKh Boris Grigorievich was at the head of this group. Here are research groups that include, especially the work was carried out by Kulakov, Borovoy, for example), and this was their main purpose, to carefully examine the premises of the 4th block:
- first, find the fuel there, determine how it is distributed there;
- second, enter the maximum number of sensors that could characterize the state of the 4th block.
Here we must pay tribute to Comrade SHEKALOV, a specialist of the Institute of Atomic Energy, as well as specialists from the Ukrainian (Kiev) Institute for Nuclear Research, who have made great efforts to find: correct penetrations, to introduce the necessary sensors, to stretch cables to them.
Well, let's say, with regard to neutron sensors, they were engaged in TSNIIP of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. His experts, under the leadership of Comrade Zhernov.
In general, specialists and investigators, one of the tasks for which was: - to equip the 4th unit with various gamma-field measurement sensors; possible neutron fields; temperature measurement; air flow measurement; measuring the concentration of hydrogen, if he suddenly appeared in the system, etc. These sensors were located at various sites.
It was, in general, both dangerous and physically difficult work, because each time it was necessary to go to the unit and search for the most suitable areas in order to reliably diagnose the condition of the fourth unit. This is one group of works.
At the same time, continuous video and photographs of the 4th block were conducted, which | allowed the designers to choose the right solutions for consistently constructing the sarcophagus itself.
At the same time, the NIPIET design team - the Leningrad Design Organization of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building - worked directly at Chernobyl, on the site, and a number of design decisions, although the general design was developed at the Institute, but a whole happy design decisions were made there on the go.
Here, it was simply that a huge amount of work was done by Comrade KURNOSOV - the chief engineer of this project and the chief engineer of the institute, when each time he found the appropriate solutions when one or another difficult situation arose.
And difficult situations were:
- an attempt, say, to apply a concrete solution to one of the marks was unsuccessful because there were quite large gaps through which the concrete was poured onto the lower marks. It was necessary to come up with some ways to keep the concrete at the desired elevations.
- not all the supports were sufficiently reliable, so they had to be strengthened.
It was such a friendly work of researchers and designers that eventually led to the fact that the structures turned out to be quite reliable.
It was one group of works.
The second group of works, at this time, were carried out by specialists from the Ministry of Energy, who erected a temporary settlement, temporary housing in the village of Zeleny Cape.
There was ordered a number of prefab houses of Finnish production, as well as Soviet production. And for the shift workers, who were supposed to provide work for the 1st and 2nd blocks, a very cultural settlement was built, with all, in general, conveniences: with a place to stay, with shops, with cultural institutions.
This village was built in just a few months.
Boris Yevdokimovich SHCHERBIN personally observed his construction constantly, paying attention not only to the fact that there would be a place where people could sleep after work, but also that there would be flowers, that the dining room would work no worse than in any other points of the Soviet Union, so that people would feel comfortable.
These organizations of the Ministry of Energy and engaged in the village in Cape Verde, as well as the construction of a number of stations decontamination equipment, which, by that time, already appeared on the site a lot.
The Government Commission itself at this time has already moved. The work was still going on in Chernobyl, on the premises of the district party committee, the former, and the place of stay and place of overnight stay was moved about 50 km from Chernobyl, and there was located the leadership of the Government Commission and a number of specialists who came to perform certain works.
A large group of researchers from various institutions of the Soviet Union, from the Academy of Sciences, from the Institute of Atomic Energy. Kurchatov (when I say: Academies of Sciences, for example, I mean GIOHI, of course, the entire Ukrainian Academy of Sciences), this whole group of researchers was engaged at this time in detailed, radioactive contamination of the area.
And they used: both sampling, statistically reliable, in the field, with subsequent analysis in radiochemical laboratories, which were deployed earlier in Chernobyl, and some of the samples were sent to the Institutes - to the radio institute, or the Institute of Atomic Energy, and helicopter surveys of helicopters could be observed. At the same time, these surveys were carried out both in terms of the amount of gamma radiation and the isotopic spectrum of gamma radiation was taken.
And tarivations were found between the content of individual isotopes, according to the content of which, relatively, it was possible to foresee the content of plutonium, for example, released into the environment.
At the same time, of course, the direct selection of samples for the content of plutonium and other heavy alpha-active elements was carried out continuously by the method of sampling, in order to compare the helicopter data with direct sampling.
Responsibilities were distributed in such a way that everything outside the 30 km zone was controlled by the State Committee for Hydromet services from the air and from the ground, which was headed by correspondent member Yury A. ISRAEL, which I don’t know exactly how much time This Chernobyl, which took the most careful part: in the collection of data, in their correct assessment, and in the history of the appearance of certain spots polluted.
In general, a lot of work was carried out, as a result of which, outside the 30-kilometer zone, more and more accurate maps appeared that spoke about the degree of contamination of various territories.
Well, in this 30-kilometer zone, it was mainly about contamination mainly with cesium, because several cesium spots appeared (here they will be shown in maps) and cesium maps began to form from the beginning of the accident to May 20, after which their formation stopped .
Accordingly, according to the existing sanitary rules, decisions were taken, in accordance with which the limit values were established, which allowed people to live in contaminated areas by certain isotopes and, in accordance with these rules | We already received local authorities: they resettled people or left them to live, transferring them to imported food, or declared the zone free enough to live and use the land.
At the same time, Gosagroprom and the specialists of Minsredmash also analyzed various crops, determined the degree of their pollution, monitored forests and fields around the Chernobyl station - outside the 30-km zone and inside it.
As for the 30-kilometer zone itself, it was the subject of concern for the specialists of the Ministry of Atomic Energy and Energy, specialists from the Kurchatov Institute, the Radium Institute and specialists from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
In September, the work of replaceable trains of the Government Commission ended. All the work was entrusted to the revised composition of the first Government Commission (which was headed by Boris Yevdokimovich Shcherbina), and its new composition was approved.
And later, starting from September and further, all the work at the site of the Chernobyl station and in the affected area, in general, was responsible for this Government Commission. She made all the decisions, considered all the projects, all the comments and did all the work.
The sequence of operations was as follows. So somewhere by September, the evacuation of the population was basically completed and the population was placed in new settlements. Some station personnel received apartments in the city of Kiev, some in the city of Chernigov. In general, such domestic, human problems were solved.
It was decided to build the city of Slavutych, because from the very beginning it was clear that the shift method could be used only as a temporary method of work at the nuclear power plant.
Therefore, the new city of Slavutych began to be designed, which would replace the city of Pripyat, as the permanent city of residence of power engineers.
The August-September period was a period of active preparation for the start-up of the 1st and 2nd units of the Chernobyl NPP. This launch was successful. Moreover, before launching these units, the whole complex of measures developed by specialists, which additionally increased the safety of this type of stations, was carried out and tested.
And on the 1st block - partially, and on the 2nd block - in full. This was the main task of that period of time.
In parallel with the preparation for the start-up of the 1st and 2nd blocks, with the implementation of launch operations, work was underway on the construction of the sarcophagus. The initial term of its construction was somewhere near the end of September, but a number of naturally occurring obstacles prevented the work from being completed on time. But, I repeat, because all the time there were some unforeseen circumstances:
there were too wide gaps that the concrete could not hold, the concrete did not harden and it was impossible to install supports on which the corresponding structures would later be placed;
- there were problems with the selection of such materials (by the way, the same Kiev specialists were engaged in them, in the end they were used the same), which would close the gaps in the elements of the pipe roll;
- It was necessary to make a project of a forced ventilation system of the sarcophagus, so that in the case when there was not enough natural ventilation, it would be possible to remove heat by switching on the forced one.
All these issues were gradually solved during the design and refined during the construction of the 4th block sarcophagus.
Its construction is a whole saga.
I repeat that the project teams worked right on the spot. The work was carried out with the help of two cranes, produced by the Federal Republic of Germany, the company "Demah". It was with these cranes that the main work was going on, but many such finishing works, works that would allow increasing the reliability of the sarcophagus, of course, had to be done manually and with the use of various robotic devices.
But it turned out, as I have already said, that robotic devices, all of which we had, our own and those that were purchased abroad, were practically unsuitable for work in those conditions.
For example, if the robots had sufficiently reliable electronics, then they could not overcome the obstacles associated with a large number of destruction of buildings of the 4th unit and stopped. For this reason could not be used. If, say, robots successful in terrain fell into the hands of researchers in the most difficult situations, the electronics in the high hafields refused and the robots also stopped.
Therefore, many could see, and here in the text we present a picture of robots standing alone on the roofs of buildings.
Here they tried to use robots in order to clean the contaminated surfaces of the roofs of the building in which the 3rd and 4th blocks were located, as well as the roof of the reactor. So they tried to use robots, but in general, this did not bring much good luck.
The most convenient technical means were created by NIKIMta specialists. This organization, the director of which was YURCHENKO Yuri Fedorovich. He himself spent a lot of time on the court. Under his leadership, the technique was created, tested and used.
Well, what's your own technique? Ordinary | . Ordinary bulldozers and scrapers, but reinforced with lead sheets, so that people can protect themselves inside this technique. And on such devices, the main works of a deactivating nature (in the most difficult places) were carried out.
Military units were mainly engaged in the decontamination of large areas within the station and inside the buildings of this station. They worked very conscientiously, with high speed and high efficiency. Of course, in time everything changed: our presentation and ways of working.
I remember well the episode when General Kuntsevich and I arrived in the city of Pripyat. It seemed that it would be practically impossible to deactivate this city, because wherever you can’t go anywhere, the radiation levels are quite high, say 700-800 milli-raytens per hour, we have discovered instruments of such magnitude with dose rate. But we did one operation: we broke off pieces of the facing of one of the buildings and took them away from Pripyat to Chernobyl.
And it turned out that there, this lining gave 800 X-rays per hour, and here no more than 10 millirentgen per hour. It was clear that the sources of pollution were not widespread, there were local sources of pollution in the city of Pripyat, which created such a general background, creating a picture of the impossibility of cleaning this city.
When we dealt with this, when the most active isotopes had already decayed, basically, somewhere in August / September, very active work was carried out by military organizations to deactivate the city of Pripyat. And the city of Pripyat was substantially cleared of pollution (approximately at the same period when the construction of the sarcophagus was ending).
By constructing a sarcophagus (it is still under construction), we solved the problem of how to close the gap. The following decisions were made: asbestos bags filled with plastic chips should be lowered into the appropriate solutions, which would foam and all the cracks on the roof of the sarcophagus would be closed with these bags.
But work on the sarcophagus has not yet ended, as work has already begun on checking the condition of the equipment of the third block, on the state of affairs with it. There was a question what to do with the 5th and 6th block. These are the questions that arose.
By October 1986, there was a very clear situation with the distribution of work:
-US 605 of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building completed the construction of the sarcophagus, which was later called the Shelter;
- the builders of the Ministry of Energy were engaged in the construction of the camp in the Cape Verde and some works related to the creation of a decontamination station within a 30-km zone and some works in the station itself;
-Minatomenergo led the work on the preparation for the launch of the 1st and 2nd unit and already slowly began to climb into the 3rd unit, in the assessment of its condition;
- military units, together with the organizations of Minsredmash, cleaned the roofs of the building where the 3rd and 4th units of the Chernobyl NPP were located;
- military units continued decontamination of those residential settlements that were included in the 30-kilometer zone;
- the research team, as I have already said, divided its tasks into: studying all that remained in the 4th block; fuel search; and maximum saturation with its diagnostic equipment.
Diagnostic equipment was inserted from the bottom of the 4th block. Diagnostic elements were introduced from the barbier rooms through drilled side walls leading to the reactor hall and the bulk of the diagnostic equipment was inserted from above, hung on special halyards in the reactor hall.
Another group of researchers, at the same time, was engaged in another task, namely, the determination of the migration of radionuclides within the 30-km zone and outside it.
I was interested in the question: how deep do the radionuclides penetrate on the surface; how they linger; various methods of artificial retention of radionuclides on surfaces were tested; problems were solved to protect the Pripyat River from radioactive elements entering it; measures were taken to prevent contamination of the subsoil waters with radionuclides.
Well, in the last area of the enterprise were fairly simple. About 150 wells were constructed, and the wells were both diagnostic and working. Diagnostic wells constantly worked and measured (determined) the radioactivity of the subsoil waters and, if necessary, could include working wells pumping out contaminated water.
But, fortunately, for the entire period of work, until today, all diagnostic wells showed that the subsoil water was always clean and never had to turn on the pumping wells.
A complex of studies was carried out in the pruduh cooler near the Chernobyl NPP, where the state of radioactivity of water and silt was determined, and a lot of attention was paid to the state of the Pripyat River itself, the Kiev reservoir.
Well, in general, it was quickly discovered that the waters themselves were not very contaminated, and the sludge was affected and the concentration of radioactive elements in the sludge, for example, in the cooler, reached 10 minus 5 degrees of Curie,
(end of side "B", cassette N 3, part 6 | )
The text corresponds to the audio:
Investigators of the investigation team
Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation
Senior Counselor of Justice xxxxxxxxxxxx
1st class lawyer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Academician V. Legasov
(text on N4 tape)
Well, in general, it was quickly discovered that the waters themselves were not very polluted, and the sludge was affected and the concentration of radioactive elements in the sludge, for example, in the cooler, reached 10 minus 5 degrees of Curie, while the radioactivity in water did not exceed 10 to minus 8 - to minus 9 curies per liter.
These were the maximum figures.
A large number of dams were built, dams, the purpose of which was to hold polluted garbage, foliage, everything that polluted the water superficially, so that radioactivity would not spread along Pripyat and further along the Dnieper.
All these works were carried out by the Ministry of Water Management of the Soviet Union and the Ministry of Water Management of Ukraine.
Conducted in a surprisingly short time.
The dams were designed and immediately built, but this was also accompanied all the time by research work, and cyolites were introduced into the body of the dams (cyoliths - specially delivered from Armenia and Georgia, possessing high sorption capacity) so that all microparticles and all radioactive components could be the elements contained in the water, to delay and prevent them from further progress.
As of today, it can be said that this goal has been achieved.
At about the same time, when the Government Commission was already formed as final, headed by Bris Shcherbina, and there were no more substitutions and replacements, around the same time, by the decision of the Government, the Chernobyl Coordination Council was established at the Academy of Sciences. the problem, led by Anatoly ALEKSANDROV, well, I was appointed his first deputy and included the heads of the main departments that were involved in carrying out work around Chernobyl, and also the largest Specialists such as, say, Academician SOKOLOV, Academician MYKHALEVICH and Academician TREFILOV, who were associated with specific works of an ecological or technical nature related to the elimination of the consequences of the accident.
It must be said that when the work took such an organized character, when efforts were distributed among various departments and various supervisors, then, of course, order and clarity became much more than in the first days, when emergency tasks were solved, but not all work, of course, went smoothly.
For example, the state of pollution of the roofs of buildings of the 3rd and 4th blocks was measured many times, and quite different numbers and different results were obtained: - from stunningly high to relatively moderate numbers. Therefore, I myself and military specialists, who at that time deployed, very successfully, in the city of Ovruch, repeatedly had a research center that would allow a large contingent of military specialists to carry out decontamination work, measuring, in general, all the work that was entrusted to the military, lead consciously.
This Center carried out the same very large work on measuring the state of radioactivity, on carrying out radioactivity, on wind transfer, on the dynamics of the state of various territories and made its great contribution in research and practical terms to all those works that were carried out in Chernobyl.
And it was not easy to solve problems.
For example, near the nuclear power plant was heavily contaminated (up to several X-rays per hour, the initial radiation power was), a large section of the forest, which was called the "Red Forest".
Here is the fate of this forest.
Various suggestions were made:
the first is not to touch it and leave it in the form in which it is with its activity, considering that somehow nature itself will process everything, that is, the needles, the most infected, will fall off, after that the needles can be collected and buried, and the trunks of trees and branches it will stay pretty clean;
the second proposal was, on the contrary, to burn all this forest and even experiments were carried out on the burning of fragments of this polluted forest, but these experiments showed that quite a lot of radioactivity goes away with the products of combustion.
In the end, it was decided to cut a part of the forest, to transport it, to bury it, and simply turn the rest of the site into a burial ground, close it, which was done.
And the radioactive impact of this "Red Forest" on the city and the surrounding area has decreased dramatically after these operations.
A very big discussion has arisen on the so-called Camton effect. Because when they began to prepare for the launch of the 3rd unit, but initially they wanted to start it right behind the 1m and 2m blocks, the radiation situation inside the building of the 3rd unit (inside its premises, especially in the computer room) did not allow to carry out even revision works seriously.
The first assumption was that this is the internal pollution of the building. After carrying out decontamination | Ivation level of activity in this room decreased, but still remained high, reaching dozens, and sometimes hundreds of millirentgen per hour at individual points, and in individual places - to the x-ray per hour radiation dose rate reached in this computer room.
Then the initial assumption was made that the source of such high activity is the roof of the 3rd block, on which a lot of scattered fuel remained, and this circumstance prevented the creation of an acceptable radiation environment, because more than 600 rooms of the 3rd block were cleaned, washed out, machine room was still quite high.
They began to carry out various measurements using the kalimator, which showed that the presence of activity on the roofs is not the only source affecting the radiation environment of the 3rd unit, that the neighborhood of the fourth unit is all the same due to the Campton effect ( coming out of the roof of the 4th block), that this radiation was the main source of increased background radiation at the 3rd block of the engine room.
How many discussions were there on this topic, how many expeditions there were, how many measurements - and, nevertheless, at the end, it turned out that the main sources of pollution are those pollution that were on the roof of the 3rd block. It was the main thing, although of course, some kind of a shred, at the level of 10 milliratgen per hour, of such a scale and even less than even 10 milliratgen per hour, was also scattered by the Kamton radiation coming from the 4th block.
Therefore, it was decided to completely change the roof of the 3rd block, install a new one, with appropriate protective devices that would allow to continue the necessary work and launch the 3rd block of the Chernobyl NPP in time.
Around the same time, when the fate of the 3rd unit was decided (well, due to this situation, the start-up date from the summer period it was scheduled for was shifted to the autumn), the need for commissioning works at 5m and 6m blocks.
These units were in a completely different state of readiness:
The 5th unit had high readiness and, practically could be completed in several months after decontamination and put into operation.
- well, and the 6th unit was in the initial stage.
Discussions were great. The public protested against continuing the construction of the 5th and 6th units and they were commissioned because it seemed to them too large capacities - 6 GWh on one site. Especially being in abnormal radiation conditions. The energy needs of Ukraine dictated the need for the introduction of new and new capacities.
This issue was also discussed at the Government Commission and was raised to higher levels, and ultimately it was decided to postpone this issue and, in the next 1987, possibly in 1988, no construction work on the 5th and 6th blocks would be possible.
All the forces of decontaminators should be thrown at the full normalization of the third block, as well as the cleaning of the construction base. On the territory there was a construction base on which mechanisms, materials necessary for the construction of the 5th and 6th blocks were located. This base was quite polluted. And in order to save a sufficiently large number of expensive equipment located there, a special workshop was built at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant - a decontamination workshop.
And this shop began to consistently deactivate the most valuable equipment and send it to various points of the Soviet Union for practical use.
In the same period, when active work began on decontamination and preparation for the launch of the 3rd unit, in the same period of time, the construction of the city of Slavutych began to unfold work not for design, but for construction.
Moreover, the pace of construction of this city increased all the time and it made a lot of sense because after about 45 months of operation in the shift mode of the 1st and 2nd blocks, it became clear that psychologically and physically, even, it was hard work when, albeit with long breaks to rest, but for 1012 hours the operators should be at the control panel, - the problem of long-term isolation from the family, working in unusual conditions - all this created such problems that it became obvious that the shift method, in this case, of course, is not imalnym.
He was forced, played a large role during the period when he was used, but based on him, as the main method of work, it became absolutely clear that this was impossible.
Therefore, the pace of construction of the city of Slavutych, as the main town of power engineers, it has increased dramatically.
For example, Boris Yevdokimovich Shcherbina, like this in my memory, almost every month, made such special voyages to control, monitor the construction of the city of Slavutych, equipment, saturation with equipment, in general this question was constantly under his control. However, like all other questions,
| data from this Chernobyl accident.
Already somewhere in the middle of 1987, this summer of 1987, at last there were robots made by our hands, Soviet. For example, robots created at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. These are reconnaissance robots, which we could not timely receive from anywhere, from any country in the world. We ourselves did robot intelligence officers, who, in the most difficult geometrical conditions, in conditions of blockages, high radiation fields, could move practically to any distances in a controlled manner, and produce radiation and thermal intelligence of the situation, to issue the necessary information.
These robots also played a big role today because with their help many interests were discovered on issues related to the nature and consequences of the accident. But I'm not sure that they will bring even more information.
Another idea that I repeatedly expressed and asked to execute (it has not yet been executed) is an idea related to the creation of flying robots, that is, radio-controlled model airplanes that would carry sensors. Sensors as radiation fields, with the help of which it would be possible to measure the composition of the gas over various points of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Well, in order not to use either ...
(record erased)
Academician V. Legasov
This text is for comrade Vladimir Mikhailovich Novikov, Vladimir Fedorovich Demin and Vladimir Konstantinovich SUKHORUCHKIN.
This is an article that should be written on the instructions of the Santik of American magazine and an article that should be of a general philosophical nature.
The provisional title of this article: "Causes of the Chernobyl accident and the consequences of it resulting." The article should be based on the works: mine; Comrade Dyomin; Comrade Novikov; Comrade Sukhoruchkin, - but, nevertheless, these works should be collected and processed in such a way that some kind of integral philosophy would flow from them.
The first section of this article, it seems to me, is to state the history of the development of Soviet atomic energy, recall that the world's first nuclear power plant (erased record) ... and the principle of safety in this small 5 megawatt station.
At that period of time, the entire safety system it was lapped up, chtoli from ... (the record was erased) ... which existed in industrial reactors and the accumulated military experience was used. Then the second station - the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant, where graphite was used as a phase cutter, but it was already a fast-neutron reactor and such was research, well, and describe its effect.
Then it must be said about the Novovoronezh station, the 1st unit of which was already being built as an atomic station, which should be operated continuously, under conditions of peaceful, ordinary personnel and describe those security systems that were introduced at this station.
Then, surely, it will be necessary to say that after and during the construction of the Novovoronezh NPP, the policy of our state did not attach much importance to the development of atomic energy, because it was thought to be based on organic fuel sources: Donbas coal; on the Saratov gas; and then still oil sources, we will be able to solve all our industrial problems and this nuclear power industry, which was demonstrated at the Obninsk, Beloyarsk and Novovoronezh stations, was in the nature of, rather, research work that prepared us for some future.
Explain that in fact it was a definite miscalculation, moreover: as a resource character (the possibilities of the Donets Basin in the supply of coal were overvalued); and a miscalculation of a transport-ecological nature, because we did not represent, at that time, the scale of land transportation if we base energy on organic sources and the scale of pollution, including radioactive elements. Here it is necessary to describe. This is important, that's why.
It is important to show that the delay, about 10 years, with the development of nuclear energy in the Soviet Union - it was the first cause of the Chernobyl accident: “the first sign”; the first such "bell".
Why? Yes, because when in the 60s it became clear that it was expensive and almost impossible to develop industry in the European part and provide it with electricity from organic sources, and that it was necessary to put nuclear sources into operation - fast paced. Therefore, a certain natural desire arose: the cost of developing nuclear energy, at such a fast pace, would be well minimized.
And so, at this moment, the main fundamental philosophical error in our approach to security was made.
Any approach to ensuring nuclear safety and an approach to ensuring a technologically complex and potentially dangerous facility should consist of three elements:
1. make the object itself, say, a nuclear reactor - as safe as possible;
2. to make the operation of this object as reliable and safe as possible, but the word “maximum”, | In both cases, it can never mean 100% reliability, can never operate equipment in it under 100% conditions specified by the project and exclude completely human, not intentional, and maybe even deliberate errors - the same is impossible.
And, due to the fact that this one is the safest possible reactor. and the safest operation, not 100% is always the case - the safety philosophy requires the mandatory introduction of the 3rd element.
3. An element that assumes that all the same accident will occur. And radioactivity, or other dangerous substance, will be released outside the apparatus. And, in this case, an essential element is - the packaging of a dangerous object in such a device that would localize the accident, which, although with a low probability, will still happen. Would pack in what is called a container (maybe an underground version, and other possible engineering options), but, most importantly for reliability - you need to have such a system that does not depend on geographical locations and, with unlikely, but possible , troubles - these troubles, well, as in the case of accidents in mines: only inside the mine itself, without extending to the environment.
This is the third element.
Here in the Soviet nuclear power industry precisely because the pace, due to the lost 10 years, was supposed to be quite high, - the third element, from my point of view, was criminally ignored.
For the sake of fairness, it must be said that many specialists of the Soviet Union spoke, and very actively spoke, from the standpoint of protesting against the construction of nuclear power plants without containers.
Well, in particular, member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Viktor Alekseevich SIDORENKO, his doctoral dissertation, and then the book, based on the motives of this doctoral dissertation, in which he proved, with all the methods and means available to him at that time, the need to construct such containers.
However, this point of view of experts was not taken into account. There is another definite circumstance to this. This is what the atomic energy in the Soviet Union grew not from the sphere of energy, but it grew, as it were, from the atomic industry: in which highly trained and highly disciplined personnel existed and acted; where there was a special military acceptance of each piece of equipment, and therefore: reliability there, in this area of the nuclear industry, reliability, both in terms of equipment, as from the personnel’s owning the station, was quite high and the 1520-year experience that this the national economy, he testified: that with competent, reliable, accurate operation of nuclear facilities, safety equipment and personnel training, it is enough for any accidents to be activity outside large - did not occur, at least in the stations themselves.
It was not taken into account that when atomic facilities from a limited industry leave for a wide space, which is atomic energy of such a peaceful purpose, the conditions change significantly and just the number of atomic stations, constantly increasing, is simple, from the simplest probabilistic considerations, increases the risk of errors in personnel actions or malfunctions of certain technical devices.
Here, from my point of view, it was a philosophical mistake: - the assumption of the work of stations without external localizing shelter, - it was a matter of principle.
Since when has this error begun to be corrected?
That's when the Soviet Union entered the foreign market and when it began to build the first nuclear power plant for a foreign country - for Finland, that's where the Finnish side - as a customer it demanded, having studied international experience, and by that time an international standard had been formed It requires exactly three safety elements: a reliable reactor, reliable operation and a mandatory container.
This third element of Fina was demanded.
And, therefore, the Finnish station has already been built with a cap. After that, the ice moved, the energy leadership, with great understanding, began to relate to the importance of this element, although to the end, of course, not realizing the seriousness of this issue, and, so to speak, our design organizations began to work on the container .
The second consequence of the slowdown in the development of atomic energy was the fact that the production capacity of, say, VVER reactors (and this is still the most common type of reactor in the world, and during its construction and operation it was possible to take into account not only our own experience, but also the experience of the entire world community) we lacked. That is, there was a shortage of power from machine-building enterprises, in order to produce the necessary quantities of shells and other equipment for VVER reactors.
And at this time, part of the power engineers came up with proposals: in order not to lower plans for introducing atomic capacities and, given the overload | The feasibility of the machine-building industry, to create a parallel branch in the nuclear power industry, which would allow building sufficiently powerful reactors without using the hull principle, without loading the machine-building industry with the complex technology of manufacturing highly reliable reactor vessels that are required in WWER.
This is how the idea of a RBMK channel type reactor with graphite blocks, etc. appeared, etc.
If the philosophy had been developed, connected with the obligatory content of the container over each of the atomic objects, then, naturally, RBMK, in its geometry, in its design, as an apparatus, simply could not appear.
He would be, so to speak, outside of international standards, outside of international rules, however reliable and no matter how good he was according to his other characteristics — he could not appear.
But, since this philosophy was not accepted by the energy management of that period — the binding nature of the container — then the RBMK reactor appeared.
And this, therefore, I believe that the beginning of the Chernobyl tragedy should be counted from slowing down the development of nuclear energy in the late 50s and early 60s.
Having built the first nuclear facility first in the world, we then slowed down the development of the technology of their creation, the consideration of all safety issues related to the operation of these devices, and then began to hurry.
And now, this haste has led to the need: for the same money to build a larger number of vehicles. There was a need for savings. Saving started on the containers.
And once the quotation became optional, there was a temptation to build a second line, which, as it were, would help the country without loading the engineering industry.
This is how the ideology of the RBMK reactor originated.
And from my point of view, this container-free approach is the main and main mistake of the Soviet atomic energy, not even of the Soviet atomic energy, because: they are nuclear experts themselves (I want to repeat again: well, not everything, not unanimously, but rather broad front) opposed a reactor of this type: - both for safety reasons; - and for reasons of lack of container, - which is the same safety issue.
Already the first start-up of this reactor at the first unit of the RBMK at the Leningrad NPP showed, moreover, that such an extensive core, in the version in which it was made, is rather difficult for the operator.
At the very first start-up of the first unit of the Leningrad nuclear power plant, in general, the problem of instability of neutron fluxes and the difficulty of controlling them arose.
I had to change on the go: the degree of enrichment of fuel; a number of other technical measures to do, in order to alleviate the problem of reactor control.
And yet, even after these events (and all the specialists in our Soviet Union knew), from the point of view of management, this reactor required a lot of attention from the operator and was always quite complicated.
In addition, the very fact of the appearance of this RBMK device, from the point of view of international and generally normal safety standards, was illegal (the fact of the appearance of such a device). But, besides that, at least three major design miscalculations were allowed inside this device:
The first design miscalculation was that, as international standards demanded and, as a matter of fact, common sense requires - there should be at least two safety systems.
Moreover, one of the emergency protection systems should be based on other physical principles than the first one and, more importantly, from my point of view: one of the two protection systems should work independently of the operator.
So let's say:
- one protection system - emergency - the operator must control: automatically, semi-automatically, manually, - this depends on the mode;
- and the second emergency protection system - should work independently (in any condition of the operator) only to exceed the parameters, say: neutron fluxes, power, temperature, etc., etc., and should automatically stop the reactor.
Here is the RBMK reactor - it was not equipped with such a second, independent of the operator’s actions, not included in the control system, protection.
This, in general, is a major mistake and, say, if it were not - there was no Chernobyl accident.
And finally, the third design error, which is even difficult to explain, was that the emergency protection systems, of which there were a sufficiently large number, were available to the station personnel.
Here, for example, there were no special ciphers, for building, say, protection disable systems, when, say, protection could only be disabled by double, or even triple command:
-turn the key by the operator;
- duplicating key rotation, for example, the station shift supervisor;
- and maybe even some kind of: especially responsible protection, duplicating the turn of the key by the head of the station, the chief engineer or his deputy.
These are the technical means and technical devices that, in general, work in many military devices, on missile systems, in poison | Nuclear weapons are used - that’s nothing was used.
This, of course, seems surprising and strange.
As I have already said, the RBMK apparatus is not easy to manage, due to the fact that it is quite often that fundamentally possible instabilities occur in the apparatus operation mode and, consequently, the simulators would be all the more important with every RBMK apparatus that would allow constantly training personnel on the correct behavior in the conditions of certain deviations in the operation of the apparatus from the norm.
However, for these devices, simulators, in fact, was not.
Well, it should be added that a number of issues in this reactor were solved very well, for example, well, it is already known, for example, a number of such advantages of this apparatus, such as:
- firstly, indeed, the possibility of constructing the apparatus without the use of engineering capacity (I mean the absence of the reactor vessel);
-the ability to overload the reactor on the fly, allowed to have a high power factor in the reactor;
- the channel principle of this reactor;
- a whole range of other technical solutions: pumps that were highly reliable in this reactor.
They were, of course, small advantages and advantages. But anyway. All the same, the lack of container, principled, which, as practice has shown, was not replaced by solid boxes.
That is the question that turned out to be fundamental.
Well, I must say that, of course, the magnitude of the coefficient of positive reactivity in this device for physicists was unexpected.
This again is connected with the first reason - with haste, with the need for high rates of development of nuclear devices, because, in principle, with the correct configuration of graphite, with a smaller volume introduced into the zone, this graphite moderator could not, of course, for the amount, as practice has now shown: the sum of measures taken for this reactor resulted in the value of the steam coefficient - not more than one betta, and this value is already completely manageable, which allows, with appropriate speed protection with any processes, but before this was not done and the device worked with the values of positive reactivity coefficients significantly larger than one betta - first, and secondly, what was considered - in practice turned out to be significantly larger than was thought, because the apparatus was not yet sufficient.
This is the group of reasons that led to the troubles that I would like to say.
And thus, it's not about the operators ...
Of course, the mistakes that the operators made were well known, they do not need to be recalled again (the mistakes themselves are monstrous): the behavior of the station’s management is difficult to explain; the punishment of the perpetrators of this accident - direct, is correct; because the actions did not meet the regulatory requirements and showed a discrepancy to the official requirements of those people who acted in this situation, but, all the same, it was the fault of the officials.
But the main reason, even, is not the errors in the design of the reactor, which have the same place and for which it is necessary, and probably will be responsible for the relevant specialists.
But the main reason is the violation of the basic principle of safety of such devices - the absence and spontaneous removal of the third element - the placement of dangerous devices in mandatory capsules, which limit the possibility of the activity going beyond the station itself and the device itself.
This is the main reason for the scale of the accident.
This is the thesis that I would like to have developed when we talk about the causes of the accident.
The following thesis is related to a specific description of the design of the device, defects of this design and a consistent description of the causes that led to the accident itself.
First of all, it should be noted that this is an experiment that should not have been conducted at a nuclear power plant, because the run-down size of the turbine at idle is a thing that should be determined on a special stand built by the turbine designer.
Here, I would like it to be emphasized. It was there that this question would have to be experimentally verified.
He was not checked there.
Therefore, it made, seemingly out of good intentions, the station management conduct this experiment. - Once.
Secondly, there is a lack of systemic thinking among station managers involved in this matter.
When the first experiments of 82 or 83 years showed that during the run-down time, the turbine does not save the necessary electrical parameters, to ensure the station's own needs, it did not occur to anyone to go and solve this problem from the other side, namely: reduction of commissioning time and output to the desired parameters of backup diesel generators.
And we went from the side of increasing the run-down time, although during this time diesel generators with the times of reaching the necessary electrical parameters have already appeared twofold better than | those diesel generators that were installed at the Chernobyl station.
The simplest operation - it would be - to replace the diesel generators of the Chernobyl station with those that would make everything normal and that the whole procedure of these tests and inspections would simply become unnecessary.
This circumstance should be noted.
Now it is necessary to describe in detail how the experiment itself took place, who resolved it there, who did not resolve, how the instructions were violated and how the accident developed.
At the same time, here, what is the essential element in this description ?!
For some reason, there are many sources:
- one explosion
-Tol two explosions
- toli hydrogen explosion,
-Toli is not a hydrogen explosion.
Today, it has been completely reliably established, and this, so to speak, needs to be unequivocally written - that there were two explosions, consecutive, and the second had more power than the first.
This here should be noted.
Secondly, it is impossible to speak of a hydrogen explosion, as it is impossible to mention that in addition to the steam explosion, chemical energy associated with the interactions in all this hot mass has been added.
I must say that all quantitative estimates show that the power of the explosion was somewhere three and four tons, in TNT equivalent.
This figure today can be called as a reliably established figure, so that numbers do not walk, there are tens of tons, in kilotons, etc., and so on.
That's 34, or called up to 10 tons of trinitrotoluene, that's the maximum that can be called.
By the nature of the explosion, by the glow, by the expansion, it is clear that the system had a volume detonating explosion.
There was a volume detonation.
The explosion was voluminous. Hence, the rapid steam expansion, thermally heated all the time, led to such a defeat, which was.
Well, further: the well-known figures of fuel removal, it was less clear.
Then you need to describe the classical scheme of what happened in the reactor with the fuel: its warm-up time, warm-up stopping time, cooling system, and so on.
And, it is very important to describe the events that were held and their significance.
For example, did it matter what the delay for a day was with events in general? The first day, the 26th. In addition to flooding the water there at night, on the night of 26, nothing was done. The casting of, say, sand, dolomite, clay, began on the 28th. 27, at the end of the day - the first, it seems, were casts.
All this needs to be described very carefully, because it is the physical meaning of each operation that needs to be written, because it lies in what we say:
- first, the reflection of the Government Commission, was the option: do nothing, give the opportunity for graphite to burn calmly.
But then it would mean: - removal of long-range radioactivity on graphite particles. The maximum burning rate at those temperatures that we determined there (the temperature of burning graphite), this is somewhere - tones per hour. So here and consider.
This burning would continue, given that there are 2,400 tons of two thousand four hundred hours. Here, during such a time, the separation of radioactivity would occur, and in aerosol form, over long distances. So it was necessary to extinguish, above all, a graphite fire.
Hence the appearance of sand, as a means of extinguishing the fire.
(ended side "A", part 7)
- secondly, once sand has appeared, it means the insulation has appeared, it means that there is an additional nuisance from the possible heating of the zone. Consequently, there are components such as dolomite and lead. Lead is difficult to oxidize. Dolomite - decomposed. Endothermically, lead takes energy to melt, dolomite takes energy to melt, SiOdva (sand itself) takes the same energy to melt, so a large amount of energy was taken to endothermic processes.
- and finally, such components as clay, for example, served as filtering elements, which were designed to keep some of the radioactive isotopes from leaving them in the external environment.
All these arguments need to be compared with real graphs: when what came out, when did it stop going out.
In particular, for example, we must say that not all events were reasonable.
In particular, the supply of liquid nitrogen, which according to my proposal was made, was somewhere on May 2nd, and began to be realized on May 45th.
This event turned out to be meaningless, because when I made a proposal, but did not know the degree of destruction of the reactor and did not know the natural circulation of air (its natural flow), and after a while we calculated that the air consumption is so great that the supply and dilution with liquid Nitrogen of this air (firstly: it went into the side slits and passed practically past the reactor space with fuel, and secondly: its amount was absolutely wrong) could not have any effect, therefore we stopped in liquid nitrogen.
This event practice, let's say, as useful, has not been confirmed.
According to the lead, it is necessary, it means the same to determine that our initial proposal was, of course, to supply metal | Useful) fraction there. The fraction was in the station, but it was in a room that turned out to be very polluted, so it was impossible to load it into helicopters. Then we did not know the exact temperature level at different levels of the destroyed Chernobyl reactor. For example, for higher grades, we have seen that the temperature scale is 300-350 degrees. Here for these temperatures the most convenient component, besides, covering radioactivity, was lead. For the region with higher temperatures, which were lower, we needed to supply metal, but then it would give additional energy by pereokisleniem, so we preferred SiOdva (sand), which served the same function, that is, melted, numb, - Dolomite does the same, because Magnesium is a relatively heat-conducting ceramics (of all the ceramics, the most heat-conducting ceramics).
Therefore, all these activities were quite reasonable.
Well, let's say, with the introduction of all these components, such as lead, for example, we evaluated there whether there would be lead pollution of the area. We simply took and calculated: we abandoned 2,400 tons of lead, we assumed, let us assume that all this lead would fall into the hot zone and evaporate, which is not possible, because most of it condensed at the upper levels. Then we assumed that even if all the lead evaporates, we took an area of 30 km zone and obtained that, so to speak, everything turns out to be below the maximum allowable concentrations.
At least, then comrade ISRAEL, with his comrades, measured lead concentration both in the air and on the ground, and it turned out that it is determined solely by the lead emitted from the exhaust pipes of cars from leaded gasoline and against this background, against the background of these lead contaminants, we see 2,400 tons of sprayed almost impossible, and there was much talk of lead poisoning.
Therefore, it is very necessary to bring all these calculations according to the sum of events.
Then you need to say a few words about the principles of the approach to the construction of the sarcophagus. There were 17 projects, but you need to describe only two approaches:
- the first approach: here is a hill of bulk and why we abandoned it;
- well, and, say, the second option, it means that sarcophagus, which is, only with a concrete dome. Why we refused from the concrete dome - the structures could not stand. Why is a concrete dome, which would of course be better, replaced with a pipe reel and a corresponding metal roof.
These circumstances need to be explained.
The following circumstances should be explained in this cycle. It is very important.
Not in one country of the world, because quite a few countries responded to our misfortune, sent telegrams, proposals, etc. We were convinced that there was no plan of action in these situations in any country of the world that had been tested and tested experimentally. This is the first circumstance.
The second. Dosimeters with the appropriate scales from the minimum dose to the maximum dose were not. Aircraft, deserted, which would have been equipped with the necessary measuring equipment - was not at the time of the accident. To the beginning, or rather. Therefore, they were forced to use helicopters with people. What made the additional irradiation of people to do and what made these flights dangerous, because helicopters could hurt one or another design and lead to the destruction of a block of, say, a neighboring one.
Returning a little back, it is necessary to note that the actions of the firefighters were expedient, because many, well, journalists, and in the plays write that the firemen stood in vain for several hours, overexposed because of this, and so forth.
Their actions were realized because there was hydrogen in the generators in the engine room, there was engine oil and they were waiting for the possibility that the fire could spread to the 3rd unit and cause the destruction of the third unit, like the fourth one. Therefore, their actions were truly selfless and deliberate, that the most important thing, and not just some senseless actions from illiteracy.
Further, we still need to return to the fact that there were no robot workers or robot intelligence officers in any country of the world. We tried and the robots bought from different countries, but they refused either for the reasons that they could not overcome the obstacles in the destroyed block, or because they lost control because of the high levels of gamma fields and when the electronics failed.
And only recently (they also need to be described), our own robot intelligence officers, which were made at the Institute of Atomic Energy.
It is necessary to say a few words about the scheme of managing the process of emergency response, that is, the division of functions:
-group clarifying the causes of accidents;
- group engaged in decontamination and preparation for the launch of the first and second unit;
-group engaged in the analysis of what is being done in the 4th block, destroyed and all the necessary diagnostics and studies;
- a group engaged in designing the sarcophagus itself;
-group engaged in the construction of the sarcophagus;
- Army group engaged in decontamination of the territory;
-group busy | the construction of new premises and buildings for the evacuated population;
- groups that were engaged in the creation of decontamination points to control transport and to wash and clean it;
This is all you need to describe in the most detailed and thorough way.
After that, it seems to me, we should write a section: "Today's State", that here is the Coordination Council at the Academy of Sciences, which includes the heads of departments responsible for the relevant types of work: the State Agroindustrial Organization, Minsredmash, the Ministry of Atomic Energy and so on, and leading medical scientists , radiology, agriculture, etc., etc., and that this Coordination Council systematically reviews the dynamics of the situation, which is related to all the circumstances of the Chernobyl accident.
This, as an organizational moment, would be worth describing.
Then, the section of Vladimir Fedorovich Demin appears where it is easy to describe clearly: how many areas are affected, to what extent, what has already been restored, what has not been restored. That's all that is connected with the consequences, starting from the defeat of people and ending with the defeat of the same Red Forest, it is necessary to accurately and accurately describe.
It is also necessary to say that in no way should psychological factors be forgotten when eliminating the consequences, because a number of diseases that were found in people, a number of phenomena associated with the staff that survived this tragedy, did not wear, say radiation lesions. It was definitely established by doctors. Nevertheless, psychological shock and, say, the meringues of this psychological shock - destonium cardiovascular was found in a very large number of specialists and still continues to be detected.
Here is the whole regime of rotational work, everything experienced and so on and so forth. Here are all these circumstances - they, of course, should be described as secondary factors.
There is a lot of information from the doctors here and I think that Vladimir Fedorovich knows it well. If not, then I can give you all you need.
In the next section, when the consequences of this accident are described, it is necessary to describe today's and research and measures of agricultural and research order, which are carried out right here today:
-What is already discovered
- that causes optimism in us, that is, I mean the accumulation of radioactive components in fish in animals that are in the 30-kilometer zone,
- that turns out not to be scary,
- that turns out to be useful,
- that useless,
-the behavior of various species of trees, all Gosagroprom conclusions, only those that are completely obvious today - that would have to be described.
And to end this section of the consequences with such normal words, that this is a long-term program, that for many years there the consequences of this accident will be affected, to describe what they will mean, that the scope of research works is large, approximate, so to speak, plan. It is safe to say about those programs that Ruteny Mikhailovich FIELD owns, which has created several of them - they can be written as activities.
This all needs to be done.
Say about the number of organizations that are involved and right there on the spot and in their own organizations, about the medical radiological center that was created there.
That's all in this section, I think, should be described here as such clear and understandable perfect things.
You can not finish this section only obvious and understandable things.
A number of questions should be asked. We, for example, is not clear. For example, there was no complete correspondence about the fall of radioactivity in the 4th block itself and in some other areas, it went faster than it followed from the laws of radioactive decay. There are different versions, but only versions. Therefore, we still cannot explain this phenomenon to the end, but we have such a version and such a version.
There are outstanding problems. Here, for example, those wonderful photos that lie on my table, and which Nikolai Nikolayevich Kuznetsov brought with the transition ate into pine forms, for example, when spruce twigs begin to branch like pines, anyway.
We must say that we are beginning to study the cause of this phenomenon, which is not clear to us. And all this is to be selected in the group of unclear questions, where we have the facts, but we do not have a full explanation of these facts. This, it seems to me, should be reflected the same, because it would be foolish to say that everything is already very clear to us, very clear.
By the way, looking back, I want to say once again that the question of how to enter reactivity is reported as a debatable question, because there are several options that could lead to the introduction of positive reactivity in such a non-controlled reactor. None of them unequivocally corresponds to all the experimental facts, therefore discussions are held here, but in general this is of no particular importance because the most important thing is that in principle it was possible to introduce positive reactivity with such powerful overclocking - this is the main thing, and the concrete ones, so to speak , the details are not as important as | the fact that the discussion itself shows that there were several ways to bring the reactor to the state it was in.
But after the division of Vladimir Fedorovich, it seems to me that Vladimir Konstantinovich needs to intervene in two ways:
-the first way: briefly, clearly and clearly describe that from the very beginning the Soviet Union did not hide anything (these moments are there: Why did they report late? Yes, because they didn’t really know what was happening, they didn’t want to sow panic, so to speak, unreliable information), and what international events were held, and what conventions were adopted, what position of the Soviet on international cooperation was adopted — that is, this side needs to be described. Like the done side.
And then, develop a philosophy that, in general, due to the fact that, as the experience of the Chernobyl accident showed, any apparatus can bring trouble not only in the country where it is located, but also to the neighboring countries and cause not only radiation damage there, but cause economic, psychological losses in these countries, then the issues of international inspections - quality control of facilities under construction and so on. - to make it an international procedure - it would be necessary as a wish to express it and it would be, mine, right illy
In general, the division of international affairs should be divided into two parts:
- the first part is what the Soviet Union internationally did, what materials it presented, whom it invited, whom it received, whom it used, who it refused,
- and the second part - how it would be internationally necessary to inspect, monitor and mutually check the level of safety of nuclear energy.
It seems to me that Vladimir Konstantinovich needs to develop these questions.
And finally, the last and most, in my opinion, important section.
It should start with what measures are planned in the Soviet Union in order to increase the safety of nuclear energy? Well, they are listed in reports presented in Vienna. Here they need to be listed.
Scheduled toto. Done toto.
But then, from the position of Vladimir Mikhailovich NOVIKOV, to say that at the level of the apparatus, which we have, this may be enough for Chernobyl not to repeat, although it must be said that for those devices that do not have containers These events apparently will not be sufficient. It is necessary to reflect on some special measures of localization of accidents for those 28 devices that do not have containers.
It is clear that these localization measures should be dynamic, since it is economically and technically impossible to build caps on them and now over unconventional dynamic methods of localizing possible accidents at such facilities you need to think today, well, then mainly the Soviet community, because this is our problem, although we could also cooperate internationally for this task. This is the problem. So here: our today's events are scheduled, so some of them are completed, and so we are concerned about the problems.
Next comes the philosophy. Can the Soviet Union limit the number of vehicles, for example, to those that are, slowly incapacitate those that are collapsible and so switch to fossil fuel?
Here it is necessary to say once again, that it can take advantage of my work with KUZMIN, which is connected with this question, whether it is possible to do without nuclear sources later, in our country so rich in fossil fuels and to show that it is impossible that in such ever increasing volume of nuclear sources, we will need, firstly for reasons of economic, resource, environmental - this is the first.
And most importantly, to emphasize that nuclear sources, like any previous source, it is the carrier of not only energy, but the carrier of a new technology. This can be taken from my old works, what today means we mainly use heat, radiation, but in fact you can get artificial materials, alloy, modify, get rid of impurities on nuclear sources, in simpler and more economical ways than this today, let's say, in the chemical and metallurgical industries.
This is another proof that they can not do without.
And then there is the concept that Vladimir Mikhailovich developed, and what kind of safe nuclear energy should be.
I will not say anything about the reactor safe, because the requirements of Novikov are formulated very precisely. But you need to add to the requirements for the reactor necessarily nuclear safety complete nuclear fuel cycle. And to make such quantitative estimates, which are made by the reactor, for processing plants, for processing plants. It is even worthwhile, in connection with the latest accident in Brazil, to touch on the use of radiomedical drugs, the forms of their use.
It would seem impossible to abandon their use, but how to make their use safe - that would be a question to think through in this way. | Therefore, the understanding of the safety of nuclear energy would be as broad as possible, and not only as a problem of creating a safe reactor.
And I would very much like to make such a statement that today we do not have the concept of safe nuclear energy, the concept of safe nuclear energy, even the concept of a safe nuclear reactor that is completely ready.
And, since the number of such sources should increase, the task becomes relevant, the time for its solution is not so little but not so much - it is about 1520 years - during which all the issues that we are discussing here should be resolved.
This is approximately the structure by which all materials should be prepared for me and, I repeat, that they should be based on the work we have previously performed, so that we would refer to our own sources, and not to some other people.
(pause, new record)
Academician V. Legasov
Interview A. Adamovich
(judging by the inscription on the tape on the side "B")
First of all, what would you imagine that I occupy a certain special point in this whole story, because I have been sitting in the field of atomic energy for 15 years, but my position is somewhat special - I am a nuclear chemist, that is, to design reactors, for example, I have nothing to do with the fact that I hear discussions in the Soviets there, discussions, well, something, and, of course, I get my own point of view, and as you can tell from the conversation that I am the director of my own department, this is the provision of a nuclear fuel cycle, that is, the separation of isotopes, Ronen activity ...
My position consists, as it were, of an external observer and participant. But here in the Chernobyl events themselves, of course, my participation was justified, because there was no reactor already, and there were his remains - this is my direct specialty. Here nuclear and non-nuclear chemistry. It is necessary to understand what processes are going on with radioactive elements, how they differ from other processes, what can be introduced, what will lead to - this may already have been a truly coincidental coincidence, but this is really my direct specialty.
But the main thing is that I have been an observer of various battles within the Soviet Union and at the international level for a number of years specialists in the field of type of reactors and, in general, it is necessary or not necessary to develop nuclear power engineering. At the same time, under my leadership, the work in the field of safety of chemical plants, which are very dangerous, also developed. Therefore, in purely professional terms, security issues and how to treat them should be, I imagined myself professionally very well.
Therefore, I am such a confused figure that, on the one hand, because I know security problems in their general philosophical form: how they should be posed and solved, I know the nuclear fuel cycle and its external part, well, I was an observer of the reactor epic.
From my point of view, Chernobyl began conditionally, of course, in 1961, that is, in the very year when GAGARIN flew into space or when it was the last highest achievement of Soviet science and technology. Although I generally think that our science and technology has been very successful by hook or by crook and developed surprisingly to the whole world with enormous achievements in all, almost, areas. And here the peak of these achievements was the flight of Gagarin into space.
After that, we began abruptly in all directions to give in, give in and the fall just began.
This is the general fall of the Soviet technology, the reasons for which can be a long and long talk, it was also the beginning of Chernobyl. And this is not a philosophical statement. And not in the sense that we have begun to lower the general technical culture, but this is a very concrete statement.
The fact is that, as you know, the Soviet Union was the ancestor of nuclear energy. The first power station was built in Obninsk near Moscow. Then we built the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant and the Novovoronezh nuclear power plant.
And they stopped the development of nuclear energy. This is in the late 50s. Because such a point of view prevailed that we have enough Donbass coal there, we don’t need to develop nuclear energy. And we, being pioneers in its development, we did not develop it for 10 years, and the three nuclear power plants of Novovoronezh, Beloyarsk and Obninsk were like fun for scientists, where scientists solved their problems. These are three different types of reactor. They had their own characteristics, they were engaged, but atomic energy, as a large-scale phenomenon, no one perceived here.
But at this time, England first, and then the United States of America, began to do precisely energy - not separate nuclear power plants, but nuclear energy. And, therefore, their science was forced to immediately talk about the safety of nuclear energy as such a large-scale energy industry — about a multitude of stations, a huge number of specialists who are involved in the operation of these nuclear power plants, and so on.
And we had made a powerful Gosplan miscalculation, calculated on the fact that we have enough organic fuel for a lot and we practically do not need nuclear power, and | It was clear by the 60th year (61.62.63 g approximately at this time) that the miscalculation was made, that the European part of the Soviet Union, where 80 percent of the population and industry are concentrated on us, will not live on imported fuel, and Donetsk coal has become too expensive and it has become too little. And imported fuel is expensive: economically, transport and environmentally expensive.
It became clear that it was impossible not to develop nuclear energy. Without it, it is impossible to live European industry.
In fact, for environmental reasons, which many people have no idea, it is impossible not to develop. If we took and, for a moment, by the decision of the Politburo, canceled the nuclear power industry: the nuclear power plants would no longer be able to operate and not build new ones - immediately, immediately, in response to this, the level of radioactive contamination of our territory and our people would have increased incredibly. It is radioactive, I’m not even talking about carcinogenic and other things.
Why? Yes, because over the centuries, many radioactive elements have accumulated in coal or oil reservoirs, and it is precisely the long-lived isotopes and the most dangerous: alpha-active. For example, in the Kamko-Achinsk coal basin, only in its upper layers, there are 2 million curies of alpha-active, long-lived isotopes. As soon as we start the Kamko-Achinsky basin to actively exploit, we will begin along the road along which the ember fumbles, when burning, especially his own lungs, to saturate it with radioactive mud.
Therefore, the less nuclear power plants and the more coal or oil - the more radioactive contamination, under natural conditions, will be. So, this is a completely obvious situation. Of course, it would be best to use what we all actively dream about - alternative sources: thermonuclear, solar, NGD, and everything else. But here it is absolutely necessary to imagine the picture that for 4050 years nothing will happen, because today, the best figures show that solar energy and the cost of human labor are a hundred times more per unit of power, and the cost of materials 150 times more than coal or nuclear power plants. Of course, science will also go through this and everything will improve, but not 100 or 150 times. Therefore, the share of alternative sources in the foreseeable period of 4550 years will be 5-7 percent. It is necessary that these percentages be, in order to develop these energy sources, but this cannot be the basis of energy.
Thus, the inevitability of nuclear energy became apparent in the 60s, and the pace was lost.
And then, - gallop across Europe. And the money is limited, because for ten years they haven't invested any money.
And here the fatal mistake was made, because of which Chernobyl began.
What is the fatal mistake?
The whole world recognizes the normal safety standard for any hazardous production, including nuclear power plants.
This standard consists of three elements:
1.- make the most reliable reactor;
2.- make the most reliable operation (trained personnel, good discipline, convenient equipment for operation, etc.)
And everywhere they strive for maximum reliability. But since the whole world understands that it is “maximum”, this does not mean 100%, and that there is always some chance that some element of the equipment, even the most reliable, can refuse and that some person is maliciously intent or illiterate circumstances can accomplish something, then a mandatory third element is introduced: 3.- all this dangerous production with the most reliable reactor; with the most reliable operation - must be encapsulated. Closed in the container (as it is called in the West), under the cap (as we call it) delivered. So that if suddenly, with some small probability but something happens, then all the same it will be limited to the zone of the reactor itself. All troubles will be limited to the zone.
And here are the most important criminals.
Of course, those who were convicted already in Chernobyl, they are criminals, because they committed incredible actions and they were convicted lawfully.
Now the investigation is underway (further investigation) and will probably be judged, I think so (at least from my point of view should be judged), the designers of this type of RBMK reactor who made at least three gross errors in the design of this reactor. The coarsest, and errors. And probably they should bear the same criminal responsibility for this, say, responsibility. From my point of view. But what will be there, I do not know.
But the main criminals are those energy leaders of the 60s who, contrary to the point of view of specialists, and the Soviet experts, say, we have such a member of the Institute, Viktor Alekseyevich SIDORENKO, now he is deputy. He wrote his doctoral dissertation, then released a book, at about the same time period, where he proved the existence of nuclear power plants without caps, no matter what type - VVER or RBMK - what it is about | criminal and criminal.
But, as they say, they spat at it from the large bell tower, because it increased the cost of each station by about 2,530 percent. And, since the Gosplan issued money for the atomic energy industry strictly set, it means that by 2530 percent to build less, at a given time, nuclear power plants.
(the question is hard to hear)
No, PETROSYANTS, in particular, as far as I know, was not involved in these issues. This is the then leadership of Gosplan: Comrade. Baybakov, Comrade. VOLOYANTS - participated and Comrade. SLAVSKY one of the main responsible and Comrade. SUPPORTED. Here is a team: DISABLED, SLAVSKY, VOLOYANTS and BAIBAK. But at the same time, the role of Baibakov is - he listened to SLAVSKY and TO THE NECAST, as power engineers.
Moreover, this is not just because there was no knowledge there. The knowledge was, experts, though not unanimous, because in the same Kurchatov Institute the author of the development itself was Professor FEINBERG Savely Moyseevich, now deceased, he advocated the possibility of such a reactor without a cap, namely an RBMK reactor (a high-power channel reactor).
It is important for me that you understand what: if an international philosophy were adopted, that each reactor is under a hood, then the RBMK reactor simply would not have appeared, because it is a high-power channel and is made up of many blocks - it is not under any cap would not fit. Therefore, there would simply be no design error, because, in principle, this reactor would not have appeared.
Now how did he appear and why did he appear. Because it was late for 10 years in the development of nuclear energy.
(question the question of the name of FEINBERG)
FEINBERG S.M.- The physicist was a good one, of course, but he also got into this story. Everything was confused.
(a question, poorly audible, about ALEXANDROVE, AP, as a guardian)
Anatoly Petrovich had nothing to do with the design of the RBMK reactor. But I will say a little bit later about the role of Anatoly Petrovich ALEXANDROV as much as I can objectively. From my point of view, he has some degree of guilt, of course not much, there is. But he is too honored, he has done too much for the country to talk about it this way, but
(the question that ALEXANDROV said that the RBMK reactor could be put on Red Square)
No, it's just a mistake. He said, really about one of the reactors - this is AST reactor - a nuclear power plant of a completely different type, which is really the safest of all that exist in the world today - that's what he said about it, that it can be installed even in Red Square. I will say later about the role of ALEXANDROV, but it is important for me that you would understand that the main thing was 10 years late.
Because once for ten years they were late, then there was first of all ... (In the world, a line of tank reactors was developed, such as our water / water power reactors / VVER / here and outside Minsk which was supposed to stand and which would not be built now - but they needed large machine-building capacities, which were not in the Soviet Union to build tanks - one building was made 23 years and then Atommash factory was specially built to build buildings for such reactors) ... question: no buildings atomic energy u need to develop and that's when Comrade SLAVSKY - the Minister of Medium Machine Building comes out with a proposal - in parallel with VVER reactors ...
(the question interrupts the narration, asks to decipher the abbreviation VVER and the difference from RBMK)
VVER reactors are a large metal casing - the active zone is lowered into the water - the water overheats, the pressure is 170 atm. - the double-circuit system heats the water of the second circuit, and the water of the second circuit turns into steam and rotates the turbine.
And the RBMK reactor is a single-circuit reactor - these are many zirconium channels - the water from the fuel pellets is heated in them and this water immediately goes to the turbine and rotates it.
Therefore, in VVER reactors, power is limited by the size of the reactor vessel, and in RBMK reactors, power is unlimited: choose a graphite formation of enormous size, make holes in it, insert channels and can gain more power.
So, when it became clear that there was not enough energy in the Soviet Union, then Efim SLAVSKY, the Minister of Medium Machine Building, said: "There is such a party - we can help the country out." Do you understand?
This type of apparatus came from the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, where several such devices, for special purposes, were built and operated in the most unique way. There, military acceptance of each piece of equipment, specially trained personnel, the highest requirements, etc.
These are the industrial reactors have the Americans. They are not the same under the hood, because they are big, but they are only 4 pieces, the Americans. And for each of them tracking and surveillance is very high class.
So, in Sredmashivtsevto, and in this sense, and in Anatoly Petrovich ALEKSANDROVA - the same, there was a feeling that this reactor, with its correct operation, and with reliability is very good and normal.
But just | About the first such reactor, and the first one was immediately landed near Leningrad, 100 km. from Leningrad, the first such RBMK reactor.
And as soon as they started to launch it, they immediately found out that the reactor was bad, that it was difficult to control it, that the neutron fields began to “walk”, the operators were all in a sweat, they could not control it, due to its large size and specificity of nuclear processes.
I had to change the degree of fuel enrichment, every time something ... well, in general, from the moment it was launched, all the time some changes and changes were made.
Nevertheless, due to the fact that 10 years were lost and because international philosophy — that every device was necessarily hidden under a cap — was not accepted, then these devices went to the national economy and they were no longer built by Minsredmash. , and Minenergo: Kursk, Chernobyl, Smolensk NPPs, here with these reactors - RBMK.
Although in a whisper, all operators, all engineers and specialists said that this reactor is very difficult to manage.
In economics, in terms of the cost of a kilowatt hour of energy, in terms of fuel consumption, it is approximately the same as the VVER - in what is better, in what is worse, but the fact that it is more difficult to control is - it has become, it is clear.
But, the main thing, and I always come back to this, is the MAJOR CRIME, which was made that the Soviet nuclear power industry was allowed into CRIMINAL PHILOSOPHY, allowing to build stations without hubcaps (of any type: VVER, RBM).
There would be caps - RBMK, simply, would not have appeared - for nothing. As he did not appear anywhere in the world (this type of reactor).
Then another mistake was that it was such a technique by which it was dangerous to go not by the world. Because, all the same, this is a dangerous technique and when we deal with VVER reactors, we can use all the world experience.
Just think, we have dozens of reactors there, and the Americans have 90 of them, and the British have 40, and the French have 60. And experience accumulates on each, mistakes and all this is the property of humanity.
And RBMKto, in total: the Leningrad station was first, yes, the Chernobyl, and no more.
That's the whole experience and: "you know everything, you know," and then it turned out that we know very little about them - that’s the so-called "development path" for you.
First, it is national, and therefore not supported by any international experience.
Secondly, the CMEA countries will not connect to this, because they did not install such a device.
Philosophy is contrary to what it is.
Yes, and in the design of the reactor were laid, I say, at least three fundamental errors.
They seem wild to me.
And you always seemed wild, so that you would not look at me as a person who ...
The fact is that our Institute was divided over this reactor. And here I will talk about Anatoly Petrovich.
What is the wildness of the design of his mistakes, except for the philosophy of the cap?
The wildness of mistakes is that the safety philosophy ... (and why am I saying this? Because the safety philosophy does not depend on what you are dealing with: an atomic reactor; a biological object in which viruses multiply; or or with something third or fourth - philosophy.
Specific technical solutions - they depend, but philosophy does not depend, since philosophy has three elements:
- the reliable device - as much as possible;
- reliable staff - as much as possible;
- and all this, with maximum reliability, hidden under the ground, in a rock, under a concrete cap - this is a philosophy relating to any object that makes the system reliable.
But with the design of some - reliable) ... requires that if you have any emergency protection systems that stop: whether the car is there; whether the train is there; something else, then you should have at least two protection systems, and they should operate on independent physical principles and one of the two systems should not depend on the operator.
This is the law of security theory.
Because, say, well, suddenly the operator became ill, and he did not press the button ..., something else ... - then from exceeding the parameters themselves, from abnormalities, the second defense should work itself.
So in the RBMK reactor there was ONE PROTECTION, in contrast to the VVER reactor, which is a gross violation of the principles. (first mistake) And the constructor until today ...
Now, if the designers of the RBMK reactor heard me and my colleagues from my own Institute, they would now tear me to pieces, because they believe that, it turns out, he does not understand the safety philosophy.
Since the emergency protection system contains 211 rods descending, they say that they did not have two systems, but 211 systems. Because they will remove 211 rods from them, each of which, as it descends into the reactor, can absorb neutrons and they say that it’s already 211.
But this is bullshit, because all these rods are falling: from the operator; from the machine; from pressing a button and so on.
And, if the operator was killed, he fell ill, died, then these 211 rods will remain in place.
This is what they still can not understand ... or maybe it's just a self-defense reaction | I am so, so they sneak at me with terrible force, in this sense.
Moreover, when the Chernobyl accident had already happened, when it was necessary to make additions, I immediately suggested such an independent gas protection system - introduction of such a gas ampoule into the apparatus (I will not tell you everything in detail).
They very reluctantly accepted it, put it at the last moment for execution in the 90s, somewhere in their plans, and they themselves began to correct their second mistake.
And the second error in the design, besides the fact that not two defenses, but one, was that ...
(end of side "B", part 8, cassette N 4)
The text corresponds to the audio:
Investigators of the investigation team
Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation
Senior Counselor of Justice xxxxxxxxxxxx
1st class lawyer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Academician V. Legasov
(text from cassette N5)
Moreover, when the Chernobyl accident had already happened, when it was necessary to make additions, I immediately suggested such an independent gas protection system - introduction of such a gas ampoule into the apparatus (I will not tell you everything in detail), they very reluctantly accepted it, put it in the last the moment for execution in the 90s, somewhere in their plans, while they themselves began to correct their second mistake.
And the second error in the design, besides the fact that it was not two defenses, but one, was that even the humanities should be clear that if you have a power build up with a certain speed, what happens (you have, let's say, trouble speed), it is clear that the protective system should be faster introduced into the system than this trouble.
And they had, five times six times slower.
(inaudible question)
Yes, and the reactivity per second increases 13 times, and the rod in 56 seconds goes down there.
So they directed all efforts to harmonize these rates, to make a dry canal. That's how they clung to these unfortunate rods (mechanical, with the help of which ...) so they still can not tear themselves away from them. And so my proposal for gas protection pushed back somewhere on a long journey.
And now it turned out that it is impossible to make such a speed at the rod, in the end of the ends. Having lost a year, I now return to this proposal of mine, which is why today these RBMK reactors are not reliable.
(unclear question).
RBMK? 14 pieces.
I always want to tell you and I don’t know if I manage to do this, that it’s a matter of safety philosophy. If the safety philosophy were correct, then technical specialists would find technical solutions for this philosophy, of course, because our specialists, competent people, intelligent people, know how to count and do other things. But the thing is that they were put in such conditions. If there was a philosophy - an obligatory cap, as a result, such an RBMK reactor could not have appeared and there would be no subject for discussion.
And 14 VVER apparatuses would not have appeared without these, as they say, “bare” ones, which are not closed by anything.
And, in fact, if the VVER jerks, and in fact it can jerk the same, it will already be a “language” not 8090 kilometers, it will already be a “tongue” 250 kilometers.
(the question is illegible)
No, we have 14 VVER apparatuses without caps.
(unclear question)
No, 14 RBMK - without caps and 14 VVER - without caps.
And only when the caps appeared, are the stations that are being built for the last 56 years, and which are now being designed, and which will be being built, that everything is being built already with caps.
Where did it come from? As soon as we Finam began to sell the station. Finns, according to international requirements, said: "Let's take a cap, we won't take a cap without it." And now our first station with a cap appeared and, by its reactor characteristics, it is very good, yes, plus a cap that costs — this is the best station in the world, Lovisa.
And after that we began to implement philosophy at home.
Therefore, those stations that are under construction for the last 56 years:
-here Zaporozhye station in Ukraine;
-By the way, the station that was built near Minsk was built for you (it would have necessarily been built with a cap).
(illegible question, clarification)
Well, the decision has already been made, so to speak, emotional. But here I must tell you that just Minsk station would not present any danger.
(slurred question)
Well, okay. The decision was made and what to talk about now. But in fact, an accident could have happened on it: the reactor could have broken, anything could have happened. But everything would have remained under the hood. That is the difference between the Minsk station and the Finnish station ...
Like the Americans. They also had a worse accident than this one. But there everything remained under a cap.
So here is the first violation of philosophy.
What is Anatoly Petrovich ALEXANDROV's fault? The wines of Anatoly Petrovich ALEXANDROVA in that he reluctantly - but gave a sanction.
I did it, I did it (along with the specialists), but then I went to meet the insistent demands of the State Planning Committee and the Ministry of Energy that it was possible to build stations without caps.
He fought very hard at first, he fought (I can show it with documents), but then he gave up.
But how did you give up? | Under the condition of the most careful implementation of all regulatory operations and so on. And for the past 20 years he has spoken wherever possible (at the Politburo, etc.): - he demanded military acceptance; - he demanded an increase in the quality of equipment, etc., and so forth.
That is, he fought for the fact that the probability of trouble at the station, knowing that there is no cap, was minimal. He fought for it.
But, the fact that, all the same, he (how should I tell you?), Well, the corpse did not lay down, as they say, across the whole of this philosophy - that’s the only thing - his fault in this.
There is no other fault. Because in all other cases he fought for the right thing.
Although it was difficult to fight, because the group of specialists (who, you know, are there: - hurray! - come on, come on!), You know, they were so strong that here SIDORENKO Viktor Alekseevich, being the director of the Nuclear Reactors Division in our Institute, the author this doctoral dissertation and this book - he was kicked out of the Institute. He had to leave the Institute. Because, his own colleagues did not understand.
Why did not understand his own colleagues?
But because:
- colleagues received awards from the Ministry;
- because the Institute was part of Minsredmash.
Do you understand?
-and therefore (they see that the director / director is a member of the correspondent of the Academy of Sciences), and they have a bad salary. He will not be given a premium of 100 rubles there, he will survive, and I get only 180 and for me 100 rubles of premium - it’s important) if I’m dzyrknu anywhere, at the expense of these caps, I’ll get shish, not a bonus;
- I will not say that - they will not publish me, I will not defend my dissertation.
And that is why their own subordinates, educated over the years in this Ministry, by such an ideology, they kicked out their own boss. Well kicked out how? Well, not kicked out, but created intolerable working conditions.
Although he, along with Anatoly Petrovich, fought for quality, since the caps could not be pierced. And there he did a lot to get Gosatomenergonadzor, where he went to work in the end, into an organization that even controlled the equipment that goes there.
That was the situation.
Therefore, Chernobyl (see why I started this way from afar?), He reflected that in the Soviet Union and to this day, having survived Chernobyl, this philosophy (which is so primitive, so simple, of which I called you three) understands so far, even in the nuclear industry. And it is not transferred to the chemical industry, where we can have Bhopal (you understand?) At any moment for this very reason - the wrong philosophy.
There is not a single organization in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union or in the national Academies that would develop this philosophy.
There is no ability to use the theory of risk and reliability of equipment to assess the possible consequences of some events and to prepare for them in advance (understand?)
That is, Chernobyl, like Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov here on the Politburo on July 14, when the issue was discussed, he said: “I have the impression that the country was slowly and persistently developing its nuclear power industry, went to Chernobyl”. He said it was done right - we were going to Chernobyl.
Only he had to, according to my assessment, take place not at Chernobyl, but at the Kola station a few years earlier, when they found out that in the main pipeline through which the heat transfer fluid was supplied, a welder would receive a premium and make faster, instead of to brew the valve, in the most critical place, he simply put electrodes into the channel and lightly brewed them from above.
It was a miracle that just this one, the most powerful accident, was discovered - we would simply have completely lost the Kola Peninsula. And it could have been a few years ago. And just by a miracle, as they say, this did not happen. And the bezkolpachnaya station - everything would have been polluted there and the wonder of nature - our Kola Peninsula - would have been destroyed.
So I wanted to tell you all that you would understand that the origins of the Chernobyl tragedy in the wrong philosophy, which began with the fact that 10 years have missed, then began to catch up, catch up faster, faster, offered this option.
Then the transfer. Unjustified transfer of the experience of the military industry to the national economy.
This is a completely unjustified transfer, because, in the military industry:
-with a limited number of objects;
- with strict military acceptance, and repeated;
- military acceptance by the manufacturer;
-military acceptance during operation;
-multiple exams;
-training staff and so on and so forth ...
And, when you suddenly, with the same object, go out into the national economy, where there is nothing like this:
-no there are no simulators;
- there is no training system;
- in general, there is simply no training system, not to mention the emergency training system (See?).
Therefore, an atmosphere of complete preparedness for such accidents was created.
And what I want to tell you today.
But this is not yet for publication, because both you and my head will be torn off, but I, first of all, and you secondarily, | that nothing has changed for today ...
(Intelligible, Adamovich A.'s words): “ADAMOV said this to me already and VELIKHOV told me, actually everything proceeds by inertia. I told them the same thing, but how can I have access to GORBACHEV - here and there. They told me about his utter helplessness. "
Helplessness is again connected with that (our universal) and lies in the fact that as long as there is a monopoly of some department specific to the system, this will continue.
Let's say, for this reason, the Politburo made the right decision to create, in the Academy of Sciences system, an appropriate nuclear organization, because there is no alternative, no competition, but the very same Velikhov, for example, is not in a hurry. Knowing this, he is also not in a hurry to create a powerful and correct alternative organization.
(the question is illegible: "And what system holds in the hands, except for the Academy all this?)
Minsredmash. He has everything, he has everything constructor, he has everything in his hands, and the Ministry of Atomic Energy only the number of operational departments, it is engaged only in operation, nothing else.
Those who developed the equipment - Minenergomash.
The situation worsened because earlier there was Minenergomash, which made only nuclear equipment, now it was combined with Minmash, in general, and this nuclear equipment for it turned out to be one of the points in the range of products.
Therefore, the situation has only worsened.
The probability of Chernobyl is now increased.
So now I am writing a note to Nikolai Iivanovich Ryzhkov, another note where the same thing is: "... the probability increases every day because ..." again, here are those capless devices ...
(the words of Adamovich A .: "which are".)
Which is. And people understand that they are dangerous.
But what do they do? They are trying to improve the reliability of the reactor so that there is no accident.
What does it mean to increase the reliability of the reactor? This means: pushing on him new and new devices, some additional diagnostic tools and so on and so forth.
Moreover, it is done in different devices at different times.
And the staff migration is quite high, therefore: on one device, they introduced changes to the regulations, on the other they did not, on this they did, on that they did not.
Imagine?
The old shift manager moved from one object to another, thinking that here he was just like his. Do you understand? Therefore, the likelihood now, because of what people seem to be doing and doing a good deed, increases the reliability of the devices, but in fact, because of a lack of understanding of this whole philosophy — they, in fact, worsen the installation position.
(a fragment of Adamovich A.'s poorly intelligible phrase: "... I understand that it is useless to write ...")
You are not confused, it is me for myself, so, just in case, it can be useful when you are writing.
This means that this applies to no less a degree, but to a greater extent to chemical plants, where we still have disgraces of this sort, much more than in the nuclear industry.
And I sit and shiver ... (now I say, a person is really sick even here and is lying, thank God I have already been cured) ... I am ill precisely from what is most likely in our near future, so I just I call what I’m afraid of, and I’m already afraid, because once I spoke at the Politburo, I said that the next accident in phosphorus in South Kazakhstan will happen when everything is dead within a radius of 300 kilometers.
(inaudible speech of Adamovich A.)
But I said that on the Politburo. They missed by the ears. But after two weeks, this is happening in America - a phosphoric accident, after two weeks, that's when they noticed. Do you understand? Thank God, that is not with us, and not at the plant, but on the railway tank transporting phosphorus, where they were forced to evacuate 30 thousand people, because of such a phosphorus accident.
So I just know that the next nuclear accident will be at the Armenian station, and the whole of Armenia will be covered. Then Bulgaria, next in probability, is Kozloduy, the next in probability is Leningrad, will surely fall back. Here are three nuclear ones. There will be the largest chemical accident in Dzerzhinsk, it will be the largest chemical accident in history, and the largest accident will be in Kuibyshev, we have a chemical accident, and an accident will happen in Chimkent in South Kazakhstan.
(Adamovich A.'s words: “I’ll write all this now, and then ...”)
Check it out. (dictates) Nuclear: Armenian, Leningrad, "Kozloduy" Bulgaria, - these nuclear power plants where there are bezkolpakovye. Now chemical accidents: this is Dzerzhinsk - an explosion, there must be a powerful explosion, then, the same thing, a three-dimensional explosion in Kuibyshev and Chemkent, at a phosphorus plant, an accident may occur, in which the formation of organophosphorus occurs, one breath is simply fatal, and Wind Rose ", by its prevalence, within a radius of 300 kilometers, with entry into China, all living things will be destroyed.
This is all what I call if the necessary measures are not taken. Moreover, the measures that can be taken to ensure that this is not, are known. But the most killing thing that makes, as they say, worry and hurt, | about the measures that need to be taken - they are known.
For example, I can really today ... (erased) ... well, it means that the information came in a standard form.
In advance, long before the accident, the alert system of the Ministry of Energy of the accident was adopted. And there was a code system. The information is code, for example, the figures are reported somehow: 1, 2, 3, 4.
1 is a fire
2 is radiation damage,
3 is a nuclear accident
4 - there are chemical hazards.
And the teams were already formed. In the event of a signal, so, in such a place to gather such an emergency team to leave, here in Moscow. In the case of a different situation, another team is going and so on.
And so, on the night of April 26, all four types of signals appeared in the Ministry of Energy - signals of all types of possible danger. Such a command was given. Therefore, the Minister was immediately summoned, and immediately all the specialists included in the list of persons who were to leave were summoned. Since it was on the night from Friday to Saturday, a part was at the dachas, so it took two hours for this procedure, but at night they all gathered in the Ministry of Energy, then another hour later they found out about the plane and this group of people flew out early in the morning to the place. I was not in this group. When they gathered, here, the same was one unpleasant moment. They established a telephone connection and from the station information began to come in contradicting the encrypted signals, which did not confirm them, but partially contradicted them. They began to say: they turned on the cooling, turned on the included, turned on it. This created the impression that the reactor lives, what happened on it, of course, is serious. In the morning they already reported that two people died. But it was reported that one died there because of mechanical damage ... and the second died of chemical burns, because the fire did indeed arise. What was really true. They simply lost one and (poorly legible words of Adamovich A., "... and stayed there ...") ... there remained buried in the sarcophagus, and the second really died from chemical burns, because a fire occurred in one place.
But of the other: that at the same time, traditional radiation lesions have already begun and something else has not yet been reported.
And during the first half of the day, 26 information from such an order came from there that the staff was trying to cope with the situation: the apparatus had left the submission and they were trying to subdue it.
Here, roughly speaking, this situation.
But, since all the same, the original signal was serious. He was transferred to the Government. The government appointed a government commission.
(question of Adamovich A. "Who gave the first signal? They are the same?")
Station staff. Director of the station.
So, on Saturday I went early in the morning to 10 am in my ministry for the party economic asset, where our aged Minister of Medium Machine-Building SLAVSKY spoke
(question of Adamovich A.: "What is his name, patronymic?")
Efim Pavlovich
(Adamovich A question: "Was it the Minister ...?")
medium mechanical engineering
(Adamovich A.'s words: "average, I write down ...")
So, he gave a big report, he always did long reports: he praised the nuclear power industry, praised himself, praised his own Ministry and in passing it: "... the truth is that there in Chernobyl, the signal came, it happened, well, there we are usually, we will manage ... "- and continued the report we happened we will consult and continued the report. He made a report. Break. At 12 o'clock, as I remember now. And during this break, the first deputy of Slavsky MESHKOV Alexander Grigoryevich (this is his first deputy, who was later removed from work for this accident)
(Adamovich's fame A.: "And he himself? He left for retirement, simply?")
SLAVSKY?
(Adamovich A. words: "Yes.")
Well, how. Gone him to retire.
(Adamovich A.'s words: "Well, of course. Well, it seems to be.")
Well, yes, since it seems to be decorous, he left without a penalty, as they say.
So Alexander Meshkov approached me and said that a Government Commission had been appointed and I was included in this Government Commission, and that at 4 o'clock I should be on Vonukovo, at the airport for departure.
The head of the Government Commission, Boris Yevdokimovich Shcherbina.
I immediately jumped into the car, went to the Institute, found experts on this type of reactor. (I repeat that I myself am, after all, not a reactor man, although it seems to be the first deputy director of the Institute. But the institute is enormous: there are thermonuclear nuclear physics and isotope separation and the use of isotopes, radio chemistry, and Devil and the devil.
My responsibilities included chemical physics and the separation of isotopes and substances, as well as the use of nuclear energy in the national economy in the form of isotopes or something else. I have the smallest branch. Therefore, Anatoly Petrovich apparently appointed me and was the first deputy, so that I would not have self-interest in carrying resources for some of my tasks. I am among the "giants" there, among the reactors, the thermonuclear, I was the smallest, so to speak, owner. That is why he took me for managerial affairs, for owning resources, he appointed me first deputy, I worked for them for many years. I think that from these considerations, maybe he and other soo | The pictures were).
Well, I called the experts with the reactor drawings with all the information that could have been collected. Of course, I imagined the design of this reactor, but not as detailed as it should have been a member of the Government Commission, for example, in such an emergency.
I took everything that I could take with me and at 4re I was at the airport. Scherbina at that time was outside of Moscow, somewhere was outside the capital, held some kind of event. We waited for him. He appeared. I looked at the composition of the Government Commission (I will name the composition of this first commission, if necessary) and we flew to Kiev.
On the way, I told Shcherbine the story of the accident at Trimaylen, in detail. That's what I did during the flight, I told him what happened in “Three May Island” in America, what events happened there, what events.
And the events there were simple - they all fled and for three years did not approach this station in "TriMayAyland", so that all the activities "Trimaylovskie". But in fact, for three days they struggled so that the hydrogen bubble did not explode. Here they were, so to speak, blowing the hydrogen bubble. They blew, closed everything and for three years nobody even approached the station. They died there
17 people from the Americans. But not at the time of the accident. During the accident, no one died, was not irradiated, and in a panic.
They began to panic in the town. They rushed on cars to do self-evacuation and in the process of evacuating 17 people there in the cars died - so they dragged - the Americans.
Here I am in Shcherbina on the plane told this story.
Flew to Kiev. In Kiev, headed by Lyashko - the head of the Ukrainian Government. A huge crowd of black limousines. The faces are grim. What is happening, no one could explain anything to us. They said that things were apparently bad. We boarded these cars and drove there. The road was grim. There is no specific information. Therefore, such conversations, you know - yes - no. I was driving in the same car with the Chairman of the Kiev Regional Executive Committee PLUSH, which became part of the Government Commission the same. What kind of talk could there be?
And, here, a measure of our ignorance and a measure of misunderstanding of what happened was expressed, for example, in such facts. That I, for example, even having time to drop by home, warn my wife that I am leaving for a business trip. But as I was on the asset in my best uniform, so to speak, in my best clothes and so on, so I moved there.
(Adamovich A.'s words: "But you understood?")
Yes, here I am. Here we are so confused by the scale of the accident. Do you understand? As far as I could not imagine, according to this information, the scale of the accident. And I’m not one accident about them ..., thank God, I had an x-ray before that on all sorts of different occasions and how to behave and so on. I knew. And the same cavalcade of black cars: Gulls and others who went there, this is the same measure of knowledge, understanding on the first day. She talks about it. Then SHCHERBINA, when he returned from there, before our eyes, he smashed his deputy badge with a hammer. Well, so that no one would use it, he was so polluted (deputy badge), he personally hammered him into pieces with a hammer - nothing else bothered. But it is so. In general, then there was an episode, a little later I will say the same about him.
Well, drove Chernobyl. Chernobyl lives a peaceful life quietly well peacefully everything is very. We come to Pripyat. And here are a few kilometers to Pripyat, and 18 kilometers from Chernobyl to Pripyat. And now, a few kilometers from Pripyat, well, after 8 to 7, this is the first time I don’t recognize a nuclear power plant. Because the nuclear power plant is always determined: the pipes are of which nothing goes. Do you understand? This is the most characteristic sign of an atomic object when the pipe is standing, because it only stands for extracting air from which only krypton is drawn85, which I told you about and nothing more, but the terms are clean.
And then suddenly a crimson glow in half the sky and a white-white steam blowing from this reactor. Well, in general, - this is not a nuclear power plant, - my first was the impression that I did not come to the nuclear power plant.
We drove to the building of the city party committee in Pripyat, settled in a hotel next door, where several days later in this hotel we lived in Pripyat itself, and the headquarters ...
(the words of Adamovich A.: "And the people have already been removed ..., people were taken on resurrection ...)
Not. We arrived 26 at 8:20 in the evening. And at 20 hours and 40 minutes, approximately, there was the first meeting of the Government Commission right in Pripyat in the city committee of the party. The first meeting of the commission was natural and simple.
Scherbina distributed responsibilities:
- he instructed MESHKOV to select a group of specialists. If necessary, call from Moscow and establish the cause of the accident;
- he instructed me to develop liquidation measures. What to do, in short. I had the task to work out proposals because I had to do it. Suggestions. Because the final decisions were taken collectively by the Government Commission or personally Scherbina. He took as chairman a decision. But to prepare proposals for what to do, it fell on my shoulders;
-VOROBYEV Evgeny Ivanovich - former Deputy Minister | public health, which was then removed, his problem was this - to determine the number of people exposed, their fate and everything related to people - what to do;
- and the local authorities were members of the Government Commission, so, let's say, the Chairman of the regional executive committee of I am positive - their task was to prepare for the evacuation. Such words were pronounced immediately, directly: “Prepare for evacuation” and execute the orders, here are the ones that I will work out - to eliminate the consequences of the accident. The first thing to do was to do reconnaissance. Because the dosimetry service is the same, by the way. Here I will step aside a little and say that dosimetry has been disgustingly delivered. Dosimetrists with instruments instead of automata. It would seem that there should be a circle there, as I write in the sentences:
-on the station itself - the first round
- in kilometer - the second round,
- three kilometers and 10 kilometers - a circle,
Around there in a hundred meters there are automatic machines that give sound and light signals in case of overdosing.
(AdamovichA words. "DP5 ...")
Yes. But DT5 was then not yet there in sufficient quantity when we arrived. Therefore, the main work was undertaken by Armen A. Abagyan, Director of the Institute of the All-Russia Research Institute of Nuclear Power Plants (Institute of Nuclear Power Plants of the Ministry of Atomic Energy of the present, and then of the Ministry of Energy)
(Adamovich A. words: "ABAGYAN ...")
Armen Artovazdovich, good man. And, a little later, such EGOROV arrived from the Adamovsk Institute, but he arrived a day or two later. Here they began to carry out. Then PIKALOV appeared with his service. That began dosimetric intelligence.
But on the evening of the 26th we did everything approximately. But already on the 26th it became clear, we established that the reactor was destroyed, and on the 26th at 11 pm a meeting of the Governmental Commission met again and it considered two questions:
The first question is about the population.
And here we had a heated discussion: Viktor Alekseyevich SIDORENKO, who was the same member of the Government Commission from GosATOMENERGONADZOR, he, mainly, and I, supporting him, insisted on the immediate evacuation of the population.
Medicine objected. But here the whole thing is connected with the fact that we have established the following orders:
-The right to evacuation gives the Ministry of Health of the USSR. Not, say, the Council of Ministers there, not the Central Committee of the CPSU, but the Ministry of Health of the USSR;
- And the rules that they had worked out before this accident were as follows, by the way, there are still no international rules. And the Ministry of Health has developed such rules:
-If there is a danger to a person - immediately, or for some time to receive a 25 rem dose dose, then the local authorities HAVE THE RIGHT (has the right, but not the obligation) to carry out evacuation measures;
-If there is a likelihood of a dose load - 75 rem and more, then local authorities MUST undertake evacuation.
So, if there is no threat to the 25 rem, then no one has the right to evacuate. Between 25 and 75 rems is a matter for local authorities. Well, above 75 rem is a prerequisite.
These are the sanitary rules at that time existed.
Immediate measurements in the city of Pripyat, and the explosion occurred in such a way that Pripyat bypassed from two sides. Do you understand?
(the words of Adamovich A.: "And went to Belarus.")
In Belarus - one part and the second part went to Ukraine, but in the other direction. And Pripyat was, so at the time of the explosion itself, it was clean. And there was no 10 rem.
Therefore, doctors were in a quandary. According to their rules, they did not have the right, on the basis of the data that they had at 11 pm, to declare some kind of evacuation.
We, as experts said,
(Adamovich's words A. "... tomorrow will be") that tomorrow will be 25 or more. Do you understand? Therefore, it is necessary to immediately declare evacuation.
Well, tomorrow will be, but now there is no seychasto, but what if there will be no tomorrow? Suddenly, tomorrow the reactor will do something and everything will be terminated? Then how will we feel, are we breaking the law?
In general, there was such a long dispute and SHCHERBINA, I must give him his due, he decided to evacuate.
Doctors do not put their signature on the protocol. They put it the next day at 11 am
But SHCHERBINA made the decision and the local authorities immediately began preparations. They called there a thousand buses from Kiev, and the preparation of routes, determining the locations of the evacuated population.
Unfortunately, there was not such a loud-speaking connection to the local radio network that could announce this. Therefore, the arrived general BERDOV from Kiev gave the command: to go round every apartment to all the policemen and declare that until tomorrow no one should go outside, sit in houses. Because there are no ...
(the words of Adamovich A. "So, there was no local ... / illegible /)
Well, I do not know. I only know that the warning of the population was made at night and early in the morning by going around all the apartments and setting up on duty ...
(the words of Adamovich A. "27 or ... / unintelligible /) ...27 in the morning and 26 at night. Nevertheless, there were 27 women walking with children in the morning, it also means that they didn’t have time to notify or they came from at | however, a store and, in general, a semi-ordinary life lived the city.
But at 11 o'clock in the morning, already completely officially, after the signature of physicians, it was announced about the evacuation of the city. Moreover, the same means our inexperience is somehow organizational, I would say. I understood, I must tell you frankly, I understood that the city is being evacuated forever. But psychologically, I didn’t have, somehow, the strength, the ability of people to announce it. Because I reasoned like that, for example, if now you announce this to people, the evacuation will be delayed, and the activity at that time has already grown exponentially. People will begin to gather for a very long time. Do you understand? Other things will arise. And there is no such time. Therefore, I advised, and SHCHERBINA agreed with me, to announce that we can’t say the exact date of the evacuation.
(Adamovich A.'s words are illegible)
No, no, that time ... he is wrong. Maybe someone understood so, but it was announced this way: "Maybe for a few days, maybe for a longer period ...", well, like that, it was announced in an indefinite form, but it was really announced so that people could understand that they disappear for a few days from your city. Do you understand? Therefore, they are all pretty light going and leaving.
Then there was another mistake made. Part of the residents asked to be evacuated in their own cars, and in the city there were about three thousand cars of such scale, their own, private ones.
(Adamovich's words: "Banned ...")
No, it was allowed, that Boris Evdokimovich, probably made a mistake, but it's hard to say. Let's say they were allowed, some of the cars drove out. Some of the residents left their own cars, but the cars were polluted, of course. Do you understand? But, on the other hand, people were contaminated and their things were contaminated. What a big difference there is - it's hard to say. The evacuation itself was extremely orderly - in two hours all of the 51 thousand inhabitants of the order of 45 thousand were evacuated, so I call the number from memory, evacuated.
Those that were needed to save the city and maintain the station remained, and the Government Commission itself remained in Pripyat.
In this case, so, it can print and will not go, and maybe it will. Do you understand what struck me? The party organization was dismantled.
(the words of Adamovich A. "That is?")
Here, even here during the war, all the same, when the retreat from the city was planned in advance, it was already determined: how who — remains in the underground — who is there in the army, ktogo. And here, everything was so fast and sudden that ... (erased) ... there was no one to lean on, which means the highest party power. But this is a few days, and in a few days, of course, this is all restored.
Now, the station personnel, who were supposed to serve the first and second units, were on duty, he was transferred, over 50 kilometers, to the “Fairy Tale” pioneer camp. It was there when I first appeared that same picture was terrible, of course, because normal dosimetric posts were installed there for the first time. People changed clothes.
And such an unforgettable picture when you drive up to the “Fairy Tale” and, probably, there are several thousand suits, such civilians, hanging on trees. Because, naturally, it is interesting. All drive up, dosimetrists measure them, and all have dirty suits. And so I remember, unfortunately, my Finnish raincoat, which my wife chose for me for a long time, an English costume ...
(the words of Adamovich A. "in the trees ..." / illegible /)
Just hung on the trees. And here you eat by car, eat for a long, long time and you see such a picture before ...
(the words of Adamovich A. "Oh, just hanged ..." / inaudible /)
Before "Fairy Tale". Well, that's it. You drive up to the gates of the fairy tale pioneer camp. The dosimetrist measures you. Says: "undress." You undress. Take a few steps. Hang your suit on the trees, wherever you are. They also give you special clothes this very white one there, blue one and you go to “Fairytale”, where you have a bed, a place, living and other things. The next one drives up. And so ...
(Adamovich's words a. "And then you went to work past these suits ...")
Well, we drove past these suits ...
(the words of Adamovich A. "And then?".)
Then they, of course, destroyed ...
(the words of Adamovich A. "destroyed?")
Of course, then they were all destroyed. Buried, destroyed.
(Adamovich's words a. are not picky.)
Makes an impression. Yes. Moreover, as stuffed such, it was all hung.
Well, another episode. So, when Sidorenko and I broke out (maybe we spent a week in Pripyat) we went to Chernobyl and went to the store in Chernobyl (the same, like - experts, like - specialists) and buy ourselves at least like new shorts, T-shirts, shirts. Do you understand? Something to change. This is - underwear - what we dreamed of. We went in, bought very nice little shirts, everything, and when we arrived at Fabulous, we measured it - it was dirtier than we were wearing. Already Chernobyl was enough ...
(Adamovich A.'s words: / unintelligible / "... this is in Chernobyl ...")
Yes, in the Chernobyl pollution.
(the words of Adamovich A.: "... and the people in Chernobyl still have seven days | lived ... ")
Somewhere after the 2nd of May they began to be evicted.
But in the end I have to say this way. Evacuation, evacuation procedure, no matter from Pripyat or from Chernobyl, was carried out in such a way that (it would be better for you, ILLIN would say, or other doctors) in general, not a single person among the population who worked at the station (just like that) at least as much as the victim, due to the slowdown, there was no evacuation even for a day, there was no evacuation. Another thing. Many residents, who then, after 67 days, drank milk ...
(Adamovich A. words: "Where?")
Well, somewhere, say, from cows that ...
(Adamovich A.'s words: "In Chernobyl? ... / inaudible /)
In Chernobyl, under Chernobyl, in your Byelorussia, anywhere. Do you understand? Yes? That is, well, because iodine first fell out. Then the cows ate this grass with iodine. Do you understand? Then they gave us milk when they were milked. And those who drank iodine: the children, in large enough quantities, had a greater load on the thyroid gland. But external exposure or any effects, so to speak, on those people who were evacuated. There was nothing of this.
But, returning to Pripyat, I say: on April 26, at night, at 11 o'clock, it was decided that the next day they would evacuate the population, and the task before me and my colleagues was what to do? What to do?
(Adamovich A.'s words. “Excuse me, but there was the first commission, probably called right there. Didn't Scherbina call to Moscow with you? Didn’t you report to GORBACHEV there and by the way, well, well, well, the situation?”)
So, on a permanent link, on this day and in the following days, the connection was with Nikolai Ivanovich RYZHKOVYOV and Vladimir Ivanovich LONG. There was a connection with them. Continuous, constant, and so on. As far as I can imagine, but this is within my competence, Mikhail Sergeyevich GORBACHEV, well, I talked to him three times. And the first time with him ...
(Adamovich A.'s words: “Well, I wonder what kind of conversation did you have with him?)
I probably won't tell you, because ...
(the words of Adamovich A.: "I will not write down ...")
Or I will say. So, not for writing, but for human understanding. That means. So I heard him the first call (when I worked with Scherbina I never heard the conversation with Gorbachev. He was or wasn’t - I don’t know, I’ll not lie), and when Sherayev came to Scherbina, I was left, all Commission, the first part, left.
(the words of Adamovich A.: / illegible /)
I was left. Left me. First, for the first time, SIDORENKO left me too, - SHCHERBINA asked me to stay. Then they called me to the Politburo meeting on May 5th. There I reported the situation. Then SILAEV called GORBACHEV himself - he demanded me back - and they grabbed me right on the way and again, after the Politburo, - they sent me there again, but these were already such personal things.
So here. Before the Politburo, before the 5th of May, when Scherbina had already left, and SILAEV appeared, it was on the 3rd or 4th of May, so I heard the first ring of GORBACHEV, which means SILAEV and his conversation with him.
This is the first.
Were there any conversations between GORBACHEV and Scherbina? It seems to me - was not. It seems to me - not a single conversation in the early days - was not, I think so. Well, maybe I'm wrong.
And, to mine, the first call of GORBACHEV was precisely to SILAYEV somewhere after the May holidays, there on the 3rd - 4th of May. And already, the second, third, fourth calls - I already talked with Mikhail Sergeyevich, I talked once GREAT to him, in my presence, according to the situation. That was it. And so, in constant communication constantly Ryzhkov and long. Here they are, so to speak, made such a connection.
(Adamovich A.'s words: / weakly, poorly legible / "Well, what did GORBACHEV ask you about ... tell ..." / unintelligible / ")
No, I turn off my ... (recording is interrupted)
... The director of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was in shock, from start to finish.
(the words of Adamovich A.: / illegible /)
I saw him on the first day I arrived there. BRYUKHANOV - his name, the director of the station. And the last time I saw him at a meeting of the Politburo on July 14, when the cause of the Chernobyl accident was considered. Right there he was asked. And he was shocked all the time. He could not utter any rational actions and words. Therefore, this is it - he was shocked. What does he represent as a person and why was he there in shock, but he was an incapacitated person there.
At the same time, let's say, confused was Shasharin - First Deputy Minister of Energy, to whom the station obeyed then, he was confused and because for him the situation was, as you say, well, not planned, it is not known how it is to lead, and he always turned to us for help, - how to behave. But he acted - exceptionally vigorously and selflessly.
And yet I’ll finish it to you - all of my manipulations, so that, so to speak (there is a lot of talk about them), logic, so that you simply understand the logic of the decisions made, at the end of the day.
The logic of the decisions was as follows. Well, let's say we introduce some kind of component that, due to chemical energy, would take heat and turn it (well, let's say we boil a kettle there), take heat, and so on.
First I suggest | l for this case throw an iron shot:
- first, it would melt and a sufficient amount of energy would be spent on its melting;
- secondly, to metal structures, thermal conductivity would be ensured and then metal structures would become faster to remove heat to the air.
But the iron shot that was found at the station was contaminated with radioactivity, so it was impossible to load it into helicopters, first of all. Secondly, at the high temperatures that we intended, at some points, the process would be reversed: the iron would oxidize and the temperature would rise (you see?) Even more.
(the words of Adamovich A. / illegible /)
Therefore, this means that the option has disappeared.
Lead appeared for those marks where the temperature was relatively low: there are 200, 300, 400 degrees. It would melt there, would take the energy on itself, and more - it would be a protective screen, to some extent, and at the same time - all the same heat-conducting element would be something.
And we even thought that it would partially evaporate. In high zones, cool and drain again. Here's how, you know, in refrigerators, such freon circulation will be. This will promote heat exchange. So, probably, and was happening.
I repeat, then there was a lot of talk about lead, these same, poisoning. But now they are preparing for me an exact reference of the analyzes of all the soils: in the 30-kilometer zone, and farther from it. All that while they gave me - no differences from Moscow there or Minsk or something else. Lead is everywhere, but the one that comes out of the exhaust gases of cars here (See?). There is no excess. And in the people, physicians never even one person directly working there found any trace of lead. This is idle talk. Although they are so common were very much.
Dolomite, we threw in there - it is magnesium. There is such a substance. It decomposed the same. The temperature on itself was taken away and decomposed into magnesium and CO 2. ЦО2, means, access of oxygen reduced, as at a fire extinguishing (understand?). Magnesium, of all the ceramics, is the most thermally conductive ceramics, and it also conducted the same heat.
And finally, sand - he played the role of iron only without oxidation. If the temperature is high, then it melted and took energy on itself. Sand played a double role: on the one hand, it melted, and we found it. And the melting took energy from the reactor. He took the energy from the reactor so that the uranium would not melt there.
And besides, we added clay to just filter. What would the particles of radioactive that came out she would filter. What would the particles of radioactive filtered by this layer.
As shown by Western experts, after our report ...
(end of side "A", part 9, cassette 5.)
... the IAEA that the events were made innovative, so to speak, generally speaking, although they were really invented on the fly, and now they are recommended. To my surprise (I thought they would criticize us because: the plan was not preliminary, everything was on the way) now the English Conference, the Vienna Conference were held and our events were officially recommended for the future, as such very effective and useful.
(Adamovich A.'s words: "Tell me, has all the graphite been burnt out there?")
Not.
(the words of Adamovich A.: "What, put out something chtoto ...")
Yes Yes. Look here. The fire is over ...
(Adamovich A.'s words: "It began somewhere in four five wecs graphite goret ...")
Yes, it began to burn.
(Adamovich A.'s words are / unintelligible / "... judging by these records, that I ...")
The burning of graphite began somewhere in 2627 ...
(the words of Adamovich A.: "No, idle, the 26th evening ...")
Yes. On the 26th in the evening, at 67 o'clock in the evening, when it was a crimson glow, when we drove through.
(the words of Adamovich A.: "Yes ..." / illegible /)
Right. And the fire ended completely on the 2nd of May. Fully.
(Adamovich A.'s words: "... yeah, it means the 2nd of May ..." / inaudible /)
And after the 2nd of May, somewhere else there were several more such, traces of luminescence were found: graphite, or metal structures heated up. And the last time it was observed on May 9 or 10. And that's all. And after that, nothing has ever happened.
(the words of Adamovich A.: / unintelligible / "... you said about nitrogen ...")
Here in relation to nitrogen. There is a lot of confusion in the international press, that there VELIKHOV somewhere 26 on the roofs there was something like this measured, for example, Yevgeny Pavlovich, and at that time he drank vodka at his dacha on the 26th and did not know anything.
(Adamovich A.'s words: “Was he not on the 26th?”)
It was not there. Yes, it was not.
For nitrogen. (This is in the SILAEV period, when SILAEV has already arrived) I suggested to apply liquid nitrogen for cooling. This was my proposal was stupid, as practice has shown. But I proceeded from what? I thought the reactor shaft was solid. Do you understand? And then if we add liquid nitrogen to the air (and we have very quickly, I must say, a whole echelon of nitrogen was driven), and this means that we will cool the hot zone more intensively with cold air. But then it turned out that the side walls of the reactor were destroyed. Therefore, all the nitrogen that (and we found the month | then where to give it) we gave it to go outside the zone, did not cool anything, and the natural air circulation was so powerful that this nitrogen was like a drop in the sea, as they say. Therefore, we very quickly abandoned this event.
And here in the report when I was preparing for Vienna (we were really in the Central Committee and crossed out this phrase, but it was in the original version) that among the ineffective measures was an event on blowing out liquid nitrogen.
Now, what else would I like to say about these events? I repeat that they were born all the time in continuous telephone conversations with Moscow, with specialists who: they believed, did thermal physical calculations. Here is dolomite, for example, Anatoly Petrovich ALEXANDROV and here is my student, who now called me, SILIVANOV, they considered what material to take such that would give CO2, and at the same time heat-conducting material. That's how they came to dolomite, which was delivered to us very quickly.
And many telegrams came to us from abroad (by the way, like that). And from these telegrams I immediately understood that no one was prepared for such an accident. Because, well, one telegram was simply provocative, obviously provocative - an additional explosion was to be arranged, well, it was offered to introduce nitrate mixtures to us.
(the words of Adamovich A.: "What would blow up ..." / inaudible /)
Well, and this if we entered, just another explosion occurred. But this one was such a telegram.
(the words of Adamovich A.: "And what is this nitrate mixture?")
Well, explosives. Essentially, it was proposed to introduce explosives. Apparently, people believed that we were in a panic and they proposed such a solution, such and such a composition, to introduce nitrate containing there. Well, the water would immediately boil away, but pure ammonium nitrate would remain, and ammonium nitrate is pure explosive and everything would be blown to the fucking mother there.
From one of the countries (Sweden, mine, it was, if I remember correctly), we got such a provocative ...
(Adamovich A.'s words: "... is this from Sweden?")
Wash, yes, from Sweden, but here I am not sure, I can’t vouch for the memory, maybe it was not Sweden. But from abroad, the telegram.
And a huge number of benevolent telegrams, the overwhelming majority of benevolent advice: how to act, what to extinguish, extinguish, and so on.
But in terms of the content of the telegrams, it was obvious that this is all, you know, that's how people fantasize, just like we are here. Do you understand? And not that they had some kind of experience.
(Adamovich A.'s words: "... and the people are saying that the Japanese have offered something like that, that we would give them the Kuriles, and they would put it all out ...")
This is not known to me.
(the words of Adamovich A.: "... still another, that SAKHAROV came ..." / further illegible /)
It certainly was not.
(the words of Adamovich A. / illegible /)
This is what was not exactly that was not exactly.
Well, here, the logic of these events was this. When the fire ended, when we established that the temperature was superficial (such an observable) did not exceed 300 degrees Celsius, well, all the measures aimed at eliminating the hearth itself, that is, its distribution, ended.
This does not mean that the spread of radioactivity has ended.
(the words of Adamovich A.: "... and these are harmful ..." / inaudible /)
About the ratio / inaudible /, I will say a little later.
Radioactive discharges were still going on, but, of course, everything was less and less, until about May 20th. Because all the same there was a hot zone. A certain amount of aerosol particles stood out, of course, with ascending air currents, and, here, cesium spots, for example, which cause so much trouble for Belarus, they formed right up to the 22nd, maybe 23rd, even May. Well, less and less.
(the words of Adamovich A. / illegible /)
Well, mostly: cesium, strontium.
(the words of Adamovich A.: "... well, this is disgusting ...")
Yes. Because, say, more such unpleasant things as: plutonium, as we set the radius of distribution - 12 kilometers. Further than 12 kilometers, nothing got from the station. And here: cesium, strontium (these spots here) - they, therefore, have penetrated into large territories.
(decrease in volume, ambiguity) ... removal of cesium, because, after all, everything is hot.
Why cesium? Because he, of all these elements of such metals that are there, of all, he is the most fusible at a temperature of 700, with a little, degrees Celsius, already, so to speak, evaporates. The evaporation of saturated vapors is also high. Therefore, he, in fact, flies.
Our goal was, the main thing: to prevent the temperature of 2500 breasts. What is the merit of those people who gave a lot of time there in the first days. We needed to not reach the temperature of 2500 degrees - that’s the main goal.
(the words of Adamovich A. / illegible /)
Because 2500 degrees is the melting point of tablets of uranium dioxide, and the main activity is inside these tablets. Therefore, if the temperature reached 2500 degrees, then, - there would be not 3 / three / percent of the activity that went outside - but 100 percent. That is, 30 times all pollution: the area of territories | the degree of pollution, its intensity, - would increase by 30 times, relative to what happened. 33 times, almost. And in fact, even more, because the foul isotopes would have gone, still much heavier than cesium, the same. Do you understand?
Here it is. And because the whole point of our all activities boiled down to - if only not 2500 degrees. Why Ryzhkov sent telegrams all the time: what is the temperature? What temperature? how much has you got up there? And here we have the maximum temperature recorded there - about 2,000 degrees, then with these measures, filled with all sorts of things, we began to reduce it and reduced it to 300 degrees at the end. And now there is the maximum temperature (life is still going on, not the reactor, and its remains still live there) somewhere 6070 degrees Celsius. Here is such a scale. Do you understand?
(the words of Adamovich A. "But if left without observation, maybe ...?")
Oh, because I’d leave it without observation, I’ll say the same thing later, separately.
Now about the other. What would be the understanding. The main goal of all activities ...
(Adamovich's words: "I see ...")
... was: - not to allow 2500 degrees.
(Adamovich A.'s words: "All uranium is there ...")
It would all be melted and all the main activity (so only three and a half percent of it would come out), otherwise all one hundred percent of the activity would go out and fly across the entire Globe. You understand? That makes sense.
(Adamovich's words: "And how much of it all ...?")
Just in the reactor? This reactor has 190 tons.
(Adamovich's words: "Uranus?")
Uranus, yes, the fuel itself. This goal has been achieved.
(Adamovich A.'s words: “Here came telegrams from RYZHKOV. You did not hear what conversation with him was, purely practical.”)
I heard and talked with Ryzhkov and I gave a report to him when they came with LIGACHYOV, and with LONGERS I myself spoke on the phone many times.
(Adamovich A.'s words: "It was a conversation, probably, what will you do and you reported?")
Report what is being done. The question is what is needed from Moscow. Full approval of our actions. Very calm. But with Ryzhkov, I really liked all the conversations with LONG. They were very businesslike.
The text corresponds to the audio:
Investigators of the investigation team
Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation
Senior Counselor of Justice xxxxxxxxxxxx
1st class lawyer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
END TRANSCRIPT
