Soviet Union stayed quiet, but nuclear plant boss knew it was the end

The world’s worst nuclear accident had been waiting to happen for 16 years, but the Kremlin still blamed the man who ran it.

The trial of Anatoly Dyatlov, Viktor Bryukhanov, left, and Nikolai Fomin in 1987.

OBITUARY
Viktor Petrovich Bryukhanov, nuclear power plant director, Born, Tashkent, Uzbekistan December 1, 1935; died aged 85, Kiev, Ukraine, October 13.

Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island – rather than places on maps, they are shorthand for nuclear accidents. Their names glow with a sense of radioactive dread. Movies have been made about them. Yet nuclear power is perhaps the safest form of electricity generation. The United Nations believes 50 people died as a direct result of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 (but that 4000 locals will contract potentially lethal cancers as a result). One man was killed at Fukushima in 2011 and two others were briefly in hospital having been exposed to high levels of radiation. And if one of the 14,000 evacuated from around the Three Mile Island plant in 1979 broke a fingernail, then they are that event’s sole casualty.

Meanwhile, 13 coalminers die each day in China. In its Benxihu Colliery Disaster, 1549 miners lost their lives, but it is not a name on the tip of anyone’s tongue. Just last month, another Australian coalminer was killed, this time near Emerald in Queensland. In 2020, more people died building and maintaining wind farms than ­operating nuclear facilities over the last decade.

But to Viktor Bryukhanov such statistics meant little. He oversaw the construction of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1970 and ran it thereafter. Following the explosion, he was sacked. After a three-week trial before the USSR Supreme Court in 1987, he was convicted of gross negligence and of flouting safety regulations and sentenced with two others to 10 years in a labour camp – the maximum. He proclaimed his innocence for the rest of his life.

Bryukhanov grew up in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, 15 years after it had been absorbed into what was then the Russian Empire following which it became a Soviet Socialist Republic. The eldest of four brothers, he was clever and did a degree in electrical engineering before joining the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences. He then worked at Tashkent’s newly built, coal-powered Angren power station rising quickly through its ranks ­before moving on to a larger coal-fired operation at Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine where he became deputy chief engineer.

A1986 aerial view of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, six months after the meltdown.

In 1970, Bryukhanov – who for some years had been active in the Communist Party – was asked to oversee the construction of four nuclear reactors at Chernobyl. They were an unusual design used only in the Soviet Union and known as RBMK. Bryukhanov’s experience was not in nuclear engineering, but RBMK reactors, often built hurriedly to impossible deadlines, were successfully operating elsewhere, though known to be unstable. Bryukhanov missed a few deadlines as work proceeded, but still managed to have the facility operating by 1977. What he could not know was that a fatal flaw had been built into the reactors’ design which, when the incidents leading up to April 26, 1986, unfolded, fanned the flames of the world’s worst nuclear accident and rendered futile attempts to control the situation. To save on running costs, control rods that dampened nuclear reaction rates incorporated boron carbide whose ends were coated in graphite. This would quickly increase temperatures. On the night of the inevitable nuclear accident they sent Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 out of control.

Bryukhanov, then aged 51, was at home. His phone rang with news they had a problem at the plant. A car was sent for him. As it approached the plant he could not see the 1000 tonne lid on reactor No.4. It had blown off and the building had collapsed – a red glow was illuminating the ruins. “This is a prison for me,” he told the driver. He served five years and even returned to work at the plant.

Communist authorities remained silent on the accident. Four days later, a nuclear plant in Sweden detected unusually high radioactive emissions, and soon other European sites began to detect the same. Finally, Soviet officials reported meagre details. There had been “an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the nuclear reactors was damaged. The effects of the accident are being remedied.”

The man who would be the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, may have sought more openness, but the nation wasn’t there yet. When London newspapers published details of the scale of the disaster in Chernobyl, and when Germany demanded compensation for farmers whose crops were now banned from sale because of the fallout, the Communist TASS news agency responded angrily: “They in Bonn (East and West Germany were five years from unifying) have apparently forgotten their irredeemable debt to the Soviet people for the grief, murder, destruction and sufferings caused by German Nazism to the Soviet Union, to every Soviet family.”