Viktor Bryukhanov: Meet the man behind the world’s most dangerous nuclear power plant

Meet the man behind the world’s most dangerous nuclear power plant

Words: Louise Starkey | The Times Producer: Louise Starkey

The chain-smoking director of the world's most dangerous power plant has died at age 85.

Viktor Bryukhanov — born to Russian parents in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in December 1935 and the eldest of four children — was the long-standing face of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant .

The site is best known for a safety test going catastrophically wrong on April 26, 1986, and sending highly radioactive uranium into the atmosphere. The event destroyed the site's fourth reactor and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Bryukhanov made a name for himself when he ignored aides recording unimaginably high levels of radiation, telling them their instruments were broken. He refused to consider evacuating Pripyat's 50,000 inhabitants, as well as accept the fact the reactor had been destroyed.

Bryukhanov eventually signed a report sent to the Communist Party's centre committee, stating there was an explosion and the reactor hall's roof collapsed. The report failed to mention the reactor had been destroyed and said there was no need for evacuation or other measures.

The husband to Valentina and father-of-two studied electrical engineering at Tashkent's Polytechnic Institute and rapidly rose through the ranks at Angren thermal power plant in the city.

In 1960s, Moscow embarked on a crash program of nuclear reactor construction. It insisted on RBMK reactors, which were bigger and more powerful than their western counterparts, but possessed serious design flaws.

In 1970, it tapped Bryukhanov to build the Chernobyl plant beside the Pripyat river, 60 miles north of Kiev. He had no expertise in nuclear power. They lacked proper equipment and much of the construction material was sub-standard.

Bryukhanov had to "cut corners, cook the books and fudge regulations", according to Adam Higginbotham, author of Midnight at Chernobyl. However, in 16 years he succeeded in "building four nuclear reactors and an entire city on an isolated stretch of marshland".

Bryukhanov acknowledged his responsibility for Chernobyl and barely tried to defend himself after he appeared before the Politburo in Moscow and was stripped of his party membership. He was formally charged by the public prosecutor in Kiev and spent nearly a year alone in a KGB cell before being released after five years for good behaviour.