Something was wrong at Chernobyl.īy afternoon, institute chemists had found radioactive iodine in the fallout, which confirmed that a reactor had exploded. Hundreds of people worked there, but the phones rang unanswered. Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, was farther away, two hundred miles southeast, where four big RBMK* thousand-megawatt reactors were lined up end to end in a building almost a mile long. Someone called the Lithuanian nuclear-power complex at Ignalina, one hundred miles northwest, and radiation was everywhere there too. An order over the public-address system warned everyone to stay indoors. The dosimetrists moved outside and discovered it there as well: on the sidewalk, on the grass, on the periwinkle crocuses pushing up through the dark litter of the forest floor. It was near danger levels at the front door.

It registered two hundred times normal on the air filters. It was in people's hair and clinging to their clothes. Dosimeter operators began working their way methodically through the labs and offices and found radiation everywhere. Or something might have spilled in the institute's radiochemistry lab. Its fuel assemblies, sealed inside aluminum cassettes at the bottom of a deep, stainless-steel tank full of distilled water, might have sprung a leak.

On the Saturday morning in April 1986 when the alarms went off at the Institute for Nuclear Power Engineering of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences, in a forest outside Minsk, the nuclear physicist Stanislav Shushkevich thought the institute's reactor was bleeding radiation. Chapter One: To the Chernobyl Sarcophagus

Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes