Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

In my previous blog about the HBO series Chernobyl I wrote about "The Cost of Lies, The Futility of Truth". Scientist Valery Legasov led the Soviet delegation at a UN IAEA conference held in Vienna in August 1986. As I noted previously Legasov shaded the truth. He not only left out of his report the fact of design flaws in the design of the Soviet RBMK 1000 reactor, of which there were at least a dozen other copies still running, but denied it repeatedly when asked by international scientists and journalists. When the facts of this came out a few years later the IAEA rewrote its report, holding design flaws rather than operator error the chief cause of the explosion. Yet despite his dishonesty he was lauded as a hero at the time by the world.

How was it that he was praised so much while misleading the world?



Understand that expectations for honesty from the USSR were low. Remember, the Soviets weren't even going to admit the reactor blew up in the first place. It was spewing as much radiation as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki every 12 hours, and they didn't want to tell anyone. They only admitted it 2½ days later after a nuclear power plant in Sweden over 600 miles away detected the radiation.

Interesting aside: As I understand it, an alarm at the Swedish Forsmark plant was triggered when radiation was detected on a plant employee's shoe. The employee was arriving at the plant, though; so authorities knew the radiation source was outside the plant.

And even once the Soviets admitted something happened at Chernobyl they downplayed it. They said only that "an accident occurred" that "damaged" one of the reactors. The rest of the world only understood how bad it was from measuring the radioactive fallout across Western and Northern Europe and from observing the site & activity around it through spy satellites and other forms of secret intelligence.

Plus, when the Soviets did acknowledge a problem at Chernobyl, they followed their brief & vague description with a whataboutism screed criticizing Three Mile Island and other nuclear accidents in Western countries. This approach of deny, distract, counterattack was a standard technique of Soviet propaganda. Back in the late '80s and early 90s books on communication styles referred to them as "Soviet-style negotiation". If these techniques seem familiar now it's because Donald Trump has used them publicly pretty much every day since he announced his first run for the presidency in 2015.

So yeah, Legasov was more forthcoming than expected at Vienna— but still didn't say anything other countries hadn't already figured out. Western European nations were measuring radiation in their own countries. Scientists could extrapolate from that how bad the situation must be. And spy satellites confirmed additional details. Legasov's presentation was remarkable primarily that he didn't deny the obvious facts. But still it made him unpopular with many of his peers & many government officials back home.

People who remember that era in Soviet relations might say, "Well, wasn't there Glasnost going on?" Although General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev mentioned glasnost (literally, "openness") when he became chief executive in 1985 it wasn't until 1986— specifically after August 1986— that he spoke of it as actual policy direction. It's believed that it was through seeing the handling of the Chernobyl cleanup and communication with the world community that Gorbachev recognized it was crucial to do to preserve the country's remaining power.

I blogged this morning about the breakthrough milestone in nuclear fusion achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory earlier this month. As I explained it's not really a breakthrough (IMO) because what was achieved was so... preliminary. An operational, scalable solution is still countless steps away.

Some arguing to call this a breakthrough compare it to the Wright brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Indeed, the new field of aviation rapidly developed into a commercial and military success not many years after that. Just under 66 years later we landed a man on the moon! Surely it can't be that long until Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future becomes a reality....



Alas, solving for nuclear fusion is way more complex than designing aircraft.

Back to the Future was set in 1985. At the end of the film a future Doc Brown arrives from 2015 with a fusion reactor— cheekily named Mr. Fusion— powering his time machine Delorean on banana peels on stale beer. 2015 vs. 1985.... Thirty years later.

That's a curious coincidence because scientists and science writers have been saying for quite a while now, "Fusion power is 30 years away." Note, of course, that it's perpetually been 30 years away. "30 Years" is science shorthand for, "We're not saying it'll never happen, but there's no way we can draw a map right now for how to get there from here."

And this Kitty Hawk moment? Well, maybe it moves the needle down to just 29 years.

The fourth episode of HBO's five-part miniseries Chernobyl is mostly about liquidators. They were the 400,000 - 700,000 men (nearly all were men) conscripted to clean up in the exclusion zone. They came in once the destroyed nuclear reactor was at least stabilized so as not to risk causing imminent additional explosions and the region was evacuated— though some residents were... reluctant... to leave.

Liquidators had a variety of tasks. One big effort was to till all the soil in the exclusion zone, burying the radioactive dirt so it wouldn't be exposed to dusting or runoff. Another, which I wrote about in my previous blog on the movie, was to kind and kill all the abandoned pets in the zone. Other combed through fields and streams looking for irradiated items that had been carried away from near the reactor and then abandoned. But the most dangerous jobs were at the reactor itself. While the open core had been rendered safe from further imminent explosion it was still highly radioactive.

In particular, there was radioactive debris on the roofs of several connected buildings in the power plant. Among these was the roof of reactor 3. Yes, there was another reactor right next to the one that exploded— and it was still running. (In fact the last of the 3 remaining reactors at Chernobyl didn't shut down until 2000.)The radioactive debris needed to be removed because it was a danger to the environment in general and to remaining plant workers in particular.

At first the Soviets deemed the roof areas too dangerous for people to work in. The debris on the roof of reactor building 3 emitted such intense radiation a person would absorb a fatal dose in less than 2 minutes standing there. Thus they sent robots to clean the roof.

The robots were basically remote-operated bulldozers. They were meant to collect radioactive debris and sweep it off the edge of the roof, into the pile around the core of reactor 4. But the radiation there was too intense. Ionizing radiation at the level of 10,000-15,000 Roentgen/hour or higher quickly fried the control circuitry of every robot brought in.

Thus the Soviets turned to bio-robots.


Bio-robots, as you might have guessed, is a euphemism for people. But that's what they called it. Bio-robots People cleared 90% of the debris from the roofs.

The areas still were highly radioactive. Leaders determined that a liquidator could spend just 90 seconds on the roof. And that wasn't "90 seconds, then you're done for the day"; it was "90 seconds, then you're done with radiation for your entire life. Don't come back." But records show some workers did go back out on the roof for a second or even third sortie.

Per records there were 3,828 bio-robots at Chernobyl. Every one of them is a brave soul as they had to work with minimal protection. And those who went back a second or third time beyond the call of duty are especially selfless.

Next in this series: The Cost of Lies, the Futility of Truth

Yesterday I wrote about 1:23:45, the first episode of HBO's 5-part miniseries Chernobyl. In that blog I addressed just the opening scene of the episode, a crackling monologue by scientist Valery Legasov. There's a lot more to the episode than just that scene, of course. Don't expect a ratio of 1 episode = 1 blog as I write about this miniseries. There's too much to unpack. Just episode 1 will stretch to at least 3 blogs.

While the episode starts with Legasov, portrayed by actor Jared Harris, who'll be the main character of the miniseries, it switches away from him after the opening few minutes. It does that with an arrangement that is very unusual for narrative storytelling. ( Episode 1 plot twist )

The show next introduces two minor recurring characters, Vasily and Lyudmilla Ignatenko. They are awakened in the middle of the night in their Pripyat apartment by the sudden explosion less than 2km away. They see the burning reactor through their window.



Vasily is a firefighter and is shown in the poster for the episode. He knows he will be called to fight the fire so he starts getting ready. As we see later in the episode, the firefighters go right up to the wreckage of the exploded nuclear reactor. They are not afraid.

Of course, part of their fearlessness is ignorance. They literally don't know how dangerous it is. They've never been trained on what radioactivity is, despite working as emergency responders in an "atom city" devoted to staffing a nuclear power plant. The specific dangers of this accident haven't been explained either. The nuclear core has exploded, and radioactive material is literally on the ground at their feet as they carry hoses toward the fire, yet they've been told they're fighting a "roof fire" with burning tar.

The lies that left initially hundreds of people, and soon millions, unaware of mortal danger, started within seconds of the explosion. This is shown in the third scene of episode. In the control room plant operators are stunned by the explosion.



In the control room we meet characters Anatoly Dyatlov (pictured above, played by Paul Ritter), Leonid Toptunov (pictured, background), and Aleksandr Akimov (not pictured). They're all a bit stunned. They're not sure what's happened. Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer, goes immediately into damage control mode. And by "damage control" I mean personal damage control.

Dyatlov blames Akimov and Toptunov for screwing up even though they were a) following his orders, and b) nobody's even sure what's going on yet. Despite nobody in the control room being sure what's happened, Dyatlov asserts it's an explosion in one of the control tanks. As other operators stumble into the control room to report that, no, it's not the control tanks, it's the whole reactor core, he dismisses them as delusional.

Dyatlov also blocked objective information that would've indicated the dangerous nature of the situation. Radiation dosimeters carried by the operators reported 3.6 Roentgen/hour— a level that's series but not "OMG, run away!" But as various technicians pointed out, 3.6 was the top of the scale for those dosimeters. The techs wanted to get to meters with higher scales; Dyatlov shut that down as a waste of time. It should be a requirement for passing even high school science classes to know that when a meter is pegged at the top of its scale the true measurement is likely well above that level.

The lie of 3.6 took on a life of its own. Dyatlov reported it to the plant manager and chief engineer, who relayed it up through the bureaucracy all the way to Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the local executive committee in Pripyat. 3.6 was key to the lie in that it was dangerous but not that dangerous. The local committee added to the situation of lies by deciding that the appropriate thing to do in this circumstance was to seal the city, so nobody could get out, and also cut the phone lines. It was an exercise in Orwellian doublethink to hold simultaneously that 1) the accepted "truth" isn't that bad yet 2) it's also so dangerous that it must be kept from people.

Thus, because information was suppressed, a number of people sacrificed themselves without realizing their danger in the moment. The firefighters took the brunt of it as they rushed in to a situation with false information and no protection.

There were instances of informed sacrifice, though. As the episode frames it, most of the operators in the plant knew what happened. Dyatlov was in denial for his own reasons, but most of the others figured it out from the information available. I mean, there was at least one person who entered the control room and said he saw the containment vessel destroyed. Others subsequently went and saw it themselves— knowing that even to look meant taking lethal doses of radiation. They knowingly walked to their own deaths believing that by doing so they would save countless other lives. Instead Dyatlov and his superiors rebuked them as liars when they confirmed reports of an open core and a full-on meltdown.

Update: keep reading: Why I watched Chernobyl - same as why Mazin created it!