The 500-ton cap on the reactor, the five-kopek piece, lifted off as the steam exploded and the middle of the reactor turned into a cloud of radioactive aerosol, taking out the 250-ton refueling machine, the 50-ton crane in the ceiling above it, and the roof of the building. Red-hot chunks of fuel from the periphery of the reactor core fell on the roof of the turbine hall, which was waterproofed with a generous coating of tar, and set it on fire. Endowed with a blast of fresh air through the top of the reactor building, the hydrogen went off with an earth-trembling roar, and the vaporized part of the power plant was lifted to 36,000 feet in the air, contaminating any commercial airliners within 100 miles. Spinning chunks of red-hot debris started falling on Chernobyl reactor No. 3, crashing into the roof and into the ventilator stack.
There had been 1,700 tons of graphite in the reactor back when it was working, but that had been reduced to a crater-shaped remnant of 800 tons. It started burning, first a dull red and then orange, lighting up the scene with an eerie glow. The reactor lid had risen, flipped like a pancake, and come back down into what was left of the core, cocked at a steep angle. The smoke was thick and black and rose vertically in what was charitably described as a “flower-shape.” Half of the 100 tons of uranium was gone. In perspective, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima vaporized 139 pounds of uranium infused with two pounds of fission products collected in one second of extreme power production. The explosion at Chernobyl No. 4 evaporated a 50-ton mixture of uranium, oxygen, and about 800 pounds of fission products produced over the previous three years of power production.
Two men, Protosov, a maintenance worker, and Pustovoit, who was the “odd-job” man at the plant, were night-fishing on the bank of the coolant run-off pond, right where the plant outflow occurs, 1.25 miles from the plant. The fish really liked the warm water, and it was a clear, starry night. It seemed like the middle of summer, and the fish were cooperating.
They turned to look when they heard two rumbling explosions, seeming to come from inside the plant. Then a third explosion reduced the top of the building to flaming splinters, and they watched with mild interest as steel beams and large concrete chunks spun overhead. The turbine hall burst into flames and illumined the enormous column of black smoke. They turned back to their fishing rods. If they got excited every time something around here exploded or burned to the ground, they would never get any fishing done. “They’ll have that out in no time,” opined Pustovoit. Whenever a steam relief valve popped off, which seemed quite often, it sounded like a Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber had crashed into the side of a building, and fires consuming switch yards or fuel depots were not rare at the Chernobyl plant. The men sat there and fished until morning, noting that the fish were becoming sluggish. The fishermen each absorbed 400 roentgens of mixed radiation, and they started feeling extremely ill, right where they were sitting.[252]
The nonstop vomiting was utterly exhausting. Their skins turned dark brown, as if they had been locked in a tanning bed for too long. They had no idea what had happened to them, but they staggered into the medical center and were quickly sent to Moscow for special treatment. Both survived, and Pustovoit became a celebrity of sorts in Europe, living proof that ignorance hurts.
Back in the control room, the earthquake-like shocks had crumbled the steel-reinforced concrete walls and floor, and light fixtures were hanging down by the remains of power wiring from the ceiling. The instruments and controls were all dead, and the only light was from some battery-powered emergency lights and the electrical arcs from broken power cables. All hand-held, battery-powered radiation detectors available were intended to find tiny contaminations around the plant on the micro-roentgen level. None seemed to be working, as their meters would crash against the stops at the highest indicated level and just hang there. There was no instrumentation available that could read the 30,000 roentgens per hour radiating out of the reactor hole or the 5,000 roentgens per hour streaming from every chunk of fuel or graphite that peppered the site. Akimov, Toptunov, and especially Dyatlov were absolutely certain that the reactor was intact, and all it needed was for water to be pumped into it to bring it down to a proper temperature and establish the cold shutdown condition. Dyatlov relayed word back to Moscow to this effect. There was nothing to worry about. There was a fire on the roof on the turbine building, and their erroneous conclusion was that a 29,000-gallon emergency water tank in the main reactor hall had exploded. They would have the plant back in operation in a few weeks.
Akimov believed this fantasy as well, but he was bothered by the fact that the control-rod locations, as indicated by the clock-like Selsyn dials on the wall, seemed stuck only partway in to the reactor. He summoned two young trainees, Aleksandr Kudryavtsev and Victor Proskuryakov, and told them to run up to the reactor hall and find out why the controls were stuck. “Jump up and down on them, if you have to.” After an arduous trip through a maze of twisted steel, an elevator blown from its shaft, and concrete chunks the size of automobiles that had once been part of the reactor support structure, the two finally made it to where there had once been a reactor. It was simply not there anymore. There were no controls to free up, just a gaping hole. They looked down into the glowing crater, amazed at the sight.
They were aware of strange sensations as they climbed their way back to the control room. The air seemed incredibly fresh, as if a spring rain had just ended, and they could feel the tingling way down in their insides. By the time they made it back, they were brown with “nuclear tans.” Akimov and Dyatlov ridiculed their finding, accusing them of being so clueless, they could not find a reactor the size of a grain elevator. They must have been on the wrong floor and completely missed it.[253]
Outside the plant building, the extent of the damage was more obvious. Flames on the turbine hall roof were shooting up above the vent stack, which was 600 feet high. The firemen had arrived within minutes, and they were aware of the gravity of a fire in the turbine hall. As is the case with all high-capacity generators, these were cooled by hydrogen gas pumped through the hollow copper field windings in the stators. There was a great deal of hydrogen gas stored in pressurized cylinders in the building, and with a fire raging they were likely to go off as bombs. It was hard to see how the condition of the plant could be much worse, but they were firemen and they were performing their jobs without contemplating the futility of it. The roof was collapsing onto the turbine floor, where broken pipes were spewing flaming oil over the linoleum, and a broken condensate pump was spewing water contaminated with fission products. Although in the stress of firefighting they could not feel it, the firemen on the roof were in a 30,000 roentgen-per-hour radiation field, and none of them would survive the radiation dosage.
Even as late as 1986, some governments would wish to keep the details and magnitudes of radioactive releases secret from the general, highly excitable local population and certainly from the external world. In this case, the Chernobyl reactor No. 4 was a military asset, and its loss of function was understood to be a state secret. At this early stage of the crisis, the Soviet Union leadership did not realize that the accident would eventually envelop the entire European continent, spreading radioactivity and bad feelings from Norway to Turkey, from Ireland to the Slavic Republic. At the time, the entire concept of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its iron grip on Eastern Europe was in the midst of change, a softening and a relaxation, under a new and forward-looking General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. As dawn broke on the morning of April 26, 1986, not even Gorbachev knew that half of the reactor core at No. 4 was airborne, and the question of whether or not anyone should be warned — let alone evacuated — had not come up.
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The Soviets did not bother to put their radiation dose estimates into human terms using rem instead of R units or to use the metric SI system. The degree of radiation exposure, however, is starkly evident. One can survive a 400 R exposure, but it really stings. Firemen on the roof of the turbine hall were getting 20,000 R/hr, which in an hour will kill an adult male 20 times over.
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Kudryavtsev and Proskuryakov were immediately sent to the infirmary at reactor No. 3, and from there to Moscow for special treatment of extreme radiation sickness. They, and almost everyone else at reactor No. 4 who had survived the explosions, died in agony in a few weeks.