Chernobyl

Monday this week was the 35th anniversary of the beginning of the Chernobyl disaster on 26 April 1986, so of course I had to mark that day with a special post on the DT Blog. But instead of recounting the unfolding accident and subsequent clean-up operations and all that, I rather conveyed my personal relationship with Chernobyl, especially formed through the three tours I took to the Exclusion Zone between 2006 and 2018.

I illustrated the post with a selection of my photos from all three of those trips, beginning with the image featured above in this Newsletter as well. It shows the original sarcophagus over the exploded reactor block 4 and the iconic chimney stack still in place on top. That photo was taken in late September 2006. This is now a historic image of a view that no longer exists. First the chimney stack was dismantled and replaced by a smaller ventilation stack further back. This was in preparation for the New Safe Confinement (NSC) arch. It was still under construction when I went on my second, longer Chernobyl tour in May 2015. But meanwhile it has been moved into place, covering and sealing off the old, crumbling, original sarcophagus and the destroyed reactor within it. I saw the finished NSC arch on my latest Chernobyl trip in November 2018.

Amongst the whopping 30 photos in that blog post (more than had ever featured in any post on the DT blog before) were also images of the famous rusty Ferris wheel at the funfair in the ghost town of Pripyat, shots taken from the rooftop of a tall apartment block, various interior shots from Pripyat as well as inside the NPP (!), along with images from the unfinished reactor block 5 and the equally unfinished associated cooling towers, including one giving evidence of wildlife in the Zone: two birds of prey circling inside the cooling tower throwing their shadows onto the inside of the tower’s walls so that it looked like four birds.
  

The next day, Tuesday 27 April, I uploaded a follow-up blog post about a single specific site within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, namely the ominous giant that is the over-the-horizon radar installation called Duga. It was part of the USSR’s early-warning system against enemy nuclear missiles and became known in the West as the “Russian Woodpecker” (never mind it’s in Ukraine), because of the interference sound it created in the ether and annoyed amateur radio operators. Long since abandoned, Duga is now a unique sight to behold and thus very special – it’s as mysterious as it is photogenic. I’ve visited it twice, first in May 2015 in glorious sunshine that emphasized the rusty reds of the steel structure, and again in November 2018 in wintery weather and with fog semi-engulfing the gigantic structure, which made it doubly atmospheric. On that second visit my guide also took us into the former control centre behind the installation and into the associated former garrison town that was code-named Chernobyl-2 back in the day (in typical Soviet fashion), now also a ghost town, like a mini-Pripyat, where some outstanding Soviet-era artwork can be discovered.

Incidentally, a friend and fellow blogger recently alerted me to a more in-depth online article about Duga (external link). This provides not only more photos but also more details about Duga’s history and about how it worked. Well worth a look, if, like me, you are fascinated by this outstanding Cold-War-era relic.

That same friend has also just published on his own blog a long interview with Alexei Ananenko (also external link). This man was an engineer involved in the efforts to contain the disaster after the explosion of ChNPP’s reactor 4 back in 1986. More specifically, he was one of three engineers who entered the flooded basement underneath the molten reactor to open a valve to release water from the so-called ‘bubbler pool’ to prevent reactor lava getting in contact with the water, which could have caused a disastrous further explosion. Or so the story went.

If you’ve seen HBO’s award-winning miniseries Chernobyl then you may recall that scene. A superior gives a rousing speech calling for volunteers for this mission and three guys heroically step forward to do the job, which in the series is depicted as a suicide mission. This is one of the things the dramatized series got wrong. There was no speech, the engineers didn’t volunteer but were simply told to do the job and they did it because they were the ones who could do it. It wasn’t a suicide mission, all three survived (one died in the 2000s of natural causes, the other two are still alive and well), and the notion of a possible explosion in the megaton range had the rector core hit the water is also a fantasy. No NPP, not even a molten one, can cause a fission explosion like in an atomic bomb. That’s just physically impossible. But of course the idea helped the drama in the miniseries. There were a few other exaggerations in it, like the helicopter crash, which in reality happened months later and had nothing to do with radiation, or the depiction of the patients with severe radiation syndrome as themselves being radioactive and a health threat to others, which is also nonsense made up for the sake of drama.

But back to the interview. It is really quite enlightening and even entertaining. As the interviewer said, he found Alexei Ananenko a pleasant, witty and engaging man. So it must have been quite a privilege to speak with him. By the way, that interview was conducted in preparation for this book (link to my review) and excerpts of it featured in it, but the full-length interview transcript reveals much more that couldn’t make it into the book. So it is a worthy add-on. I do recommend reading it if you have more than just a passing interest in Chernobyl.
  

So, the topic of Chernobyl dominated this week on the blog’s front, but my work on my main website has meanwhile come to focus on a completely different subject matter, namely World War One. I’m finally writing the chapters about all those places I visited a few years ago in West Flanders, Belgium, as well as in the Somme and Verdun in France. In total that will be 30 chapters. A lot to do. I’ve so far drafted the first six chapters, and to be frank I’m already getting a bit “trenched out”. The “Great War” is not a topic I’m naturally so fascinated by, although I have to admit that, even so, I’m enjoying the learning aspect as I research the various sites deeper and discover aspects I hadn’t even been aware of when I was there. But the purely military minutiae I really can’t get into (like what designations which battalion, division, company, etc. had and what their commanders’ names were). Hence the tricky task in writing these chapters is containing the amount of detail, as I really don’t want to get bogged down in the minutiae, but of course I have to supply some level of historical background information. It’s a balancing act. By next Sunday the first batch (Ypres) may be finished and uploaded to the website, so I can say more about them in the next Newsletter. Fingers crossed.

But so much for this time

Have a good week – and, again and as always, stay safe!

Best

Peter