TODAY is Sunday, April 26, and exactly 40 years ago, the world experienced its worst nuclear disaster to date: the explosion of Unit 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. That deadly accident, which contributed in a way to the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire five years later, still has ramifications for nuclear energy four decades on.
As an important note of language accuracy, that is the last time I will refer to the power plant or the district it is located in by its Russian transliteration, “Chernobyl.” In Ukrainian, it is called Чорнобиль, which transliterates to “Chornobyl.” If you sound it out the way it looks, the pronunciation is close enough to how it sounds in Ukrainian.
For those of you who watched the excellent HBO miniseries from a few years ago about the disaster, you probably know the story already. Although the show was not entirely historically accurate, it still faithfully recounted the basic chain of events, and was still a fantastically gripping drama because of the performances of Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgảrd, Jessie Buckley, and Paul Ritter. For those of you who have only heard of Chornobyl, but do not know the story, I could fill this entire paper with an explanation, but here is a short version:
In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, the operators of Unit 4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant attempted to carry out a test of an alternative method of powering the reactor’s emergency cooling water pump system. This particular test had failed three times before, so the plant operators were under pressure to complete it successfully. It should have been done during the day shift at the plant, with those personnel having been properly trained and briefed for it, but because the local grid controller requested that the plant stay online longer than anticipated, the test was postponed until the night shift, whose personnel were not ready to carry it out.
On top of that, the reactor was in a poor condition, having reached the point where it should have been taken offline and serviced. The reactor design itself was somewhat flawed, and had an extremely narrow inherent safety margin. A combination of the operators not being completely familiar with the test program, not fully understanding the reactor’s condition, and the reactor not being in a condition for the test to be done safely, led to things spiraling out of control, with the result being that the reactor exploded, twice — first a steam explosion, and then an instant later, a second, more powerful hydrogen gas explosion.
The explosions ripped apart the reactor containment structure and the building it was housed in, exposing the deadly radioactive core to the atmosphere. Two people were killed in the initial explosion, and another 29 died within the next few weeks from radiation poisoning. The number of premature deaths due to cancer and other radiation-induced ailments from the surrounding region is hotly debated to this day, but it is in the thousands. The accident necessitated the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat and the establishment of an “exclusion zone” of 30 kilometers’ radius around the plant, which remains in place to this day.
The Soviet government initially tried to keep news of the disaster under wraps, but when high radiation levels were detected in other parts of Europe, it was forced to come clean. That admission, which was in line with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of openness, or “glasnost” (though it was reluctantly applied in this case), may have been the first crack in the Iron Curtain that eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe.
Chornobyl is still, 40 years later, held up as an example of what could happen if countries like the Philippines pursue nuclear power. In truth, if an accident like Chornobyl were to happen again, it would only happen in Russia; the country still has seven of the RBMK-type (the acronym comes from its Russian name) reactors of the same design as Chornobyl, although they have been heavily modified to hopefully prevent the same kind of failure. Any sort of nuclear power plant that would be built here in the Philippines would be of a more common and safer design that could not fail in the same way.
However, though it is my conviction that economics, and not safety, are the real Achilles’ heel of nuclear power, whether here or anywhere else, that does not mean that the potential risk of an extraordinarily catastrophic accident can be dismissed entirely. Nuclear power falls into that category of technologies that are subject to “normal accidents,” a theory I have discussed at length in the past. Other examples include spaceflight, air transportation, and oil refineries. I am not going to go into all the details again now, but in a nutshell, the theory, which has been proven time and time again, holds that some technological systems are so complex that some kind of failure is inevitable, especially when the systems require human interaction. Every major nuclear accident in history has been unique; the engineers and regulators learn from them so they are not repeated, but accidents still happen, and will continue to happen. The best we can do is to mitigate the risk to a point that is acceptable.
That does not enter at all in the Philippines’ calculus in its eager push for nuclear energy, and it would be worrisome if that push was not otherwise so uninformed and immaturely unrealistic as to make it dismissible entirely. Chornobyl will not happen again. Fukushima will not happen again. But something, somewhere will happen again; it is the nature of the nuclear beast. We should take care that it doesn’t happen here.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
Website: www.badmannersgunclub.com
