In this case I could not stand it so I wrote a very angry letter together with Anatoly Pavlovich where we strongly objected this excessive allocation of people who would get high radiation doses when constructing that second plate. There werent any radio-controlled aircraft equipped with dosimetric devices. Legasov: Yes, there is contamination in Chernobyl itself. Where did this come from? Since Anatoly Pavlovich was himself a reactor man, creator or participant in the creation of many reactors, he needed me not as a reactor scientist, but as someone who, from the outside, could give unusual advice, find unconventional solutions. var sc_project=11574782; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="3ab3cc38"; an EPUB file of the text that is suitable for ereaders. But the main thing, and I keep coming back to this, the main crime committed was allowing a criminal philosophy into the Soviet nuclear energy, allowing stations, of any type, VVER or RBMK, to be built without containments. Numerous other scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Energy and the Ministry of Energy took active part in our discussions. Logistical issues started to arise and a separation register was made. Well, so as to not use [TAPE ERASED]. He regularly found proper solutions when one or the other difficult situation arose. [citation needed] Extracts from his tapes were published in Pravda in May 1988. Then, no organisation would take on the development of an unconventional compressor or an unconventional, say, heat exchanger, again driven by the lack of needed material or experience. You hang your suit on a tree, wherever you are. We didnt get precise information here, so we got into our cars as quickly as we could and set off for the power plant. I never witnessed a single case where specialists from the SA [Soviet Army] or a USSR citizen, somehow trying to do their work, or felt like they were forced to do difficult or dangerous work. He took this role in order to gain practical experience that would be the basis for later research. He took the leadership of the construction project in his hands. Want to tell you the untold and hidden truth of the Chernobyl disaster.About Valery Legasov:On April 27, 1988, one day after the second anniversary of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident and one day before he was due to announce his results of the investigation into the causes of the disaster, Legasov committed suicide by hanging himself. Here is the fate of this forest. They had estimated a colossal plutonium spreading zone on the territory of the Soviet Union. There were also issues with elementary culture. about the accident at the station "Trimayalen", Show that most likely the reason that led to the accident, has nothing to do with, the events in Chernobyl because of the fundamental difference in the design of, In Kiev, when we got out of the plane, the first thing that caught our eye was the, cavalcade of black government cars and the disturbing crowd of Ukrainian, leaders headed by the Chairman of the CM of Ukraine, Comrade. Additionally, Celites were added into the bodies of damsCelites, shipped from Armenia and Georgia, had a high sorption capacityto capture all the microparticles and all the components of radioactive elements that were in the water and to prevent them from spreading further. He was interested in the current status of work, and the measures required from the government to resolve the situation faster. that happen there, from which I, of course, gain a perspective. [7], At Vnukovo airport, Legasov met Boris Shcherbina, the head of the government commission dealing with the accident response. The work would start very early; at around seven or eight in the morning, the first meeting would be held. We waited for him. Legasov: No, no such duration. The station was under the supervision of our neighboring Ministry of Energy. There, led by Liashko, the head of the Ukrainian Government, was a huge crowd of black limousines. He is now mainly remembered for his work as the chief of the commission investigating the Chernobyl disaster. I was not with this group when they left. Anatoly Petrovich had a deputy for nuclear energy earlier, Eugeny Petrovich Ryazantsev. We arrived on the 26th at 8.20 pm. The habitual rhythm of work persisted and the usual approach to solving problems prevailed. So we had to send out a lot of people to assess the situation. You can find a transcript of these tapes here, but you won't find the line from the first episode that opens HBO 's miniseries ("What is the cost of lies? This is why their actions were truly selfless and, most importantly, rational; and not just some pointless actions arising out of ignorance. Eventually all came to the following number: between 3% to 4% of the fuel was thrown out of reactor number 4 reactor. There is another definite circumstance to it. Another thing. At this time, both the Army and the regional organisations allocated builders for the construction of villages in which the evacuees could live. Legasov was the one who pushed for honesty and evacuation of the town of Pripyat, at a time Soviet officials were trying to cover up the causes of the disaster. But this had not been done before and the device worked with values of positive reactivity coefficients much higher than a beta in the first place. I will not talk about safe reactors because the requirements formulated by Novikov are very accurate. I immediately jumped into the car, went to the Institute and found experts on this type of reactor. This fact should be noted. And it complicated my relationship with the Ministry when I tried to, not very carefully, speak out on this issue. The two-circuit system heats the water in the second circuit, and the water in the second circuit, turning into steam, drives the turbine. And if the operator is killed, falls ill or dies, then all these 211 rods will remain in place. After this, all the specialists would begin work on their assigned tasks; and in the late eveningat least when Scherbina was the chairman, around 10 in the eveninga summary was reported. But because I had been at the meeting dressed in my best suit, my best clothes, I left in the same clothes. Yurchenko Yury Fedorovich was the director of this organization. The station personnel was transferred to a Pioneers camp Skazochniy, that was 10 km from Pripyat. That is, was it generating short-lived radioactive isotopes or not? All the work was transferred to the revised composition of the first Government Commission (the one led by Boris Yevdokimovich Shcherbina) that had been approved. Sidorenko and I, when we had moved to Chernobyl after spending a week in Pripyat, went to a shopwe were supposed to be the expertsto buy ourselves at least something, new underpants, undershirts, shirts. russell 2000 rebalancing. It is said that this was a poor and thoughtless decision - this is not true. Complex research was done in the cooling pond near the Chernobyl NPP, where the radioactivity of the water, as well as silt, was measured. A personal pistol remained in a drawer, but the professor chose to hang himself. A hotel was nearby, a very good one, where the local authorities met us. [7] Viktor Alekseyevich Sidorenko called for immediate evacuation of Pripyat, which Legasov supported, as the situation was expected to deteriorate in the town, and this decision was approved by Shcherbina. The people there were active and interesting; many proposed a lot of unique solutions that triggered discussions. Concreting, removing various [sic], which sometimes appeared to be unsuccessful. Velikhov spoke with him once, in my presence, on the situation. Legasov: That is why this option was discarded. Legasov: That tomorrow, there will be 25 or more. This blog is dedicated to translating the text that comes from the audio tapes recorded by academician V.Legasov. "[11], While the initial Soviet investigation put almost all the blame on the operators, later findings by the IAEA found that the reactor design and how the operators were informed of safety information was more significant. I was shocked by the speed and scale at which all the needed materials were delivered to fulfill this operation. The No. After some considerations, the Government Commission allowed them to use their cars. We arrived at the building of the city party committee in the central square. On April 26th, 1986, a nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl power plant rocked the area near the Ukrainian town of Pripyat, spreading giant clouds of radioactive material across 77,000 square miles of land. Then an initial assumption was made that the source of such high activity was the roof of the 3rd block on which was a lot of scattered fuel. Work was the man, almost the only meaning of his life. I wanted to prove to him that most likely the cause of that accident was in no way related to the Chernobyl accident because of fundamental differences in the construction of reactors. By the way, there are no international rules even now. And the city of Pripyat was considerably decontaminated by about the same time when the sarcophagus construction was ending. There could have been such cases but I never saw anything like it. This, in my opinion, was a defect in the communication system, firstly. The monstrosity of the mistakes lies in the philosophy of safety. And so the design of the new city of Slavutych began; the city that would replace Pripyat as the permanent residence for the power engineers. And it still is the most common type of reactor in the world. It was necessary to immediately work on zone-wise decontamination, following the guideline of going from the most contaminated areas to the less contaminated ones. Every specialist who invents either an upgrade for an existing system or an entirely new system must prove the benefits of such innovation. Physicists make up the majority. They ran away. They selected people, agreed on the time, arranged the needed tools, and decided the sequence of carrying out the procedure. In particular, we were worried about two things: can that movement cause critical mass buildup in some region which would produce short-living isotopes. The trip was in the evening. passed it. And just by a miracle, it didnt. During this, the project team from NIPIET - Leningrad Design Institute of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, was working on-site in Chernobyl, and an array of design decisions, though the general design had been developed at the Institute, an array of design decisions were made there on the spot. Since when has this mistake begun to be corrected? Legasov is portrayed by Ade Edmondson in the BBC docudrama Surviving Disaster (2006), by Adam Curtis in his documentary series Pandora's Box (1992), and by Jared Harris in the Sky/HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019). They left me. [28] Legasov had an article on industrial safety entitled "From Today to Tomorrow" published in Pravda on 5 October 1987 but it received little interest. My responsibilities included chemical physics, and separation of isotopes and substances, as well as the use of nuclear energy in the domestic infrastructure in the form of isotopes or something else. So there we were, trying to use robots to clean the contaminated roofs of buildings where the 3rd and 4th blocks were, and also the roof of the reactor, of the radioactive contamination. The upper reactor plate (nicknamed Yelena) that hermetized the reactor, was in an almost vertical position, slightly off kilter. Our main goal was to prevent 2,500 degrees there. A group of specialists was there also; they had arrived after the first call the previous night. This was quite unexpected. And I sit and shiver. It is hard for me to say what is going on there. 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