valery legasov tapes transcript

There was zero information; well, it only confirmed what had been obtained by other simpler and more reliable methods. Unfortunately, we came across this sloppiness quite often. This was the reasoning that led to the introduction of this group of metals into the destroyed reactor. These circumstances need to be explained. During this time the Operative group was constantly trying to provide maximum protection for the people and judging from possible degrees of contamination decide on a compensation amount that would be necessary for the evacuees. For example, the many-years-long struggle of Viktor Alekseyevich Sidorenko, that was supported by academician Aleksandrov, resulted in a government resolution for the creation of Gosatomenergonadzor, representatives of which should be present at every station, and every enterprise that manufactures critical equipment for nuclear power stations. He was the real Soviet Union nuclear physicist who was in charge of investigating the disaster. Tape 1 A Deeper Dive A Deeper Dive Legasov also describes how stress he was on the way to Chernobyl and how tense the Tape 2. Perhaps it was not Sweden. When I looked at this device, I was confused by, for example, an unusual and, in my opinion, insufficient construction of safety systems, that would work in extreme situations. These decisions were accepted and written down in session protocols. So this process took two to three hours. [1], Legasov attended a turbulent meeting with the Politburo, on 3 July in which the causes of the accident and flaws in the RBMK reactor were discussed. And the measures there were simple. For two years he worked as a released secretary of the VLKSM committee, he was elected to the bureau of the Soviet District Committee of the Komsomol and to the Moscow City Committee of the Komsomol. The original deadline for this construction was at the end of September, but various issues that naturally come up prevented this work from being completed in time. First, for higher fuel consumption; for higher capital costs; and for a non-industrial basis of its construction. And this value is already quite controllable and allows, with proper fast protection devices, to manage any processes. Say, a duty officer starts their shift. This too was a point of concern. This meant that a kind of equilibrium would be achieved: the uranium oxide fuel pellets would melt and stop producing additional radioactive particles. Ordinary. The area, the extent of contamination, its intensity would increase by 30 times compared to what happened. This is one more proof that we cannot do without them. But in practice, the design organisations have not strengthened, except for one, but have remained at the same habitual level of carrying out their originally-assigned duties. And I have seen more than one accident. But within 25 - 75 biological roentgens, the decision to evacuate lied with the local authorities. This had to be changed on the go. This project would have cost billions and such a canal would have passed through Belorussia. 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. But then the commission did a much more thorough assessment and concluded the same thing as I did. They said that things were probably bad. Mass hysteria has begun. Additionally there were comrade Soroka, Deputy General Prosecutor of the USSR; and Fyodor Alekseyevich Scherbak, the head of one of the important divisions of Government Safety Committee (the KGB); also, the Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian government, who would be at the site already; comrade Nikolayev; and the head of the Regional Executive committee, comrade Ivan Plyusch. Legasov: Yes. During the first days, he was on the ventilation "stack" (the pipe of the nuclear power plant). How? This was making things more complicated. And so a generation of engineers came up who were very competent, but not critical of the devices themselves, not critical of all the systems that were ensuring their safety; but mainly knew the systems and required an increase in their numbers. I tried to establish such things that would bring the institute together, like the Kurchatov General Council, the institutes general seminar, and setting up various publications that would, on order, sit on the desks of researchers so that they could quickly get all the news from their field. I have already mentioned that I had proposed from the beginning to create a press group under the Government Commission that would correctly inform the population about the events that were happening, that would give the right advice. You know, similar to our current state quality control, a lot of specialists appeared that were not involved in engineering or scientific activities. I find them monstrous, and have always found them monstrous. At the same time, Shasharin, the First Deputy Minister of Energy, under whom the station was at the time, was at a loss. However, I will repeat myself that the evacuation had been carried out at such a time when the radiation levels of Pripyat were not that high; and therefore the level of contamination of the items, as well as the people themselves, was also not high. I remember the time when the Government Commission was still in Pripyat, we didnt have enough respirators, personal dosimeters called TLDs, and even somewhat reliable pencil dosimeters, that would show some measurements. Talk about the various organizations that are involved both on the site and in their offices; about the medical radiology centre that has been created there. There is no standardised system of evaluation. Valery legasov was a nuclear physicist. There is a lot of graphite, a lot of zirconium and water. Then, have a section by Vladimir Fyodorovich Dyomin wherein simply describe the following clearly. This was in the late 50s. All through, I want to tell you, and I dont know if I am succeeding, that it is just about the philosophy of safety. Do you understand? The important pipeline had been carelessly quality-assured. Moreover, many of them either hadnt been charged, or the people had not been instructed on how to use them and when to recharge them. Since Ive already started talking about the army, then I must say that from the moment when the Soviet Army was charged with organizing the work, the scope of work was quite extensive, but the deployed chemical forces first had to scout and establish the contaminated area. The habitual rhythm of work persisted and the usual approach to solving problems prevailed. Except for the station workers, and some workers that were needed to operate public services. So General Berdov, who had arrived from Kiev, ordered that all policemen will go to every flat and inform that no one should go outdoors until the next day and should stay at home. Since I didnt have administrative authority over this department but generally understood many specific details of what was going on, and because I was concerned, I began to suggest to the reactor department an engineering, not physical, approach to solving problems. In practice, this then turned out to be the best decision, as all the wells had been built and the measuring wells showed that there was practically no penetration of contaminated water into the ground. . And it is very good judging by its reactor parameters, and it is with containment. Immediately in that, room Alexander Grigoryevich Meshkov looked in - First Deputy Minister and said, that the Government Commission on the Chernobyl accident had been, Commission should meet at the Vnukovo airport by f, Immediately I left the asset, got into the car and went to my institute. Two weeks later, on August 25, Valery Legasov, wearing a gray suit and striped tie, his face puffy and haggard behind thick glasses, took the floor on the opening day of the special . [7], After 10 May, the situation had somewhat stabilized and Legasov was able to spend less time at the accident site but still frequently visited. Having done that, they closed the entire thing and for three years, no one even went near the station. It was all tangled up. To date, it has generated more than half a billion roubles of income for the Government, which more than covers that cost of 25 million roubles for the projects that failed. Instead, each time it was a response to some technical proposal, or to some accident, or to some pre-accident situation. All in all these measures were excessive. But now they are preparing for me a precise report of analyses of all the soils from both within the 30-kilometre zone and beyond it. We want to tell you the untold and hidden truth of the Chernobyl disaster. Well because it was already clear in the 60s that it would be expensive and practically impossible to develop industry in the European part and provide it with electricity from organic sources. They rushed to their cars to evacuate themselves and, in the process, 17 people died in cars. But not in the accident itself. These robots have played a huge role even today because many interesting things have been discovered with their help regarding the questions related to the nature and consequences of the accident. The relevant passages in Higginbotham's 'Midnight in Chernobyl' with respect to the Vienna Conference say:. They told me about their complete helplessness. Adamovich: People say that the Japanese proposed something like this, that we give them the Kuril Islands and they will extinguish everything. In this situation, many people overheard things here and there and this led to exaggerated rumours; naturally about the number of people affected by radiation sickness, about the levels of contamination in Kiev and the extent of the affected area. If there were containments, then RBMK would simply not exist; as it didnt anywhere in the world, this type of reactor. But my colleagues and I were faced with the task of what to do next? Because, well, one telegram was just provocative, clearly provocative. By the evening of the 26th, all possible manners of flooding the core had been tried, though it resulted in nothing but high steam generation and the spread of water through the various transport corridors in the neighbouring unite. All this must be described in the most thorough and detailed manner. The leaders of the Government Commission, as well as the various experts that were arriving to perform certain tasks, lived there. Another idea that I have repeatedly talked about and asked to be implementedit has not been implemented yetis the idea of creating flying robots, that is, radio-controlled aircraft models that would carry sensors on them. But since Shcherbina had approved the decision, the local authorities had promptly begun the preparations. Comrade Voronin was replaced by Yury Nikitich Maslyukov, and during his time a lot of work was done to build new premises, new villages for the evacuees. [1] Bencana Chernobyl [ sunting | sunting sumber] So Ivan Stepanovich Silayev had to tackle all these issues. That is, was it generating short-lived radioactive isotopes or not? There was an absolute disregard of the viewpoint of the Chief Designer or the Science Supervisor. And ammonium nitrate is an explosive in its pure form. Legasov: Even during the war, when a retreat was planned from a city, it was already determined in advance who would remain undercover, who would be with the army, etc. However, the more I learned about what was happening there, the more anxious I became. About nitrogen. of the USSR, Boris Evdokimovich SHCHERBINA, Chairman of the Bureau for the, Fuel and Energy Complex, was approved as the head of the Government, Commission. This proposal was stupid as practice ha showed. The natural air circulation was so strong that this nitrogen was like a drop in the ocean. This was sort of the main task in that period. As such, we didnt have any technical means to put the graphite fire out in a traditional way, for instance with water or foam. The dams were designed and built immediately but this was also accompanied by research work. We arrived at the building of the city party committee in the central square. However, this point of view of the experts was not considered. Who would like that? People had started sensing that. This phosphorous plant was something frightful, both from the perspective of the quality of technologic and the saturation with diagnostic devices. This was miraculously discovered and this, the most powerful disaster we would have just lost the entire Kola Peninsula. So, no proper systematic information was provided on these questions. Do you understand? But here everything was so quick and sudden that. People were changing clothes. Nothing got farther than 12 kilometres from the station. This kind of scientific management of aviation seems right to me. But traditional reactor engineering somehow did not interest me much, and it was not assigned to me, and it seemed rather boring. [29], As a national hero at the time of his death,[27] Legasov's suicide caused shockwaves in the Soviet nuclear industry. At 11 a.m., we were officially informed that the whole city would be evacuated by 2 p.m.. All the transport had been gathered; all the routes had been identified; and at around 2-2:30 p.m. the entire city was empty. Concreting, removing various [sic], which sometimes appeared to be unsuccessful. He told me that, as planned in advance, teams were gathering to respond to each hazard and either go to the site itself or coordinate from a distance, and take over control of the station personnel. First, the fate of the local population, and the number of members of station personnel that should remain at the station (and, in its current state, continue to service it). Indeed, there was nothing that impeded the organization of this unusual and difficult operation. Of course, all this was done in the name of productivity. The commands were issued; however, the checks on how precisely they had been fulfilled were at times delayed. For some reason, many sources state that there was one explosion, or two explosions, or a hydrogen explosion, or a non-hydrogen explosion. Either graphite or metal structures were heating up. But these are such personal things. Because once we were 10-years late, then before anything, the question arose A line of cased reactors was developed in the world, similar to our water-water energy reactors VVER; like the one that had to be built near Minsk but will not be built now. He can be a philosopher, historian, an engineer"[5] The school now bears his name, and his bronze bust stands at the entrance. valery legasov tapes transcript. For example, different groups in June provided different estimates of the radioactivity that had escaped reactor number 4. This is what led them, and directed their actions. Answer (1 of 2): 1. In one case, a commander was recording higher doses for soldiers who were working wellperhaps as an incentive to work harder and as an opportunity to complete their stay in the zone fasterand lower doses for soldiers who were working poorly. However, Sidorenko and I stayed behind to finish the decontamination work while Sidorenko continued to investigate the role of Gosatomenergonadzor (USSR State Committee on Supervision of Safe Conduct of Work in Atomic Energy) in what had happened and what was going on now. I heard often that specialists, Kramerov Aleksander Yakovlevich in particular, while discussing these problems with Anatoly Petrovich Aleksandrov, made proposals to the [reactor] designer to change the accident protection system (APS), to improve the APS of this device, and they were not rejected. The party organisation was removed. Many young people arrived. And they estimated the escaped fuel by the activity within their measured points. It was not taken into account that after the nuclear facilities move from limited industrial environment to wide usage in civil nuclear energy, the conditions will change drastically. And Pripyat appeared, at the time of the explosion, it appeared to be clean. But all these solutions and advice did not concern the design of the reactors, which I never worked on. A personal pistol remained in a drawer, but the professor chose to hang himself. And only when we had the containments, the stations being built for the last 5-6 years, the ones being designed now, and the ones that will be built, all are being built with containments. Because the questions of safety in nuclear energy are the most acute in various spheres of international public opinion, I was interested in comparing the real dangers, the real threats that nuclear energy carries to the threats of other energy systems. As had been observed, a large amount of radiation had leaked out of reactor number 4, but at that time we were mostly worried about whether the reactor was still working. For example, at the meeting on the 14th of June, Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov said in his speech that this disaster did not seem accidental to him; that nuclear energy with a degree of inevitability was heading towards such a tragic event. On these matters, I would say, Viktor Aleksandrovich Sidorenko was the leader of the people who were concerned. And our Kola Peninsula, a natural wonder, would have been destroyed. This was a very important meeting. And then, from the position of Vladimir Mikhailovich Novikov, state that the level of device that we currently have is probably sufficient to ensure that Chernobyl does not happen again. Of course there was a concern that if temperatures in the core were significantly higher than our estimates, say 1600-1700C, the lead would just evaporate and be carried out of the reactor, causing additional contamination of the surrounding areas and rendering this measure ineffective. They had their peculiarities that they [scientists] were researching. The ministerial cadres grew up and acquired their own extensive engineering experience. Legasov: The director of ChNPP was in shock, from beginning to end. And so if we add liquid nitrogen to the airand we had, very quickly I must say, an entire train of nitrogen brought to usthen that cold air would cool the hot zone better. Military acceptance was also extensive in our industry, so the quality of the equipment was high grade . There werent any radio-controlled aircraft equipped with dosimetric devices. The energy leadership started to regard the importance of this element with great understanding, although without fully realizing the seriousness of this issue themselves. A big discussion arose about the so-called Compton effect. The journey was gloomy. Ukraines energy demands dictated the need for introducing more and more power capacities. Further still, we must return to the fact that neither work nor reconnaissance robots were available in any country in the world. He was working on a helium-cooled high-temperature reactor, and we considered this reactor as having the best technological capabilities for our national economy. These were the sanitary rules that existed at the time. Adamovich: And he was not there on the 26th? It seemed that it would be impossible to decontaminate this city because everywhere one went, there were very high levels of radiation, say, 700-800 milliroentgens per hour. And a station without containment would have contaminated everything. I cost the government around 25 million roubles in these failed projects. During the flight, our conversation was nervous. It must be said that all the quantitative assessments show that the power of the explosion was equivalent of around three to four tons of TNT. This could have resulted in a terrible disaster - the rupture of a large pipeline of the VVER device. But the article stated very precisely that: firstly, the Soviet Union has developed the physical fundamentals of nuclear energy on the same level as the rest of the world, but the technology gap to implementing those physical fundamentals is huge, and the French should not help the Russians in overcoming this gap. I repeat that I myself am not a reactor man despite being the First Deputy Director of the Institute. But I felt that his approach to the questions of safety was serious. This may have been a truly random coincidence but this is really my direct speciality. This is why Ryzhkov was constantly askingwhat is the temperature? An absolutely enormous amount of work was done by comrade Kurnosov, the chief engineer of this project and the chief engineer of the institute itself. Minatomenergo led the work on the preparations to launch the 1st and 2nd blocks and had already started to gradually make their way into the 3rd block to assess its condition. It is commonly known that nuclear power stations are very cleanly and exactingly run, with machinery and pipes that dont exhaust anything visible into the atmosphere. When Boris Evdokimovich arrived at Vnukovo he immediately boarded our plane and we flew out to Kiev. This is why the firefighters' actions were not only heroic but also very professional, thoughtful and correct. Legasov: I think, yes, from Sweden, but Im not sure. This is why the first job of the first team that went in was to start the reactor shutdown procedure of the 1st and 2nd blocks. [20][21] He had been involved in work on industrial safely with the GKNT (State Committee for Science and Technology), in which he had explored the risks involved in energy generation. soon it was necessary to literally fight for the correct implementation of every technological mode. Science, like art, does not tolerate intermediate links. There were 17 projects but only two or three need be described. That is why I advised, and Shcherbina agreed with me, to announce that we cannot tell about the precise duration of the evacuation yet. Moreover, this is being done on different devices at different times. The army was responsible for the work at the station itself and decontaminating villages, houses and roads in the 3-kilometre zone. Legasov was told he was assigned to a government commission that was looking into the accident. Because even though the more than 600 rooms of the 3rd block were cleaned, washed, the radiation condition in the engine room nevertheless remained quite high. Because, after all, this is a dangerous technology. Of course, I did understand the design of this reactor but not in as much detail as a member of the Government Commission would need to in such an emergency. In his personal life, he composed poetry and encouraged its publication. Thus, in this way, the inevitability of nuclear energy became apparent in the 60s but the pace was lost. Today, our measures are planned; such and such have been implemented and such and such issues worry us. And we had already begun, on the site, to consider the first options for constructing a dome over the destroyed block. It was the impression he made on us when we. These mistakes themselves are monstrous. Valery Legasov, 51, Chernobyl Investigator - The New York . And here the fateful mistake was made, from which, specifically, Chernobyl began. I will end here all my manipulations with you, so to saythere is a lot of talk about itthe logic, so the logic behind the decisions that were made is clear to you. An assessment of the situation was also needed, as well as considering the reactivation of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd blocks. Happily, a sufficiently large amount (forty tonnes) of boron carbide was available from an uncontaminated stockpile, and it was quickly dropped into the reactor by helicopters. And this is necessary and essential. At the same time, under my leadership, work developed in the field of safety of chemical production, which also poses a great danger. It was led by comrade Petrov who had arrived here earlier. All this must be described. He is now mainly remembered for his work in containment of the Chernobyl disaster and presenting the investigation findings to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Concurrently with the preparation for the launch of the 1st and 2nd blocks, and with performing the launch operations, work was underway on the construction of the sarcophagus. Then Pikalov came with his services. This is its distinctive feature, if we're not speaking of complex technical aspects. At the same time, videos and photos of the rooms of reactor number 4 were taken continuously which allowed the engineers to select the proper solutions for the construction of the sarcophagus itself. This question was discussed at the Government Commission and was escalated to higher levels, and ultimately it was decided to defer the issue and that in the next year, 1987, and possibly in 1988, no construction work will be done on 5th and 6th blocks. [1] Even before the Chernobyl disaster, Legasov was known to stress the need for new security and safety methods to prevent large catastrophes. Such and such things have been implemented. Our brainstorming session was conducted in constant consultation with Moscow, with whom one of us was constantly on the phone - for example Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov. This was especially the case for the radioactive outbursts in reactor number 4 - different services had been providing different information in the first stages of localization. However, because radioactivity had been thrown out earlier, a large number of vehicles were spreading it on their tires across various areas. The heating up could continue and some vertical movement of this fuel mass may occur. But when it comes to the design of a [particular] aircraft, it must have a single owner. I have not seen a single group in the Soviet Union that raised and considered [the analysis of nuclear safety] with any degree of competence As for the RBMK reactor, you know, in reactor circles, it was considered a bad reactor.

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