Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019) is a non-fiction book by the English author and journalist Adam Higginbotham. The book explores the causes and consequences of the 1986 explosion at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station in Ukraine, which killed at least 31 plant workers and firefighters and resulted in the evacuation of over 100,000 people. The radioactive fallout from the disaster ostensibly caused an unknown number of cancers and other serious health problems across the Western Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In researching Midnight in Chernobyl, Higginbotham interviewed a number of individuals closely associated with the accident and subsequent cleanup efforts. The recipient of the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, The New York Times, Time magazine, and NPR selected Midnight in Chernobyl as one of the best books of 2019.

This study guide refers to the 2019 edition published by Simon and Schuster.

Plot Summary

On February 20, 1970, a hundred miles outside Kiev, construction begins on the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station under the direction of Viktor Brukhanov. Unlike in the United States and Western Europe where nuclear engineers build safer but less efficient pressurized water reactors, the Soviet Union’s plants—including the one at Chernobyl—use RBMK reactors. As early as 1983, Soviet designers become aware of potentially grievous design flaws, including one in which the RBMK’s emergency shutdown mechanism can in some cases result in a surge of reactivity, potentially leading to a core meltdown or even an explosion. While senior plant managers sometimes hear of this and other serious design flaws, reactor operators don’t usually receive updates.

True to the Soviet Union’s reckless approach toward nuclear power, Chernobyl’s Unit Four reactor is two years overdue for a test on its backup generator mechanisms. Around midnight on April 25, 1986, deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov directs the men in the Control Room to begin the test. When lowering the power in preparation of the test, senior reactor control engineer Leonid Toptunov makes a serious error causing core reactivity to enter a freefall. Rather than end the test and shut down the reactor, Dyatlov instructs Toptunov and shift foreman Alexander Akimov to withdraw a dangerous number of control rods from the core to increase reactivity, leaving it susceptible to the kind of runaway reactions that can lead to meltdowns or explosions upon initiating an emergency shutdown.

With the test complete, Akimov orders Toptunov to initiate this very shutdown sequence. Within three seconds, thermal power reaches more than 100 times its maximum and an explosion of ignited hydrogen and oxygen tosses the reactor’s 2,000-ton concrete-and-steel lid into the air “like a flipped coin” (88). The atmosphere then sucks up seven tons of tiny radioactive fragments, forming a gaseous mixture made up of “the most dangerous substances known to man” (88).

In Moscow, Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov handpicks members of a government commission to travel to Chernobyl. Among them is Valery Legasov, deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. Legasov estimates that if gone unchecked, the core will burn for at least two months, “releasing a column of radionuclides into the air that would spread contamination across the USSR and circle the globe for years to come” (153).

After days of declining temperatures, the core temperature suddenly spikes to 1,700 degrees centigrade and the radiation output increases from three to six million curies overnight. As a result, two new terrifying threats emerge. The first is that the material in the core becomes so hot it melts down to the groundwater, poisoning the water supply for 30 million Ukrainians. The second is that the molten fuel leaks into the water suppression tanks, resulting in a steam explosion throwing “enough fallout into the atmosphere to render a large swath of Europe uninhabitable for a hundred years” (192).

Meanwhile, the explosion claims its first victims of radiation poisoning. After a period of latency, the bodies of numerous plant workers and firefighters begin to rot on the inside and out. Their skin falls off, and they begin to excrete their own intestines in the form of bloody diarrhea. By the last week in May, a total of 20 patients are dead, including Akimov and Toptunov. In total, 31 plant workers and firefighters will die of injury or acute radiation syndrome as a result of the Chernobyl explosion.

Back at Chernobyl, the core temperature declines dramatically, all but eliminating the possibility of the meltdown the scientists fear. With the most immediate and dire consequences of the explosion abated, Legasov leads a technical inquiry into the causes of Chernobyl. The logbooks and tape recordings from the Unit Four Control Room tell a clear story, implicating unsatisfactory decision-making by plant operators but also inherent flaws in the RBMK design. After a long and tortuous bureaucratic battle, General Secretary Gorbachev and his Politburo choose to maintain a public narrative that operator error—not design flaws—are to blame for the Chernobyl accident. Despite his private misgivings, Legasov travels to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and convinces the agency that the plant’s operators are the ones responsible for the explosion and not the designers who built the reactors, nor the bureaucrats who allowed them to remain in service.

On July 7, 1987, six men face trial for causing the Chernobyl explosion, including Brukhanov, and Dyatlov. All six defendants receive a guilty verdict. Brukhanov and Dyatlov receive maximum sentences of 10 years, while the rest receive sentences between two and five years.

While Legasov continues to uphold the Politburo’s narrative surrounding Chernobyl, in private he remains tortured by his both his failure to properly address the RBMK’s design flaws before the accident—and his role in covering these flaws up to the IAEA. After making a series of candid tape recordings about his experiences at Chernobyl, Legasov hangs himself on April 27, 1988.

It is difficult, Higginbotham argues, to estimate the full extent of the damage caused by the radioactive fallout of the Chernobyl accident. While various international studies have failed to identify statistically significant increases in cancer or cardiovascular disease as a result of radiation from Chernobyl, Higginbotham points out that “little effort had been made to establish an internationally recognized body of data on the long-term consequences of the accident on the population at large” (360).