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Title: Chernobyl: Nuclear Disaster (Environmental Disasters) by Nichol Bryan ISBN: 0-8368-5504-3 Publisher: World Almanac Library Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 Format: Library Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.27

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Rating: 3
Summary: Has plenty of pictures: farmer drinks fresh milk (p. 31)
Comment: Eighteen years have passed since the incident at Chernobyl, and fifty years since the optimistic speech given by Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission quoted at the top of page 14 in this book, CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR DISASTER by Nichol Bryan (World Almanac Library, 2004). The book attempts to provide individual insights on the issues which remain, which have often become political arguments about problems that remain to be solved. The technology involved showed tremendous advances since basic subatomic particles started to be identified after the discovery of the neutron in 1932, but simply providing electricity to an advanced infrastructure for modern societies required unprecedented dependability that was keeping people up at all hours when most people will be better off sleeping.

"No wonder so many countries invested heavily in nuclear power -- the United States alone built more than one hundred plants between 1944 and 1985. The amount of U.S. electricity provided by nuclear power grew to 20 percent. In countries such as France, with fewer coal supplies, almost three-quarters of all electricity was generated by nuclear power plants by the mid-1980s." (pp. 14-15).

"People became concerned about how to dispose of the used atomic fuel rods, which remained dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. Plutonium, one of the elements in these `spent' fuel rods, is also one of the deadliest substances known. And, plutonium can be used to make atomic bombs. Many worried that the spread of nuclear power plants could lead to more countries having nuclear weapons." (p. 15).

Chapter 2 describes the safety test run on the Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl in April, 1986. In the event of other electrical failures, the electricity provided by the turbine for that reactor core might not be enough to shut down the operation of the reactor. "Because the same water that cooled the reactor also ran the turbines, the process that controlled the reactor started to seesaw. As the turbines turned faster, the water flowed more quickly in the reactor and cooled it down. Consequently, as the heat in the reactor dropped, it produced less steam to power the turbines, so the turbine slowed down. Plant operators made constant adjustments to the speed of the turbines and the placement of the control rods in a frantic attempt to control the reactor." (p. 19). The neutrons in the core of the reactor were able to produce a chain reaction much faster than anyone could insert control rods to slow down the neutrons that generated heat by splitting atoms when "At 1:23 A.M., the operators at Chernobyl lost the battle. Power output in the reactor suddenly jumped to one hundred times the normal amount. The radioactive fuel in the reactor core started to burst apart. The steam in the reactor core exploded. Seconds later, another explosion ripped through the reactor. The twin explosions destroyed the core of Unit 4 and blew off the reactor's 1,100-ton (1,000-tonne) roof." (p. 20).

"By late afternoon, many of the smaller fires around the plant had been put out. Then a new blaze erupted. The graphite used in the reactor core began to burn. Graphite is a form of carbon, similar to coal. It burns with an intense heat. Firefighters couldn't put out the graphite fire with water. It burned for ten days, sending more radioactive smoke into the air." (p. 21). One of the firefighters' wives said, "It was strictly forbidden to talk about this. `Your husbands got poisoned with gases,' the families of the firefighters were told." (p. 23).

This book identifies the person responsible for informing the world that a catastrophe was taking place:

"On April 28, Cliff Robinson, an engineer at Forsmark Nuclear Plant 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Uppsala, Sweden, walked through a radiation detector to get to his office. He was startled to hear the alarm go off. When Robinson measured the radioactivity of his shoes, he found levels never seen around the plant before. `My first thought was that a war had broken out and that somebody had blown up a nuclear bomb,' Robinson recalled." (pp. 27-29). Some people's feelings were hurt by the announcements which followed, and President Ronald Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes carefully defended the position of the United States by declaring:

"The United States Government at no point encouraged inaccurate reporting on the accident. If some reports carried in the mass media were in fact inaccurate, this was an inevitable result of the extreme secrecy with which the Soviet authorities dealt with the accident in the days immediately following it." (p. 32).

The biggest disagreement has been in the number of people who are dying as a result, and the miraculous survival of all the people who are not dead yet. The media recently have shown a real interest in reporting the precise numbers of people who died due to any particular incident, however daily such incidents might have become. There aren't any wild numbers in this book, like a global 500,000 or the 100,000 abortions sought by women who had been exposed to radiation and did not want to risk giving birth to a monster. "Ukrainian nuclear experts estimate that more than two thousand five hundred deaths were caused by the disaster. But other scientists, noting that half a million people got higher radiation doses from Chernobyl, estimate the death toll at closer to five thousand." (p. 36). Farms were the primary recipients of radioactive material. "And, randomly scattered `hotspots' of fallout from Chernobyl will produce radioactive crops for at least another three hundred years." (p. 37). "The government of Belarus also estimated that Chernobyl would eventually cause $235-billion worth of lost production in that country." (p. 37). Pictures on page 37 show the deactivation of Reactor Number 3 on December 15, 2000, the last of Chernobyl's reactors.