The Battle of Chernobyl Page #4

The country's top experts are called into action.

Vassili Nesterenko was one of them.

At the time, he was working on improving the Soviet Union's intercontinental nuclear missiles.

If the heat managed to crack the cement slab, only 1400 kg of the uranium and graphite mixture

would have needed to hit the water to set off a new explosion.

The ensuing chain reaction could set off an explosion comparable to a gigantic atomic bomb.

Our experts studied the possibility and concluded that the explosion would have had a force of 3 to 5 megatons.

Minsk, which is 320 km from Chernobyl, would have been razed, and Europe rendered uninhabitable.

We had to stop the process.

If it continued, it would have been an enormous disaster.

An enormous nuclear disaster...

This second explosion would have been accompanied by a terrible shock wave and a massive rise in radioactivity

that would have claimed thousands of lives in a matter of hours.

Thank God it didn't happen!

There were trains with over a thousand cars in Minsk, Gomel and Kiev, ready to evacuate the population.

The situation is critical.

In Moscow, the state commission decrees two emergency measures.

First:
send in a battalion of firemen to drain the water from under the reactor.

They will later be declared national heroes, but will suffer from radiation sickness the rest of their lives.

Second:
seal the breach more effectively to bring the temperature down once and for all.

In two days, General Antochkin's men will drop 2400 tons of lead into the reactor.

When we started dumping lead in, the temperature went down right away.

It absorbed well and sealed the hole as it melted, so there was less radiation.

But some of this lead melts when it hits the blaze and vaporizes into the atmosphere.

Twenty years later, traces of it can be found in the sick children of Chernobyl.

It's highly criticized today, but given the situation, there was no better solution.

And all the people - military or civilians, officers or not - worked selflessly.

I participated in this first stage, and I can tell you, it had to be done.

It was heroism.

During this operation, 600 pilots are fatally contaminated with radiation.

All of them will die.

But their efforts only buy a few days.

Although it has been covered over, the fire still isn't out.

Flying over in helicopters isn't solving the problem.

They needed to get closer, go down into the breach.

But how?

With the imminent threat of a second explosion still looming, the makeshift measures continue.

The blueprints of the plant reveal that the "active zone" can be approached through the cable and pipe tunnels built out of thick cement.

A delegation of technicians from the Kurtchatov Institute venture into the labyrinth.

It is tough going. Parts of the tunnels have collapsed in the explosion.

They pierce through the shell of the 4th reactor with a blow-torch, and stick their radioactivity detectors and thermometers in, along with cameras.

The result is terrifying.

The radiation levels are astronomical, and their worst fears are confirmed.

The white-hot magma has cracked the cement slab and seeped into the empty basin.

It is now threatening to sink even further.

There was a five to ten percent risk of explosion.

We'd drained the water from under the reactor, but something absolutely had to be done,

something had to be put underneath the reactor to keep the magma from seeping down,

something had to keep it from falling in.

Nothing is stopping the magma from seeping even deeper into the sandy subsoil.

And beneath the reactor lays a huge stretch aquifer that supplies the entire country with water.

What worried us the most was that the entire mass would sink down and reach the ground water,

which then would pollute the rivers Pripyat, then Dniepre, Kiev...

The Black Sea...

We absolutely needed to come up with a solution!

A new operation is considered.

But it will entail the loss of more lives.

On the 12th oh May, 1986, 17 days after the initial explosion, the miners of Toula, one thousand kilometers from Chernobyl,

receive a visit from the Kremlin from the deputy Minister of the Mining Industry.

The minister spoke to us about the accident at Chernobyl.

He said they needed miners from our region, the Moscow basin.

He gave us 24 hours to gather our belongings.

The next day, we were bused from that very square to the airport in Moscow.

On May 13, our comrades were already at work in Chernobyl.

Their mission:
to approach the reactor through what is now the only possible path - underground.

Our mission was this: dig a 150-meter tunnel from the 3rd block to the 4th, a tunnel 30 meters long.

Then dig a room 30 meters long and 30 meters wide to hold a refrigeration device for cooling down the reactor.

To limit their exposure to radiation, the miners dig 12 meters down before making their way over to the burning reactor.

There, they build a room 2 meters high and 30 meters wide where a complex cooling system of liquid nitrogen will be set up.

In one month, 10,000 miners from Russia and the mining regions of the Ukraine are sent down into the tunnel.

They are between 20 to 30 years old.

Inside the tunnel, which has no ventilation, the temperature hits 50C, and radioactivity is at a minimum of 1 roentgen per hour.

We worked without any protective gear.

The miners couldn't used masks, because the filters would get damp after a few minutes.

So everyone just took them off and kept on working without them, with our shirts off too.

We drank water out of open bottles, which was really bad because the radioactive particles were ingested right into our body.

One of our comrades swallowed a grain of sand that was highly radioactive.

He died.

How can we know what each of us breathed in or ingested?

The hardest thing was the lack of oxygen...

...and the incredible heat.

It was hot, hot, hot...

and we had to work really fast.

At a crazy pace.

Faster and faster...

That was the hardest. Go, go, go...

Battalions of 30 miners relay each other every three hours, 24 hours a day.

In one month and four days, they dig a 150-meter tunnel a job that in a mine would have normally taken three months.

The most dangerous places were not underground.

There wasn't as much radiation below the reactor.

But as soon as we came up, we had to run even faster.

Radioactivity at the mouth of the tunnel is three hundred times higher.

Not a single miner is spared from exposure.

Not once are they informed of the real dangers they are facing.

Someone had to go and do it.

Us or someone else...

We did our duty.

Should we have done it? it's too late to judge.

I don't regret anything.

The miners accomplish their mission, but the cooling system is never set up below the reactor.

The underground room is finally filled with cement to solidify the structure.

The official position is that each miner received 30 to 60 roentgens, but survivors claim they received up to 5 times that amount.

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