After Ryzhkov and Ligachev arrived at the disaster zone, journalists were allowed in. At least not at the age that I currently am, just into my fifties. [They made him retire.]. The idea of creating such an expert group and doing this work was mine. It is possible to safely talk about the programs that are led by Ruteny Mikhailovich Polevoy who established several of them. Execution of the command begun immediately. The No. This is the group of reasons that led to the trouble I wanted to speak about. There it was quiet, calm, everything as in ordinary life. The show opens with Legasov's suicide, on the second anniversary of the explosion. Although I had not been able to describe the issue in such a way, he did. Do you understand? Punishing the direct culprits of this disaster is correct because the actions did not meet regulatory requirements and showed inconsistency with the job requirements of the people who were acting in this situation. Formally however I had to be replaced in Silaevs team by Eugeny Petrovich Ryazantsev - deputy of the director of our Nuclear Energy Institute. Because information came out in separate blocks. First, for higher fuel consumption; for higher capital costs; and for a non-industrial basis of its construction. Sometimes, they managed to ask the Chairman of the Government Commission, or one of the members of the Commission, about some particular, specific topic. The RBMK reactor has only one protection [system], unlike the VVER reactor, which is a flagrant violation of principles, the first mistake. Should the fuel get there, it would contaminate a considerable part of water in Ukraine. Take a few steps. Not one sensible action or word could he utter. Adamovich: [faintly audible] And he remained there. The meaning. When the fire ended, when we established that the surface temperature, that was monitored, is not higher than 300 degrees Celsius, all actions targeted towards eliminating the fire itself and its spread ended. T2A was re-checked and published by our new contributor. Slowly, once the most powerful in the country, they began to lose the standard of modern equipment. But when we returned to Skazochniy and measured them, they turned out to be more contaminated than the ones we were wearing. But it was not. All the preparatory work was done in a very quick and very organized manner. The information was not enough, we were, preparing for some unusual work and therefore the, with long pauses and, in general, everyone was in suspense and each of us, Remembering this road now, I must say that it never occurred to me then that we, are moving to meet an event of a planetary scale, an event that will probably go, down in the history of mankind like the eruption of famous volcanoes, for, example, the death of people in Pompeii or that do not be close to this. There were 17 projects but only two or three need be described. Of course, all this reminded me of the the warwhich I remember from my childhood, and from accounts told by soldiersthat the logistics were certainly as, if not more, important than the work of those at the front lines, who worked on the decontamination itself, on measurements, diagnostics and various other things. My first idea was to drop iron shot. But there was only one such telegram. 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. Common sense would suggest that all these cases had to be simulated before the experiment, be it this particular one or any other. But still, some practical experience had already been accumulated. We dropped another 80 tonnes of lead; that was the last large drop. That was it. Only they had discarded all of our automatic control systems and put in Canadian ones. To make direct measurements of the reactor, Legasov was driven in an armored personnel carrier to the site which established the reactor had shut down. A considerable number of staff members was injured. He trusted certain people who worked on, say, naval equipment, station machinery or specialized devices; and really didnt like the appearance of new faces who could somehow bother him or make him doubt the decisions made earlier. He recorded these tapes after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and not long before his death. A group of scientists from Novosibirsk telegraphed me that it was necessary to use more tuff and elite. Legasov: Feinberg S.M. For this reason, in VVER reactors, power is limited by the size of the reactor vessel but in RBMK reactors, power is not limited by anything. These decisions determined the entire order of organisational work for the rest of the period. A few hours later, we got to Chernobyl. This proposal was stupid as practice ha showed. Not only were the decontamination tasks performed incredibly quickly, the construction of the new residential villages, where the evacuees were moved, was also incredibly quick. And thereafter would be the concept, developed by Vladimir Mikhailovich, about what safe nuclear energy should look like. The relevant passages in Higginbotham's 'Midnight in Chernobyl' with respect to the Vienna Conference say:. They often practised there. These questions were drafted out then. In fairness, I must say that many experts of the Soviet Union spoke, and very actively spoke, against the construction of nuclear power plants without containments. What if something is done to the reactor tomorrow and the whole thing is over? Very basic, but it enabled keeping people's hands, and the food itself, safe from contamination. This is why I have copied the entire text to this page and edited it so a "clean" version is available. All this has to be done. Well there is an *abridged* transcript at which I've taken the liberty of Google-Translating (not easy due to character limits) to Valery Legasov tape recordings 7.6K views View upvotes 6 Alexander Rumiantsev B.A. The public was protesting against the continued construction of the 5th and 6th blocks and their entering into service, because they felt that it was too much power, 6 gigawatts, on a single site, especially in abnormal radiation conditions. Various parts of fuel assemblies were visible. All the indicators are good in its. During this break, Slavskys First Deputy, Meshkov Alexander Grigorievich, his First Deputy who was later fired because of this accident. Bryukhanov was accused of mismanagement and that operator error was the primary cause of the accident, while design flaws were also a factor. Another mistake was that with such technology, it is dangerous to not go the way the world is going. This is the first circumstance. Immediately after me, Aleksandr Grigorjevich Meshkov, First Deputy Minister of Medium Machine Building, entered the room, quickly stated that a Government commission had been formed to investigate the Chernobyl accident, and that I had been assigned to that commission. I suppose what I am saying is that the institute, for the first time, managed to assemble a group of experts who looked at nuclear energy as a system, all elements of which should be equally efficient, equally safe and reliable; and depending on the size of one or the other element in the system, the quality of the entire nuclear energy system should be more or less optimum. A large article was published where he tried to simply explain what these REMs are, milliroentgens, at which levels they pose a real threat to human health, at which level they dont, how to behave in conditions with increased radiation levels. There was a problem of prolonged separation from families, working in unusual conditions. As soon as we started selling stations to the Finns. Obviously, people thought that we are panicking and suggested a solution of such and such composition, containing nitrate, to be dropped there. On the roofs of the engine room and on station territory graphite blocks were scattered, some intact and some in pieces. This is not a nuclear station. And only recentlythis must also be describedhave our own reconnaissance robots been developed at the Institute of Nuclear Energy. These divisions of the Ministry of Energy had taken part in the construction of the village at Green Cape, and also in the construction of many stations for the decontamination of vehicles, quite a lot of which had gathered on the site by then. The logic behind our process of decision-making was as follows. A. Ustynyuk said of Legasov: "His main quality, which set him sharply apart from all the great organizing scientists I knew, was his exceptional dedication to the cause. But as soon as the first such reactor, the first one they plugged in near Leningrad, a 100 kilometres from Leningrad, the first such RBMK reactor As soon as it began to run, right away it was discovered that the reactor was bad, that it was difficult to control, that its neutron fields started to float. This is how the Americans fled. This, broadly, is the range of issues that I worked on professionally. And this value is already quite controllable and allows, with proper fast protection devices, to manage any processes. The permission for evacuation is issued by the Ministry of Health of USSR; not the Council of Ministers or the Central Committee of the CPSU but the Ministry of Health. But at the same time, because the information was presented from a particular, specific point of view each time, the nation did not get a daily or maybe at least weekly, depending on the state of events, idea of what was going on. But the radioactivity that would be carried out with the smoke could heavily contaminate a considerable area of land. 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. I was a member of the Science and Technology Council of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building of the USSR, but I was not a member of the reactor unit of this council. And it seemed to him that there was also a lot of fuel. He wrote a doctoral dissertation and later published a book at approximately that time, in which he proved the impossibility of having nuclear stations without containments, no matter the type, VVER or RBMK; that it was dangerous and criminal. But then the commission did a much more thorough assessment and concluded the same thing as I did. There were no reports of, radiation injuries and little was understood in this information. It had already been decided to assign the construction of the sarcophagus to SU 605, a department in the Ministry of Medium Machine Building; and that a thorough assessment of the internal condition of reactor number 4 had to be carried out, of the structural soundness of its remaining building, so that the project could rely on some analysis, on some verified data. Vyacheslav Dmitrievich Pismienniy was made responsible for laser technology. "[11], I feel sick thinking about exactly what is most likely to happen to us in the near future [Major industrial accidents will happen] unless the necessary measures are taken. And the second mistake in the design, apart from there not being two protection systems but one, was that. [1] Spending four months in and around Chernobyl,[23] he received a high dose of radiation. And just by a miracle, it didnt. No information was received about radiation-related injuries and this fact, while not conclusive, did calm us down somewhat. Valery Legasov Audiotapes (CC) - Tape 1 Part 1 - Recorded in English Aenigmaticus 1.19K subscribers Subscribe 1.4K Share 61K views 3 years ago #Chernobyl #HBO #Legasov The following piece of. If we could, we would sleep in a nearby hotel. It had a very small share in the institute, both from a monetary and human resources perspective. They are trying to increase the reliability of the reactor so that there would not be an accident. The next day, when we were at Ivan Stepanovich Silayevs office again, the phone rang once more, and this time he asked for the phone to be given to Evgeny Pavlovich Velikhov. There were a couple of thousand of such cars in the city. He was against it, objected to it together with the experts, but then went on to meet the stubborn requirements of State Planning Committee and the Ministry of Energy, that stations can be built without containments. But the refueling itself took only 18-19 days, while for us it takes around a month and a half, and upto two months at times. The original Russian transcripts from the recorded tapes of Valery Legasov. Since I have touched upon communication a little, mentioned the reactor a bit, it may be time when I can express some personal opinions about how on earth I got involved with this story, how I was connected to it, how I understood the history and quality of the development of nuclear energy and how I understand it now. But how they did it, how they made it happen, I still cannot imagine because I only know the result of their work. And there was another episode. But why didnt they understand him? He didnt get proper support in our ministry; every document, every step was painfully difficult. I think that we should look at the work in other industries [as well]. I will say a few words about this later. Probably, there were a few thousand suits, civilian, hanging on trees. Unfortunately, we came across this sloppiness quite often. Because they are competent specialists, sensible people; they can make calculations and have other skills. We drove through Chernobyl. The time available to solve it is not too small but not too much either. Legasov: That tomorrow, there will be 25 or more. And at the same time, England first and then the United States of America began to develop their energy sector, not as separate nuclear power plants but as a nuclear power industry. Or manually, using the special AZ-5 button to reset the emergency rods. But because my professional occupation was in a different area, I was an observer integrating all this information that was entirely impossible to discuss in the ministry; because they were used to having very specific engineering discussions, such as how to replace one kind of steel with another, how to modify a technological system. But this work was unfortunately suspended at the very beginning, initially because of a serious illness of Aleksander Sergeyevich Kachanov and an inability to find an equivalent replacement, and then because of the subsequent Chernobyl events. It is about an article that was requested to be written by the magazine Scientific American and must have a summarizing philosophical character. Among the giants, among the reactor people or the thermonuclear people, I was the smaller, so to say, proprietor. [7] Legasov thought people worked together efficiently and this put them in good spirits. And the first time with him. Was Shcherbina calling Moscow with you? Then the next one arrives and so it goes on. The experts from this institute were led by comrade Zhernov. So we had to send out a lot of people to assess the situation. Eugeny Pavlovich Velihov who as it seemed was watching too much TV about the China syndrome, arrived with concerns which I reported to Rizhkov and Ligachev. By the time of his death, Legasov had been exposed to 150 rem (1.5 Sv) of radiation, which was far above safe levels. This job was constructed and built in a very short period, but was completely useless, because no fuel got there and nothing had to be cooled. The Chernobyl part of this section would be exclusively official, to provide precise information from the Government Commission at the time when this section is released; and the second part should be an emotional part, narrative with personal opinions. I can't find any factual mention of the tapes being hidden. For at least five years, there have been long talks about creating diagnostic systems for the most critical equipment nothing has been done. 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 didnt go near that Three Mile Island station for three years. I must say that, of course, there were many senseless things done in the course of this work. When Boris Evdokimovich arrived at Vnukovo he immediately boarded our plane and we flew out to Kiev. Some of the station personnel got flats in Kiev city and some in Chernigov. In Kiev, after we got off our plane, what surprised us was a long line of black government cars and an anxious crowd of various Ukrainian chairmen, led by comrade Lyashko Aleksander Petrovich. But within 25 - 75 biological roentgens, the decision to evacuate lied with the local authorities. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. And this workshop began to regularly decontaminate the most valuable equipment and send it to various parts of the Soviet Union for practical utilization. But with the illness of Aleksander Sergeyevich Kochinov and after the subsequent events, everything has changed. Legasov: Sometime after the 2nd of May, they started to evacuate them. So I immediately sat down to write this letter, and after a few edits by Ivan Stepanovich Silayev, it was sent to Gorbachev that same night, signed by Silayev, Velikhov and me. On the one hand, it melted and we did find evidence of that. In these cases, a soldier was no different from a civilian who took part in these efforts. Basically, they proposed to drop explosives. Adamovich: Well, thats interesting. Even though we have Atomenergoizdatformerly called Atomizdatmedical publishing houses, the Knowledge society, it turned out that prepared literature that could quickly be distributed among the people to explain, for example, what doses are extremely dangerous for humans, how to behave when a person is inside a zone of increased radiation exposure, a system that could correctly advise on what to measure, how to measure, how to treat fruits and vegetables, the surface of which could be contaminated with beta, gamma, alpha radiationall this literature was totally absent. Everything there would be blown to kingdom come. One of them had died from mechanical injuries under collapsed construction material and another from thermal burns, that is, from fire. Please help us share these tapes with the world. 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. The station had lots of it stockpiled - it was used in construction, to mix with concrete to weigh it down. Concrete may fail due to high temperatures. G. Alimov interview with Legasov, Izvestia newspaper, 1987. International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Mendeleev Moscow Institute of Chemistry and Technology, State Committee for Science and Technology, Nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, " , ", "Valery Legasov: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know", "Who was Valery Legasov, the Soviet scientist that saved the world from Chernobyl? But with Dolgikh, I myself spoke on the telephone many times. Legasov was 51 years old. I tried to explain to him that there was no possibility of dropping iron shot because of the reasons I mentioned earlier. These surveys were done for both the total amount of gamma radiation and the isotope spectrum of gamma radiation. And the most dangerous tasks during his term were to determine whether or not there was water inside the upper and lower bubblers, and in the rooms beneath the reactor hall because this was crucial. Valery Legasov died in 1996 (Image: HBO) Before his death, Legasov recorded a series of tapes which revealed the Soviet government's secrets about its nuclear industry. So this episode of installing the needle was described very elaborately and very, so to say, extensively. It was considered bad because of economic reasons. This is how the situation was developing before the Chernobyl events. Then we got onto a road that led to Pripyat, a nuclear city, where the builders and workers of the Chernobyl power plant lived. Many supervisors that should have been on the staff were just absent. I wanted to say that aloud. He consistently looked for possible sources of issues that would lead to accidents, systematized them, and made probabilistic evaluations of events, estimates of the likelihood of an event leading to a release of radioactivity. Of course, many things changed as time passed, our views and ways of working. Then I was called to the Politburo meeting on the 5th of May. But what caused the good spirits was the way the people had been working; how quickly they responded to our requests, how quickly various engineering scenarios were evaluated. All in all, this quick and diligent work of the people that were delivering the materials resulted in the reactor being plugged around the 2nd of May. All in all these measures were excessive. Of course, I could not imagine at that time the level of danger, the scale of danger that was inherent in those old devices. From this perspective, there was no understanding of the steps that needed to be taken, neither from station personnel nor from the Ministry of Energy. The first assumption was that it is the internal contamination of the building. The energy leadership started to regard the importance of this element with great understanding, although without fully realizing the seriousness of this issue themselves. [7] Legasov developed a plan to extinguish the reactor fire using nitrogen gas pumped throughout the plant's pipe network but the pipes were too badly damaged to be effective. This third element was requested by the Finns. The army was responsible for the work at the station itself and decontaminating villages, houses and roads in the 3-kilometre zone. "[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.

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