Chernobyl: The Cost of Lies
Post #1104
Spoiler Alert: Too much information is given in this post, so read it at your own peril (it is better to watch the miniseries first, because this post gives too much away)
In the five-part HBO miniseries called Chernobyl, the first episode opens with protagonist Valery Legasov (played by Jared Harris) asking: What is the cost of lies?
The conclusion he reaches is that the lies eventually prevent people from identifying truth, which is something human beings need to be able to acquire in order to live happy and healthy lives. By short-circuiting the human connection to the truth of things, great misery ensues. The Soviet system prevented truth from getting out.
And that malfeasance by government led to innocent people losing their lives.
There is a rich and colorful depiction of the arrogance of government officials throughout the series, which is very eye-opening. In recent years, we’ve witnessed similar arrogance of government officials, such as when Anthony Fauci associated himself with the enterprise of science, itself:
“Attacks On Me, Quite Frankly, Are Attacks On Science”
While more total people died from the lies related to COVID, it helps to look back at how a few lies played out in Chernobyl. It will be assumed that those producing this HBO miniseries did do their due diligence and reported, for the most part, the actual happenings accurately.
The bureaucratic system of Soviet Socialism created incentives for people to lie. While the Chernobyl plant had been recorded as having passed all safety inspections, that was a lie: there was a test that could not be completed when attempted, but the plant was approved anyway.
The “Safety Test”
The uncompleted test involved powering down to simulate a blackout, and then attempting to use the residual momentum of the spinning turbine — i.e., nuclear plants use “hot” uranium to boil water into steam to turn a turbine, creating electrical power — to maintain power to the plant controls until diesel backup generators come online.
But, because of bureacratic quotas, the power company official told the Chernobyl plant manager to wait until midnight to try running the test again — so that he could personally get his energy quota met and therefore not anger those Soviet Party officials that he reported back to.
Because they had already reduced power to half (from 3200 megaWatts to 1600 megaWatts), they stayed at half-power for several hours until midnight, rather than to scrap the test — as safety protocols would have required of them — and try it later on.
But staying at half-power is dangerous, because xenon accumulates whereas it would have normally been burned-off when at full-power. Uranium is kept in a balance on-the-fly with a few factors that increase reactivity and a few that decrease it. The boron control rods, when inserted into the water, decrease reactivity, and so does xenon.
When they powered down even further from half-power, it required inserting more boron control rods. The goal was to reach 700 megaWatts, simulating a blackout, so that they could test to see if the residual momentum of the spinning turbine would be enough to maintain power to plant controls until diesel backup generators powered up.
But after approaching 700 megaWatts, the plant was still powering down further, even though they did not move any of the control rods. Xenon kept building up. The only way to offset it was to break safety protocols again: to pull out almost all control rods, allowing the uranium to ramp-up power with almost nothing left to keep it in check.
You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to know that “unchecked uranium reactivity” cannot possibly be “a good thing.” The power began rising exponentially, and there was a fail-safe button put in place to prevent a meltdown. That button inserts all control rods at once. They hit that button, believing it would prevent a meltdown.
But Soviet RBMK reactors had a fatal flaw — a flaw which had been pointed out 10 years prior, but was never acted upon, because to call a Soviet project flawed was just too much for arrogant Soviet officials. While the boron in the control rods reduces reactivity, the very tip of the rods was made of graphite, which increases reactivity.
If you simultaneously insert all 200-plus rods into the water at once, the first reaction is the reaction caused by all of their graphite tips. That split-second reaction of graphite inserted into unchecked uranium was so powerful that it instantly vaporized the water, froze the control rods in place, and then blew-up the reactor core.
The Lies
After the initial lie of approving the plant without the critical safety test completed, further lies were required in order run the safety test unannounced so as to cover-up the initial transgression. Keep in mind that the originally-ignored flaw in the fail-safe mechanism was also a lie.
After an explosion and a resulting fire, the arrogant plant manager said that it was a tank of hydrogen — something separate from the reactor core — that must have blown up. He ordered men to go down to make sure that cooling water was still being pumped into the reactor. The dosimeter they had went to 3.6 rem, and it maxed out.
When the plant manager asked for the reading, they said it was 3.6 rem per hour, but that that was the top reading possible. The plant manager, knowing that the real reading could be much higher if a better dosimeter had been used, said that 3.6 rem per hour was all that they had measured, and that that’s not very dangerous.
In U.S. occupational standards, the maximum yearly exposure is 5 rem. For the general population, the maximum yearly exposure is 0.5 rem. Using just that first reading which was communicated to the plant manager, each hour was worth 72% of a full year’s worth of exposure.
Then further measurements were done, maxing out a 200 rem dosimeter. The plant manager said that that must be a malfunctioning dosimeter then. At 200 rem per hour, you get a full year’s worth of radiation every 90 seconds. That second report of attempted dosimetry also included a 1000 rem dosimeter that spiked but broke down.
At 1,000 rem per hour, you get a full year’s worth of radiation every 18 seconds.
But a third attempt at dosimetry was made later on when a brave military leader got inside of a lead-lined truck and drove right up to the edge of the rubble from the blown reactor core: 15,000 rem per hour.
At 15,000 rem per hour, you get over 8 full year’s worth of radiation for every single second of exposure. If you remain in the area for just 10 seconds, you get 80 year’s worth of radiation. If you remain for two minutes or more — like plant workers and first-responders did — then you pay with your life.
Astonishingly, even after the 200 rem per hour reading, the plant manager kept reporting that things were under control — and he kept sending plant workers down to make sure that cooling water was still flowing into the core: a core which was non-existent (because it had already blown itself up).
The Relevance to Current Events
The Soviets could not admit harm from their official decisions, even when the evidence of that harm was staring them in the face. Unfortunately, we have lived through a similar situation with the COVID debacle — rather than learning from history — via the unacknowledged harm from the measures taken by the government.
Reference
[Chernobyl miniseries] — https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl
[Fauci equates himself with the enterprise of science] — https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/06/09/fauci-on-gop-criticism-attacks-on-me-quite-frankly-are-attacks-on-science/