68 pages • 2 hours read
Adam HigginbothamMidnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 19-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “The Elephant’s Foot”
As the Soviet Union hurtles toward its demise, a new group of scientists seeks to answer the biggest remaining questions surrounding Chernobyl: What happened to all the molten fuel? And what of the 16,000 tons of material dropped by General Antoshkin’s helicopters? As the scientists carefully probe Unit Four’s ruins, remaining in some dangerous areas for only minutes at a time and others not at all, they come across what comes to be known as the Elephant’s Foot, a giant black stalagmite-shaped object emitting 8,000 roentgen an hour. Too hard to drill, the scientists only manage to obtain a sample when one of them fires a pistol at it. After analyzing the sample, they determine the Elephant’s Foot is comprised of a small amount of the molten radioactive fuel. There are no traces of lead or any other substances used to douse the core from above.
In 1988, scientists manage to drill into the core chamber itself. Using a periscope, they peer into the core to find no trace of the core fuel. They do however discover that only the smallest trace of the 16,000 tons of Antoshkin’s material actually hit its mark and made it into the core. Moreover, the water suppression tanks supposedly emptied by Zborovsky’s team to avoid a steam explosion still contain several meters of water. The scientists infer that the molten nuclear fuel hit this water, but rather than causing a steam explosion, the water caused the burning core material to burn itself out harmlessly. In the end, all the heroic work done at great cost by Zborovsky and Antoshkin’s helicopter pilots had little impact on the course of events.
After receiving a diagnosis of reactive psychosis, the government releases Fomin from prison and he enters a psychiatric hospital. He later recovers and finds work at a nuclear plant in Moscow. In 1990, the government releases Dyatlov due to declining health and he dies five years later of bone marrow cancer at the age of 64. In September 1991, the government releases Brukhanov five years early due to good behavior and he obtains employment with the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy’s body for international trade. The following year, the IAEA revises its report on the Chernobyl incident, stating that while the actions of the plant’s operators were less than satisfactory, the primary reason for the explosion was the RBMK reactor’s design flaws. In 2008, Toptunov and Akimov finally receive recognition for the heroism they displayed in the immediate wake of the explosion as posthumous inductees into the Ukrainian Order of Courage, Third Class.
Chapter 20 Summary: “A Tomb for Valery Khodemchuk”
Despite recurring health problems, Alexander Yuvchenko is eventually able to return to work and live a fulfilling life with his wife Natalia and their son Kirill. In early 2007, at the age of 45, he returns to the hospital for a high fever. Doctors at Hospital Six—now known as Burnasyan Medical Center—diagnose Yuvchenko with symptoms of leukemia. The following year, he develops a massive inoperable tumor and later falls into a coma on November 10, 2008, dying eight hours later at the age of 47.
By 2005, radiation renders 4,700 square kilometers surrounding the Chernobyl plant officially uninhabitable. Parts of Eastern Europe remain contaminated, and traces of nuclear fission appear in meat, dairy, and produce as far as France. Wild boar shot in the Czech Republic is too radioactive to eat. In turn, a number of plants and animals in the Exclusion Zone itself make a remarkable comeback. With the area bereft of humans, species of wolf and elk not seen in Ukraine or Belarus for decades resettle the area.
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, to replicate the seventy-year study of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb attacks in 1945 (360).
Meanwhile, the rest of the world begins to move on and embrace nuclear energy anew. This trend comes to a halt in 2011 when Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant suffers three meltdowns, three hydrogen explosions, and the release of radioactive material into the atmosphere due to a tsunami. Japan shuts down its remaining nuclear facilities and Germany plans to do the same by 2022. The United States also cancels a number of plans for new nuclear plants. At the same time, Higginbotham points out that three million people die premature deaths annually due to air pollution caused in large part by coal- or oil-fueled power plants. Despite the risks of nuclear power plants, Higginbotham argues that plans to eliminate fossil fuels to head off climate change will be futile unless nuclear power plays a major role.
Epilogue Summary
Here, Higginbotham briefly lists the fates of some of the key figures involved with the Chernobyl explosion, including Zborovsky, who suffers a sudden decline in health and dies in 2007 at the age of 55. Natalia still lives in Moscow near Kirill, his wife, and their three children. Tarakanov is a survivor of radiation-induced leukemia and returns to work in Soviet disaster relief, coordinating efforts during the devastating Armenian earthquake of 1988 which kills 25, 000 people. Scherbina also helps with these relief efforts, but his failing health causes him to step away from his duties on the Council of Ministers. Two years later, Scherbina dies at the age of 70. As for Gorbachev, he writes in April 2006:
The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl twenty years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that followed (368).
Chapter 19-Epilogue Analysis
The findings of the 1988 scientific expedition into the bowels of the Chernobyl Sarcophagus tell a deeply deflating story about the heroic efforts of the Chernobyl relief workers. For example, of the 16,000 tons of material dropped by Antoshkin’s helicopter pilots at great risk to their own health, only a tiny amount reaches its target. Most piles up uselessly in the corners of the reactor building. Perhaps even more disheartening is the fact that Zborovsky’s courageous mission to release the water suppression tanks fails, and furthermore may have actually done more harm than good had it succeeded. That’s because it’s the standing water left in the tanks that, rather than causing a steam explosion, finally cools the molten uranium fuel and halts its downward flow toward the groundwater. When taking stock of all of the heroic deeds involved with the Chernobyl disaster—the firefighters and plant workers who stay behind to fight the blaze, the helicopter pilots dropping material from above, the attempt to release the water suppression tanks—most have little to no effect on the fate of the core, which essentially burns itself out. Knowing this gives even the undoubtedly heroic elements of the Chernobyl story a muted quality.
As the tide of glasnost surges uncontrollably across the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl incident, Soviet scientists finally address the inevitability of the explosion, the design flaws that caused it, and the bureaucracy that keep the flawed reactors in service for the first time outside the walls of the Politburo. In 1991, a former Chernobyl chief engineer tells a group of delegates “that the origins of the Chernobyl disaster lay in a combination of ‘scientific, technological, socioeconomic, and human factors’ unique to the USSR.” (347).
Meanwhile, the full extent of the damage caused by the Chernobyl explosion’s massive release of radiation is, frustratingly, something of an open question. Certainly when reading the book’s Epilogue, the number of individuals involved with the relief efforts who die of cancers at relatively early ages remains disheartening, as well as once robust individuals like Zborovsky who suffer steep declines in health in their 40s and 50s. This evidence, however, is ultimately anecdotal. As for the blast’s impact on individuals who live whole countries away from Chernobyl, the data is even less conclusive. While compiling this data would have been no easy task, Higginbotham argues there is already an existing study on which to model such an investigation: The health effects of the Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. And yet no one attempted a study modeled after the Japanese survivors. For that reason, the failure to conduct such a study does a disservice not only to the potential victims of the Chernobyl fallout, but also to the study of radioactivity in general.
The extent to which radiation is still poorly understood is highlighted by the unpredictable ways in which the wildlife and flora inside the Exclusion Zone adapts to the fallout. In one of the great ironies surrounding the Chernobyl disaster, some plant and animal life seems to thrive more effectively in a severely radioactive wasteland than in a radiation-free zone populated by humans, suggesting that humans are more damaging to the environment than radiation. This also emphasizes how little scientists know about how radiation affects different species, and why some species are more affected than others.
And on the subject of humanity’s effect on nature, Higginbotham opens a debate weighing the risks and rewards of embracing nuclear power. Despite his disturbing descriptions of Acute Radiation Syndrome and his use of Prometheus metaphors to conjure images of angry gods punishing humanity for harnessing fire, the book’s most consistent argument is this: The Chernobyl explosion is less the result of mankind manipulating forces better left alone and more the inevitable endpoint of a Soviet experiment mired in secrecy, hubris, and corruption. From that perspective, it is not nuclear power that’s at fault for the horrifying outcomes associated with the Chernobyl disaster, but the Soviet men and the system that shaped them and ultimately crushed them under the weight of a dysfunctional bureaucracy.
On the contrary, Higginbotham believes nuclear power may be the only thing preventing a global cataclysm with the potential to dwarf the Chernobyl explosion.
