Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

This history book recounts and explains the events of the Chernobyl disaster in detail, including full background such as the construction of the plant and short biographies of many of the people involved. It is very readable; almost too readable because the horrors of the event are so fascinating as to seem almost fictional. Of all books about Chernobyl, this one seems to be the best-researched.After you read this book you can appreciate the later (and really very good) Chernobyl TV miniseries https://www.amazon.com/Chernobyl-BD-Digital-Copy-Blu-ray/dp/B07SSDQSHV/ref=sr_1_1 even more-- you will recognize how the TV writers crunched down, melded, and distorted the stories of the real people and events to fit the small screen (and you can feel a bit annoyed at some of their politically-correct inventions and technical goofs).This book is fully-justified as history and (though it may seem disrespectful to say it) as entertainment (at least entertaining history is not quickly forgotten). However, it can also be justified as a warning against subordinating safety engineering to bureaucratic politics. Both engineering and public-administration students should read this book; it should be featured in ethics training for people in both lines of work.

The book goes into great detail with lots of background information on the accident and the people who were involved. The author starts by describing the years of mismanagement and secrecy that led up to the accident, including several smaller but similar accidents involving that reactor design that were covered up, and ends with the aftermath and how those who survived ended up.. After reading this, I'm amazed that those reactors went as long as they did without an accident of this magnitude. The Soviets couldn't have done things worse if they had tried.

Very detailed account of this event. What is most disturbing is the LONG history of Soviet nuclear disasters hidden from the world prior to Chernobyl. If you are someone who dislikes American 'big government', you'll be very grateful for our system after reading this.

I never really knew very much about Chernobyl. I was going through a very difficult time in my life in 1986, so current events weren’t at the top of my list. It’s a good thing I didn’t know what was going on! What a horrific nightmare. This book is Not an easy read. I had to force myself to continue reading it a few times. It will enrage you, shock you, scare the hell out of you, and it actually brought me to my knees in prayer. Let me just say this one thing. The core of the reactor at Chernobyl nearly burned a hole through the earth directly to China. That could, in no way, bode well for any of us! You will have to read the rest for yourself. All I can say is that I spent most of my time reading and just shaking my head in disbelief!I highly recommend this book for anyone brave enough to know the truth about an event that changed our world and potentially could have ended it.

I just received the book and haven't read it yet. I received the book in a timely manner and was in excellent condition. Thank you.

I was a junior in high school when this story exploded. I thought I knew a lot, especially since I played Call of Duty in the deserted streets and buildings of Pripyat. At the time of the disaster, I was also a huge supporter of Ronald Reagan, and loved his challenges to the "Evil Empire." I remember, "Mr. Gorbackev, tear down this wall."I've also watched documentaries about the wildlife returning and reclaiming the town and region. But Higginbotham's book takes those fragments of knowledge and creates entire lives and drama from so many directions. Riveting reporting! It took years for him to work on this book, working for different magazines on different angles, making the journeys several times to interview those whose stories needed to be told. From a non-science major, I had to read slowly at times. And it felt like a Tolstoy novel at times with the challenging Russian and Ukrainian names. The drama fits right in with Tolstoy or the other Russian greats. I never made the connection between the fall of the USSR and Chernobyl. I knew how cronyism works and the Party system, but just how dangerous such systems can be are truly eye-opening. We have fiction for this, of course, but it's even more terrifying when the terror is nonfiction.The takeaway for me, besides a great course in nuclear physics and alpha, beta, gamma rays, (please do not give me a quiz), is the 1) need for powerful leadership at all levels in government and in hospitals in times of crisis, like now with COVID-19 2) the ability for ignorance and arrogance of radiation, like a virus (we don't see it, therefore it doesn't exist), to kill and mutate so many people and animals and ecosystems 3) the ability of government propaganda to persuade so many people that what has happened or what is happening is not actually a cause for concern 4) the ways a few lower on the Party level can pay the price for systematic and wide-spread failure across the entire Soviet Empire. 5) Those who have power will do everything to keep power and truth from coming out, in spite of what is best for its citizens and for the citizens of the world. After all, I was shocked to see how far-reaching the radiation spread throughout the world. (Radiated animals in Scotland? What).People who select to read this book may not need these lessons in government propaganda and the corruption of power. This is not a Book for Dummies. But many intelligent people need to know what happens when ideology and blind loyalty to the Party, whether Communist, Republican, or Democrat, trumps everything else, and may not only blind us to truth, but kill us and make the land and animals and humans sterile or mutated for generations.Truly frightening. There is a time to trust the government, like with Churchill and the Nazi Menace, and there is a time to distrust: are you really concerned with my welfare, or just your Power and Cronyism? When there is no honest journalism, like this, which took over more than three decades to cover, how can the people even know?

The book is written beautifully but the unfortunate event should have been avoided where safety was overlooked . The gift of fire became a disaster with uncontrolled expectation and government hubris .

I was in rage upon coming across the review in which its author complained about "little new," "some technical inaccuracies," and recommended instead the book by a certain Grigory Medvedev." Most likely, the said reviewer had not even bothered to read "Midnight in Chernobyl."Firstly, it was safe for him to say "little new." The latter book was published more than thirty years after the event, and the number of previous publications is impressive. Which doesn't mean there is "little new," not at all.Secondly, it's easy to accuse the author of "some technical inaccuracies," without mentioning them to boot. The author is a professional journalist, not a nuclear scientist after all. Especially when even the academicians were running about the accident area like headless chickens.Finally, about the "recommendation." It's not even the fact that Medvedev's book, "The Truth About Chernobyl" dates back to 1990. It's the fact, barely known in the West, that this book had been approved for publication by the VAAP agency. This agency was the USSR government's chief tool for censoring all literary work, however insignificant. You may remember how hard the USSR government tried to suppress the truth about the catastrophe. Therefore, the VAAP's approval of "The Truth About Chernobyl" speaks volumes about the kind of "truths" Medvedev offers to his readers. Some recommendation.Pray, forgive my excavating some unsavoury linen.Adan Higginbotham's book, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of journalistic investigation. It's the first really comprehensive account of the tragedy. I use the word "tragedy" rather than "catastrophe" on purpose. To me, "catastrophe" obliquely refers to the technical aspects of an accident, whereas "tragedy" stresses the human element. And this is a book about a tragedy. The book is about people in ultimately stressful situations. And a very humane book at that.They say sometimes about "spoilers." No go. Read the book.But if I haven't lost you yet, indulge me with some more of your patience."Midnight in Chernobyl" hit me on the raw and proved to be deeply personal. When I reached "Inside control room (...) Boris noticed a sharp, mechanical smell, unlike any he had ever encountered before" (p/b edition, p. 89), the words "sharp, mechanical smell" all but floored me. You see, once I was recuperating at a Sredmash sanatorium on the Black Sea. One early morning I was about to go for a dip in the sea, not a swim: the water was too cold, and froze in my tracks. I sensed something unusual and tried to comprehend what it was. There! A sharp, metallic smell in the air, unlike any smell I've experienced before. The date was April 26, 1986. A few days later came the explanation: we were allowed to know that a "slight accident" occurred at a nuclear power station in Chernobyl, and the words got etched in my memory forever. By the way, this is the first time ever that I "speak" about that experience of mine: who cares for being laughed at: I was hundreds of miles from Chernobyl after all. However, "The lecturers in Moscow might tell you that radiation has no odor or taste, but they’ve never been to Chernobyl" (p. 286). Now I feel redeemed.Then it was the sentence "One of the assistants was showered eighteen times in an attempt to remove the radioactive particles from his skin" (p. 192). In my case, once I was forced to shower eight times before the dosimetrists let me go. A mere eight times, but probably because all this was happening in a canvas tent pitched amidst a steppe, in deep winter, and the dosimetrists simply got cold or bored or tired, whatever.More about "personal." My neighbor next flat, i. e. in the flat above mine, a young nuclear scientist, volunteered or was sent to Chernobyl shortly after the accident. He died a few months after returning home. Even now I hear his groans, his constantly calling his wife for help in a weak voice. If she couldn't come to him immediately, apparently when exhausted by looking after him, he would start throwing at her good Russian curses, and in a much stronger voice at that.My neighbor next door has died recently. Was radiation to blame? I don't know. But he had been to Chernobyl as a liquidator, and nobody in fact knows either a maximum safe radiation dose or how late in life an exposure to radiation can reveal itself and in what form.I could go on and on.But why all these reminiscences and what have they to do with Adam Higginbotham's superb book? Easy: blame the book. Blame the range of emotions it engenders in the reader: rage, anger, shame, pity, amazement, gratitude, sympathy, you name it. I'm not in the least ashamed to admit that sometimes I had to push away the book in order to swallow down the tears.The book is that powerful.And one of the ways to adequately reward the author for this feat of highly professional, exhaustive, unbiased, humane journalism, for this ultimate account of a dire tragedy, would be to award him the Pulitzer Prize.

Nuclear NightmareAt 1:24 a.m. Staturday, April 26, 1986 the world changed when Alexander Akimov pressed the AZ-5 "fail-safe button" of the Number four Nuclear Reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Planet, near the city of Pripyat, Soviet Ukraine. He thought he was stoping a run away chain reaction. But because of a cost-cutting design defect (kept secret by the USSR), the falling graphite tiped control rods instead cause the core to exploded. And the dream of limitless free electricity, thanks to nuclear power was relieved to the whole world to be the nightmare it always was.Bizarrely the accident acured during a safety test. The explosion killed two of the reactor staff. 134 staff and fire fighters would be treated for acute radiation syndrome, of these 28 would die. Officially the USSR claimed only 31 people died because of the nuclear disaster. However it is possible that the radiation released caused up to 16,000 deaths from different forms of cancer acrose Europe as a whole. This book by Adam Higginbotham explains why this was a continent wide disaster, it effects felt as far away as Wales;"In Britain restrictions on the sale of sheep grazed on the hill farms of North Wales would not be lifted until 2012. Subsequent studies found that three decades after the accident, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic were still too radioactive for human consumption."The book is written in clear and concise style. And can be read by people who are familiar with nuclear physics or are complete novices. It is based on years of research by the author. What makes the book so interesting is the wealth of incidental details, that helps to bring the stories of those who worked in the planet, fought the fire and tried to contain the radioactive ruins of reactor number four. The writer has real human sympathy for all of those involved, the living and the dead."Against this wall, surrounded by a puddle of milky liquid, stood a red marble monument hearing a bronze bas-relief: the dark shape of a man wearing the cylindrical cap of a power plant worker, one arm outstretched in alarm...This was the tombstone of Valery Khodemchuk, the first man to die as a result of the explosion of Unit Four. His surviving colleagues had built the memorial as close as they cared to the place they believed his body lay buried. Whatever remained of the vanished machinist lay immediately beyond this point, on the other side of three meters of concrete and a layer of lead, beneath thousands of tonnes of rubble, sand and twisted debris. Somewhere in there with him, too, was the melted heart of Reactor Number Four, a protean mass of uranium, zirconium, and other core elements that remained almost as enigmatic and deadly as it was on the day of the catastrophe began almost thirty years before."This book is ideal for anybody who labourers under the absurd delusion that nuclear power is the magic panacea for all of the world's economic, energy and environmental problems. It is a dirty, old fashioned, discredited technology that should be entombed in that vast sarcophagus that houses the remains of plant, crashed under the weight of the "Elephant's Foot", the radioactive remains of the reactor's nuclear fuel, they found in the ruins of Unit Four;"What they found there was a massive, globular, stalagmite-like formation of some mysterious substance. It appeared to have closed down from somewhere above their heads before solidifying into a anthracite-black glassy mass. The formation, which they named the Elephant's Foot, stood half as tall as a man and weighed as much as two tonnes. Its surface was emitting an astonishing 8,000 Roentgen per hour, or 2 roentgen a second: five minutes in its presence was enough to guarantee a agonizing death."This book would make a good companion to the brilliant HBO/Sky miniseries 'Chernobyl. Recommended.

This excellent and relatively recent book – it was first published in 2019 – describes in detail the events before, during and after the “worst nuclear disaster in history”, when the reactor in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded on Saturday 26th April 1986. The author is a journalist and he undertook exhaustive research, including interviewing many of the main players - such as Viktor Brukhanov, the plant director - and scrutinising and analysing contemporaneous and subsequent documents and reports, some of which have only recently become available.His conclusions are convincing, and markedly different to those propagated by the Soviet Union at the time, and by the governments of USSR and Russia for many years afterwards. They claimed that the accident’s sole cause was the errors made by the reactor’s operators, thus absolving the country’s designers and scientists from blame and preserving the “prestige” of Soviet technology. The book recognises the failures of the reactors’ operators on the night of the accident, who pressed ahead with a test while ignorant of the consequences of doing so; but it concludes that the main causes of the disaster were the design of the graphite and water-cooled RBMK-1000 reactor (one unique to the USSR); deficiencies in the reactor’s construction, including the use of poor quality and incorrect materials, in order to meet unreasonable Soviet timetables; insufficient testing during the reactor’s commissioning; breaches of safety regulations, which were themselves inadequate; the failure to learn from earlier nuclear accidents in the country; Soviet bureaucracy; and so forth.The book describes the heroic efforts of the people who attempted to fight the disaster, jeopardising their health in the process, sometimes out of a sense of duty but frequently in response to inhumane Soviet orders. These were the firemen local to the Chernobyl plant who responded first to the incident, without knowledge of the effects of radiation or any training on handling incidents in a nuclear facility; the Russian helicopter pilots who made hundreds of sorties to drop boron and sand into the destroyed but still active reactor; and the over 3,000 “biorobots” who were recruited to tip radioactive debris from the shared roof of units 3 and 4 into the reactor’s core, using just their bare hands and basic tools. Sadly, all these efforts were futile.The Chernobyl explosion released a stream of radioactive particles westwards, driven by the prevailing winds, across Belarus and then over much of Western Europe. Although the official death toll is only 54, Soviet and then Russian, Ukrainian and other countries’ governments have actively discouraged, and still discourage, the attribution of cancers, deaths and mutations to the accident. Many researchers believe, and I’m inclined to believe them, that the actual number of deaths could be as high as 200,000; whatever the true number, it is obvious that thousands of deaths have not been properly investigated.Radioactive contamination was experienced far from the exclusion zone that was eventually created around the Chernobyl nuclear plant and Pripyat, the town adjacent to it, with Polesia – the area that stretches from Eastern Poland, straddles the Belarus-Ukraine border, and reaches into western Russia – particularly badly affected. Polesia experienced a spike in cancers and birth defects after the disaster, and the term “Belarusian necklace” was invented to refer to the horizontal scar after surgery for thyroid cancer. Some estimates suggest one in five people in Belarus still live on contaminated land, with poor people having the greatest exposure to radiation because they eat locally sourced food such as wild mushrooms, berries and milk.The author’s explanations of the technicalities of nuclear reactors and radiation are clear and are helped by a useful glossary.This book is not a comfortable read, but it is highly recommended.

A well written and compelling story of hubris, arrogance, cowardice and heroism. The author brilliantly weaves science and politics into a fascinating documentary of a real-world horror.