• Trip to Pripiat.Chernóbil, life without us

Chernobyl 01:23:40 is the title of one of the books on which the popular HBO series is based on that nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986. It is a cold and weighted account of the chain of events that led to the catastrophe. and an analysis of the remedies that were put in place: some heroic and other useless measures, and in some cases both .

Written by Scottish Andrew Leatherbarrow, it is published in Spanish by the Duomo publisher on Monday. At the end of the interview, the journalist will challenge the author to be able to explain Chernobyl in an elevator conversation.

And there it goes: "During a safety test, the reactor became so unstable that when the shutdown button was pressed a design defect led to a runaway nuclear reaction that in turn caused an explosion of the steam under pressure." Chernobyl was a bit more complicated than that, but Leatherbarrow puts the atoms in their place.

The horror and pain we have seen in the series has debtors and the guilt was not well distributed. " The Soviet Union was unusually honest in admitting mistakes in the Chernobyl accident, and because of this, the world believed them when they lied stating that it was all the fault of the men in the control room," explains Leatherbarrow to ELMUNDO. That "lie" continued for five years, until the fall of the USSR. "The truth came to light, but by then everyone had been blaming the operators for too long."

The clarity came with the report of the State Committee for the Supervision of Safety in the Nuclear Industry of the USSR, which concluded that "the Chernobyl accident (...) had disastrous consequences due to deficiencies in the design of the reactor ." And he also referred to another critical issue: that there was no consistent high-level responsible action in charge of the nuclear industry, “which was one of the reasons why the production of a dangerous reactor like the RBMK could be approved- 1000 ».

Eleven reactors of that model are still running . Should I take our sleep away? “It is not ideal, although these reactors underwent modifications and the regulations for their use have also changed a lot; but that type of reactor has many failures, so it would be better to remove them ».

The Chernobyl book. 01:23:40 It 's the final judgment of the disaster. And Leatherbarrow's opinion is that the fault was not so much of the people who were in the control room, that in any case he made mistakes and paid for them. The plant was a danger since its construction : "I do not understand how many design failures went unnoticed for so long," explains the author, for whom "the most notable design error was that at the ends of each control bar, which [moving into the reactor] are used to stop the nuclear reaction, a material was used that actually increases the reaction instead of decreasing it ».

Using flammable materials to seal the roof of a nuclear power plant is another of the biggest mistakes made. It also caused problems "secrecy and lack of training, which meant that the people who operated the reactors did not understand the danger of what they were doing." Chernobyl is a way of explaining what the Soviet Union was: "Secrecy and control overruled all other considerations."

Other negative factors were the rush to launch Chernobyl in the 70s without finishing the tests, and that sickly opacity of the USSR that led those responsible to believe that nothing could fail, when there had been major breakdowns in other plants, hidden even from inside doors to the specialists themselves.

In fact, the fatal experiment had already been carried out previously in the other reactors. "The difference was that this time the power of reactor four fell to almost zero, causing an atomic poisoning of the fuel that lasted the increase in power, becoming unstable enough to explode."

In his book, Leatherbarrow describes chaotic situations inside the control room of an already almost doomed reactor, such as transcripts of telephone calls between an operator and another colleague:

-What I do? In the action program [of the essay] there are instructions on what to do. And then there are others that are crossed out.

- [After thinking for a moment] Better follow the crossed out instructions .

It was after midnight. Engineers were beginning to reduce energy levels and the plant was heading towards disaster.

By the way, the acclaimed series of Craig Mazin for HBO is declared innocent in this trial, except for some licenses: it is false that soldiers aimed at miners and employees to do their job.

His main character, the scientist Valeri Legasov , is a tragic hero in fiction but he was also in reality. "I think he was a good man in his essence, the Chernobyl accident changed him and one could argue that he was less altruistic before that fact, but he devoted the last years of his life to making positive changes in the Soviet scientific establishment ."

Legasov and his team "made some mistakes in the early days, especially by throwing sandbags on the fire , which only served to make the problem worse."

Leatherbarrow destroys myths such as those who plunged into the flooded reactor gave their lives in a few days: they actually lived and have been decorated a few years ago. And he faces terrible realities such as that a quarter of the miners who chopped a tunnel under the plant naked did not last more than 10 years and that their work was useless.

Craig Mazin ran into Leatherbarrow's book during the documentation work to make the series and decided to be guided by him when writing the script. "Mazin invited me to Lithuania, where they filmed during the summer of 2018 [at the Ignalina nuclear power plant] and I was moved to see actors and producers trying to do their work in the most authentic way," says the author.

Already in 2011, after years of reading, researching and dreaming about Chernobyl, Leatherbarrow traveled to that old Ukrainian nuclear power plant, a place stopped in time. He took hundreds of photos, heard the emptiness of Pripiat, walked along polluted paths, learned to shoot with a Kalashnikov and returned crying against the window pane , suddenly assuming what had happened there. He knew that he had to finish his work: "I had never felt the desire to write a book, but I decided to write something I wanted to read." The result is this thorough chronicle of how the human being is more dangerous than uranium.

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