Journey to Chernobyl: Encounters in a Radioactive Zone
By Glenn Alan Cheney
This book is a journalist’s diary about a trip to Ukraine in the early 90s to discover personal accounts of the events that occurred in and around Pripyat in late April of 1986. The author does an excellent job of balancing humorous anecdotes about his trip to a foreign country and his experience during first-hand interviews with people who lived through the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion.
The majority of those interviewed said similar things about how their government was to blame for the incident at the power plant and that the disaster was largely caused by poor and hasty construction as well as poor management of the project. At the time of the event, Pripyat was still under the control of the Soviet Union which was doing its best to hasten progress, even at the expense of its citizens. This lead to many corners being cut, and safety came second to the desired results.
One of the men interviewed by Cheney was the control board operator at Chernobyl reactor number four during the night of the meltdown. The reason behind the failure was due to inexperienced staff trying to conduct a test of an emergency situation in which they intentionally shut down fail safes to see if the reactor could shut down safely in the event of a blackout. Predictably, the situation got out of control too quickly for anyone to stabilize the reactor and thus caused the worst nuclear disaster in history.
This excerpt from the book best describes what went wrong:
“It’s hard to imagine a nuclear reactor in a more precarious position. It was poorly designed and shoddily constructed. Its directors knew little about nuclear power and its operators knew little about what could go wrong. All safety systems were shut off. The reactor was in a very unstable condition and an experiment was about to be conducted. If it failed, it might very well prove that a nuclear reactor could indeed blow up under certain conditions.
Cheney also interviewed citizens of Pripyat who became irradiated that day. Many were blissfully unaware of the danger lurking in the air. The government was quick to deny the danger to avoid a panic, but just days after ordered an evacuation of Pripyat and surrounding areas.
Many people suffered thyroid problems due to their bodies accepting radioactive materials as nutrients. Medicine and non-radioactive food is hard to come by in Ukraine, and much of the relief effort never made it past the government’s filters to reach citizens.
In all, the event at Chernobyl was a culmination of poor planning, poor decisions and a corrupt government. Journey to Chernobyl does a great job of telling the story from those who witnessed it first-hand and are still suffering from the after effects. The book makes for an easy read as it is told in conversational form and the author is very relatable as a “fish-out-of-water” in his visit to Ukraine.
