”Nobody orders me to do this, nobody forces me to do it. When I
enter the fourth reactor no one can bother me, no one can get hold
of me. There are no people around checking the radiation dose
that I get there. I’m in another world, a world of freedom. I was
the very first person to see the reactor from the inside. I was the
first person to think about it, to set a goal, to see even more – it’s
pure euphoria and joy.”


Checherov sits in the changing room and thinks a little about what he’s seen before he removes the white suit. He has just come back from yet another expedition into the exploded, concrete-encapsulated reactor. He is getting on in years but keeps himself in good shape and can still climb around in the ruins to explore the place that most of the world fears more than any other. ”Perhaps
it’s the radiation that keeps me fit,” he says and laughs. Checherov’s life is Chernobyl.

As a member of the absolute elite of the scientific community it sometimes seems as though he finds himself in a completely different world – a sort of parallel reality of neutrons and protons. Sometimes this is problematic for explaining his research to the rest of us.

Even before the disaster was officially announced he understood how serious it was. On 27 April 1986, he and his colleagues from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow were asked to ’deactivate’ some radioactive busses. The first victims of the disaster had been flown hastily to Moscow the day before. They were transported from the airport in busses for treatment in Hospital number 6.

”It was essential to ’deactivate’ the busses. Even though the victims had been washed before they entered the busses, the busses still became radioactive. When we saw those busses and found out how many people had been transported we understood that it was a large-scale disaster. That was ow we heard about it.”

The first official announcement came on 29th April. Although nobody knew precisely what had happened or what the consequences were, everybody from the Institute wanted to help. ”It was like an impulse and a great spiritual virtue to help.” In the first few days around 1,200 young people from the Institute volunteered to go to Chernobyl. Although Checherov was not a Komsomol* member like the others were, he applied to be sent there.

However, it was not until 7th June that he arrived at his future workplace. First he was trained at the Institute in the use of particular measuring equipment that the Soviet intelligence service had smuggled in from the U.S.A.

”Back then it was classified information but one can talk about it openly now. The plan was that I should fly over the reactor and measure temperatures with the equipment. We didn’t know whether or not it would work in a radioactive environment or what level of radioactivity it could tolerate. So I tested the equipment first in our hot (radioactive) rooms at the Institute. When the tests were over and it was clear how the equipment could be used in Chernobyl I went there.”

He flew over the open reactor but had problems getting the helicopter pilot to hover over it. Instead they flew around it several times, which unfortunately did not give nearly such accurate readings.

The nuclear power plant at Chernobyl was the pride of the Soviet Union and much depended on building up the nuclear power industry to ensure the nation’s energy supply. Each of the four large reactors could produce 1,000 megaWatts and a fifth was being built. After unit number 4 exploded the remaining three continued to produce energy right up until the year 2000 before it was finally decided to shut them down. However, one cannot simply close down a nuclear reactor in a day. It will still contain fuel that is too hot and too radioactive to be removed, so water has to be used constantly for cooling and people have to be there continually to service it.

The water reservoirs in the reactors can hold about 20% of the reactor’s fuel, so the reactor can only be cooled gradually in small portions. It takes about three years to cool one portion, which means at least 15 years for all the fuel. Only then can one begin to look at how the buildings can be demolished - and parts of these will also be radioactive.

A reactor being phased out under controlled conditions is one thing, but it is quite a different matter to clean up after an exploded reactor.

”Of course it’s a paradox that you can’t remove the fuel from the fourth reactor for the next 100 years. This means that the fourth block requires maintenance for at least 100 years from now,” says Checherov with self-assured scientific arrogance, as if one can definitely plan so far ahead.

A couple of years ago 11,000 people worked there, but after many rounds of redundancies there are only about 5,000 people left working in the exclusion zone. They work with everything right from maintenance of the sewers in the abandoned town, landscape maintenance in the zone, to the phasing out of the nuclear power plant and supervision of the ’sarcophagus’, as the concrete-encapsulated reactor is called.

After work Checherov takes the train out of the Chernobyl zone. There used to be a local railway line that went through the area with a station in Pripyat, the town where the Chernobyl power plant’s workers used to live. Today the train is used for workers and scientists to commute between the zone and the town of Slavutich, 50 km away.

Compared with an ordinary Ukrainian town Slavutich is an idyll. The streets are clean and there are flower beds in the parks. People are thriving and there is a baby boom.

There is a strange monument in the central square - a low wall of black marble: on this are engraved the portraits of 20 people who died as a direct consequence of the explosion. Behind the wall there are some bizarre cartoon-like murals. Two black figures clad in protective suits stand holding a shovel and a flower. One of the figures’ hands has six fingers, as if he’d become a mutant through his work. In order to emphasise the necessity of keeping to the facts Checherov points out that this is an exaggeration on the part of the artist. This type of protective suit was simply not available. Everybody wore cotton garments.

The other mural shows a man in a laboratory coat and mask. He looks the total cliché of a mad scientist. Each of his arms holds a wire and the two wires are producing an electrical discharge where they meet. The inscription on this mural reads ‘We shall build a new world’ in both Russian and English.

”What is this supposed to illustrate? Perhaps it shows someone who wants to blow up the whole thing with dynamite? And the person is even wearing clothes with the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s logo on it. What’s that supposed to mean? It’s simply frightening!” says Checherov, leading on to the next discussion about human error in complex technical processes.

”In general the Chernobyl personnel were less disciplined than they could have been, but discipline in the fourth reactor was very good. They followed all the commands they were given under the experiment. Those who were responsible for the disaster were a person who drafted the faulty plan for the experiment and another person who failed to ensure that the plan was followed and who got the personnel to do things that deviated from the plan.”

And what was this plan exactly?

”If the electricity supply subsides then the turbines will continue to rotate for a while. As long as they keep turning energy will still be produced. Since they are not rotating as normal the energy production will not be constant. The experiment was designed to find out how long the turbines would continue to rotate such that they produced an acceptable quantity of energy before the
backup generators had to be switched on.”

Checherov is only just warming up before he continues his explanation of the accident:

”24 hours before the experiment began the reactor was running at half capacity. In that period there were some elements of waste that absorbed the neutrons. This was the reason why the ’neutron physical’ state was different at that point in time from what it normally was. The operators didn’t know how much of this absorbed ’neutron mass’ there was in the reactor. When they began to reduce the power of the reactor in accordance with the plan they should have stopped when the power was 700 – 1000 megaWatts, but the reactor was shut down almost completely.”

Checherov is beaming. He is now in his element, even though he knows that the journalists around the table have no idea what he is talking about.

The leader of the experiment decided to increase the power of the reactor and all the control rods were raised out of the ’active zone’, as they call that part of the reactor that houses the fuel elements and control rods. However, it was not possible to increase the power of the reactor to more than 160 – 200 megaWatts because it was ’contaminated’ by elements that naturally absorb neutrons. Thus the experiment had started when the power situation was entirely different from what had been planned. Not while the power was dropping but while it was rising. The absorbing rods should have been introduced into the ’active zone’ while the power was falling, but in reality they were taken right out and so there was nothing left to prevent the reactor from accelerating.

Checherov thinks that parts of the reactor simply melted and turned into plasma. When this plasma overflowed there was an explosion of such a force that it blew the reactor’s uppermost plate off 15- 17 metres upwards. But it wasn’t the only thing to fly out. In contrast to the more ’official versions’ Checherov is convinced that most of the active zone was blasted out of the reactor and exploded while it was in the air. This explanation matches eyewitness accounts of two explosions. When the active zone was blasted out it was still compact and was still gaining speed. All the water inside it had evaporated and when the active zone reached maximum pressure it was totally destroyed.

”It’s impossible to imagine that the whole thing could return to the building if the explosion was outside.”

”There are people who think it’s important to believe that most of the active zone is inside the reactor. I doubt their opinion because I think they have their own commercial interests. I think that 95% of the fuel and the products of the nuclear fission came out of the reactor and were spread across our entire planet. Some of this fell down immediately, some a little later and some of it is still flying around in the atmosphere.”

A number of environmental organisations disagree with Checherov’s interpretation. They think that more than 97% of the radioactive materials are still inside the reactor and that only 3% were dispersed outside.

”In theory my version is the ’worst case scenario’. Why doesn’t this version suit the environmentalists? Because it’s easier for them to talk about the horror of the accident. They say: ’You see, only 3% came out of the reactor and just look at the consequences of that!’ I say: ’Almost everything came flying out and look at the consequences’. No doubt there are a lot of people making money out of scaring everyone else. ’Ooh! Nuclear power hazard! Ooh! A hole in the ozone layer!’”

Checherov grumbles about the environmental organisations being against his beloved nuclear power and about the failure of science to keep to the facts, but he is in no doubt about the medical profession’s assurances that the consequences are limited.

”The worst that can happen with a reactor of this type has happened. It can’t get worse than that. But I think the consequences are very limited and that one can certainly survive them. Of course there are some places where people have been affected a little more than others. You can’t deny that. But in general you have to say that the worst accident in a large reactor can be survived by anybody,” says Checherov.

The wall in Checherov’s office is papered with technical drawings charting what the reactor looks like today. Another part of his explanation is that the plasma that flowed out of the reactor before the explosion was at no time in danger of burning through the floor of the reactor and entering the groundwater. ”We could determine the speed of the melted part by measuring the height of the channel it carved out,” says Checherov, who believes that it flowed through some channels to the levels below, which were filled with water. There it solidified and turned to pumice, which he has found in the ruins.

”It’s very interesting inside the sarcophagus. It was fascinating to see what was left after the accident, what was deformed and what was destroyed. Every single detail can be used in research.”

Geometrical measurements taken under the shaft of the reactor showed that the supporting construction sank 3.85 m but remained horizontal. A quarter of it melted completely and flowed in different directions. Some of it flowed all the way to the lowest chamber under the reactor.

”When I crawled into that chamber I could see the melted metal constructions. They had vertical cuts with melted ends, as if a plasma cutter had been used. But the paintwork just 15 cm from there was untouched. This means that the melting process had been a short one at a very high temperature. It must have taken place at temperatures of several thousand degrees Celcius – at least 2,000 anyway.”

”The surface of the sun has a temperature of around 6,000 degrees Celsius. But the temperature in technological constructions can reach 25,000-50,000 degrees. If we assume that this sort of temperature was reached – and we have every reason to believe that this was so – then it can’t have been just hot water or steam but plasma that came out at a temperature of 5,000 degrees or even more. It’s very important, because the higher the temperature of the working element, the more powerful the pressure that is generated when the plasma flows out.”

Other scientists just smile when the name Checherov is mentioned. Perhaps because he is the type of science ’nerd’ of whom few exist or perhaps because he does not follow the unwritten rule of science which says that finance is more important than fact.

”In order to attract financial support a scientist has to scare people,” says Checherov. For example with a story about an asteroid that is going to explode on Earth or the ozone layer being eroded. You have to paint a threatening picture to convince people that it’s necessary to work on the problem. If I come to the conclusion that nothing terrible can happen and that all problems can be overcome and that people have in fact overcome them, then I won’t get any financial backing at all.

”By and large no disaster analysis was done back then. There’s no one interested in finding out what happened. Who’s interested in that? Those who said something or other in 1986, which wasn’t even correct? All these people still have power. In reality it’s ordinary people who need to hear the truth, so they can understand what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of. So you could say that it’s ordinary people who should finance this work. And not just that. Those who are working on the project should have access to the entire collection of documents. Who could give such a permission? The same people who don’t want the truth exposed.”

”So the attempt to find out the truth gets done by amateurs like me, using personal contacts and time. Amateurs in the sense that there are no specific goals for the research. It’s not work that’s been planned specifically.”

About EarthVision's 20 Years 20 Lives Project.


- Meeti Grigorij Sorikov, Pensioner, Belarus
- Meet Hanna Koslova, Wife and Mother, Ukraine
- Meet Galina Bandazhevskaya, Pediatrician, Minsk, Belarus
- Meet Valentina Smolnikowa, Buda-Koshelevo, Belarus
- Meet Alexander Filippov, Retired School Teacher, Babichi village, Belarus
- Meet Igor Komisarenko, Direktor of the Komisarenko Institute for Endochrinology and Metabolism, Kiev, Ukraine
- Meet Natalia Ivanovna Ivanova, Deputy Director, Vesnova Orphanage, Mogilev Oblast, Belarus
- Meet Danilo Vezhichanin, Mayor, the village of Yelno, Rivne Oblast, Ukraine



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* Komsomol, the Communist youth organisation in the Soviet Union. Komsomol played an important part with respect to educating young people in Communist ideology. The organisation also functioned as a centre from which manpower could quickly be opportuned, along with political activists and know-how for high-priority areas. As a member of Komsomol one received special privileges and promotions. When the organisation was at its peak in the 1970s there were more than 10 million members.


Text: Mads Eskesen
Translation: Angela Heath

Photos: Mads Eskesen and Gabriala Bulisova

The story is based on interviews in 2004 and in 2005 by Marianne Barisonek and by Mads Eskesen