“Risk,” according to London Business School’s Elroy Dimson, “means that more things can happen than will happen.” Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl Roulette provides the reader with a compelling demonstration of that dictum: During the recent war in the Ukraine, catastrophe balanced on the knife edge between “can happen” and “will happen” at both Chernobyl and Zaporizhia.
In the first days after the February 24, 2022 invasion, thousands of Russian troops swept through Chernobyl on their way to Kiev, 85 road miles to the south. One detachment, under Colonel Andrei Frolenkov, stayed to garrison the facility, a hot radioactive souffle since the April 1986 explosion of its reactor No. 4.
The shuttered nuclear power plant required ongoing management to prevent explosive heating of the nuclear debris from both the original explosion and from spent fuel rods from the three intact reactors. Both the Russian invaders and Ukrainian plant operators were well aware of the high stakes involved in a military attack on any nuclear facility, let alone this one.
The lightly armed Ukrainian militiamen facing Frolenkov’s heavy armor especially understood the risk to their homeland. With heavy hearts, the defenders, torn between their military duty and the risk of contaminating the fatherland with lethal radioisotopes, laid down their arms. The invaders, for their part, offered the world a rationalization for the plant’s occupation that was outrageous even by Russian standards: They were there to protect the world from nuclear blackmail by the Ukrainians, incredibly enough, on their own soil.
Nearly all of Chernobyl’s workers lived in Slavutych, dozens of miles to the east, now cut off from the plant by a southeastern finger of Belarus, which was – and still is – hostile territory. Even before the invasion, the plant’s operators worked grueling 12-hour shifts. With relief crews now cut off from the plant, those present on the afternoon of February 25 found themselves working 24/7 for weeks on end.
A foolhardy gambit
The Russian disinformation campaign during Chernobyl’s five-week occupation evolved in tragicomic fashion: Not content to sabotage the facility, Russia claimed the Ukrainians were intent, variously, on developing either a radioactive “dirty bomb” or a full-fledged atomic weapon. Worse, the Russians believed their own propaganda and tore the facility apart in search of supporting evidence. Finding none, they proposed a suicidal unearthing of the area’s waste mounds, smoldering from isotope decay; they stopped only when the Ukrainians told them that they’d be digging their own graves.
Over the course of the occupation, the Ukrainians and Russians engaged in a macabre dance, the former dependent on the forbearance of their paranoid, heavily armed captors, the latter petrified by their dim knowledge of the facility’s radioactive danger. The Ukrainians well understood this dynamic and constantly reminded the Russians that if they went too far, “Who can guarantee [we] won’t turn a valve the wrong way?”
As a general rule, the Russians, out of self-preservation, treated the Ukrainian plant workers well, though their tolerance fell off rapidly with distance from the facility – Ukrainians who ventured too far off site often found weapons aimed at them. Moreover, the Russians looted anything they could get their hands on, even computers and essential radiation monitors, mayhem they blamed on the Ukrainians.
In mid-March, the plant suffered a hair-raising power outage, likely the result of fighting along the transmission lines leading north from Kiev. The Russians, knowing that this would result in overheating of the hot, spent uranium rods, arranged an electrical power connection from Belarus; the Ukrainians agreed to this only on condition that the Russians also supply electricity to their headquarters at Slavutych, where their families lived. The Russians, finally realizing the danger posed by exhausted Ukrainian operators, arranged a change of shift from Slavutych; the incoming fresh batch of volunteers wondered if they would ever see their homes again.
Endangering the world
The Chernobyl episode reached its climax in late March, five weeks into its occupation, with the battle for Slavutych, between Ukrainian defenders, largely lightly armed irregulars, and Russian troops manning multiple rocket launchers, tanks, and heavy artillery. After several days of brutal fighting, the Russians slowly made their way into the town’s central square, now thronged with most of the remaining population. Led by a local priest, Father Ioann Shepynda, the unarmed crowd rushed the Russians, who fired mainly over the crowd’s heads, though a few townspeople, either deliberately or by accident, were killed and injured.
Although it seemed incredible at the time, the Russians withdrew to checkpoints outside the town. Why? Likely because they had been told by Chernobyl’s operators that if any harm came to their families and colleagues in Slavutych, they would contaminate the plant with a dirty bomb. The Russians, who intended to blackmail the world with nuclear contamination at Chernobyl, fell victim to the same blackmail and, bloodied by their unsuccessful attack on Kiev, departed the plant for good on their way back to the Belarus frontier.
The early-March Russian storming of the facility at Zaporizhia, one of the world’s most powerful nuclear plants, was more frightening than that at Chernobyl. If Colonel Frolenkov afforded the Chernobyl plant a modicum of care, the same cannot be said of Major General Alexei Dombrovsky’s assault on Zaporizhia. His troops fired indiscriminate tank and RPG rounds at the multiple buildings, including one of the still operating reactors, as well as one housing a critical generator. As fires raged and smoke billowed, the engineers frantically began the lengthy shutdown process, imagined the worst, and pleaded with the attackers, “Stop shooting immediately! You are threatening the security of the whole world!”
Zaporizhia’s operators somehow staved off catastrophe; the Russians, for their part, told the world that their assault had saved the planet from Ukrainian saboteurs. While the Chernobyl plant was a still-smoldering mausoleum, Zaporizhia’s six reactors shut down gradually over the next several months; since September 2022, five have been in “cold shutdown” and one in “hot shutdown,” just enough to power the plant’s critical steam generators.
Gaps in the story
Chernobyl Roulette suffers from the rarest of literary flaws: At 188 pages of text, it is simply too short to methodically lay the necessary narrative foundation. Much of the story revolves around the dense immediate geography in the Chernobyl vicinity, yet the author provides only one inadequate map that displays just a small number of the many locations discussed, omitting, for example, the town of Slavutych, as central to the crisis as Chernobyl itself. (The author similarly did not place on any map the city of Enerhodar, which was critical to the attack on the Zaporizhia plant.)
An understanding of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhia occupations would have been greatly enhanced by a basic description of the underlying nuclear engineering at the two plants. Even a “physics for poets” discussion of their operations would have been greatly appreciated.
At Chernobyl, for example, the action centered on controlling the ongoing potential for nuclear contamination, especially from reactor 4 – which blew up in 1986 and was now encased in its infamous “sarcophagus” – and from the other 3 reactors, which had long since been decommissioned but still required attention to their spent fuel rods.
Moreover, the author devotes only about 10 percent of the book to the Zaporizhia facility, with its six partially shut down reactor vessels, which remain under Russian control and subject to ongoing military operations. The reader is left to wonder if the author did not throw away the Zaporizhia baby but keep the Chernobyl bathwater.
These deficiencies are a shame; 440 nuclear power plants operate around the world, and as recent events in the Middle East have highlighted, some are bound to wind up in war zones, where catastrophe waits in the wings. While Chernobyl Roulette is a readable introduction to the recent events at Chernobyl and Zaporizhia, a more complete understanding of the fraught transition from the “can happen” and “will happen” of nuclear powerplants in war zones awaits a future volume.
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, the co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and a writer with several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from the CFA Institute.
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“Risk,” according to London Business School’s Elroy Dimson, “means that more things can happen than will happen.” Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl Roulette provides the reader with a compelling demonstration of that dictum: During the recent war in the Ukraine, catastrophe balanced on the knife edge between “can happen” and “will happen” at both Chernobyl and Zaporizhia.