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How I survived Chernobyl
Sasha Yuvchenko was working at the power plant on the night of the world's worst nuclear disaster. One of his workmates was vaporised and three others died within weeks. Vivienne Parry hears his terrible tale
* Vivienne Parry
* The Guardian, Tuesday 24 August 2004
On April 25 1986, 24-year-old Sasha Yuvchenko clocked on as usual for the night shift at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine. It was a beautiful evening, particularly warm and clear, and Yuvchenko, an engineer-mechanic, and his workmates were full of their plans for the upcoming May Day holidays. At home, his wife, Natasha, was still up with their fretful two-year-old, Kirill.
On that fateful night, the water pumps in the newly commissioned No 4 reactor were being safety-tested. As the clock ticked past midnight, an argument was raging about the right power level at which to start the test. But what no one knew, thanks to years of error and cover up, was that there was a fatal flaw in the reactor design that made it unstable at low power levels. As power levels were lowered in preparation for the test, they dropped too low and the reactor ground to a halt. Meanwhile, unseen, a dangerous hot spot was building deep in the reactor.
To raise the power, the boron control rods were removed. It was like cocking a gun, and when, at 1.20am on April 26 1986, the test began and the turbines were turned off, the reactor was turned into a volcanic steam pressure cooker. Emergency shutdown procedures were started, but when the control rods were reinserted, their graphite tips caused the power levels to rise so dramatically that a portion of the reactor was destroyed. There were two explosions and the 500-tonne safety cap was blown off the reactor. It was the worst nuclear accident in history.
Yuvchenko, now 42, recalls what happened that terrible night 18 years ago. He is a bear of a man, 6ft 5in tall, and a former Soviet champion rower. You can't help but notice his left arm, which is half the size of his right and shiny with scar tissue. His wife, Natasha, sits nervously on the edge of her seat.
"There was a heavy thud," he says. "A couple of seconds later, I felt a wave come through the room. The thick concrete walls were bent like rubber. I thought war had broken out. We started to look for Khodemchuk (his colleague) but he had been by the pumps and had been vaporised. Steam wrapped around everything; it was dark and there was a horrible hissing noise. There was no ceiling, only sky; a sky full of stars." A stream of ionising radiation was shooting starwards, like a laser beam. "I remember thinking how beautiful it was."
Yuvchenko went with a party of men to recce the damaged reactor hall. He stayed outside, propping the heavy reactor hall door open with his shoulder. The three men who went in all died within two weeks. "You don't feel anything at the time," he explains. "We had no idea there was so much radiation. We met a guy with a doseometer and the needle was just off the dial. But even then, we were still only thinking 'Rats, this means the end of our careers in the nuclear industry. We all thought, 'We've been exposed now, this has happened on our watch' and set about doing what we could. After about an hour, I started to vomit uncontrollably. My throat was very sore."
By 6am, he could no longer walk. He was taken to the local hospital. Still he had no idea of the huge hit of radiation he'd received. "We were thinking we might have had 20, perhaps 50rem. But there was a man there who'd been involved in a nuclear accident in the submarine fleet, he said it was more serious than that. 'You don't vomit at 50,' he said."
At the hospital, they worked out (through measuring the fall in his white blood-cell count) that he'd received 410rem - or as it's now since been styled, 4.1Sv (one sievert is equal to 100rem) - a measure of the absorbed dose of radiation per kilogram of body weight. Four sieverts is lethal for half of those affected.
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