Chernobyl Summary

Chernobyl teaches some fascinating and important history, science, and leadership lessons by diving into the details of the events leading up to the worst nuclear disaster in human history and its aftermath.
On April 26, 1986, reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. It was powerful enough to knock the 200-ton lid of the reactor through the roof. What’s worse is that it spewed radiation out into the atmosphere and surrounding area, affecting countless lives.

But what caused this disaster that would go down in history as the worst ever at a nuclear power plant? And what can we learn from the sequence of events before and after it happened?

This is what you’ll find out in Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. It’s got lessons on a wide range of topics, from leadership to the importance of managing big problems quickly rather than denying their severity.

These are my 3 favorite lessons I got out of this book:

1.The chain of events that led to the nuclear meltdown began with a safety test.
2.Bad leadership, incompetence, and a design flaw in the reactor all contributed to the explosion.
3.The Chernobyl disaster was responsible for only 31 recorded deaths, but dozens and maybe hundreds of people suffered because of it.

Grab your hazmat suit and let’s learn about this disaster of nuclear proportions!
Lesson 1: A safety test was at the beginning of the events that led to the meltdown.

Nuclear power plants have a lot of potential to generate significant amounts of clean energy. They do this by making nuclear fission happen. This is easiest with chemicals like Uranium, which are put into rods.

Engineers control the process with water and “control rods” that slow down the reactivity of the elements inside the core. When these rods are inside the reactor, the process slows down. By removing them, however, nuclear fission is free to carry on and the plant generates more energy.

But these facilities aren’t without their dangers. In some cases, like a bombing, the reactor can lose power and catastrophic failures are not far behind.

This is one reason it was important for personnel at the Chernobyl power plant to conduct a safety test. Their aim was to see how the plant would do if it lost power for a short amount of time. They had backup generators, but the 45 seconds these took to restore power was dangerously long.

The aim was to find out if the reactor could safely power itself while the backup power system started up. So the plant workers intentionally lowered the electricity input. They did this by removing the control rods from the reactor while simultaneously reducing input power to the plant.

But the test which began in the early hours of April 26, 1986, went horribly wrong.
Lesson 2: The explosion happened because of a prideful leader, incompetent staff, and a major design flaw that the USSR covered up.

It’s Friday afternoon and the night crew is beginning their shift at Chernobyl. However, the leader, Yuri Tregub, didn’t feel well-acquainted with the procedure for the test they had to conduct that night. Luckily, or rather unluckily, Anatoly Dyatlov, deputy chief-engineer was there to oversee the operation.

By 10 pm the team had the go-ahead to begin, and by 11 Dyatlov had arrived. Although Tregub asked for help, Dyatlov dismissed his questions. This arrogant leader pushed the team to keep working regardless of their uncertainties because he didn’t know about the fatal design flaw in the reactor. They began the test anyway, reducing power in the reactor.

Dyatlov continued to scold the crew for not working fast enough despite their questions. When the machine struggled to maintain power on its own, Dyatlov only pushed them to keep going. Eventually, only nine control rods remained in the core.

Even though power was low, the enormous amount of nuclear reactions boiled all water in the reactor into steam. The rapid increase in temperature spiked the power and Leonid Totunov pressed the emergency shutdown button, sending all control rods back in.