Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
With its zealous air-conditioning and spotless tile floors, the store was a step up from the
grungy maze of Karavayevi Dachi. Its offerings, though, were even more varied. Scanning
the room, I saw shelves of videophones and security cameras next to displays of construc-
tion paper, coloring books, and crayons. Behind us, an entire section was given over to a
plastic oasis of elaborate garden fountains cast in the shape of tree stumps. Between this
and the Chernobyl Museum, I was beginning to discern a Ukrainian national genius for ec-
lecticism.
And they sold radiation detectors. PADEKC, said the brand name on the box.
NHDNKATOP PADNOAKTNBHOCTN. The device itself was a small, white plastic box
with a digital readout and three round buttons. It looked like an early-model iPod, if iPods
had been built by PADEKC. It was simple and stylish, perfect for hip, young profession-
als on the go in a nuclear disaster zone. Leonid—the salesman—assured me that it could
measure not only gamma radiation but alpha and beta as well. (Leonid was a liar.)
He turned it on. “Russian made,” he said. We crowded around. The unit beeped uncer-
tainly a few times, then popped up a reading of 16. Sounded good to me. I coughed up far
too many hryvnia and tossed the PADEKC in my backpack, and we went outside.
In front of the store, Volod asked for some money. I had been dreading his price.
“You should pay me vodka money,” he said without irony. “A good bottle will cost
about twelve hryvnia.” He considered a dollar's worth of vodka decent pay for an hour's
work. I handed him twenty hryvnia. As he started for the street, I asked him if he would tell
us more about his time in Chernobyl.
He stopped and turned to us, suddenly taller.
“As a former Soviet officer, I cannot,” he said. And then he wandered off to buy his
vodka.
The problem with Reactor No. 4 was not so much that its safety systems failed—although
you could say they did—but that some of those systems had been disabled. Now, you could
also argue that when you're running a thousand-megawatt nuclear reactor, you should nev-
er, ever disable any of its safeguards, but then…well, there's no
but.
You'd be right.
Those systems were disabled by an overzealous bunch of engineers who were eager to
run some tests on the power plant and thought that they could do so without a safety net.
On the evening of April 25, 1986, they began an experiment to see if the reactor's own
electrical needs could be supplied by a freewheeling turbine in the event of a power outage.
