Tag: Mikhail Gorbachev

Chernobyl 01:23:40 The Incredible True Story of the World’s Worst Nuclear Disaster by Andrew Leatherbarrow. Sincere props to Andrew for self-publishing this well researched book. His trip to Chernobyl in 2016 provides rich insights.

While other Chernobyl books are certainly well written from an engineering view of the disaster, Andrew writes a story easy to digest.

He begins with a very strong Chapter: A Brief History of Nuclear Power. Tracing the work of Marie Curie who pioneered ground breaking research into radioactivity. Moreover, her family legacy has five Nobel Prizes. Yet, Marie and her family all died of radioactive poising.

Andrew addresses for the most part, the history of nuclear accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima.

In chapter two Chernobyl, Andrew writes a historical view of Chernobyl’s construction from 1970. One of the striking issues was finding documentation of an earlier serious accident at reactor number 1:

It is not well known that there was a severe accident at Chernobyl before the disaster of 1986, which resulted in the partial core meltdown of Unit 1. The incident occurred on September 9th, 1982, and remained secret for several years afterwards.

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Yet, even after the 1986 tragedy, a third serious accident at reactor number 3 in 1990 would again reveal problems impacting the entire Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham Adam writes for The New Yorker, Wired, The Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazines. Published in 2019 the book is named a New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year. Adam won the 2020 William E. Colby Award  for military and intelligence writing. The book also was awarded the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-fiction.

Due to the overwhelming positive response to HBO’s mini series this is a must read to learn the facts versus the dramatic and creative license of television.

The series gained widespread critical acclaim and received 19 nominations and won Emmy awards for Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing.

At the same time the series won Golden Globe awards for Best Miniseries or Television Film and actor Stellan Skarsgård won Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or Television Film.

However Adam’s detailed account sheds truth to the horrors of Chernobyl. We are now learning a much greater internal understanding from a time when information was not freely available. Conversely, the Soviet nuclear power planning would bring the number of reactors at Chernobyl from four to eight.