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Viktor Bryukhanov, who helped build and manage the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, in 1986, when a reactor explosion released a cloud of radioactive dust over Europe and a smog of political fallout that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Viktor Bryukhanov, in Kiev on October 13. died. He was 85 years old.
His death was announced by a spokesman for the now-closed power station. After five years in prison, Mr. Bryukhanov returned to civil service in Ukraine to head the technical department at the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade.
He was treated for Parkinson’s disease and has had several strokes since retiring in 2015.
However, Mr. Bryukhanov denied criminal responsibility. He attributed the explosion to original design flaws dictated by Moscow, the failure of high-level officials to provide adequate equipment to measure radiation leaks, and bureaucratic bureaucracies dividing responsibility between technocrats and Communist Party apparatuses.
Nevertheless, he was chosen as the most important man in the fall, convicted of serious violations He was expelled from the party due to security rules. He was sent to a labor camp, serving half his 10-year sentence, and was released after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Investigations concluded that faulty protocols in the plant’s design and inadequately trained personnel caused the steam explosion and fires in the early hours of 26 April 1986 during a faulty safety experiment at the end of the plant’s four reactors.
The explosion shattered the reactor’s steel and concrete roof and spewed tons of radioactive debris half a mile into the air.
Two workers died immediately, and within weeks another 28 deaths from radiation poisoning were recorded. Although about 350,000 people living in the area were evacuated, scientists estimate that the radiation exposure from the accident could be attributed to an additional 5,000 thyroid cancers.
“My father came home after 24 hours and looked like he was 15,” Oleg, son of Mr.
The wind spread radioactivity as far west as Italy and France, contaminating millions of acres of European farmland and forest, and deforming newborn animals. After the accident, the reactor core was enclosed in a concrete and steel sarcophagus, but even that proved to be structurally inadequate and officials declared the 1,600 square miles surrounding the facility to be indefinitely uninhabitable.
“You need to understand the real causes of the disaster in order to know in which direction you need to develop alternative energy sources,” Mr. Bryukhanov told the Russian magazine Profile in 2006. “In this sense, Chernobyl did not teach anyone anything. ”
He claimed that he and several other factory officials were scapegoated as a result of “a pile of lies that kept us from investigating the true causes of the accident”.
Viktor Petrovich Bryukhanov was born on December 1, 1935 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which was then a Soviet republic. His father was a glazier and his mother was a cleaner.
After graduating from the Tashkent Polytechnic Institute (now Tashkent State Technical University) with a degree in electrical engineering in 1959, he got a job as a mechanical fitter at the Angren Power Plant in Tashkent.
He and his wife, Valentina, a former electrical engineer in Chernobyl, have lived in Kiev since 1992. In addition to computer repairman Oleg, they had another child, a pediatrician named Lily. Complete information on survivors was not available.
As the construction manager of the Chernobyl plant, Mr. Bryukhanov recommended the installation of what are known as pressurized water reactors, which are widely used around the world. But it was rejected in favor of a different type unique to the Soviet Union: the four Soviet-designed, water-cooled RBMK reactors placed end-to-end in an enormous building.
“Scientists, engineers, and managers in the Soviet nuclear power industry, among others, argued for years that a coolant loss accident was unlikely to the point of impossibility in an RBMK,” wrote historian Richard Rhodes. “Arsenal of Stupidity” (2007), his book on the nuclear arms race. “They knew better.”
Chernobyl’s first reactor came into operation in 1977. After a leak was fixed in 1982, all four reactors were operational by 1984.
In his report on the accident, Soviet Politburo He also blamed government investigators.
Mr. Rhodes wrote that he was promoted to run Chernobyl despite a previous accident involving a steam valve leak at another facility where Mr Bryukhanov was involved.
“Now in the night someone called Bryukhanov from the power plant and told him ‘something terrible happened – some kind of explosion’,” said Mr Rhodes. “He rushed to the scene, thinking he would have to deal with another steam valve breakage, but when he saw Number Four devastated and smoking, fires burning on the roof, fire trucks everywhere, he later said ‘my heart stopped’.
“He claimed he called Moscow to order an immediate evacuation, without finding any officials willing to believe such an accident could happen to an RBMK,” Mr. Rhodes continued. “Irrespective of whether he had contacted Moscow, he waited until four in the morning – three and a half hours after the explosions – to alert the Kiev Regional Civil Defense, the official closest to the factory, and then only reported the roof fires and told Kiev. It’ll go out soon.”
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