Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry

"She does a great job here of discussing in superb and easy-to-read technical detail what an RBMK reactor is, and why the Soviets chose this design among other possible variants. She gives a biography of the development of nuclear power in the Soviet Union and shows the immense challenges involved in managing and sharing this expertise. She says that although the disaster involved Soviet organisations and people and technologies, we can’t point to a singular inherently Soviet aspect of operation of nuclear power reactors as the root cause of the catastrophe. Chernobyl was at the end point of a long history of decisions and practices—all of which, she points out, worked quite well for some time. She’s against retroactively condemning the Soviet praxis of nuclear engineering as inevitably leading to worst case scenarios. “We can’t point to a singular inherently Soviet aspect of operation of nuclear power reactors as the root cause of the catastrophe” She also says that the Soviet Union was not the only place where scientists showed an excess of hubris, or where there existed conflict between military and civilian operations that produced nuclear reactors and nuclear power. It’s not only the place where there were supply problems, mismanagement, and ambitious individuals. These are common factors in almost every society. And I think Schmid does a great job of pointing out the politics behind the development of technologies and the management of complicated technology. Yes. I think it’s important to keep in mind that the positive void coefficient comes from the United States. The first American reactors were graphite-moderated water-cooled reactors that were built for producing plutonium at Hanford. The early ones had a positive void coefficient which the Americans then corrected. Through espionage, the Soviets stole blueprints for a graphite moderated reactor. The whole understanding of plutonium as a new, man-made element was transmitted to the Soviets through espionage. So, it’s not a surprise that the Americans first had this problem in their early reactors and the Soviets appropriated that problem as they annexed the American technology. They’re not the only people in the world to have struggled with this positive void coefficient. Yes. The RBMK reactors are very big reactors—they’re not vertical; they’re horizontal and are buried in the ground—and they are really handy reactors in that you can refuel them while they are still running. You can pull out fuel rods in one part of the reactor while the other part of the reactor is still going strong. That saved them from having to turn off the power and shut down the reactor, spend a couple of months re-fuelling, and then turn it back on again with all of the slow, expensive procedures that that takes, while the reactor is off the grid. One of the reasons they chose that reactor is because it was efficient and affordable. One thing to keep in mind is that the nuclear power plant operators worked like capitalists in that they got paid by the amount of electricity they produced. Workers got bonuses if they produced more electricity. When they were running the test, they wanted to see how long they could keep the turbines going once the reactor had shut down. That was a question about power supply: can we keep feeding power with the reactor in shutdown mode? The other value of an RBMK reactor—and the Americans saw this too—is that it is a dual-purpose reactor. With some adjustments, you can not only produce electricity but also plutonium. When the Soviets built reactors abroad, they built single-purpose reactors that did not also produce plutonium. That was a geostrategic decision to make sure that places like Poland, and other countries they were helping out, didn’t have the possibility of easily producing nuclear weapons."