Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene

2. Marie Curie's Fingerprint: Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone

G33 2 MARIE CURIE’S FINGERPRINT NUCLEAR SPELUNKING IN THE CHERNOBYL ZONE Kate Brown it is hard to iMaGine entering a rabbit hole under the charred Chernobyl No. 4 reactor. Aleksandr Kupny did just that many times. He showed me photos he took during his expeditions underground into the reactor cavern. He would go with a friend on the sly without official permission. The explosion that occurred on April 26, 1986, thirty seconds after the reactor was shut down for an experimental safety test, blew off the building’s 4 million pound concrete roof as well as the upper walls and part of the machine room.1 The fire generated by the eruption burned at greater than two thousand degrees Celsius. The tremendous heat melted iron, steel, cement, machinery, graphite, uranium, and plutonium, turning it all into running lava that poured down through the blown floors of the reactor complex.2 The lava eventually cooled into stalactites, black, sparkling, and impenetrable. One stalactite is called the “elephant’s leg” for its thickness, gray shade, and deep furrows. In the months following the accident, scientists estimated (because it was too hot to measure directly) that the elephant’s leg emitted ten thousand roentgens an hour. To translate that measurement biologically, ten thousand roentgens means thirty seconds spent near the leg would cause dizziness and nausea for the rest of the week. Two minutes and cells would hemorrhage, four minutes would G34 ● Kate Brown lead to diarrhea and fever, while five minutes would deliver to most people a fatal dose.3 In 1989, Kupny worked as a health physics technician at Reactor No. 3, which was paired with Reactor No. 4 and still functioned after the accident. He had volunteered to go to Chernobyl, like tens of thousands of Soviet citizens in the late 1980s, because he believed it was his patriotic duty to help out after the catastrophe.4 He was also intrigued professionally. The smoking Chernobyl plant had radiation levels like nowhere else on earth. Chernobyl, Kupny said, “was the Klondike of radiation fields.” He approached the blown reactor not with justifiable dread but with a sense of opportunity. Inside the ruined reactor, he had a chance to measure radiation at levels few others could experience . “I didn’t look at the Chernobyl sarcophagus with fear. I saw it as a phenomenon. You can’t study something you fear.”5 As the years went by working as a radiation monitor, Kupny had grown more and more curious about the invisible energy he was paid to measure. He wanted to experience firsthand the tremendous power of splitting a nucleus. As a monitor, Kupny had a pass to the hottest areas at the nuclear power plant, including the sarcophagus, the vast concrete tomb built around the smoldering reactor in the months following the accident. The sarcophagus had two entry points, which were cavelike openings used by workers after the radiation levels had cooled to access the crushed control and machinery rooms. Kupny had the necessary equipment—hazmat suits, gas masks, flashlights, and radiation detectors. He also possessed a camera. His friend Sergei Koshelev had a video camera. Kupny and Koshelev had no formal permission to take their cameras and headlights on their days off and crawl into the sarcophagus, but they knew the guards and the workers, and no one stopped them. “We went there as partisans,” Kupny explained. “We took on the risk ourselves. The fewer people who knew about it, the better.” The risks were considerable, though Kupny is cavalier about them. The caverns under the reactor are former rooms—the control room, a pump house, the turbine halls—but they are no longer in the same places or in the same order they were in when the reactor was operating . The basement of the turbine generator hall is filled with water. Planks thrown over it serve as flooring. Spilled oil, slimy and slippery, seeps everywhere. The men must step lightly around cables, potholes, and ankle-trapping crevices. “Just walking,” Koshelev noted, is “a Marie Curie’s Fingerprint ● G35 hazard.”6 In the heavy darkness of the cavern, it is easy to stumble over rubble and cables, to pitch into a ditch, break a leg or arm. Heavy doors could swing shut and jam, trapping them below until help came, if it did. Flashlight batteries are not reliable when exposed to radioactive decay, and they give out, not...