Adam Higginbotham's "Midnight in Chernobyl: An Unprecedented Look at the World's Most Catastrophic Nuclear Accident"

Subhrendu Nath: The book is written beautifully but the unfortunate event should have been avoided where safety was overlooked . The gift of fire became a disaster with uncontrolled expectation and government hubris .

India on Aug 19, 2023

Bruce F. Wilken: Very detailed account of this event. What is most disturbing is the LONG history of Soviet nuclear disasters hidden from the world prior to Chernobyl. If you are someone who dislikes American 'big government', you'll be very grateful for our system after reading this.

United States on Aug 12, 2023

Goat_Whisperer: The book goes into great detail with lots of background information on the accident and the people who were involved. The author starts by describing the years of mismanagement and secrecy that led up to the accident, including several smaller but similar accidents involving that reactor design that were covered up, and ends with the aftermath and how those who survived ended up.. After reading this, I'm amazed that those reactors went as long as they did without an accident of this magnitude. The Soviets couldn't have done things worse if they had tried.

United States on Jul 30, 2023

Stevie in YYC: A well written and compelling story of hubris, arrogance, cowardice and heroism. The author brilliantly weaves science and politics into a fascinating documentary of a real-world horror.

Canada on Jul 17, 2023

Poetic Engineer: This history book recounts and explains the events of the Chernobyl disaster in detail, including full background such as the construction of the plant and short biographies of many of the people involved. It is very readable; almost too readable because the horrors of the event are so fascinating as to seem almost fictional. Of all books about Chernobyl, this one seems to be the best-researched.

After you read this book you can appreciate the later (and really very good) Chernobyl TV miniseries https://www.amazon.com/Chernobyl-BD-Digital-Copy-Blu-ray/dp/B07SSDQSHV/ref=sr_1_1 even more-- you will recognize how the TV writers crunched down, melded, and distorted the stories of the real people and events to fit the small screen (and you can feel a bit annoyed at some of their politically-correct inventions and technical goofs).

This book is fully-justified as history and (though it may seem disrespectful to say it) as entertainment (at least entertaining history is not quickly forgotten). However, it can also be justified as a warning against subordinating safety engineering to bureaucratic politics. Both engineering and public-administration students should read this...

United States on Jul 06, 2023

Phil Knight: Nuclear Nightmare

At 1:24 a.m. Staturday, April 26, 1986 the world changed when Alexander Akimov pressed the AZ-5 "fail-safe button" of the Number four Nuclear Reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Planet, near the city of Pripyat, Soviet Ukraine. He thought he was stoping a run away chain reaction. But because of a cost-cutting design defect (kept secret by the USSR), the falling graphite tiped control rods instead cause the core to exploded. And the dream of limitless free electricity, thanks to nuclear power was relieved to the whole world to be the nightmare it always was.

Bizarrely the accident acured during a safety test. The explosion killed two of the reactor staff. 134 staff and fire fighters would be treated for acute radiation syndrome, of these 28 would die. Officially the USSR claimed only 31 people died because of the nuclear disaster. However it is possible that the radiation released caused up to 16,000 deaths from different forms of cancer acrose Europe as a whole. This book by Adam Higginbotham explains why this was a continent wide disaster, it effects felt as far away as Wales;

"In Britain restrictions on the sale of sheep grazed on the...

United Kingdom on Nov 11, 2020

R. A. Walker: This excellent and relatively recent book – it was first published in 2019 – describes in detail the events before, during and after the “worst nuclear disaster in history”, when the reactor in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded on Saturday 26th April 1986. The author is a journalist and he undertook exhaustive research, including interviewing many of the main players - such as Viktor Brukhanov, the plant director - and scrutinising and analysing contemporaneous and subsequent documents and reports, some of which have only recently become available.

His conclusions are convincing, and markedly different to those propagated by the Soviet Union at the time, and by the governments of USSR and Russia for many years afterwards. They claimed that the accident’s sole cause was the errors made by the reactor’s operators, thus absolving the country’s designers and scientists from blame and preserving the “prestige” of Soviet technology. The book recognises the failures of the reactors’ operators on the night of the accident, who pressed ahead with a test while ignorant of the consequences of doing so; but it concludes that the main causes of the...

United Kingdom on Jun 30, 2020

Walter Bowne: I was a junior in high school when this story exploded. I thought I knew a lot, especially since I played Call of Duty in the deserted streets and buildings of Pripyat. At the time of the disaster, I was also a huge supporter of Ronald Reagan, and loved his challenges to the "Evil Empire." I remember, "Mr. Gorbackev, tear down this wall."
I've also watched documentaries about the wildlife returning and reclaiming the town and region. But Higginbotham's book takes those fragments of knowledge and creates entire lives and drama from so many directions. Riveting reporting! It took years for him to work on this book, working for different magazines on different angles, making the journeys several times to interview those whose stories needed to be told. From a non-science major, I had to read slowly at times. And it felt like a Tolstoy novel at times with the challenging Russian and Ukrainian names. The drama fits right in with Tolstoy or the other Russian greats. I never made the connection between the fall of the USSR and Chernobyl. I knew how cronyism works and the Party system, but just how dangerous such systems can be are truly eye-opening. We have fiction for this, of...

United States on May 10, 2020

Gennady Shalygin: I was in rage upon coming across the review in which its author complained about "little new," "some technical inaccuracies," and recommended instead the book by a certain Grigory Medvedev." Most likely, the said reviewer had not even bothered to read "Midnight in Chernobyl."
Firstly, it was safe for him to say "little new." The latter book was published more than thirty years after the event, and the number of previous publications is impressive. Which doesn't mean there is "little new," not at all.
Secondly, it's easy to accuse the author of "some technical inaccuracies," without mentioning them to boot. The author is a professional journalist, not a nuclear scientist after all. Especially when even the academicians were running about the accident area like headless chickens.
Finally, about the "recommendation." It's not even the fact that Medvedev's book, "The Truth About Chernobyl" dates back to 1990. It's the fact, barely known in the West, that this book had been approved for publication by the VAAP agency. This agency was the USSR government's chief tool for censoring all literary work, however insignificant. You may remember how hard the USSR government tried to...

United Kingdom on Mar 02, 2020