The gripping story of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, from an acclaimed historian and writer.
On the morning of 26 April 1986 Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. In the end, less than five percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout.
In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy recreates these events in all of their drama, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep. While it is clear that the immediate cause of the accident was a turbine test gone wrong, Plokhy shows how the deeper roots of Chernobyl lay in the nature of the Soviet political system and the flaws of its nuclear industry. A little more than five years later, the Soviet Union would fall apart, destroyed from within by its unsustainable communist ideology and the dysfunctional managerial and economic systems laid bare in the wake of the disaster.
A poignant, fast paced account of the drama of heroes, perpetrators, and victims, Chernobyl is the definitive history of the world's worst nuclear disaster.
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There are eight of us on the trip to Chernobyl, marked on my Ukrainian map as 'Chornobyl'. PREFACE
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(@PenguinUKBooks, 15 May 2018, ebook, 432 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveInc, # POPSUGARReadingChallenge, a book featuring a man-made disaster)
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I chose this because Chernobyl is the only man-made disaster that came to mind. I also have very limited knowledge of the disaster was I was five years old at the time so thought it would be an interesting read. I enjoyed Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy a lot. The book not only focuses on the disaster, the attempted cover-up and the aftermath but the history of the plant including the Soviet Union. The book is a bit dry at times and I preferred the chapters that focused on the disaster rather than how the plant came about etc but it was so well researched and engaging I got sucked in. This is well worth a read.
