12 Alexander Borovoi
He stalks the Chernobyl nuclear reactor
CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE--Disasters demand heroes, and the explosion of the No. 4 reactor at the V. I. Lenin nuclear power station was a disaster on an unimaginable scale. During 10 days beginning April 26, 1986, the burning reactor belched over 100 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. Dozens died, and fallout settled on millions downwind. Since then, thousands of youngsters in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia have come down with thyroid cancer. The catastrophe caused untold social disruption and dealt a heavy blow to the tottering Soviet Union.
The line between hero and victim was thin in the first frantic weeks after the accident. Firemen fought the flames but lacked instruments to tell them they faced lethal doses of radiation. Military helicopter pilots hovered in the radioactive smoke plume to smother the burning reactor with tons of sand and lead, but their bombing runs missed the mark.
Yet the catastrophe--and the chance for heroism--did not end when the fire burned out. In the months and years that followed, a band of scientists led by physicist Alexander Borovoi explored the reactor's corpse to make sure it could not reawaken. Working in a hot, dark labyrinth where lingering radiation could kill within minutes, they mapped and analyzed tons of reactor fuel remaining. It was heroism of a quieter and more effective order than had come before. "Borovoi knew what he was doing," says Harvard University nuclear physicist Richard Wilson, "and he had the imagination and common sense" to succeed.
Now, 15 years after the accident, the miles of deserted countryside around the plant are turning to wilderness. Pripyat, once a gleaming city of some 45,000 plant workers and their families, is a nuclear ghost town, silent except when wind rustles the weeds or bangs a door. Inside the concrete "sarcophagus" built over the ruin, Borovoi still searches for signs of danger. A bearish, white-haired man of 63, he did not expect to crown his career this way. But he says that when asked, he and his colleagues "could not say no. We had to go and do it [because] we understood that our work was very important for other people."
At the prestigious Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Borovoi studied neutrinos, wispy subatomic particles that stream harmlessly through the human body. But he spent the spring and summer of 1986 calculating the radioactive hazards from the ruined reactor. He stayed in Moscow because his mother was dying. But by the fall he was at Chernobyl, where he faced a simple question: Could the remnants of the reactor fuel explode again? The lives of the thousands of workers erecting the sarcophagus were at stake.
To find the remnants, Borovoi and his men had to venture into the heart of the destroyed reactor. Robots were not up to the job; they got stuck in debris or ran amok, circuits scrambled by radiation. "We had only one kind of robots [that worked]," says Borovoi. "Biorobots--ourselves." They called themselves "stalkers." Coveralls, gloves, and a respirator were their protection--lead suits were too bulky for dashes through the reactor. A fall or wrong turn could be fatal.
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