12 Alexander Borovoi
He stalks the Chernobyl nuclear reactor
Late in 1986, beyond a gantlet of highly radioactive rooms and narrow passages, the stalkers discovered a glassy, black formation resembling a giant elephant's foot. Getting a piece to analyze was not easy. It was so fiercely radioactive that the scientists could spend only seconds near it, and its surface shrugged off a drilling machine and an ax. Finally a marksman took aim with a Kalashnikov rifle. The shards gave the first clues to what had happened to the nuclear fuel and the chance of a future catastrophe.
When Borovoi and his colleague Eduard Pazukhin analyzed the fragments, they found the elephant's foot was made of uranium and zirconium from the reactor fuel rods and silicon from sand packed around the reactor vessel. As the reactor core burned at thousands of degrees, molten fuel had apparently eaten through the concrete floor and oozed into the warren of rooms below, where it cooled and hardened. The uranium in this "Chernobyl lava," it turned out, was too dilute to threaten a new nuclear reaction.
That was good news, but the elephant's foot was only a small fraction of the 180 tons of fuel. Dividing his time between Moscow and Chernobyl, Borovoi went on exploring the bowels of the reactor. He and his colleagues found more glassy lava--heaps of it, lakes of it. In May 1988, they drilled through concrete walls into the reactor pit itself--and found it empty. All of the fuel, it appeared, had either been blown out in the explosion or had oozed into the lower rooms as a dilute lava. The reactor seemed unlikely to reawaken.
To win this peace of mind, the stalkers had to brave radiation exposures that are a health physicist's nightmare and may ultimately raise their risk of cancer. Borovoi will not reveal his own dose. "Top secret," he says with a laugh, adding that his supervisors might bar him from the reactor if they knew. So far, he and his men have suffered "no specific radiation illnesses," he says. Strokes and heart attacks have taken a heavy toll on the stalkers, but he attributes that to the stress of their work.
He continues exploring trouble spots: rooms where dangerous, unmelted fuel may be buried in the rubble, outcrops of lava crumbling into toxic dust. The hastily built sarcophagus itself is riddled with holes and rests on the ruined reactor's weakened walls. A collapse would raise clouds of radioactive dust in a second, smaller Chernobyl. An international project is underway to plan and build a second, secure shelter over the existing one. Until then, Borovoi will be bound to the ruined reactor he calls "my main enemy, and my main friend."
Born: Sept. 15, 1938.
Personal: Married, two children, six grandchildren.
What he is proudest of: His work at Chernobyl.
What makes him happy: Knowing that the people he loves need him.
Favorite authors: Bulgakov, Pushkin, and Steinbeck.
Alexander Borovoi: My Hero
"Very often the people who are not famous are the real heroes. When I came to Chernobyl I looked in a church. It was dark--just one priest. Nobody else! This was Chernobyl. For three years I sometimes saw him [in the empty church]. This is a hero. Who knows about this man? Nobody knows. Only God. "
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