Nuclearizing Ukraine – Ukrainizing the Atom
Résumés
En tant que système sociotechnique, la technologie nucléaire soviétique était impérialiste. Elle était considérée comme la pierre angulaire de « grands projets d’intégration fondés sur la technologie » sur le territoire et au‑delà. L’Ukraine soviétique occupait une place prépondérante dans ces visées, et sa nucléarisation consolidait son statut de secunda inter pares dans la gestion de l’Union. Cette nucléarisation cadrait d’ailleurs avec les intérêts de Kyiiv en matière de distribution des ressources. De plus, les capacités nucléaires de l’Ukraine soviétique étaient destinées à établir un lien puissant avec les autres pays socialistes et leur système électrique. L’apparition de grandes centrales nucléaires dans des régions rurales non industrialisées de l’Ukraine servait les objectifs de colonisation interne de l’URSS et de développement d’infrastructures. Elle déplaça des milliers d’experts russophones vers des régions de l’Ukraine qui, deux décennies plus tôt, étaient considérées comme des confins dangereux. En même temps, le recrutement au niveau local dans les centrales nucléaires ukrainiennes eut l’effet de produire une nouvelle classe de spécialistes du nucléaire ukrainophones et d’ouvriers qualifiés, écrivant un nouveau chapitre dans l’histoire de l’ascension sociale après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il faut ajouter que c’est sur les confins ukrainiens que le programme Des Atomes pour la paix traversa de graves crises tout en faisant preuve de résilience et d’anticipation des problèmes. L’article réexamine les récits traditionnels sur le nucléaire ukrainien, souvent réduits à l’expérience de la domination russe, à la catastrophe de Černobyl, à la victimisation et à l’effondrement postsoviétique, et dans lesquels le rôle actif de l’Ukraine dans l’histoire générale de la technologie nucléaire soviétique et celui de la résilience et de la transformation sont occultés. Ce sont à la fois des récits venant d’Ukraine posant celle‑ci en victime et des conceptions centralisatrices soviétiques présentant le nucléaire comme un projet véritablement russe. Ce qui se passe à la périphérie est la preuve du contraire et remet en question ces deux points de vue.
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1. Reconsidering Soviet nuclear power “in” Ukraine
- 1 Mykola Shteinberg, June 2014, quoted by Tatiana Kasperski, “Nuclear dreams and realities in contemp (...)
- 2 This refers to statistical data from 2017. Ukraine’s nuclear share in electric generation is the se (...)
- 3 “Atomni elektrostantsii Ukraiiny [Ukraine’s Nuclear power stations],” Hryhorii Lysychenko, Mykola S (...)
- 4 To date, there is no comprehensive history of nuclear energy in Ukraine, but there are many books a (...)
- 5 Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia Atomnoi Ėnergetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii [History of the Nu (...)
1“There was no such thing as Ukrainian nuclear power in the Soviet period – there was Soviet nuclear power in Ukraine,”1 states Mykola Shteinberg, former director of the post‑disaster Chernobyl nuclear power plant and head of the Ukrainian nuclear regulatory body in the 1990s. His statement illustrates the ambivalences and entanglements of nuclear energy in Ukraine, which today has a share of 55 % in electricity generation2 and is trying to diversify its nuclear fuel supply in order to reduce Russian dominance in its nuclear market.3 But which, and whose, history is meant when we discuss nuclear history “in” Ukraine ? Whereas Ukrainian narratives tell a story of Russian domination, Ukrainian resistance, and Chernobyl victimhood,4 the Russian centrist grand narrative declares Soviet nuclear technology to be a Russian project, and is highly selective in its memory politics. The seminal collaborative Russian work on nuclear history reads “Istoriia Atomnoi Energetiki v SSSR i Rossii” and thus claims historical continuity for Russia.5
- 6 “Uranove vyrobnytstvo v Ukraiini [Uranium production in Ukraine],” in Atomna industriia, 47–53.
2Indeed, before 1991, and to a great extent after 1991 too, there was no Ukrainian nuclear industry, let alone a Ukrainian‑speaking industry. Independent Ukraine’s nuclear plants were interconnected with the post‑Soviet Russian nuclear industry in manifold ways. Their fuel was (partly) made from Ukrainian uranium but manufactured in Russia, as was other nuclear machinery. Although Ukraine fulfilled several conditions for developing an independent nuclear fuel cycle, with uranium mining, fuel assembly manufacturing, and reprocessing, it never did so, largely due to lack of capital and the unclear priorities of Ukrainian governments.6
- 7 Paul R. Josephson, “Science and Technology as Panacea in Gorbachev’s Russia,” in James P. Scanlan, (...)
- 8 Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer : Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cam (...)
3However, today’s 50–55 % nuclear share in Ukrainian electricity generation is so large because many nuclear projects were realized after Chernobyl. Arguably, the experience of disaster did not put an end to nuclear power in the land of Chernobyl. Thus, the history of nuclear technopolitics in Soviet Ukraine (and beyond) has more to offer than victim narratives, teleological concepts on the rise and fall of the Socialist engineer’s hubris,7 or accidents which had to happen within a deeply flawed, dysfunctional technological system.8
- 9 Anna Veronika Wendland, “Inventing the Atomograd. Nuclear Urbanism as a Way of Life in Eastern Euro (...)
4There is much reason to reconsider the history of nuclear energy in Ukraine and the role of Ukrainian agency in Soviet nuclear technopolitcs as a transnational history – i.e. with regard to its entanglements with Russia, other Soviet republics, and the Socialist bloc, or with respect to the manifold knowledge and technology transfers and migration processes between the center and the periphery, or between peripheries. Finally, we should rethink this history with regard to the micro‑history of nuclear communities and installations in the Soviet republics.9
- 10 Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics ?,” Daedalus,109 (1980) : 1, 121–136.
- 11 Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power : The Pre‑Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambri (...)
- 12 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France : Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (C (...)
- 13 Michael Schüring, “Advertising the Nuclear Venture. The Rhetorical and Visual Public Relation Strat (...)
5As a rule, critical histories of nuclear technology are organized around clear‑cut imaginaries of nuclear artifacts. It is widely recognized that artifacts have politics10 and this results in perceiving nuclear industries as highly political organizations : large technical systems “produce power” and underlie specific inherent political and technical logics of development.11 Nuclear generation, in this view, is a technology which centralizes social relations. The extremely high energy density of nuclear processes in reactor cores corresponds with the concentration of power in nuclear administrations, since reactors, and the radioactive materials they process, require protection and securitization by administrative means, and by means of force. Accordingly, nuclear energy is regarded as a powerful symbol of national grandeur and scientific‑technological achievement12 and a highly effective organizer of hierarchies. From this perspective, the nuclear artifacts are, as a rule, envisioned as “orderly,” tidy, and archetypical objects which serve the technical purposes of the organization – as they were displayed in the brochures and popularizing films in almost all countries with nuclear industries, including the Soviet Union.13
- 14 Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear : Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, (...)
6However, what we can observe when studying the micro‑history of nuclear power on the Soviet periphery is that the Soviet nuclear power plant, as it was envisioned from the top‑down perspective of Moscow‑centered research institutes, construction bureaus, and high‑ranking officials, differed from the stantsiia [plant] as an everyday object and labor environment, with its routines, jargons, conflicts, rituals, and individual work practices. The stantsiia, the socialist NPP, as it was established and implanted into the rural landscapes on the Soviet imperial periphery, was expected to be a stage of nuclear grandeur, but at the same time it was an everyday industrial world of its own. This had some implications for social and professional self‑concepts of being nuclear14 on the periphery, and for everyday practices of nuclear safety.
- 15 Kate Brown, Plutopia : Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium (...)
- 16 Sonja D. Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power In (...)
- 17 Anna Veronika Wendland, Atomgrad : Kerntechnische Moderne im östlichen Europa, 1966‑2018, Habilitat (...)
- 18 Russian : Polesˊe, Belarussian : Palessie.
- 19 Korenizatsiia was an early Soviet meme, meaning the programmatic goal of “putting down roots” of co (...)
7Therefore, I argue for reconsidering generic assumptions concerning social identities in Soviet “nuclear families”15 and the clear‑cut divides in élite visions of professional identities.16 This paper is derived from a larger study on “nuclear modernity in Eastern Europe” based on transnational comparative case studies in industrial anthropology in different places in Europe.17 The focus is on one of these case studies, Rivne NPP, a Ukrainian nuclear power plant which is situated in Varash (former Kuznetsovsk) in Rivne Oblast, 380 km west of Kyiiv, in the marshland region of Polesia (Ukrainian Polissia – “woodlands”).18 In the 1970s and 80s, Rivne was the Ukrainian SSR’s second nuclear plant project after Chernobyl, which was also situated in Polesia. It is a case in point for the analysis of Soviet top‑down socio‑technical interventions in “backward” regions, but also a specific, technology‑driven korenizatsiia process of nuclear technology (and nuclear technicians)19 which laid the ground for a subsequent Ukrainization of the atom. Today, Rivne’s four Soviet‑designed, modernized pressurized water reactor units functionally replace Chernobyl as a powerful energy hub for Northwestern Ukraine.
- 20 Constance Perin, Shouldering Risks : The Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power Industry (Princeto (...)
8This paper is composed of seven parts (the introductory considerations constituting part 1). In part 2, I will provide an outline of the process of implementing the Soviet civil nuclear program in Ukraine and the local circumstances. In part 3, I will discuss the process of korenizatsiia, the “putting down roots” of a highly modern industrial artifact, Rivne NPP, in a remote marshland region where well into the 1970s people remained only partly touched by Soviet modernization. Part 4 will present several observations on the character of nuclear work on the Soviet periphery, practices of “shouldering risks,”20 and their impact on the emergence of social and professional identities. Part 5 considers crises of Soviet nuclear technology and analyzes them in the light of a “shared agency” approach in the study of human–machine relations, focusing on two accidents in the 1980s which occurred, not coincidentally, on the Ukrainian periphery. The first is the disastrous accident at Chernobyl‑4 in April 1986, which I reconsider as a fatal interaction of technical and socio‑political factors. The second is an accident at Rivne‑1 in January 1982, a near‑miss that emerged from the same problems as those besetting Chernobyl but nevertheless demonstrated some stabilizing and safety‑enhancing qualities of Soviet PWR technology and expert training. Both, moreover, framed later developments in post‑Soviet Ukraine, where the attempt to “Ukrainize the atom” is still an ongoing project. This is the subject of the outlook in part 6, followed by concluding remarks in part 7.
2. Nuclearizing Ukraine
9Soviet nuclear power “in” Ukraine was a cornerstone of the Soviet nuclear economy. This refers to the civilian nuclear industry of the 1970s and 80s, but also to the early “military‑industrial complex,” the Soviet nuclear weapons program, from which civil nuclear power emerged. Ukraine provided the second‑largest share of specialists in the industry after the Russia, and ethnic Ukrainians or non‑Ukrainians who began their careers in the Ukrainian SSR could make it into the leading positions within the imperial system.
- 21 Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom : Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today
- 22 Ministerstvo Srednego Mashinostroeniia, the “Ministry of Medium Machine‑Building,” was founded in 1 (...)
- 23 Josephson, Red Atom, 113–119, depicts Aleksandrov as the archetype of a loyalist and uncritical exe (...)
- 24 L.A. Kochetkov, M.F. Troianov, “Reaktory na bystrykh neitronakh [Fast Neutron Reactors],” IAĖSSiR, (...)
- 25 Efim Slavskii, “Avtobiograficheskaia zapiska [Autobiographical note],” in Vladimir Gubarev, Belyi A (...)
- 26 Borys Lewitzkyj, Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine 1953–1980, (Edmonton : Canadian Inst. of Uk (...)
10From the 1930s onwards, Ukrainian research institutes played a major role in the development of Soviet nuclear physics.21 Efim Slavskii (ukr. Iukhym Slavskyi), a metallurgy engineer and head of the Soviet nuclear ministry Sredmash,22 was an ethnic Ukrainian from a peasant family ; Anatolii Aleksandrov, Kurchatov’s successor as scientific supervisor of civil nuclear projects throughout the Soviet Union, and head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences,23 Nikolai Dollezhal, the constructor of the RBMK, and Aleksandr Leipunskii, head of the Soviet breeder reactor program,24 belonged to a cohort of physicists and engineers whose careers were closely connected with the Ukrainian SSR, especially to the famous Kharkiv UFTI (Ukrainian Physico‑Technical Institute) and the chemical and metallurgical industry, before they were recruited to the center. Slavskii displayed Ukrainian nostalgia when he insisted on naming a newly planned nuclear city on the Caspian Sea after the Ukrainian national poet, Taras Shevchenko, who had been deported to the region in the 1840s by the Imperial authorities.25 Russian‑speaking Ukrainians served as engineers and technicians in Russian labs, secret plutonium production facilities, or at the nuclear power plants in Russia, Armenia, and Lithuania. High‑ranking cadres of Brezhnev’s energy bureaucracy came from Ukraine, such as energy ministers Petr Neporozhnyi and Anatolii Maiorets, or former oil and gas minister, then deputy chair of the Soviet council of ministers Borys Shcherbina. Ukraine’s nuclear careers can be regarded as just another case in point for hypotheses that Soviet Ukraine was the “junior partner” or secunda inter pares in co‑ruling the Soviet Union and that Ukrainian experts were a powerful human factor in this process which rendered the empire East Slavic rather than Russian.26
- 27 Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization : Russia’s Imperial Experience (New York : Wiley & Sons, 20 (...)
- 28 Linda Cook, “Brezhnev’s ‘Social Contract’ and Gorbachev’s Reforms,” Soviet Studies, 44, 1 (1992), 1 (...)
11When it came to the internal nuclear colonization27 of Ukraine from the late 1960s onwards, young Ukrainians enthusiastically followed the call of the mirnyi atom, which provided specialist careers and blue‑collar jobs at home, and quick access to modern housing in the atomgrad. Ukrainians participated in the nuclear version of Brezhnev’s Soviet social contract, exchanging loyalty and the readiness to work in risky environments for prestige, social security and relative well‑being.28 Rivne NPP was the second‑largest industrial project in rural Northwestern Ukraine after Chernobyl. For many Ukrainians from peasant families, getting a job at the nuclear building site, or at the nuclear plant, was a vehicle of social mobilization which did not require them to move far away from their native homelands, as the oil drillers, steel workers, and coal miners had done before them. This time, the energy industry came to them, while their parents’ generation had still had to choose between low‑paid rural labor at home and labor migration.
- 29 General trend based on the data of 26 short routine interviews which I conducted with nuclear worke (...)
12At the same time, it was the regionally recruited Ukrainian blue‑collar workforce that established stable links between the modern industrial giant and the surrounding world of the Polesian village, though the early cohorts of nuclear specialists and the plant management were largely recruited from Russian secret nuclear sites, power plants, or universities with nuclear engineering programs. As time passed, it was Soviet Ukrainian Polytechnic Schools and universities that provided an increasing share of the specialists for Ukrainian nuclear plants, besides the Moscow‑based Baumanskii Institute, the MIFI, or Tomsk University, all famous for their nuclear engineering classes.29
- 30 TsDAHO (Tsentral´nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads´kykh Obˊiednanˊ Ukraiiny [Central State Archive of P (...)
13However, it was not easy to convince students and specialists with urban backgrounds to take a job in the provinces, and thus turnover was high. This was a powerful incentive for the NPP managements to invest resources in housing, education, and leisure at the atomgrad in order to attract and develop a skilled workforce.30 Beyond the nuclear workplace proper, Ukrainian research institutes and the Ukrainian nuclear machine‑building industry, which provided pressure vessels, turbines, I&C technology, and other equipment to the Soviet NPP, were of crucial importance to the system, thus rendering Ukraine a cornerstone in the Soviet nuclear energy project.
- 31 Guth, “Oasis” ; Lists of Ignalina NPP employees in Eldar Batrakov, Violeta Shumilene, eds, Ignalins (...)
- 32 Shift supervisor, Rivne‑2, 07. 07. 2015 ; head of reactor department, Rivne NPP, 06.09. 2013.
14As a result, we observe a specific, site region‑based korenizatsiia recruitment pattern which was typical for the Western Ukrainian NPP of Rivne, Chernobyl, and Khmelnytskyi – but not for every nuclear project on the non‑Russian Soviet periphery. At Ignalina, in Lithuania, or Shevchenko/Aqtau, in Kazakhstan, nuclear korenizatsiia never came into being, since very few Lithuanians and Kazakhs were recruited to the power stations and surrounding industries.31 In contrast, the nuclear community of Kuznetsovsk/Varash, which had a non‑Soviet pre‑WW II history similar to Lithuania, was bilingual even in Soviet times.32
- 33 Anna Veronika Wendland, “Die ukrainischen Länder 1945 bis 1993,” in Frank Golczewski, ed., Geschich (...)
- 34 Shelest to the CPSU Central Committee on Energy Economy, 08.06.1965, Iurii Shapoval, ed., Petro She (...)
- 35 Jurij Latysh, “Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, liudyna ta ii epokha [Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, the man and (...)
- 36 Shelest to CPSU CC on Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 03.09.1967, in Shelest, Spravzhnii sud, doc. n (...)
15The Soviet Ukrainian party élite ardently supported the establishment of nuclear research, nuclear machine‑building, and nuclear power plants in the republic. Since the 1960s, Ukraine’s need for electrical energy had skyrocketed due to the electrification and automatization of rural labor, post‑WW II industrial development, and rapid urbanization.33 Both the national communist Petro Shelest (1908–1996) and his loyalist successor Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi (1918–1990) envisioned a bright future for nuclear‑powered Ukraine, being aware of the republic’s diminishing reserves of high‑quality coal, which historically formed the backbone of the republic’s electricity economy. Their view on Ukraine was that of development technocrats, and their policy was oriented towards the accumulation of resources for Ukraine and the de‑centralization of resource control, which included Ukrainian control over energy systems.34 Coal mining in the Donbas region produced ever‑rising costs, and hydropower capacities, already in the process of maximum exploitation on the Dnieper cascade, were limited.35 Shelest constantly lobbied for Ukrainian energy interests and Ukrainian nuclear research in Moscow, referring to electricity and fuel shortages.36
16His autonomism and orthodox anti‑détente position with regard to Soviet foreign policy brought Shelest into direct conflict with Moscow, and he was ousted from office in 1972. His successor, Shcherbytskyi, chose the strategy of loyalist and quietist reconciliation of imperial and local interests. This meant, for the Ukrainian side, conducting a zero‑tolerance policy towards political and nationalist dissent, but also promoting decentralization where it was deemed to be beneficial for domestic industrial development. The intensive nuclear self‑colonization of Ukraine was part and parcel of the national Communist, later loyalist Communist Ukrainian technocratic development project.
- 37 In Ukrainian.
- 38 Chernobylˊskaia AĖS s reaktorom RBMK ; Lewytzky, Sowjetukraine, 177–179 ; “Kratkaia spravka o proek (...)
- 39 On Ukrainian dissident positions on Russification through modernization see Instytut natsional´noii (...)
17In a way, today’s different perspectives on nuclear Ukraine were already formatted in the late 1960s, when planners selected the village of Kopachi on the river Prypiat, in the Chornobyl37 district north of Kyiiv, as the site for “Ukraine’s first nuclear power plant”.38 The Communist élite tried to secure Ukraine’s secunda inter pares position by brutally cracking down on dissent, issuing doctrinaire guidelines on cultural and language policy, and leading the republic into the Atomic Age by deploying large power reactor parks. Meanwhile, patriotic and (social‑) democratic dissenters perceived Ukraine’s industrial development, the resulting inter‑republican labor migration, and the emergence of integrative energy networks as further steps towards the Russification of modern Ukraine. This position later transformed into eco‑nationalist and anti‑nuclear prohibitionist positions.39
3. A nuclear spaceship in the marshland : the korenizatsiia of Rivne NPP
- 40 Klaus Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus : sowjetische Technik‑ und Umweltgeschicht (...)
- 41 In Russian : Pust´ budet atom rabotnikom, a ne soldatom. See also Guth, “Oasis.”
18Most of the Ukrainian nuclear capacities were established in rural regions of right‑bank Ukraine : Chernobyl, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, and Yuzhnoukrainsk. Only Zaporizhzhia NPP, the largest NPP in Europe (6,000 MWe), was installed in a former industrial landscape, near the DniproHES hydroelectric power station, which had marked the starting point of Soviet Ukrainian large‑scale electrification in the 1930s. Showcasing nuclear energy in the 1960s and 1970s recalled the pomp and ceremony of the Stalinist velikie stroiki.40 In both eras, the issue was the colonization of “the wild,” and Soviet man (often represented as a male scientist) mastering the natural world. Whereas DniproHES had tamed the “Wild Dnieper,” the present task would be making the military atom “a worker, not a soldier,” or technically speaking, a colonizer of marshes and deserts.41
- 42 Klaus Gestwa, “Ökologischer Notstand und sozialer Protest : Ein umwelthistorischer Blick auf die Re (...)
19Less favorable and invisible aspects of nuclear power, i.e., radioactive emissions, or nuclear safety risks, would be addressed only by and for a narrow circle of experts, not in public presentations. When nuclear power was mentioned and discussed in a broader public setting, it was widely perceived as an instrument for mitigating environmental risks such as the air and water pollution caused by heavy industry and coal‑fired power plants. The few critical scientists, who often happened to be the first Soviet speakers addressing ecological problems,42 took a similar position : nuclear power plants were regarded the lesser evil, or no evil at all. Placing the nuclear sites in the middle of “wild” natural landscapes, as was the case in Ukraine, supported the imaginaries of minimally invasive and “clean” nuclear energetics.
- 43 Josephson, Red Atom, 6‑46.
Fig. 1 : “Chernobyl NPP, equipped with an RBMK reactor, and Ukraine’s first NPP” (Kiev 1978, front and back cover), featuring techno‑modernist images of nuclear technology and arcadian images of, in Paul R. Josephson’s words, “the reactor in the garden.”43
- 44 Rivne and Khmel´nyts´kyi Oblasts were the least urbanized regions in Soviet Ukraine in the 1960s, o (...)
- 45 Falk Flade, Energy Infrastructures in the Eastern Bloc : Poland and the Construction of Transnation (...)
- 46 V.P. Denisov / Ju.G. Dragunov, Reaktornye ustanovki VVĖR dlia atomnykh ėlektrostantsii [VVER reacto (...)
20One of the regions selected for its ideal nuclear landscapes was Polesia, a marshland region in Northwestern Ukraine, which, besides the Carpathian Mountains, was the most under‑industrialized region in the republic. It provided cooling water in abundance, and prospective nuclear sites at an ideal distance from large cities (as was required by Soviet nuclear safety regulations), but was not so remote as to render current transmission via high‑voltage lines too expensive.44 Furthermore, Polesia was not far from already existing railway connections and high‑voltage lines, so a newly constructed power plant could easily be connected to existing transport and electricity grids. Three of the five nuclear sites in Ukraine, namely Chernobyl, Rivne, and Khmelnytskyi, were situated in this region. They were regarded as flagship projects which were to develop the backward marshland regions of Soviet Europe and integrate them into the transnational electricity grids of the Eastern Bloc.45 Sredmash planners chose two different reactor concepts, one for Chernobyl, and the other for Rivne and Khmelnytskyi. Chernobyl was home to the Soviet national design, the graphite‑moderated RBMK, whereas the other Ukrainian stations were selected to operate the VVER, a homegrown version of the transnational pressurized water reactor (PWR) design.46
- 47 Lewytzky, Die Sowjetukraine, 178–190 ; 187–195.
- 48 Anna Veronika Wendland et al., “Modernity in the Marshlands : Interventions and Transformations at (...)
21At that time, only 30 % of all kolkhoz worker households in Rivne Oblast were connected to the public electricity grid. Roads were in a deplorable condition, or did not exist at all ; rivers represented the most reliable means of transport in many parts of Polesia until the 1970s.47 However, nuclear power was not the first Soviet technocratic intervention in the region. After the establishment of Soviet rule, forced collectivization and industrial‑range melioration projects had already transformed much of the former swamp wilderness, resulting in unintended effects such as dust storms, soil salination, and desertification.48 Consequently, Polesia was certainly not an “untouched land.”
Fig. 2 : Polesia, 20th–21st century
Map : Marc Friede, Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, 2019
- 49 Chernobylˊskaia AĖS s reaktorom RBMK ; Prypiat´. Fotorozpovid´ pro odne z naimolodshykh mist Ukraii (...)
22Collectivization and melioration, and the technologies used for them, had targeted the region’s traditional rural economy in order to Sovietize it. Now the Soviet plan was to convert Polesia, where peat was the only domestic fuel, into a modern energy landscape based on uranium. The center’s enviro‑technical perspective on the periphery remained the same : Sredmash and its power plant developer Gidroproekt perceived Polesia as an under‑resourced wasteland which had to be given a function by installing an infrastructure that was meant to be the “economic‑technical basis of communism.” Land not suitable for agriculture was to be used for building sites, the rivers Prypiat, Styr, and Horyn were to supply the reactor parks with cooling water, and the surrounding woodlands would serve as a leisure resource for tens of thousands of new city dwellers. The novel Ukrainian energopolis was to cover the needs of collective farm electrification and right‑bank Ukraine’s newly established industry. Kyiiv, the rapidly growing republican capital, would become a largely nuclear‑powered Soviet metropolis.49
- 50 Electrician, Rivne NPP, 20.08. 2013. The term refers to Stepan Bandera, leader of the OUN‑B (orhani (...)
- 51 Paraphrasing Kate Brown’s book title : A Biography of No Place : From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet H (...)
- 52 Propaganda meme referring to the Soviet occupation and later annexation of Western Ukrainian lands (...)
23Additionally, Soviet authorities and media formed an even more powerful narrative : the Polesian lands, which had first been neglected by former Polish and Tsarist rulers and then ravaged by war, German occupation, and mass violence, would now be revived and developed by a modern technology, the mirnyi atom. In creating this narrative, they attempted to overwrite Polesia’s recent history. For the newcomers, this history was present in whispered conversations and tacit references to horrible places in the forests where thousands of local Jews had been murdered by German Sonderkommandos and Ukrainian politsai, where warlords and partisans had continued to fight NKVD forces up to the mid‑1950s, and Polish civilians had been massacred by Ukrainian nationalists. Incoming Russian and Eastern Ukrainian nuclear specialists, like some of my interviewees, knew little about their new homeland when they arrived in Polesia in the early 1970s, but quickly learned that these lands were bloodlands : backward, mystic, “banderovtsy lands”50 where the locals were considered as treacherous as the swampy grounds. Soviet infrastructure and nuclear territorialization was to render these lands safe and secure. Former contested borderlands had to become Soviet heartlands51 by being connected to the high‑voltage grid of the “re‑unified Soviet Ukrainian lands”52 and the entire Soviet Bloc.
- 53 Lewytzkyj, Sowjetukraine, 31 ; Bogdan Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen 1941‑1944. Mythos und Wirklich (...)
- 54 From 1982 onwards, the full name was Rivnensˊka AES imeni 60‑richchia Radians´koho Soiuza, to honor (...)
- 55 Holdings of the Rivne NPP Information Center (which equally functions as local museum), Photo album (...)
24With their keen sense for symbolism, the Soviet authorities chose a political name for the nuclear city that arose on the site of the old village of Varash : Kuznetsovsk, after a Soviet NKVD agent who had coordinated the operations of Soviet partisan groups behind the German lines and was killed in action in 1944 during a fight with nationalist OUN partisans, the ill‑reputed “Banderovtsy.”53 Kuznetsovsk was a victor’s tag on conquered land. Even the power plant’s first name, “Western Ukrainian NPP,” was dropped in the late 1970s and replaced by “Rovno (Rivne) NPP. ”54 It seems that for the Kremlin’s taste, “Western Ukraine” was too closely connected with memes like “collaborators,” “bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists” and “fascists,” ever present in Soviet propaganda and often named in connection with “Western Ukraine.”55
- 56 “RAĖS budut testirovat´ po mezhdunarodnym standartam [Rivne NPP will be tested according to interna (...)
25However, as far as its infrastructural function was concerned, Rivne NPP of course was a “Western Ukrainian NPP”, since it was under the jurisdiction of Lvivenergo, the Western Ukrainian grid operator, which constituted a subdivision of the republican Ministry of Energy. As such, Rivne NPP produced electric power for large parts of Western Ukraine. And as such, it became the laboratory for a novel decentralization offensive in Soviet nuclear technopolitics, which was directed at transferring more competences to the all‑Union and the Ukrainian Minenergo as nuclear operators, whereas Sredmash was to remain in charge of reactor design, NPP construction and testing operations, and the nuclear fuel cycle.56
*
- 57 Photo archive of Aleksei Kislyi, Kuznetsovsk. Kislyi is a retired engineer and amateur photographer (...)
- 58 Lidiia Orel, Polissia. Te, shcho ne zabuvaietsia [Polesia. What will never be forgotten], (Kyiiv : (...)
- 59 Halyna Savchuk (b. 1958), Netishyn (Khmel´nyts´ky NPP), interview with Svetlana Boltovska, 11.10.20 (...)
- 60 Electrician, Rivne NPP, 20.08.2013, on the first new housing in Kuznetsovsk.
26The nuclear specialists who arrived at the Polesian nuclear sites recall a “backward,” but arcadian region, and documented the rapid transformation “from Varash to Kuznetsovsk” in melancholic photo series.57 The local polishchuky did not adhere to their traditional lives as ardently as later assumed by Kyiiv ethnographers, who became increasingly concerned about the erosion of ancient Ukrainian traditions.58 Young people adapted quickly to the new situation and applied for the new jobs which brought them upward social mobility. Pioneer pride is often expressed in stories about conquering the marshlands : “This was swampland / forest all over here,” “everything here is built on piles.”59 People recalled the forest with warm words, as a wartime hiding place, or as a source of food supply, but they expressed no nostalgic laments that it was now gone. Since time immemorial, their ancestors had been subjected to the laws of nature, but now they saw their chance to change this imbalance, and were ready to pay the price : “Well, for the elderly people, anyway, moving from their own house, with the animals and the garden, to an apartment in a multistory house, that was hard for them.”60
- 61 Radiansˊka Ukraiina na RAES (1979–1991), later Enerhiia [Energy] (since 1991), Rivne NPP and Kuznet (...)
- 62 “Do 40‑richchia voz´iednannja. Vysoty bryhadyra [On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Reu (...)
- 63 Vykonavchyi Komitet Kuznetsovs´koii Mis´koii Rady – Arkhivnyi viddil [Archival department of the Ku (...)
27However, most of the locals maintained connections to the world of Polesian agrarian culture through kinship, or by keeping a dacha or an inherited khata (village house) somewhere beyond the nuclear plant, where they would grow fruit and vegetables. In Kuznetsovsk, the Soviet local press reproduced the transformation stories and staged the pioneer narrative, thus establishing a self‑enhancing pioneer communication pattern.61 Moreover, the provincial journalists established a new reference place for regional pride by constantly referring to the NPP, “the Polesian energy giant,” or the “pearl of the Polesian land.”62 Soon the plant’s 120‑meter‑high cooling towers were accepted as a local landmark and symbol of the new city – not in spite of their absolute uniqueness in a landscape with an architectural tradition of, at most, two‑story houses, but rather due to their novelty, and perceived, like the Soviet roads, as the messengers of a new era. Meanwhile, neo‑urban pride in the prefabricated high‑rises built from scratch centered on kulturnist´, “being cultural,” which meant living in decent housing with kitchens and water closets, schools, parks, the culture palace, the cinema, and sports facilities. Pioneer pride and kulturnist’ compensated for the typical problems of new‑build Soviet urban neighborhoods : housing that had to be reworked and repaired shortly after construction and supply shortages of building materials, food, and consumer goods. “Being cultural” was seen as interconnected with “being nuclear.”63
4. Being nuclear on the Soviet periphery
- 64 Chernobylˊskaia AĖS s reaktorom RBMK, back cover.
- 65 Andreas Renner, “Globale Ikone des Kalten Kriegs ? Der Atompilz und die sowjetische Nuklearkultur,” (...)
- 66 Claude Parent, Les maisons de l’atome (P. : Éditions du Moniteur, 1983).
- 67 Today, everything is in place, except the bookshop, and the posters feature “best performers,” not (...)
28The imaginaries of nuclear power which circulated in Soviet public were heroic, arcadian, and tidy.64 Displaying the nuclear power plant as a public project despite the routinized practices of compartmentalization and secrecy in the industry was one of the ambivalences of Soviet nuclear technopolitics. Images of nuclear plants embedded in waterscapes and of the hero‑scientist “taming the atom”65 were reproduced in photographs, paintings, and films. One side of the Rivne NPP, an industrial giant of concrete and steel, acted as a showcase : a campus‑like public square was designed to link the nuclear station with the road leading to the atomgrad. Soviet nuclear showcase architecture did not (primarily) refer to ambitious nuclear building design, as it did in France.66 Rivne’s campus was embellished with a fountain and two sculptures – a wall relief featuring the splitting of the atom, and a hero‑scientist taming it. There were benches, fruit trees, and rose beds, the shift bus stop, a café and small shop called Kvant, a bookshop, and posters with portraits of the actual station heroes of Socialist work.67
Fig. 4 : Being nuclear, sots‑art version : Rivne‑2 Main control room, 1982.
Source : Rivne NPP, Nadiia Tymofeienko.
- 68 Head of department, then shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, August 18, 2013.
29In 1982, Kyiiv art academy painters were sent to Rivne NPP to produce representative canvases depicting nuclear workplaces. They asked the engineers at the main control room of unit 2, who were to be portrayed at work and operated the reactor in trousers, shirts and home‑knit sweaters, to dress in white lab coats.68 Atomshchiki, such was the image, were dressed in white and worked in clean and tidy scientific environments, as shown in many visual sources on nuclear work.
Fig. 5 : Being nuclear, real life : Aleksei Kislyi, head of I&C department, Sergei Fedorchenko, shift supervisor, and an unknown colleague at the Rivne‑2 main control room, ca. 1982.
Source : Aleksei Kislyi, Kuznetsovsk.
- 69 Hecht, The Radiance of France.
- 70 Interviews with nuclear engineers and participant observation, Rivne NPP, reactor department 1, saf (...)
30The attempt to render the nuclear workers visually more scientific than they already were is a telling example of what it meant to “be nuclear” on the Soviet periphery : it was an identity produced at the interface of discourses, social entitlements, and technological practices.69 Not necessarily all people who were ascribed the role or image of “being nuclear” in Soviet times were actually working the reactor, and not all people who were working the reactor could easily be recognized as “nuclear” by outsiders.70
31“Being nuclear” in the field, i.e. being in direct contact with nuclear machinery, meant working in a place which was not necessarily as orderly and clear‑cut as it was represented in the many visualizations of nuclear power and conceived in the top‑down views of Moscow‑ and Leningrad‑based nuclear bureaucrats. It was a heterotopic place that organized an entirely new technology, posed entirely novel problems to operators, and produced myths – while also being an ordinary noisy and dirty industrial workplace.
Fig. 6 : Participant observation in the radiation‑controlled area (RCA), reactor department 2, Rivne‑3, A‑100, July, 2015.
All buildings of a nuclear plant where there are systems containing radioactive media belong to the controlled area, in Russian : Zona strogogo rezhima. In order to avoid spreading radioactive contamination, workers have to dress in a special uniform before entering the RCA, and to undress when leaving it. The dress code is derived from the Soviet hospital (white dress, white cap) and has not changed since Soviet times. However, this is no radiation protection garment. When doing work in highly contaminated areas, one has to dress in hermetic overalls and a gas mask. The “sotka,” room A‑100 in the basement of the auxiliary building, is the RCA field operator headquarters. This is an enlarged maintenance outage shift, consisting of two operations engineers, three field operators, one reactor operator, and me, the author (third from the right).
Photo : NadiiaTymofeienko.
32The oral history of nuclear workers and specialists is full of assessments of one’s own agency in the historical process of making nuclear technology run on the periphery, imaginaries of what it meant to be a “good engineer”, e.g. when solving problems or facing conflicts. Thus, interview data is to be seen under the premise that the individual speaker molds his or her account according to the narrative patterns of his or her peer group, or of the Soviet nuclear industry as a whole. Beyond the technician’s autostereotype of “only referring to hard facts,” memories are arranged in a specific way, and reproduce self‑concepts of the (Soviet) male engineer. This includes a special narration of how “things got done,” and a specific view on decision‑making. In the 1980s, the latter was still starkly influenced by the Sredmash style, a command‑and‑obey approach marked by secrecy, compartmentalization, and authoritarianism, as was common to the military hierarchies of the Soviet nuclear defense program.
- 71 Rivne‑1 was a first‑of‑its‑kind VVĖR‑440/V‑213 unit (the first Soviet V‑213 after the Soviet–Finnis (...)
33Nuclear work was not as “white” as the Radiation Controlled Area overalls suggested. What rendered the traditional dirty powerhouse work with pumps and valves heterotopic was the fact that it had to be done in the presence of radioactive sources and radioactive media in pressurized systems. Reactor operators had to control complex, highly coupled nuclear machinery that could run into transients (i.e., a dynamic, rapidly changing state of technical systems) within milliseconds. These were novel technical circumstances and, consequently, nuclear technicians had to develop specific procedures, practices, and skills to deal with them. Such practices were not simply “there” from the very beginning, but had to be developed together with the “scientific supervisor” from Moscow, codified, discussed, modified, learned, and trained on the job. This very process was narrated by my interviewees as a pioneer story, similar to the narrative of the plant’s builders.71
34Working in radiation‑controlled areas required embodied skills of hygiene, consumption, and moving in high‑dose environments in order to avoid individual over‑exposure. Workers had to cope with thirst or hunger when a task required longer intervention – or with boredom and overfatigue. Memories of appropriating the RCA are often arranged as individual (and successful) processes of learning to “cope with problems” ; superiors recall their role in civilizing the radiologically illiterate worker. Role conflicts would emerge when experienced nuclear workers and engineers, who had a strong concept of their own skills, masculinity, and implicit knowledge of radiation protection, would perceive additional protective measures as superfluous and a hindrance, and would not accept the advice of radiation protection technicians. Trade‑offs between safety and efficiency and resulting conflicts between different status groups constituted everyday experience.
- 72 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, 06.02.2013.
35Recalling the 1980s, and comparing that time with the situation today, Ukrainian nuclear technicians often draw a contrast between Soviet “then,” and Ukrainian “today” : “back then,” reactor scrams were an everyday experience, while “today there are engineers who have never seen that except in simulator training,” and “back then,” radiation protection discipline was low because “there were so many negramotnye” (non‑educated people) who became negligent when it came to self‑discipline around routines of nuclear work, but “today everything is different.”72 Informants recall conflicts between engineers and blue‑collar workers who would not accept that drinking and eating “in the zone” was prohibited.
- 73 Shift supervisor, Radiation Protection Department, Rivne NPP, 03.06.2015. ALARA : “As low as reason (...)
- 74 Borovoi, “Moi Chernobylˊ,” 155.
- 75 TsDAVO (Tsentral´nyj Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Vyshchykh Orhaniv Ukraiiny [Central State Archive of Higher (...)
36However, in many situations, educated nuclear specialists felt compelled to break radiation protection rules themselves in order to “get things done.” Recalling such situations is often embedded in the implicit narrative of engineers’ ethics and self‑sacrifice ; we know similar narratives from memoirs of scientists and engineers in the early nuclear program, or from the context of the Chernobyl accident cleanup. Problems in high‑dose environments were expected to be solved in a head‑on, military manner : “At that time, they got bonuses for heroism. Today, they get them for dose reduction and ALARA.”73 Bonuses constituted a large part of the operators’ salaries and were a powerful incentive for taking on risky jobs. What later became famous as bioroboty in Chernobyl74 – men replacing automated technology in cleanup jobs in high‑radiation and contamination fields – was no emergency‑related exception, but rather the rule and a well‑known practice in the industry, and a constant reason for concern at the nuclear plants.75
37At Rivne NPP, during the routine inspection of steam generators, workers had to crawl into the vessel and detect heating tube defects, marking them with wooden bolts, chopiki, so that the welders could come in after them and carry out repairs. Working time was counted in seconds in order to limit the radiation exposure. Such practices were not limited to blue‑collar workers. Engineers would intervene during operations in primary circuit rooms where there was high radiation in order to detect valve defects :
Who had to go to the germozona ? We, the stupid ones, had to search for the leakages. However, in that time, we had almost no beta contamination, and to avoid gamma doses we used shieldings,
- 76 Head of safety analysis department, former shift supervisor, 03.03.2015. Germozona, “hermetic zone, (...)
- 77 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, on his own intervention in a primary c (...)
38i.e. lead sheets or lead bricks which partly absorb gamma rays and thus reduce the dose rate.76 Often, they conducted such operations without taking a dosimeter with them in order to keep risky interventions off the record and to avoid “questions”.77 Nuclear engineers recall that they were confronted with the urgent need to keep the systems running at a time when electricity supply in the Western Soviet Union was scarce :
- 78 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, 07.08.2015.
At that time, whenever the director came to the main control room his first glance was at the electric frequency readings.78
- 79 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, 11.01.2015. Mogila, Metsamo (...)
- 80 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, 30.01.2013.
39The initial operating phase of the first nuclear units in Ukraine was hampered by a high rate of reactor scrams, minor and major defects, and incidents, which made nuclear work stressful and exhausting.79 Frontline engineers recall constant conflicts between those who had to make decisions in the main control room and middle‑range managers who owed their post to their membership of the Communist Party or to having been transferred from a prestigious Russian plant. In the case of defects and un‑planned outages, the station’s KGB department set about finding “who was to blame” and identifying “saboteurs.”80 When recalling one’s own role in such conflicts, my interviewees referred to nuclear safety as a higher interest which they served, even risking reprimands and KGB prosecution. When assuming a “questioning attitude” was not possible, engineers decided to ignore overtly ill‑considered orders, and would then conceal their own (correct) decisions in the shift journals.
- 81 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, 11.01.2015.
At that time, things were declared a cause, and people were declared guilty, but root causes were never really researched and identified.81
So the Soviet engineers on the nuclear periphery developed strategies of creative disobedience and an ethos of personal accountability :
*
- 83 German main control room operators and field operators operate both the reactor and the turbine‑gen (...)
- 84 Shift supervisor, Rivne‑2, 25.03.2014. Until the Russification campaign in the late 1970s, engineer (...)
- 85 Another interesting example of linguistic transition (and Westernization of Soviet technology) is c (...)
40“Being nuclear” on the Soviet periphery meant, moreover, interconnecting migration experience, ethnic‑linguistic divides, and the tacit divisions of nuclear work in a specific way. An NPP is a highly complex and interdependent, but highly standardized, technical system. However, Soviet operators tended to envision parts of it as different “nuclear” and “non‑nuclear” systems, and thus as systems which are, allegedly, to a higher or lesser degree safety‑relevant. Such perceptions were reproduced by internal organizational structures. In Rivne, the operation of the nuclear island, the auxiliary buildings, and the turbine hall was (and remains to date) divided between the “reactor” and the (non‑nuclear) “turbine” department. Different professional traditions and levels of social status were attributed to these departments. Contrastingly, in West German NPPs, nuclear and non‑nuclear functions of this kind were highly integrated, which resulted in a generalist and integrative attitude towards coupled systems.83 Due to the recruitment strategies outlined above, for a long time Rivne’s reactor departments were regarded as urban, educated, elitarian, and Russophone, whereas the turbine departments were considered Ukrainophone. In the 1980s, the official language at the plant was exclusively Russian. Incoming Russophone specialists had almost no command of Ukrainian, whereas all Ukrainophones had a command of Russian. When Lviv‑trained engineers entered the reaktornyi tsekh in the mid‑1980s, conflicts arose with Russophone superiors over speaking Ukrainian during the shift.84 Today, bilingualism is accepted routine at Rivne NPP, whereas the language of technical documents and IT systems has remained Russian for reasons of pragmatism.85
- 86 Viktor Sidorenko, “Vvodnye zamechaniia k urokam Chernobyl´skoi avarii [Introducing remarks on the l (...)
41Socio‑organizational divides at the plant level intersected with other, top‑down views of the industry’s meta‑structure and issues of nuclear safety. The Kurchatov Institute’s deputy director Viktor Sidorenko envisioned a divide between atomshchiki, i.e. nuclear specialists proper from the Sredmash context, as bearers of a “martial” safety culture (oboronnaia priemka), strong discipline, and secretiveness, and ėnergetiki, i.e. power plant specialists from the Minėnergo administration, whose priorities centered on the economic issues of producing electricity and who were supposed to have no real concept of nuclear safety.86 Principally, Sidorenko referred to the existing divide in the Soviet nuclear energy industry : whereas the Soviet and Ukrainian Minėnergos administered the operating NPPs (except for Leningrad and Ignalina as the first facilities of their kind), Sredmash, the ministry of Atomic Energy, was responsible for R&D, reactor design, the nuclear fuel cycle, scientific supervision, pre‑operational testing of NPPs, and the nuclear defense sector. The typical secretiveness and institutionalized mistrust towards “alien” organizations of Sredmash was no good for nuclear knowledge transfer and played a central role in the lead‑up to the Chernobyl disaster. The Minenergo routines, ultimately, did not foster awareness that a nuclear reactor is much more than just another, more sophisticated source of heat for driving a steam turbine. This divide in itself contradicted advanced visions of the nuclear facility as an integrated system requiring trans‑disciplinary attitudes and training.
- 87 The minutes of the Ukrainian Minenergo Nuclear Administration show Kyiiv’s concern with Rivne’s pro (...)
- 88 TsDAHO f. 4906, op. 4, spr. 4423 Doklad Minėnergo UkrSSR o karsto‑suffoznykh strukturakh [Report of (...)
42However, in everyday nuclear power plant operations, the atomshchik/ėnergetik divide never did exist in that ideal‑typical form as seen through the lens of the nuclear élites. Rivne NPP was under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Minenergo, an administrative structure which still had to develop the routines of administering and supervising large nuclear stations. Consequently, Rivne faced problems with workforce recruitment and maintenance organization87 and suffered construction backlogs due to serious geological problems.88 Rivne’s plant management, however, was dominated by Russian sredmashevtsy, who nevertheless could have been regarded as ėnergetiki by Sidorenko despite their early careers within Sredmash : they had been trained at a fossil‑fueled power plant at the nuke complex of Seversk near Tomsk. The junior generations of engineers at Ukrainian NPPs were trained at the nuclear departments of civil universities.
- 89 Ukrainian version of Russ. atomshchik, “nuclear worker.”
- 90 Russ. Den´ energetika /Ukr. Den´ enerhetyka.
43At the plant level, career patterns and professional cultures were much more complex and fragmented than Sidorenko’s atomshchiki–energetiki divide suggests. Emotional attachment of frontline staff to the “native unit” (rodnoi energoblok) overrode professional or linguistic divides. With the arrival of integrative safety concepts in the early 2000s, the spatio‑professional divide between the reactor and the turbine departments became increasingly blurred. In the eyes of the outside world, the entire NPP workforce were perceived as atomnyky89 with reference to their place of work, but at the same time as enerhetyky because all of them produced power. The most appreciated public holiday at the plant and in the atomgrad Varash‑Kuznetsovsk was, and is, December 22, Energy Worker’s Day.90
44Thus local visions of “being nuclear” were fluid and situation‑related. The sometimes multiple, sometimes merged social identities at the Ukrainian power plant gradually transformed the clear‑cut professional identities that were once imposed by the center. Ultimately, it is the strong collective identity of “belonging to the plant” and running a public facility of strategic significance that have helped the multi‑ethnic and bilingual Rivne staff during the recent years of Ukrainian–Russian conflict.
5. Crisis and resilience
- 91 Karl E. Weick/ Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Managing the Unexpected : Sustained Performance in a Complex (...)
45A nuclear power plant is a commercial facility that is made to produce electricity. At the same time, it is a high reliability organization where safety and security concerns should be given priority over economic values.91 On the one hand, a strong safety culture means permanent readiness to adopt questioning attitudes ; on the other hand, self‑concepts of one’s own perfection and pressure from superiors can reinforce the tendency to evade discussions. This is the classical quandary of nuclear safety cultures and their crises, and this was the dilemma of the real Socialist nuclear plant. In the 1980s, Soviet nuclear operators on the imperial periphery were under huge pressure to be successful. They operated the flagships of “scientific‑technical revolution,” and they had to solve the constant problem of electricity under‑supply.
46Soviet Ukraine is a case in point for nuclear crisis history. Interestingly enough, we observe that the crises and major challenges for the Soviet nuclear power industry emerged on the periphery, not at the center. At first glance, this observation seems to follow a simple logic, since most of the Soviet NPPs were situated in provincial regions. However, in the cases I discuss here, we can observe certain center–periphery communications patterns that, as I suggest, played a decisive role in the emergence of crisis.
- 92 The Soviet PWR VVĖR‑440 has some qualities which render the system relatively “benign” under accide (...)
- 93 Werner Rammert / Ingo Schulz‑Schaeffer, “Technik und Handeln : Wenn soziales Handeln sich auf mensc (...)
47Soviet nuclear power in Ukraine experienced two major crises : first, the well‑researched accident at Chernobyl‑4 on April 26 1986, where systemic instability of the Soviet “national” reactor design RBMK, together with organizational factors, led to a transnational disaster. The second crisis that I will discuss is an almost unknown, but nevertheless serious, accident at Rivne‑1, where systemic instability in a transnational reactor design, the Soviet version of the PWR, resulted in successful crisis intervention and, at the same time, demonstrated the resilience and self‑stabilizing qualities92 of the technological system as such. Both are interesting objects for a study of shared techno‑human agency,93 since these accidents emerged at a dynamic interface of social relations, political constraints, and the inherent logic, or Eigensinn of nuclear machines.
- 94 According to the World Health Organization’s research data from 2006 and 2016, “fewer than 50 death (...)
- 95 In nuclear engineering, a transient is any deviation of important parameters (such as primary circu (...)
48If we compare Chernobyl with other large nuclear accidents in history, Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi, it was the only accident with a large toll of victims.94 Technically speaking, it was the only nuclear accident in the strict sense, , i.e. an accident transient95 in which nuclear physics played the dominant role. Whereas Three‑Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi suffered loss‑of‑coolant accidents and subsequent meltdowns due to different root causes, the Chernobyl‑4 disaster was a reactivity accident. A prompt supercritical nuclear power excursion resulted in the immediate explosive disintegration of the reactor core and the melting of part of the fuel.
- 96 Due to graphite (not light water) moderation, the RBMK had a characteristic positive void coefficie (...)
- 97 “Prichiny i obstoiatel´stva avarii na 4m bloke Chernobylˊskoi AĖS 26 aprelia 1986. Mery po povyshen (...)
49The first root cause of the Chernobyl accident was related to the inherent physical characteristics of the RBMK, which rendered the system unstable under certain rare, but possible circumstances.96 In such transients, controlling the RBMK’s sensitive neutron economy was a challenge even for experienced operators. A second destabilizing factor consisted in the hybrid control rod design, which tended to add reactivity to the system in the very first seconds of a reactor scram instead of removing it ; under distinct preconditions, this “positive scram effect” could prove very powerful. Additionally, the RBMK’s reactor protection system did not prevent the manual extraction of too many control rods from the reactor core by means of automated reactor protection system actuation, which played a large part in rendering the positive scram effect so powerful.97
- 98 Former reactor operator at Chernobyl‑4, Kyiiv, 05.02.2013 ; records of witnesses who were present a (...)
50The third root cause of the accident was a socio‑political one. It consisted in the inhibition of knowledge transfer between the center (RBMK research and development) and the periphery (the RBMK plants) for reasons of Sredmash secrecy and Socialist procrastination. Consequently, evidence and warnings about RBMK flaws circulated only among a small group of high‑ranking nuclear specialists, but did not make their way to the field, where the local RBMK operators observed non‑plausible behavior and reactivity peaks under specific transients. Lacking the information from above, they never came to the conclusion that this was the precursor symptom of a potential severe accident transient. Proposals for modernization of the relevant instrumentation and control systems had already been discussed before the accident, but these were neither prepared by the responsible central authorities, nor transmitted in a timely manner to the periphery. A further social factor in the Chernobyl accident transient was social pressure from a superior, which prevented the reactor operators from assuming a questioning attitude towards a – purportedly non‑nuclear, turbine‑related – test program. Acting under the direct supervision of their superior, who urged them to hurry up, the operators had no opportunity to develop a subversive exit strategy, something which had previously saved many of their colleagues.98 Consequently, the human–machine system of Chernobyl‑4 was not prevented from further destabilization. The Soviet national reactor RBMK, which was well known as a challenging, capricious nuclear machine, played a decisive role as an autonomous agent in this systemic collapse.
*
- 99 Otchët s detal´nym opisaniem perekhodnykh rezhimov ėnergobloka Nr. 1 Rovenskoi AĖS [Report with a d (...)
- 100 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie,” 224.
51However, there are reasons to assume that not only the disaster path of nuclear technology was experienced on the Soviet periphery, but also the resilience path. Prior to Chernobyl, Rivne‑1 suffered a severe accident, a primary‑to‑secondary system loss of coolant (PRISE) due to multiple steam generator collector tube failures on January 22, 1982. Though this accident had been foreseen neither in the planning of the unit nor in accident instructions, the plant’s design turned out to be sufficiently robust, and the staff’s preparedness prevented damage to the reactor core. No one was injured in this accident,99 but it originated from the same economic and political constraints and administrative problems as Chernobyl. The main constraint was a chronic scarcity of electricity supply. In this situation, as Sidorenko puts it, ėnergetiki interests prevailed over atomshchiki interests and output over system integrity ; the station’s management were seduced into ignoring early symptoms of the first steam generator defects for a period of three months.100
52After the first deviations were already recorded in the autumn of 1981, in early January 1982, the symptoms became increasingly alarming : radioactivity levels in the secondary circuit rose, indicating that primary circuit coolant was escaping through leakages into the secondary system due to the pressure difference. However, Rivne’s management feared the Eastern European cold more than radioactive releases. If the unit could not produce heat and electricity, the station would suffer severe damage due to piping systems freezing, as would the nearby atomgrad with its 20,000 inhabitants. So, they continued muddling through. In this situation, the Soviet peripheric energopolis model – the specific spatial and infrastructural interdependence of a large, but isolated energy provider and an urban structure – proved to be highly vulnerable. Soviet authoritarian governance did not allow junior managers, who analyzed and reported the deterioration of the situation, to opt in favor of the unit’s outage. Chief engineer Dmyterko’s proposal for immediate reactor shutdown was rejected.
53However, whereas ignoring vital information lead to catastrophe at Chernobyl‑4, the operators of Rivne‑1 proved to be sufficiently trained to find methods to cope with the accident transient, which eventually occurred on the night shift of January 22 1982, when small leakages in four of the six steam generators worsened abruptly. The unit experienced a large loss of primary coolant, and consequently an immediate decrease of primary circuit pressure. Within seconds, all emergency core cooling systems were automatically actuated as expected, thus giving the operators time to analyze the situation, and to take measures.
54PRISE transients are among the most complex accident transients in PWRs, and automatic safety systems alone cannot master them. Consequently, successful accident management largely depends on the decisions of human operators, who must, in spite of extreme stress, develop a clear conception of the complex interactions between the “nuclear” and the “non‑nuclear” side of the plant. In this distinct transient, decision making is very complex, since basic safety goals (subcriticality, prevention of radioactive releases, reactor core cooling) compete with and contradict each other and put the operators in dilemmas. Rivne‑1’s team achieved the most important goals – to protect the reactor core from fuel assembly damage (and highly radioactive releases), to secure subcriticality, and to organize regular core cooling. However, a small amount of (lightly) radioactive steam‑water mix escaped into the atmosphere through secondary circuit safety valves.
- 101 IAEA Tecdoc‑1610, Safety Analysis of WWER‑440 Nuclear Power Plants : Potential Consequences of a La (...)
- 102 Former heads of Electric and I&C department, Kuznetsovsk, 26.09.2013.
55The Rivne method of coping with the PRISE was later assessed as “best practice” by experts from the IAEA, which many years later initiated research programs on this type of accident.101 When a government commission arrived at Rivne NPP and asked the station management to “name the culprits and punish them,” plant manager Korovkin answered, “We should rather praise them than punish them.”102 The commission’s accident report consequently criticized the management for not taking measures earlier, but did not blame the subaltern. Instead, it identified the root cause, the corrosion of steam generator collector coverings due to mistakes in the production of these components.
- 103 “Doklad pravitel´stvennoi komissii po rassledovaniiu prichin avarii na Chernobyl´skoi AĖS 26 apreli (...)
56The incident showed that the lauded oboronnaia priemka had not prevented serious flaws in nuclear equipment. Besides, it proved that superiors in the Soviet nuclear industry could, if they decided to, protect their staff from the typical kto vinovat blame game. However, too much depended on the will and prudence of a single manager or head of commission ; there was no systemic protection from arbitrary and unjust decisions. In Chernobyl, the Sredmash bureaucracy would decide adversely : the first accident report of 1986 blamed the local operators in order to protect the nuclear élites, who were responsible for design flaws and information blockades. This approach was, in a way, a breach of the nuclear social contract, and caused a major crisis of confidence in the nuclear community on the Soviet periphery, which had hitherto always been loyal to the state.103
- 104 The VVĖR‑1200, which has been operational at Novovoronezh II‑1 since 2017 and at Leningrad II‑1 sin (...)
- 105 Josephson, Red Atom, 290–292.
57The 1982 case, however, shows that technological choices decide over far‑ranging historical developments. In contrast to the RBMK, the Soviet VVĖR‑440 proved to be resilient under the extremely unfavorable conditions of multiple component failure. In expert opinion, this was thanks to large safety margins, which helped the shift team to develop timely strategies for action. Whereas the Soviet VVĖR at Rivne NPP proved to have self‑stabilizing characteristics, the RBMK at Chernobyl NPP tended to self‑destabilization in accident transients. Both of them, within only four years, demonstrated the broad range of possible paths between successful accident management and a severe accident running out of control. Both experiences eventually led to major transformations in the Soviet nuclear industry as a whole, and marked the end of the RBMK design, whereas the VVĖR design was being gradually transformed into the modern solutions of today.104 Consequently, there is reason to rethink the simplistic post‑Chernobyl “lessons learned, back to work” narratives of the industry, but also teleological assumptions of “accidents waiting to happen,” and pessimist‑activist narratives of a never‑ending history of nuclear decay in Eastern Europe at “station sites covered with mud and debris.”105
6. Outlook : Ukrainizing the atom
58Most visions of nuclear history in Ukraine are dominated by two negative experiences : the Chernobyl disaster, and the post‑Soviet disintegration of the nuclear industry, which posed a series of major problems for the Ukrainian nuclear plants. In the early 1990s, the nuclear expert class in Ukraine experienced the post‑Chernobyl crisis of confidence, financial atrophy, overdue wage payment, the disruption to decades of cooperation with Russian colleagues, rapid workforce turnover and brain drain to construction sites abroad, a nuclear moratorium law, and finally, the reorganization of nuclear legislation and regulation. So, was this just another historical crisis ?
- 106 “Upravlinnia jadernoiu enerhetykoiu i promyslovistiu Ukraiiny [The administration of the Ukrainian (...)
- 107 TsDAVO, f. 1 Verkhovna Rada, op. 16, spr. 4878, Minutes of the moratorium debate, 17.06.1993.
59Ukrainian atomnyky had three options : to remain an integrated part of the post‑Soviet Russian nuclear industry, an option that was promoted by the Russian side, but soon became obsolete due to the development of independent nuclear corporations and the growing differences in nuclear regulation, which followed Western patterns of state oversight over a (nevertheless state‑owned) licensee in Ukraine.106 The second option was to develop an entirely independent industry and full nuclear cycle, which was prevented, however, by a lack of financial means and political will. The third option was hybrid transformation and ad‑hoc adaptation, which meant developing new connections with a number of partners in Western Europe and the US, but maintaining connections with Russia. The fourth option, a nuclear phase‑out and liquidation of the industry, was rejected in 1993, when the Ukrainian parliament repealed the nuclear moratorium prohibiting further development of nuclear energy in Ukraine.107
- 108 Fedorchenko, “Krechshenie” ; Rivnens´ka AES perlyna polis´koho kraiu, 53.
60Ukrainian atomnyky, reorganized in the form of the state‑owned company NAEK Enerhoatom, chose the third option, and Rivne NPP, again, is a case in point for the hybrid Ukrainization. Rivne’s nuclear engineers, who turned overnight from Soviet to Ukrainian specialists, had to develop a range of new practices in nuclear safety research and practical application, since they found themselves cut off from their scientific basis at Russian‑based research institutes. However, as we have seen, Rivne had some experience in overcoming crisis. Apparently for this reason, the station had been selected to host the very first international peer review of plant operational safety on Soviet territory (IAEA OSART) in 1988.108 In the 1990s, Rivne faced the same transformation crisis which paralyzed the whole industry, but profited from this “window to the West” experience. The station established a nuclear safety analysis department and erected a full‑scale simulator training center. This was secured by transnational partnerships and modernization programs in the 1990s, which were financed by European and US governments. Western partners had a vital interest in the stabilization of post‑Soviet nuclear states and in safety upgrades of Eastern European nuclear plants.
61Turning to the West did not mean disrupting connections with Russia. In fact, quite the opposite was true : Russian partners played an eminent role when Rivne NPP resumed the completion of its unit 4, which had been stopped due to the moratorium in 1990. After the parliament’s decision, Rivne’s management had decided to conserve the construction site, but to retain a small construction workforce at the site in order to save the already installed equipment from decay. However, under the cover of “conserving,” there was much subversive “constructing,” and so Rivne‑4 outlasted the end of the moratorium in 1993 in unexpectedly good condition – in comparison to other post‑Soviet nuclear construction sites, which were ravaged by theft and vandalism. However, it was not until 2000 that financing, partly with Western aid, was organized to complete the project.
- 109 Mykhailo Laba, “Istoriia, iaku my sami tvoryly [A history that we made],” Enerhobloku Nr. 4, 108‑10 (...)
- 110 Povyshenie bezopasnosti i prodlenie sroka ėkspluatatsii ėnergoblokov 1 i 2 OP “Rivnenskaia AĖS”. It (...)
62Ukrainian firms like Radii (Kirovohrad), Impuls (Severodonetsk), and Westron (Kharkiv), which emerged from former Soviet defense technology enterprises, now played an eminent role in modernizing the Soviet VVĖR‑1000 at Rivne‑4, whose electrical equipment and computer systems dated from the late 1980s. Additionally, Rivne NPP cooperated with Škoda, in the Czech Republic, and several partners in Germany, and received scientific consultation from the Kurchatov Institute and the German Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit. Eventually, a brand new I&C and reactor protection system for Rivne‑4 was designed.109 From then on, Rivne‑4 was nicknamed the evroblok, the “European Unit,” although its nuclear heart was still the Soviet workhorse VVĖR‑1000/V‑320. In 2011, Rivne NPP continued modernization with a lifetime extension project for the VVĖR‑440 units 1 and 2, and pursued a similar strategy (European co‑financing, new Ukrainian and European partners, Russian partners), followed by Rivne‑3’s modernization in 2018, and plans to use Westinghouse fuel for the very first time in Rivne’s history. However, this transformation process sometimes suffered setbacks, when Westernization was implemented as makeshift Ukrainization. For instance, in 2008 reverse‑engineered spare parts for German pressurizer relief valves caused a serious incident with a valve malfunction at Rivne‑3.110
7. Conclusion : Re‑centering the periphery
63Nuclear energy “in” Ukraine began as an imperial intervention on the Soviet periphery. However, it transmuted, like many other imperial projects in the country, into a process of adaptation and appropriation. Implementing the nuclear program in Ukraine did not necessarily mean another act of forced Russian centralist modernization, but rather triggered a process in which Ukrainians participated in manifold ways – sometimes taking the lead. Nuclear power in Soviet Ukraine was a mainstay of the Soviet nuclear program, and there was much of Ukraine in Soviet nuclear power, as we have seen. Ukrainian party and scholarly élites mostly welcomed the atom on Ukrainian soil, and this was not because they were driven by Little Russian subaltern loyalism, as eco‑nationalist narratives suggest, but because they hoped to stabilize Ukraine’s position as Soviet secunda inter pares. The nuclear installations triggered a mobilization process that changed the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians in former under‑industrialized parts of the country. Rivne NPP, which had initially landed like a modernist Russian spaceship in a traditional Ukrainian world, gradually “put down roots” in the Polesian marshes. Today, it is an organization of 7,000 employees that operates four reactors in two languages and not only “produces power” but serves as an anchor of regional pride and identity.
64It is worth studying the periphery in order to learn more about the large socio‑technical system of nuclear power. Nuclearizing Ukraine was a Janus‑faced endeavor. Change within this system was disruptive and evolutionist at the same time. It was on the Ukrainian battlefield that the Soviet national reactor RBMK faced its disastrous defeat and drove the whole country into the worst crisis since the end of WW II. At the same time, in the same 1980s, in the same Ukrainian Polesia, the Soviet transnational reactor concept VVĖR proved to be resilient to one major accident.
65At Chernobyl, the optimism, creativity, and stress‑resistance of frontline nuclear experts could not counteract systemic flaws in technical design and knowledge transfer blockades. At Rivne, the creativity and flexibility of the Soviet engineer would produce viable solutions in times of crisis – and open a window to the West. That helped the station through the chronic transformation crisis of a post‑Soviet industry, which involved not only adjusting Soviet technology to the requirements of a modern nuclear safety culture, but also reinventing and reestablishing knowledge formats and knowledge transfers. This process is still ongoing today. The micro‑history of nuclear Ukraine calls for a sense of place, and for open‑mindedness towards the ambivalences of nuclear modernity, which came to Polesia twice : once as a story of defeat and suffering and once as a story of recovery and resilience.
Notes
1 Mykola Shteinberg, June 2014, quoted by Tatiana Kasperski, “Nuclear dreams and realities in contemporary Russia and Ukraine,” History and Technology, 31, 1 (2015) : 55–80 (58, and fn. 25).
2 This refers to statistical data from 2017. Ukraine’s nuclear share in electric generation is the second‑largest worldwide, with France taking the lead, and Belgium, Slovakia, and Hungary ranking third, fourth, and fifth. World Nuclear Organization, nuclear share figures, 2007–2017, http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figures/nuclear-generation-by-country.aspx (14.08.2018).
3 “Atomni elektrostantsii Ukraiiny [Ukraine’s Nuclear power stations],” Hryhorii Lysychenko, Mykola Shteinberg, et al., Atomna industriia Ukraiiny. Ekspertnyi ohliad [The Nuclear Industry of Ukraine. An Experts’ Survey] (Oslo : Bellona, 2017), 26–27 ; “Enerhoatom vymahaie rivnykh umov rozvytku [Enerhoatom demands equal conditions for development],” Enerhiia, 19.07.2018 ; “Khto pidirvaie enerhetychnu bezpeku Ukraiiny ? [Who Undermines Ukraine’s Energy Security ?],” Ukraiins´kyi Tyzhden´, Nr. 27, 12.07.2018.
4 To date, there is no comprehensive history of nuclear energy in Ukraine, but there are many books and articles that frame the Chernobyl catastrophe as a Soviet disaster in Ukraine caused by the technocratic hubris and plan economy authoritarianism of the Moscow center, e.g. Vladimir M. Chernousenko, Chernobyl : Insights from the Inside (Berlin : Springer, 1991) ; Iurii Shcherbak, Chernobyl. A Documentary Story (Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1989) ; Roman Solchanyk, ed., Ukraine : from Chernobyl´ to Sovereignty : A Collection of Interviews, Basingstoke : MacMillan, 1992). See also Jane I. Dawson, Eco‑Nationalism : Anti‑Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, (Durham : Duke UP, 1996) ; for a revisionist view, see Anna Veronika Wendland, “Povernennia do Chornobylia. Vid natsionalnoii tragedii do predmeta innovatsiinykh dystsyplin v istoriohrafii ne tilky Ukraiiny [Chernobyl Revisited. From National Tragedy to an Innovative Historiography of Ukraine and beyond],” Ukraiina Moderna, no. 18 (2011), 151–184.
5 Viktor A. Sidorenko, ed., Istoriia Atomnoi Ėnergetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii [History of the Nuclear Power Industry in the USSR and Russia], henceforth IAĖSSiR, vol. 1‑5 (M. : Izdatel´stvo po atomnoi nauke i tekhnike, 2000–2004) ; for popular presentations on Russian nuclear history see “Strana Rosatom,” http://www.strana‑rosatom.ru/category/history/ ; for an example of transformation of “Soviet” into “Russian” technology (here, the Soviet VVĖR‑1000/V‑320 PWR, with 13 units in Ukraine) see : “Atomnaia Ėnergiia 2.0. Novosti : Rosatom gotov ‘omoloditˊ’ korpus rossiiskogo iadernogo reaktora VVĖR‑1000 [Nuclear Energy 2.0. News : Rosatom ready to “rejuvenate” the pressure vessel of the Russian VVĖR‑1000 nuclear reactor],” May 24, 2018, http://www.atomic‑energy.ru/news/2018/05/24/86080 (15.08.2018).
6 “Uranove vyrobnytstvo v Ukraiini [Uranium production in Ukraine],” in Atomna industriia, 47–53.
7 Paul R. Josephson, “Science and Technology as Panacea in Gorbachev’s Russia,” in James P. Scanlan, ed., Technology, Culture, and Development : The Experience of the Soviet Model, (Armonk, NY : Sharpe,1992), 1992, 25–61 (26).
8 Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer : Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA : Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 89–93 (90).
9 Anna Veronika Wendland, “Inventing the Atomograd. Nuclear Urbanism as a Way of Life in Eastern Europe Before and After Chernobyl,” in Thomas M. Bohn, Thomas Feldhoff, Lisette Gebhard, Arndt Graf, eds, The Impact of Disaster : Social and Cultural Approaches to Fukushima and Chernobyl (Berlin : EBV, 2015), 261–288 ; Stefan Guth, “Oasis of the Future. The Nuclear City of Shevchenko/Aqtau, 1959–2019,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 66, 2 (2018) : 93–123 ; Felix Ackermann, Benjamin Cope, Siarhei Liubimau, eds, Mapping Visaginas : Sources of Urbanity in a Former Mono‑Functional Town (Vilnius : Academy of Arts Press, 2016).
10 Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics ?,” Daedalus,109 (1980) : 1, 121–136.
11 Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power : The Pre‑Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2015) ; Thomas P. Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technical Systems,” in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, Trevor J. Pinch, eds, The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1987), 51–82.
12 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France : Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1998).
13 Michael Schüring, “Advertising the Nuclear Venture. The Rhetorical and Visual Public Relation Strategies of the German Nuclear Industry in the 1970s and 80s,” History and Technology, 29, 4 (2013) : 369–398 ; Sonja D. Schmid, “Celebrating Tomorrow Today. The Peaceful Atom on Display in the Soviet Union,” Social Studies of Science, 36, 3 : 331–365. Prime examples of the NPP on display in Soviet documentary film and brochures are i.a. D. Kuper, L.A. Kochetkov (directors), A.S. Teliatnikov (camera), BAĖS – Beloiarskaia AĖS im. Igoria Kurchatova [Beloiarsk Igor´ Kurchatov NPP], USSR, 1964, and I.D. Morokhov, A.K. Grigoriants, V.P. Briukhanov, eds, Chernobyl´skaia AĖS s reaktorom RBMK. Pervaia na Ukraine [Chernobyl NPP, equipped with an RBMK reactor, and Ukraine’s first NPP] (Kiev : Otraslevoi vystavochnyi tsentr / spetsial´nyi ėksperimental´nyi khudozhestvenno‑konstruktorskii otdel, 1978).
14 Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear : Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2012).
15 Kate Brown, Plutopia : Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford : Oxford UP, 2013).
16 Sonja D. Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power Industry,” Osiris, 23, 1, Intelligentsia Science : The Russian Century, 1860–1960 (2008), 82–111 ; ibid., Producing Power.
17 Anna Veronika Wendland, Atomgrad : Kerntechnische Moderne im östlichen Europa, 1966‑2018, Habilitationsschrift, Philipps‑Universität Marburg, 2020.
18 Russian : Polesˊe, Belarussian : Palessie.
19 Korenizatsiia was an early Soviet meme, meaning the programmatic goal of “putting down roots” of communist rule in non‑Russian, non‑urban, non‑proletarian populations of the Soviet Union. This objective was to be accomplished by granting cultural autonomy rights, recruiting local native cadres to the ranks of the Communist Party, and by conducting education in the titular language of the region or Soviet republic. Gerhard Simon, Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitik in der Sowjetunion : Von der totalitären Diktatur zur nachstalinschen Gesellschaft (Baden‑Baden : Nomos, 1986) ; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire : Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca – London : Cornell UP, 2010) ; Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, 53, 2 (Summer 1994) : 414–452.
20 Constance Perin, Shouldering Risks : The Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power Industry (Princeton : Princeton UP, 2005).
21 Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom : Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today
(Pittsburgh, PA. : Pittsburgh UP, 2005), 203–242.
22 Ministerstvo Srednego Mashinostroeniia, the “Ministry of Medium Machine‑Building,” was founded in 1953 in order to reorganize the nuclear defense industry and to integrate the nuclear installations and research labs into civil research and development.
23 Josephson, Red Atom, 113–119, depicts Aleksandrov as the archetype of a loyalist and uncritical executioner of Soviet nuclear aspirations. Cf. Borovoi, “Moi Chernobyl´ [My Chernobyl],” Novyi Mir, 3 (1996) : 132‑180 (139), who recalls Aleksandrov in deep despair after the Chernobyl accident ; however, Gorbachev did not accept his resignation.
24 L.A. Kochetkov, M.F. Troianov, “Reaktory na bystrykh neitronakh [Fast Neutron Reactors],” IAĖSSiR, vol. 1, 164–187.
25 Efim Slavskii, “Avtobiograficheskaia zapiska [Autobiographical note],” in Vladimir Gubarev, Belyi Arkhipelag Stalina. Dokumental´noe povestvovanie o sozdanii iadernoi bomby, osnovannoe na rassekrechenykh materialakh “Atomnogo proekta SSSR” [Stalin’s White Archipelago. Documentary story on the making of the atomic bomb, based on de‑classified material from the Soviet nuclear project], (M. : Molodaia gvardiia, 2004), 128–132.
26 Borys Lewitzkyj, Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine 1953–1980, (Edmonton : Canadian Inst. of Ukrainian Studies, Univ. of Alberta, 1984), 5 ; John A. Armstrong, “The Ethnic Scene in the Soviet Union : the View of the Dictatorship,” in Erich Goldhagen, ed., Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union (New York : Praeger, 1968), 3–49, esp. 32.
27 Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization : Russia’s Imperial Experience (New York : Wiley & Sons, 2013).
28 Linda Cook, “Brezhnev’s ‘Social Contract’ and Gorbachev’s Reforms,” Soviet Studies, 44, 1 (1992), 1, 37–56 ; Wendland, “Inventing the atomograd,” 268–272.
29 General trend based on the data of 26 short routine interviews which I conducted with nuclear workers and engineers at Rivne NPP (May–September 2013, June–August 2015). In‑depth interview with former female technician in a construction brigade, Kuznetsovsk, 02.09. 2013 ; Igor Mogila, Metsamor – Kuznetsovsk (Lutsk : Media, 2014) ; Serhii Fedorchenko, Ivanna Kovb, eds, 40 rokiv nadii i zvershen´. Rivnensˊka atomna elektrostantsiia [40 years of hope and accomplishment : Rivne NPP] (Kuznetsovsk : Rivnens´ka Atomna Elektrostantsiia, 2013) ; Workers’ biographies in Radiansˊka Ukraiina na RAES [Soviet Ukraine at Rivne NPP], 07.09. 1979.
30 TsDAHO (Tsentral´nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads´kykh Obˊiednanˊ Ukraiiny [Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine]), f. 283, Partiinyi komitet ministerstva enerhetyky ta elektryfikatsii URSR, opys´ 1, sprava 145, Protokol no. 8, 1‑go iul´ia 1981, arkush. 25–30 ; Radiansˊka Ukraiina na RAES, 07.09.1979.
31 Guth, “Oasis” ; Lists of Ignalina NPP employees in Eldar Batrakov, Violeta Shumilene, eds, Ignalinskoi AĖS 25 let [On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Ignalina NPP] (Visaginas : Visagino poligrafija, 2009), e.g. Reaktornyi tsekh [reactor department] 162, 174‑5, Tsekh teploavtomatiki I izmerenii [instrumentation and control department] 245, 247.
32 Shift supervisor, Rivne‑2, 07. 07. 2015 ; head of reactor department, Rivne NPP, 06.09. 2013.
33 Anna Veronika Wendland, “Die ukrainischen Länder 1945 bis 1993,” in Frank Golczewski, ed., Geschichte der Ukraine (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 269–312 ; Borys Lewytzkyj, Die Sowjetukraine 1944‑1963 (Köln : Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1964), 115–119 ; 189 ff.
34 Shelest to the CPSU Central Committee on Energy Economy, 08.06.1965, Iurii Shapoval, ed., Petro Shelest. Spravzhnii sud istorii shche poperedu. Spohady, shchodennyky, dokumenty, materialy [Petro Shelest. History’s just judgment is still ahead. Memories, diaries, documents] (Kyiiv : ALEF‑Ukraiina, 2011), doc. Nr. 18, 714‑716 ; Shelest to CPSU CC, Council of Ministers on industrial development of Ukrainian SSR, 09.06.1965, ibid. doc. no. 19, 716–720 ; Shelest to CPSU CC on fuel shortages at Ukrainian power plants, 30.12.1969, ibid., doc. no. 50, 832.
35 Jurij Latysh, “Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, liudyna ta ii epokha [Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, the man and his epoch],” UACommons, 10.08.2017 ; http://commons.com.ua/uk/volodimir‑sherbickij/ http://commons.com.ua/uk/volodimir‑sherbickij/ ; Wendland, “Die ukrainischen Länder,” 286.
36 Shelest to CPSU CC on Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 03.09.1967, in Shelest, Spravzhnii sud, doc. no. 25, 730–31 ; Shelest to CPSU CC on Ukrainian Ministry of Energy and Electrification, 08.07.1969, ibid., doc. no. 45, 819–822.
37 In Ukrainian.
38 Chernobylˊskaia AĖS s reaktorom RBMK ; Lewytzky, Sowjetukraine, 177–179 ; “Kratkaia spravka o proektirovanii ChAĖS” [Short information on the planning of Chernobyl NPP],” in : “O prichinakh i obstoiatel´stvakh avarii na 4m bloke Chernobylˊskoi AĖS 26 aprelia 1986. Doklad Kommissii Gosatomnadzora SSSR, 1991g. [On the causes and contributors of the accident at Chernobyl‑4 on April 26, 1986. Report by the State Committee for Nuclear and Radiation Safety of the USSR, 1991],” IAĖSSiR, vol. 4, 333–410 (341–342).
39 On Ukrainian dissident positions on Russification through modernization see Instytut natsional´noii pamiati, Arkhivy KDB Ukraiins´koii RSR, tom 1, ark. 104‑119, Kriminal´na sprava Ivana Dziuby, 1972, Vysnovok, 15.02.1972 ; Ivan Dziuba, hand‑written responses on interrogator’s questions, ibid., ark. 2 (251)–30(279) ; Yurii Shapoval, “Petro Shelest. Zhyttja ta politychna dolia [Petro Shelest. His life and political fate],” Shelest : Spravzhnii sud istorii, 18–44 (32). See also Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl : the history of a nuclear catastrophe (New York : Basic Books, 2018), 285–300 ; Dawson, Eco‑Nationalism.
40 Klaus Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus : sowjetische Technik‑ und Umweltgeschichte, 1948–1967 (München : Oldenbourg, 2010) ; Anne D. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power : the History of Dneprostroi (New York : Oxford UP, 1988).
41 In Russian : Pust´ budet atom rabotnikom, a ne soldatom. See also Guth, “Oasis.”
42 Klaus Gestwa, “Ökologischer Notstand und sozialer Protest : Ein umwelthistorischer Blick auf die Reformunfähigkeit und den Zerfall der Sowjetunion,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 43 (2003), 349–383.
43 Josephson, Red Atom, 6‑46.
44 Rivne and Khmel´nyts´kyi Oblasts were the least urbanized regions in Soviet Ukraine in the 1960s, only 17 % and 19 % of the respective populations being urban. The Northern part of Kyiiv Oblast was also under‑urbanized : Lewytzkyj, Sowjetukraine, 231 ; Charles K. Dodd, Industrial decision‑making and high‑risk technology : siting nuclear power facilities in the USSR, Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 42–47, 60–68.
45 Falk Flade, Energy Infrastructures in the Eastern Bloc : Poland and the Construction of Transnational Electricity, Oil, and Gas Systems (Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 2017), 135–174.
46 V.P. Denisov / Ju.G. Dragunov, Reaktornye ustanovki VVĖR dlia atomnykh ėlektrostantsii [VVER reactor installations for nuclear power plants] (M. : 2002) ; A.Ia. Kramerov, “Ob ėvoliutsii kanalˊnykh vodo‑grafitnykh reaktorov v Kurchatovskom institute [On the development of channel‑type water‑graphite reactors at the Kurchatov institute],” IAĖSSiR, vol. 3, 5–60 ; V.P. Vasilevskij, A.A. Petrov et al.,“Razrabotka proekta i sozdanie pervogo energobloka s reaktorom RBMK‑1000 [Design and installation of the first power unit with RBMK‑1000 reactor],” IAĖSSiR, vol. 3, 61–100 ; Nikolai Dollezhal´, I.Ia. Emelianov, Kanalˊnyi iadernyi energeticheskii reaktor [Channel‑type nuclear power reactor] (M. : Atomizdat, 1980).
47 Lewytzky, Die Sowjetukraine, 178–190 ; 187–195.
48 Anna Veronika Wendland et al., “Modernity in the Marshlands : Interventions and Transformations at the European Periphery from the Nineteenth to the Twenty‑first Century,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa‑Forschung / Journal of East Central European Studies, 68, 3 (2019) : 319‑343 ; Artem Kouida, “Land Melioration in Belarusian Polesia as a Modernization Factor in the Soviet Periphery,” ibid., 401–418.
49 Chernobylˊskaia AĖS s reaktorom RBMK ; Prypiat´. Fotorozpovid´ pro odne z naimolodshykh mist Ukraiiny, shcho zavdiachuie svoiim vynyknenniam sporudzhenniu na r. Prypiati Chornobylskoii AES im. V.I. Lenina [Prypiat. Photo story on one of the youngest cities in Ukraine which emerged thanks to the erection of Chernobyl Lenin NPP on the river Prypiat] (Kyiiv : Mystetstvo, 1986).
50 Electrician, Rivne NPP, 20.08. 2013. The term refers to Stepan Bandera, leader of the OUN‑B (orhanizatsiia ukraiinskykh natsionalistiv/Bandera), the radical fascist branch of the multi‑faceted Ukrainian partisan movement in the 1940s.
51 Paraphrasing Kate Brown’s book title : A Biography of No Place : From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge MA : Harvard UP, 2004).
52 Propaganda meme referring to the Soviet occupation and later annexation of Western Ukrainian lands (which formerly belonged to interwar Poland) in the wake of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and the Yalta Conference.
53 Lewytzkyj, Sowjetukraine, 31 ; Bogdan Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen 1941‑1944. Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Paderborn – München : Schoeningh, 2009), 231–239.
54 From 1982 onwards, the full name was Rivnensˊka AES imeni 60‑richchia Radians´koho Soiuza, to honor the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union.
55 Holdings of the Rivne NPP Information Center (which equally functions as local museum), Photo album “Zapadno‑Ukrainskaia AĖS [West Ukrainian NPP],” (1974). In 2016, Kuznetsovsk was renamed Varash.
56 “RAĖS budut testirovat´ po mezhdunarodnym standartam [Rivne NPP will be tested according to international standards],” Enerhiia, 08.11.2012 ; Sergei Fedorchenko, “Edinstvennyi v mire ėksperiment [An experiment unique in the world],” ibid. ; Sergei Fedorchenko, “Vospominaniia byvshego reaktorshchika [Memories of a former reactor specialist],” Enerhiia, 23.09.2010 ; Mogila, Metsamor – Kuznetsovsk, 11 ; Vladimir Korovkin, former director of Rivne NPP (from 1973 to 1994), Kuznetsovsk, 21.12.2012.
57 Photo archive of Aleksei Kislyi, Kuznetsovsk. Kislyi is a retired engineer and amateur photographer. Many of his photos are displayed at the NPP information center.
58 Lidiia Orel, Polissia. Te, shcho ne zabuvaietsia [Polesia. What will never be forgotten], (Kyiiv : Informatsiino‑Analitychna Ahentsiia “Nash Chas,” 2010), 14–18.
59 Halyna Savchuk (b. 1958), Netishyn (Khmel´nyts´ky NPP), interview with Svetlana Boltovska, 11.10.2016.
60 Electrician, Rivne NPP, 20.08.2013, on the first new housing in Kuznetsovsk.
61 Radiansˊka Ukraiina na RAES (1979–1991), later Enerhiia [Energy] (since 1991), Rivne NPP and Kuznetsovsk newspapers ; Enerhobudivnyk [The power plant builder], Khmel´nyts´kyi NPP and Netishyn newspaper.
62 “Do 40‑richchia voz´iednannja. Vysoty bryhadyra [On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Reunification. A foreman at the height of his skills],” Radians´ka Ukraiina na RAES, 05.09.1979. See also Serhii Fedorchenko, Nadiia Tymofeienko, Ivanna Kovb, eds, Rivnens´ka AES perlyna polis´koho kraiu. 40 rokiv nadii i zvershen´. Fotoalˊbom [Rivne NPP, the pearl of the Polesian lands : Forty years of hope and accomplishments. Photo album] (Kuznetsovsk : Rivnens´ka Atomna Elektrychna Stantsiia, 2013).
63 Vykonavchyi Komitet Kuznetsovs´koii Mis´koii Rady – Arkhivnyi viddil [Archival department of the Kuznetsovsk City Council’s Executive Committee] (VKKMR‑AV), f. 1 Kuznetsovs´ka Mis´ka Rada [Kuznetsovsk City Council], op. 1, spr. 22, ark. 19–35, Protokol zasidannia vykonavchoho komiteta Kuznetsovs´koii silrady [Minutes of the Kuznetsovsk Village Council’s Executive Comittee], 15.01.1979 ; “Novi, industrial´ni kraievydy vidkryvaiut’sia teper na zelenii polis’kii zemli [New, industrial horizons are now opening up above the green lands of Polesia],” Radiansˊka Ukraiina na RAES, 15.10.1980 ; head of International department, Rivne NPP, 19.12.2012 ; head of department and former shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, 16.03.2015.
64 Chernobylˊskaia AĖS s reaktorom RBMK, back cover.
65 Andreas Renner, “Globale Ikone des Kalten Kriegs ? Der Atompilz und die sowjetische Nuklearkultur,” Osteuropa, 66, 6–7 (2016) : 215–236.
66 Claude Parent, Les maisons de l’atome (P. : Éditions du Moniteur, 1983).
67 Today, everything is in place, except the bookshop, and the posters feature “best performers,” not Socialist heroes.
68 Head of department, then shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, August 18, 2013.
69 Hecht, The Radiance of France.
70 Interviews with nuclear engineers and participant observation, Rivne NPP, reactor department 1, safety analysis department, May–September 2013 ; reactor department 2, turbine department 2, July–August 2015.
71 Rivne‑1 was a first‑of‑its‑kind VVĖR‑440/V‑213 unit (the first Soviet V‑213 after the Soviet–Finnish project of Loviisa NPP), and hence most of the Eastern European VVĖR‑440 newbuilds in Hungary (Paks), the GDR (Greifswald‑5, ‑6) and the ČSSR (Mochovce, Dukovany) were erected and modified using Rivne’s experience. Fedorchenko, “Vospominaniia reaktorshchika” ; Mogila, Metsamor – Kuznetsovsk.
72 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, 06.02.2013.
73 Shift supervisor, Radiation Protection Department, Rivne NPP, 03.06.2015. ALARA : “As low as reasonably achievable,” an international safety guideline for radiation protection.
74 Borovoi, “Moi Chernobylˊ,” 155.
75 TsDAVO (Tsentral´nyj Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Vyshchykh Orhaniv Ukraiiny [Central State Archive of Higher Government Organs of Ukraine]), f. 4786 Ministerstvo Enerhetyky i Elektryfikacii URSR, op. 1, spr. 1237, Otchët po komandirovke v g. Moskvu 21–25 avgusta 1973 goda glavnogo spetsialista Indychenko Ju.F., i zamestitelia nachal´nika sluzhby Urazovskogo V.S [Report on senior specialist Ju.F. Indychenko’s and deputy head of service V.S. Urazovskii’s official trip to Moscow, August 21‑25, 1973], Kyiiv, 02./03.09.1973, ark. 37–48.
76 Head of safety analysis department, former shift supervisor, 03.03.2015. Germozona, “hermetic zone,” is the Russian nuclear jargon for primary circuit rooms.
77 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, on his own intervention in a primary circuit room, 14.06.2016.
78 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, 07.08.2015.
79 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, 11.01.2015. Mogila, Metsamor – Kuznetsovsk, 9–10, 42, 60, 62, 74. Nikolai Karpan, Chernobyl´. Mest´ mirnogo atoma [Chernobyl : The peaceful atom’s revenge] (Dnepropetrovsk : Balans‑Klub, 2006), 282, on everyday stress factors for RBMK operators ; former reactor operator at Chernobyl NPP, Kyiiv, 05.02.2013.
80 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, 30.01.2013.
81 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, Rivne NPP, 11.01.2015.
82 Head of Safety Analysis Department, former shift supervisor, 07.08.2015 ; Fedorchenko, “Vospominaniia reaktorshchika.”
83 German main control room operators and field operators operate both the reactor and the turbine‑generator equipment, the actual labor distribution being assigned to the operators at the beginning of every shift, as I recorded on many shift changeovers, Grohnde NPP, February–April 2016 ; February–May 2018, April‑June 2019.
84 Shift supervisor, Rivne‑2, 25.03.2014. Until the Russification campaign in the late 1970s, engineering courses at the Lviv Polytechnical Institute were held mainly in Ukrainian.
85 Another interesting example of linguistic transition (and Westernization of Soviet technology) is component codes – a central instrument for technical communication at the NPP. At Rivne NPP, these codes were transformed according to the growing influence of transnational standards in the course of the plant’s development : whereas at the senior VVĖR‑440/V‑213 units 1 and 2 a system of Russian abbreviations is used, the junior VVĖR‑1000/V‑320 units 3 and 4 have a transnational, alphanumerical code system which was originally developed in West Germany.
86 Viktor Sidorenko, “Vvodnye zamechaniia k urokam Chernobyl´skoi avarii [Introducing remarks on the lessons of the Chernobyl accident],” IAĖSSiR, vol. 4, 4–16 ; ibid., “Upravlenie atomnoi energetikoi [Administration of the nuclear power industry],” IAĖSSiR, vol. 1, 217–239. Sonja D. Schmid follows Sidorenko’s division in her study on the Soviet nuclear industry, see Schmid, Professional Identities ; Producing Power.
87 The minutes of the Ukrainian Minenergo Nuclear Administration show Kyiiv’s concern with Rivne’s problems, which ranged from technical to cadre issues, especially high turnover. TsDAHO, f. 283, op. 1, spr. 145, ark. 149, Ob avangardnoi roli komunistov upravleniia po obespecheniiu nadëzhnoi i bezopasnoi ėkspluatatsii v osenne‑zimnii maksimum nagruzok [On the leading role of the Administration’s communists in securing a reliable and safe operation during the autumn‑winter load peak], attachment to Protokol Nr. 13, 26.10.1981 ; Deputy Minister V. Semenyuk, Zapiska, ibid., ark. 147–148 ; Minenergo UkrSSR, Partiinaia organizatsiia upravleniia po atomnoi ėnergetike [Party organization of the Nuclear Energy Administriation], Protokol Nr. 4, 27.01.1981 ; Protokol Nr. 12, 22.09.1981, ibid. ark. 85–91, 131‑133.
88 TsDAHO f. 4906, op. 4, spr. 4423 Doklad Minėnergo UkrSSR o karsto‑suffoznykh strukturakh [Report of the Ministry of Energy of the Ukrainian SSR on karst‑suffosion structures], 29.08.1983, ark. 5‑8 ; 9–15. Mykola Panashchenko, “Pusky vsikh enerhoblokiv Rivnens´koï AES – tse iaskravi storinky u moii trudovii biohrafii [Commissioning Rivne’s power units – bright pages in my professional biography],” in : Serhii Fedorchenko, ed., Enerhobloku no. 4 RAES 10 rokiv. Zbirka statei [On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Rivne NPP‑4 : Collection of articles] (Kyiiv : KMTs “Poeziia”, 2014), 36–44 (43 f.) ; Volodymyr Korovkin, “Vazhkyi, ale peremozhnyi shliakh [A hard, but victorious way],” in : Enerhobloku no. 4, 29–32 (29).
89 Ukrainian version of Russ. atomshchik, “nuclear worker.”
90 Russ. Den´ energetika /Ukr. Den´ enerhetyka.
91 Karl E. Weick/ Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Managing the Unexpected : Sustained Performance in a Complex World (Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2015) ; Chrysanti Lekka, High Reliability Organizations : A Review of the Literature, (London : HSE Books, 2011).
92 The Soviet PWR VVĖR‑440 has some qualities which render the system relatively “benign” under accident transients, e.g. a relatively large coolant / core ratio, horizontal steam generators, the possibility to remove residual heat entirely passively via primary circuit and steam generators in a natural circulation regime.
93 Werner Rammert / Ingo Schulz‑Schaeffer, “Technik und Handeln : Wenn soziales Handeln sich auf menschliches Handeln und technische Abläufe verteilt,” in ibid., eds., Können Maschinen handeln ? Soziologische Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Mensch und Technik (Frankfurt : Campus, 2002), 11–63.
94 According to the World Health Organization’s research data from 2006 and 2016, “fewer than 50 deaths” can be directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, all of them NPP staff and fire fighters. Of the 530,000 recovery and clean‑up workers, and the 330,000 evacuees, a total of up to 4,000 people would eventually die of radiation exposure. Some of the total of 11,000 recorded thyroid cancers in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia between 1986 and 2016 can be attributed to radioiodine intake in the affected areas. WHO, “Chernobyl : the true scale of the accident. 20 Years Later a UN Report Provides Definitive Answers and Ways to Repair Lives,” https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ ; WHO, “1986–2016 : Chernobyl at 30. An update” (Geneva : WHO, 2006). An UNSCEAR report of 2008 states that there is no evidence on the influence of low‑dose (<100 mSv/a) exposure from Chernobyl on solid cancer rates : “Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation. United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation UNSCEAR 2008 Report to the General Assembly with Scientific Annexes”, vol. II, Scientific Annexes C, D and E, (New York : UNSCEAR, 2011),
95 In nuclear engineering, a transient is any deviation of important parameters (such as primary circuit pressure, temperature, coolant throughput) from set points that can result in an imbalance between heat generation and heat removal in a nuclear reactor.
96 Due to graphite (not light water) moderation, the RBMK had a characteristic positive void coefficient of reactivity, a relationship causing positive feedback circles that could lead to uncontrolled rises in power output and fuel damage.
97 “Prichiny i obstoiatel´stva avarii na 4m bloke Chernobylˊskoi AĖS 26 aprelia 1986. Mery po povysheniiu bezopasnosti AĖS s reaktoramy RBMK. Zakliuchenie ėkspertov Minatomėnergoproma SSSR, 1991g. [Causes and contributors of the accident at Chernobyl‑4 on April 26, 1986. Measures for improving nuclear safety at NPPs with RBMK reactors. Conclusions by the Minatomėnergoprom expert group, 1991],” IAĖSSiR, vol. 4, 297–332 ; “O prichinakh i obstoiatel´stvakh, IAĖSSiR, vol. 4, 333–410.
98 Former reactor operator at Chernobyl‑4, Kyiiv, 05.02.2013 ; records of witnesses who were present at the main control room of Chernobyl‑4 in Karpan, Mest´ mirnogo atoma, 328–29, 342–44 ; “O prichinakh i obstoiatel´stvakh,” 379–380.
99 Otchët s detal´nym opisaniem perekhodnykh rezhimov ėnergobloka Nr. 1 Rovenskoi AĖS [Report with a detailed description of transients at Rivne NPP‑1] (Kuznetsovsk : Rovenskaia Atomnaia Ėlektricheskaia Stantsiia,1982) ; IAEA, “Leakage of primary circuit coolant into the secondary circuit within the steam generator through the sealing of the primary circuit hot header in a NPP with a WWER‑440 reactor. Rovno‑1” Incident 909. Report to IAEA Nr. 6006.00 ; Sergei Fedorchenko, “Kreshchenie pervogo bloka [Unit 1’s baptism],” Enerhiia, 19.01.2012.
100 Sidorenko, “Upravlenie,” 224.
101 IAEA Tecdoc‑1610, Safety Analysis of WWER‑440 Nuclear Power Plants : Potential Consequences of a Large Primary to Secondary System Leakage Accident (Vienna : IAEA, 2009) ; IAEA, “Safety issues and their ranking for WWER‑440 Model 2013 Nuclear Power Plants. A Publication of the Extrabudgetary Program on the Safety of WWER and RBMK Nuclear Power Plants,” IAEA‑EBP‑WWER‑03 (Vienna : IAEA, 1996), 27, 55, 62 ; P. Groudev, R. Gencheva, A. Stefanova, RELAP5/MOD32 investigation of a WWER‑440 steam generator header cover lifting, Science and Technology Journal of BgNS, 8, 1 (2003) : 30‑35.
102 Former heads of Electric and I&C department, Kuznetsovsk, 26.09.2013.
103 “Doklad pravitel´stvennoi komissii po rassledovaniiu prichin avarii na Chernobyl´skoi AĖS 26 aprelia 1986 goda (Iun´ 1986g.) [Report of the Governmental Commission for the investigation of the causes of the accident at Chernobyl NPP (June 1986)],” which was to become the IAEA INSAG‑1 (International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group) report, August 1986. In 1989/90, the report was thoroughly revised by a commission headed by Mykola/Nikolai Shteinberg, and a new report was published which clearly identified the true root causes of the accident in the reactor design : “Chernobyl´skaia avariia : Obnovlenie INSAG‑1 [The Chernobyl accident : Update of INSAG‑1],” which was to become IAEA INSAG‑7, Russian version in “Doklad Mezhdunarodnoi konsul´tativnoi grupy po iadernoi bezopasnosti, MAgAtĖ, Vena 1992” [Report of the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, IAEA, Vienna 1992],” IAĖSSiR, vol. 4, 411–442.
104 The VVĖR‑1200, which has been operational at Novovoronezh II‑1 since 2017 and at Leningrad II‑1 since 2018, and is under construction in Astravets (Belarus), is an advanced pressurized reactor design with additional passive safety systems, and an example of the convergence of Western and Russian safety philosophies.
105 Josephson, Red Atom, 290–292.
106 “Upravlinnia jadernoiu enerhetykoiu i promyslovistiu Ukraiiny [The administration of the Ukrainian nuclear energy industry],” Atomna industriia, 33–34 ; Mykola Shteinberg, “Systema atomnoho rehuliuvannia v Ukraiini [The system of nuclear regulation in Ukraine],” ibid., 53–58.
107 TsDAVO, f. 1 Verkhovna Rada, op. 16, spr. 4878, Minutes of the moratorium debate, 17.06.1993.
108 Fedorchenko, “Krechshenie” ; Rivnens´ka AES perlyna polis´koho kraiu, 53.
109 Mykhailo Laba, “Istoriia, iaku my sami tvoryly [A history that we made],” Enerhobloku Nr. 4, 108‑109 ; Mikhail Iastrebenskii, Iurii Rozen, Svetlana Vinogradskaia, Bezopasnost´ atomnykh stantsii. Sistemy upravleniia i zashchity iadernykh reaktorov [Safety in nuclear power stations. Instrumentation and control and reactor protection systems for nuclear reactors] (Kiev : Osnova‑Print, 2011) ; head of instrumentation and control department, Rivne NPP, 09.09.2013, on major technological transformations since 2000. Westron was a fission product of the Soviet defense technology enterprise Khartron, and was later acquired by Westinghouse.
110 Povyshenie bezopasnosti i prodlenie sroka ėkspluatatsii ėnergoblokov 1 i 2 OP “Rivnenskaia AĖS”. Itogovyi otchët [Improvement of nuclear safety and lifetime extension of units 1 and 2 of Rivne NPP. Final report] (Kuznetsovsk : RAĖS, 2011) ; Ivanna Burakova, “Enerhoblok Nr. 3 pratsiuvatyme shche 20 rokiv [Unit 3 will be working another 20 years],” Enerhiia, 19.07.2018 ; ibid., “Stan hotovnosti bloku Nr. 3 do prodovzhennia terminu ekspluatatsii pereviriaie komisiia Derzhatomrehuliuvannia [State regulator reviews implementation status of unit 3 for lifetime extension],” Enerhiia, 07.06.2018 ; “Information und Stellungnahme zum INES 1 Ereignis “Nichtschließen eines Druckhaltersicherheitsventils der Fa. Sempell” während des Funktionstests vor dem Wiederanfahren nach der Revision im KKW Rovno‑3 am 22.9.2009,” (Erlangen : Areva, 2009), following NAEK Enerhoatom / Rivne NPP, Otchet Nr. 3 ROV‑P02‑002‑09‑09, 16.10.2009 ; “Istorija atomnoii enerhetyky v Ukraiini,” Atomna industriia, 15 ; “Atomni stantsii Ukraiiny,” ibid., 24–26 ; “Westinghouse Extends Nuclear Fuel Deliveries to Ukraine,” NucNet Weekly News Review, 11 April 2014.
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
Titre | Fig. 1 : “Chernobyl NPP, equipped with an RBMK reactor, and Ukraine’s first NPP” (Kiev 1978, front and back cover), featuring techno‑modernist images of nuclear technology and arcadian images of, in Paul R. Josephson’s words, “the reactor in the garden.”43 |
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URL | http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/docannexe/image/11212/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 256k |
Titre | Fig. 2 : Polesia, 20th–21st century |
Crédits | Map : Marc Friede, Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, 2019 |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/docannexe/image/11212/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 52k |
Titre | Fig. 3 : From Varash to Kuznetsovsk, ca. 1976 |
Crédits | Photo : Aleksei Kislyi, Kuznetsovsk/Varash. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/docannexe/image/11212/img-3.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 228k |
Titre | Fig. 4 : Being nuclear, sots‑art version : Rivne‑2 Main control room, 1982. |
Crédits | Source : Rivne NPP, Nadiia Tymofeienko. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/docannexe/image/11212/img-4.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 344k |
Titre | Fig. 5 : Being nuclear, real life : Aleksei Kislyi, head of I&C department, Sergei Fedorchenko, shift supervisor, and an unknown colleague at the Rivne‑2 main control room, ca. 1982. |
Crédits | Source : Aleksei Kislyi, Kuznetsovsk. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/docannexe/image/11212/img-5.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 204k |
Titre | Fig. 6 : Participant observation in the radiation‑controlled area (RCA), reactor department 2, Rivne‑3, A‑100, July, 2015. |
Légende | All buildings of a nuclear plant where there are systems containing radioactive media belong to the controlled area, in Russian : Zona strogogo rezhima. In order to avoid spreading radioactive contamination, workers have to dress in a special uniform before entering the RCA, and to undress when leaving it. The dress code is derived from the Soviet hospital (white dress, white cap) and has not changed since Soviet times. However, this is no radiation protection garment. When doing work in highly contaminated areas, one has to dress in hermetic overalls and a gas mask. The “sotka,” room A‑100 in the basement of the auxiliary building, is the RCA field operator headquarters. This is an enlarged maintenance outage shift, consisting of two operations engineers, three field operators, one reactor operator, and me, the author (third from the right). |
Crédits | Photo : NadiiaTymofeienko. |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/docannexe/image/11212/img-6.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 117k |
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Anna Veronika Wendland, « Nuclearizing Ukraine – Ukrainizing the Atom », Cahiers du monde russe, 60/2-3 | 2019, 335-368.
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Anna Veronika Wendland, « Nuclearizing Ukraine – Ukrainizing the Atom », Cahiers du monde russe [En ligne], 60/2-3 | 2019, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2023, consulté le 19 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/11212 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.11212
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