Original subtitles

At 23 minutes past one, on the morning of April 26, 1986, the world was seconds away from

its worst ever nuclear accident.

The act in number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union exploded.

Five minutes later, a phone call recorded at the time was the first alert of a tragedy

in the making.

By morning, the physical devastation was revealed, but much worse was to come.

The disaster at Chernobyl brought death and disease.

It brought the very idea of nuclear power into question.

And within the Soviet Union, the trauma of Chernobyl was so great that many see it as

the first step in the breakup of the communist regime.

This film tells the story, minute by minute, second by second, of the one hour countdown

to tragedy.

As seen through the eyes of the key actors in the drama, the workers who were accidentally

led to their deaths and the innocent bystanders who looked on.

Based on documented evidence and eyewitness reports, it has been filmed on location inside

the surviving areas of the Chernobyl nuclear power station.

The control room at Chernobyl's reactor number four.

It's here that all the key decisions in the coming hour will be taken.

The future of the reactor and the world beyond is in the hands of three men.

At only 26, Leonid Toptenov is senior control engineer.

His job is to control the enormous power in the reactor.

Alexander Akimov is the shift foreman, the captain of the ship.

But tonight he is outranked.

Deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov is in charge.

Dyatlov is one of the Soviet Union's top nuclear engineers.

He's also a hard man operating in a harsh system.

There is a further vital character.

The newly commissioned reactor number four itself.

One of the communist regimes proudest technological achievements.

Tonight the control room is preparing for a safety test on the reactor.

But a fateful argument is brewing between the two senior engineers and Dyatlov about

the level of power at which it is safe to begin the test.

On this night Chernobyl is harboring two of deadly secrets.

The first is a potentially fatal flaw in the reactor's design which the engineers are unaware

of.

A flaw that makes it highly unstable when run at low power.

The second secret concerns the man in charge.

Anatoly Dyatlov's own history is scarred by the very technology he is seeking to dominate

Tonight Dyatlov and the reactor will face each other in a battle of strength that will

destroy them both.

31 minutes past midnight.

The argument over the power level at which the safety test on Chernobyl's reactor number

four can begin grows ever more serious.

The test has been demanded by Russia's atomic energy authorities and stems from the Cold

War fear of being attacked that still grips the Soviet Union.

A few years before the Israeli Air Force bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor built by the Russians.

Since then, Soviet scientists have demanded tests on their reactors to see what will happen

if they come under enemy attack and their power supply is knocked out.

The deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov is deliberately ignoring top level advice on

how the test should be done.

The guidelines state that the reactor's power should be between 700 and 1,000 megawatts

when the test begins.

Dyatlov wants to do the test at only 200 megawatts to preserve the cooling water that

stops the reactor overheating.

He believes there's little risk.

Unfortunately, that night there was not a single man in the control room that he saw

as his equal.

There really wasn't anyone there who was a stronger character or as professionally qualified

whose opinion he would respect.

Dyatlov is not in fact an unreasonable man.

Rather, he is a creature of the communist system that has raised and promoted him.

He was born a fisherman's son in Siberia and ran away from home at the age of 14.

He's overcome these unpromising beginnings to rise through the ranks as an engineer.

He is a party man who tries to follow the rulebook, but he's aware that in the nuclear

industry the rulebook and reality often don't match.

To get things done, shortcuts and improvisation are sometimes the only answer.

Finding the power down has led to it dropping too fast.

One mile away from Chernobyl is the dormitory town of Pripyat.

Everyone who lives here works at the power station.

Though they don't know it, all these people's destinies will be dictated by the events unfolding

in control room number four.

Among them, soundly asleep is Nikolai Fomen, the chief engineer of Chernobyl, who left

the order for the safety test to be carried out.

A few hundred yards away, Natasha Yevchenko is being kept awake by her two-year-old son

Kiro.

From her window, Natasha can see the likes of the nuclear power station where her husband,

engineer Sasha Yevchenko, is working a routine night shift.

As he passes through the kilometer long turbine hall, Sasha's thinking not of work, but of

the upcoming Mayday holidays.

There was something about that night, something unusual.

For some reason, I got all dressed up.

The weather was remarkable, very warm for spring.

I went off to work in a terrific mood.

But my wife said that all night, our son Kiro was crying.

She didn't sleep a wink.

Others are also awake.

Among them, two fishermen.

One at Chernobyl maintenance man, casting for fish, attracted by the power plant's warm

waste waters.

24 minutes to one.

A new problem disturbs the concentration of the increasingly fraught operators.

A new problem.

Senior unit control engineer Boris Stoliatzuk controls the flow of water through the reactor.

He's all too used to alarms like this.

As for the water levels in the separated rooms, it was always difficult to control them at

low power.

All the operators knew about it, so I didn't feel afraid.

Then.

22 minutes to one.

The reactor has ground to a complete halt.

The atlove makes a fateful decision.

To raise power after 1230, the shift actually had to pull all the control rods out of the

reactor.

All the control rods.

This is like cocking a gun.

Control rods are the accelerator and the brakes of the nuclear reactor.

Below the 50 foot reactor lid are 1,661 uranium filled fuel rods, which descend into the reactor

core.

The splitting of the uranium atoms releases enormous heat from the fuel rods, which turns

water into steam.

The steam drives the giant turbines which generate electricity.

To control this power, 211 boron control rods are spread throughout the reactor core.

If they're raised, power accelerates.

If they're taken out altogether, the engineers lose their ability to apply the brakes.

But that is exactly what the atlove tells us men to do.

The men's revolt has failed.

Tregu and Akimov power up the reactor.

Within five minutes, they've got power rising again.

The atlove has what he wants.

The control room staff have every reason to fall in line.

To be a nuclear engineer is a prestigious and well-paid job.

They and their families live in the company town of Pripyat.

The shops are well-stocked, and there's a new school in the newsroom park.

Nobody wanted to lose the job because losing the job would mean losing the flat in Pripyat

and going elsewhere to some probably some ghastly outpost in Siberia.

The fear of getting sacked was a reason why they didn't speak out more effectively

when they realised that they were doing something that could be very dangerous.

Eight minutes to one, another alarm.

No one outside the control room knows about the argument going on there.

The workers like Sasha Yevchenko, it's just another ordinary night.

There were no specific assignments for the shift.

I'd already done one shift and we all thought the reactor had been shut down.

I thought the tests had been done on the earlier shift.

Inside the plant, the night is still.

Three minutes past one.

After the failed revolt, the control room is now calm too.

The men have got the reactor's power to the level Deputy Chief Engineer, Dyatlov, wants

it for the test.

In the pumpering, mechanic Valera Kedemchuk is visited by his friend, Foreman Valeri Paravajenko.

Kedemchuk has less than 20 minutes to live.

Next on Paravajenko's round is Sasha Yevchenko in the maintenance department.

An innocent request will lead them back to the pumpering near the reactor core.

The water shortage continues to set off alarms, but still none of these engineers believe

a serious accident is possible.

For the top man, Nikolai Fomen, it's simply inconceivable.

Fomen had done a correspondence course in nuclear engineering, but he wasn't an expert in the field at all.

He had risen mainly because of his standing as the party secretary.

Unlike Dyatlov, who was aware that there were dangers in these reactors, Fomen believed everything he'd read.

So when the issue of safety arose, he'd say, well, the chances of an accident are completely remote,

about as remote as you being hit by meteorite.

Even the safety conscious Alexander Akimov, who does understand the technology, has officially estimated the chances of an accident at Chernobyl as one in ten million per year.

But Akimov and his colleagues do not know the reactor as well as they think.

They are the victims of years of cover-up and negligence.

From the 1960s, the expansion of nuclear power has been a key target of the communist regime.

Nothing has been allowed to get in the way. Not even the KGB.

These recently released KGB documents show the authorities ignored repeated warnings between 1979 and 86, that Chernobyl had serious design flaws.

Chernobyl's director, Viktor Bukhanov and his senior managers, rushed to get reactor number four open early,

so that they and their party bosses could win substantial bonuses.

Safety came second.

Bukhanov, the director of the whole power station complex, was always at his wit's end to meet deadlines to build these reactors.

For example, the roof of the reactors was meant to have been built with fireproof materials, but these fireproof materials didn't exist.

The roof had to be put on, so he used combustible materials.

Accidents were common and hushed up.

The very tests being done on this night should have been carried out before reactor number four was even opened.

Now at Chernobyl, all these chickens are coming home to roost.

Something deadly serious is happening in the reactor's core, that no one in the control room is aware of.

The few boron control rods still in the reactor are only partially inserted at the top.

So power is building into a hotspot at the bottom of the core, where the sensors don't always see it.

The reactor is now an invisible ticking time bomb.

Hey!

12 minutes past one.

The growing pressure inside Chernobyl's reactor number four is matched by the pressure within the man controlling the night's events.

Deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov.

Dyatlov remains determined to push through the safety test, despite the opposition in the control room.

One reason may be power station politics.

Dyatlov is in trouble with the local Communist Party for being rude to his workers.

His boss Nikolai Fomen is due for promotion.

A successful test could help Dyatlov get Fomen's job and remove him from the engineers on the shop floor.

But Dyatlov also holds a darker, more personal secret.

Back in the 1960s, he'd worked in Siberia, installing nuclear reactors into submarines.

There was a nuclear accident.

The investigation found that it happened as a result of Dyatlov's actions, though it was not shown to be his fault.

Dyatlov was exposed to 200 rem, three lifetimes' worth of radiation.

Soon after the Siberian accident, Dyatlov's son died of leukemia.

The most common disease children get from exposure to radiation.

It is said that tragedy changed him, made him more driven, more willful.

Tonight, his will is set against the very nuclear power that may have taken his child.

One 17 am, less than six minutes to the start of the safety test.

Dyatlov is confident.

He's not a good person.

Dyatlov is a good person.

Dyatlov is a good person.

He's not a good person.

He's not a good person.

He's not a good person.

But the hotspot continues to build unseen at the bottom of the core.

Outside the control room, life in gossip carry on as normal.

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What's wrong?

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What's embarrassing?

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Perovajenko's route to the control room will lead him past the reactor.

He did my accident at Guille Therapy.

What would you like when you bring home money in person or holidays?

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them with a button.

what would you like to do?

The test will shut off the power to the massive turbines and let them coast.

Back up diesel generators will take over, but there's a 42nd gap before they kick in.

The question is how effectively the slowing turbines will keep the water pumps going until the diesel generators take over.

Without that water, the reactor could boil dry like an immense kettle.

But to the atlof who continues to have no idea of the hotspot that has already built up, the risk remains purely theoretical.

The power to the turbine is turned off.

As the turbines wind down, the pumps push less water through the reactor core.

More and more steam is generated from less and less water.

Steam pressure builds at the core's invisible hotspot with every passing second.

As the steam pressure rises, it spreads to the pump room.

Paravajanko enters the huge reactor hole directly above the reactor lid to see something never witnessed before.

Steam pressure inside the core is lifting the 350 kilo caps to the fuel rods out of their sockets.

The fuel is still in the air.

The fuel is still in the air.

Pressing the emergency AZ-5 button automatically lowers the boron control rod to reduce power,

but it has an unforeseen and fatal effect.

The boron rods were in fact tipped with graphite, and that short moment when they are first inserted into the reactor,

the graphite in fact leads to a surge in the power, not a reduction of power.

When the AZ-5 button was pushed until the explosion, the power increased not two or threefold.

It increased hundreds of times.

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Steam pressure at the reactor's hot spot can't be contained.

50 control and fuel rod shafts are torn apart.

How are rockets turning the whole reactor into a volcanic steam pressure cooker?

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After the first explosion, I thought the problem was a hydraulic blast in the diuretors.

I wanted to switch the setting to compensate, but then the second explosion happened.

Seconds after the first blast, we heard the second, a massive explosion.

I didn't know what it was. We only felt the blast wave. It smashed my door.

I didn't know what it was.

Clouds of dust are sucked into the control room, accompanied by a strange smell.

Gases released from the core leave a metallic taste like ozone after a thunderstorm.

It is in fact the stench of death. The dust is the cloak of the invisible killer of radiation.

The control room operators are far enough away from the reactor core to survive the explosion,

but some will wish they had not.

Many will face days, weeks, even years of agony, as radiation burns them to death from the inside.

What struck me was my wall. It's cast concrete, a meter thick.

I saw the wall in the corner of my room bending, as if it was made from rubber, like this.

It got dark immediately. The lights went out. Steam wrapped around everything.

Dust. Steam. Darkness. And a horrible hissing noise.

I thought it could be an earthquake, or maybe war. The reactor was the last thing on my mind.

I thought it was a fire. It was a fire.

I thought it was a fire.

That was my operator, Victor Dectorenko. I only recognized him by his voice. You see his face was burned.

All covered in blood.

Victor was still in shock, but he said to me that he had been near the pumps together with Rusinovski,

the second pump operator, and that he stayed there, and I should help him.

When I reached him, he was all shivery, you know, when a man is in shock.

He just indicated with his hands and said,

I have to ask that.

But what did I find? Ruins. That's all I saw.

If he had been there, he would have been buried under the pillars.

In place of the ceiling, there was only sky. A sky full of stars.

Or a Mostly Brown.

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Yes, but I'm Hugh.

But he arrived running on WhatsApp.

He was running on WhatsApp.

lie damaging speech.

Why are you talking to me?

Why are you writing other texts about the

music that you have to do?

Because a few of these do seem pretty

aggressive as well.

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and took me to the medical station.

Sasha of Cenco will survive.

Others are dying.

The radioactivity pours out of the reactor

to be blown across Biela Russia

towards the heart of Europe.

The real nightmare is still to come.

By the morning of April 26, the KGB was filming the devastated scene of the worst nuclear accident in history.

Whoever shot this declassified KGB footage absorbed a massive dose of radiation.

The next day the people of Pripyat were officially told the worst.

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159 Alternate

The following night I was taken to Moscow by plane.

Doctors selected the first group.

Only five persons survived from those who were on board.

And my family was evacuated with the entire city.

It would take a full week for all 135,000 people to be evacuated.

The radiation count was so high that flashes from it burned straight onto this film.

A 30-kilometer zone of exclusion was declared.

A zone frozen in time like a modern Pompeii.

Over 600,000 Soviet men and women were brought in to contain the radioactivity.

They worked in hellish, often chaotic conditions with extraordinary bravery,

in order to safeguard the rest of the world.

Many of them had no protective clothing whatsoever.

Everything they touched burned with radioactivity.

The poisonous clouds spread beyond borders across much of the northern hemisphere.

Washed into the earth by the rain, the radioactive dust lives on in plants, animals and human beings.

Within the Soviet Union, in the changing times of a new openness, the political effect was profound.

She was made, and she was a little bit more than a little bit more than a little bit more.

I think in both a symbolic and a very real way, Chernobyl was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.

I think in a symbolic way, the meltdown, the explosion was caused by all the inherent contradictions in the Soviet system.

And therefore, it's a very good paradigm, if you're like a symbol of what was to happen.

Chernobyl's death toll, though horrifying, has turned out to be smaller than many first feared.

The scientific consensus is that it will cause some 10,000 cancers in Russia and 25,000 worldwide, over a 70-year period.

As yet, the only proven rise in disease is in thyroid cancers in children.

It is an individual human lives that the cost is most visible.

The fishermen spent the night watching the firemen fight the radioactive blaze until they started to feel ill.

Within hours, their skin went black.

A nuclear tan that foreshadowed their deaths.

30 workers, including a fire crew on the site, died from acute radiation poisoning.

Valera Kedemchuk was vaporized in the explosion while at his post in the pumperum.

Valera Peravigenko died six weeks later of radiation burns, suffered trying to find his friend Kedemchuk.

Alexander Akimov died 15 days after the explosion from radiation poisoning.

As long as he could speak, he said, I did everything right. I don't understand why it happened.

Leonid Toptenov died three days after Akimov.

He too protested his innocence to the grave, saying he'd done everything he could.

The chief engineer of Chernobyl, Nikolai Fomen, was sentenced to ten years' hard labor, but was soon released due to a mental breakdown.

He's now said to drift in and out of lucidity.

Miraculously, Sasha Yevchenko survived, as did his wife Natasha and their son, Kirill.

But that night lives on in his memory and in his body.

I had 15 skin graft operations in the first year.

The burns didn't show themselves at once.

They came out here in Moscow at the hospital. They ripened.

When I was in the recovery unit, my skin was all black.

When they pulled back my sheets, my skin peeled off like Xerox powder.

Of course, I have to be careful now.

For instance, I can drive a car, but I can't do any repairs.

I can't touch petrol or oil.

The wounds won't heal. The blood won't congeal properly.

There are other things, but you get used to them.

You just live with it. You have to.

Anatoly de Atloh received a massive 390 rem of radiation.

But even this 5 lifetimes worth of radiation didn't kill him.

He lived on till 1995, when he died of a heart attack.

De Atloh served 4 years of his 10-year sentence.

And in a remarkable interview given shortly before he died, he argued that in the battle between himself and the reactor,

only one side could be blamed.

The reactor shouldn't have been in operation. The real blame lies with the atomic energy authorities.

Not having the correct documentation when and where it was needed, made the explosion of the reactor inevitable.

In the end, the reactor was not made possible.

It was not made possible.

Not having the correct documentation when and where it was needed, made the explosion of the reactor inevitable.

The reactor marched straight to its tomb.