Interview with Vladimir Asmolov

(this is transcript of the video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC9Cr8l7AsA)

Dmitry Puchkov: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon, Vladimir Grigorievich.

Vladimir Asmolov: Good afternoon.

DP: Please introduce yourself.

VA: Vladimir Grigorievich Asmolov. I’ve worked in nuclear power industry for all my life. After finishing institute I started working as an engineer at Russian Research Centre “Kurchatov Institute”. I went all the career ladder from an engineer to a director without skipping any steps. Besides the research… My main job there was a researcher and experimenter, I did science and so on. The main issues I have been working on all my life are the nuclear power safety issues. I also worked as a regulator. I mean, in a supervisory organization. But it wasn’t ours. I had worked in American Nuclear Regulatory Commission for half a year. It was in early 1990s. There was an exchange between us and them. I had worked there for half a year, I had supervised their work. I also was a top-rank official. I had been a deputy minister in Ministry for Atomic Energy for 10 years. Perhaps they were the best years of my life, I could use all my experience to help people. I also was a technical manager of Russian nuclear power engineering in group of companies called Rosenergoatom. And I’ve been an advisor of CEO of Rosatom state corporation for the last three years. I’m 73 years old.

DP: Wow.

VA: I’ve lived such a life. I took part in rectification of the consequences of the accident in Chernobyl. I spent there almost all 1986… went home only for several work trips. Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov appointed me as a research supervisor of the sarcophagus project. The Shelter project. Besides, we had an expedition from the Kurchatov Institute. Its managers changed several times. Valery Alexeyevich Legasov was the general manager of the expedition. For one of that months, beside my work on building the shelter, I did the general work with all Kurchatov employees. There were about 900 of us in Chernobyl. We called ourselves “stalkers”. Even made a movie. There were the best people of the institute. We wrote the report for IAEA together with Valery Alexeyevich Legasov about the results of Chernobyl accident. I wrote a chapter about safety and also made the general layout of this report. I know all twists and turns… about nuclear power industry development, about safety methods development. Since 2004… Right after the accident at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station a group of nuclear safety advisers was created affiliated with the Director General of IAEA. Before me there were outstanding people representing Russia. Viktor Alekseyevich Sidorenko, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. He was the first. Armen Artavazdovich Abagyan. A unique man, also a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. And there also was Bukrinsky. I was the fourth. And this commission, being a group of international top-rank experts, one from each country, formed modern methods of safety justification. Basic safety principles. It published several reports. These are not guidelines or rules. Guidelines and rules are on lower level. This is kind of philosophy. And nowadays this philosophy is at top of mind, it’s a superstructural element called the safety culture. It’s superstructural but it determines motivation of all people who work in nuclear industry… There should be some motivation. All the rest… Economics is very important. But safety is the main thing. So… a principle was formed as the most important method. A principle of defense in depth, that how it sounds in English. What does it mean? It consists of two parts, of preventing and decreasing of consequences. The first step. You must do everything in the project for an accident never to happen.

DP: Is it possible?

VA: You know there always is a residual risk which can be really low. In case of this residual risk we understand that we should say to all our nearest and dearest: “I guarantee”. Knowing that this residual risk always exists. But there still is the second step. On this second step… However small the possibility of an accident might be, you must hypothesize it. You must look how it will overpass the safety barriers we create on the way to it, both inside the unit where the main thing is an active zone containing danger and outside: tsunamis, tornadoes, sabotage, terrorist attacks.

DP: Earthquakes.

VA: Earthquakes. There are all this safety barriers. Beside this safety barriers, there are actions for controlling these barriers. People often think that there is an armed and well-equipped battalion on each safety barrier. But there aren’t any people, there are resources and systems which meet the danger, each on its own barrier, outside or inside. The main barriers from a physics perspective are inside. We even have stated a principle: “We see each barrier as a last one. We have nowhere to retreat, Moscow is behind us”. But if the danger goes further, it’s met by a next barrier. We call it danger control. I mean, what has always frightened people? Modern atomic power industry evolved from the atomic bomb, both in our country and in our closest friends’country, the USA. All resources were used for creating this parity, these bombs. Without this resources… Our country was in a unique situation during the war. We started to invest into this industry in 1943. In 1946 the first reactor was launched on the territory of Kurchatov Institute. In 1948 the production reactor was launched, And in 1949 the first bomb was exploded, only 4 years after the American one. And we were the first to create the thermonuclear bomb. The country heavily invested in all this… Machines, human resources, education. It was impossible not to use it for civilian purposes. Because God gave us high concentrated energy and we had to be complete fools not to use it. Calorific efficiency during nuclear fission is 2 million times as much as one of coal. 2 million times. Imagine, a wagon load of uranium fuel replaces 2 million wagon loads of coal.

DP: Impressive.

VA: You understand that these two million wagons must be delivered to their destination.

DP: Loaded, unloaded, mined.

VA: I had always wondered why our railroads are so slow. When you take an express train somewhere in France, it’s like flying. The answer is: because 80% energy in France is nuclear powered. And our trains make 50 kmph. We transport coal across the country. That means there are a lot of advantages of nuclear power. But also a lot of disadvantages. It’s purely dialectical. Concentrated power is concentrated danger. It causes the next question: “How can we control it?” You have to have background knowledge. You have to demonstrate that you can control this danger anytime. You can control it. Why aren’t people afraid of coming outside the house when there are tens of thousands death on roads? They can say: “I won’t come outside, I will go to the underground passing, I won’t drive”. And so on. And nuclear power is something otherworldly, A man, a human being cannot save himself from it. Then he doesn’t want to trust those who say: “I guarantee it to you”. But if these people demonstrate that they have enough knowledge… Take the Chernobyl accident. Why did it happen? Because of not having enough knowledge. Everybody says… The first IAEA report said that it was the operator’s mistake. Yes, it certainly was. Why did it happen? It’s an interesting question. The operator didn’t know that the state in which he started this experiment was the most dangerous state for this machine. Why? The experiment was planned to be performed at a power of… The thermal power of this reactor is 3 thousand megawatt. From the psychological point of view, people often think that the highest power means the max danger. But for this reactor it’s wrong. The experiment was meant to be performed at a power of 1000–1200 megawatt. No one would know about Chernobyl and this experiment. It was seen as a purely electrotechnical one. And it was useful. They had in mind a situation when a full blackout of the station would happen and the turbine would start to stop. The turbine is working for a minute. And it delivers some amount of current at this moment. Stations have four safety trains, four diesel engines of 5 megawatts each. And when they receive a signal about a full blackout of the station… These diesel engines launch and supply electrical power to the emergency pump. A diesel engine fully launches in 40–50 seconds. They wanted to compare if the turbine worked for a while after a blackout and if a diesel had time to launch. It was really a routine experiment. But then… The Kievenergo dispatcher didn’t let them start the experiment when they wanted to. He asked to let the station work a little longer. Then the operator during switching to this experimental mode in his new state almost couldn’t stabilize in this mode. He practically put the reactor to zero point. I mean, stopped it. According to all instructions, if a reactor fully stops, really serious absorption cross-sections appear there, the so-called iodine pit. And the reactor cannot be launched in such a state for about 3 days, according to instruction. But that was our operator. He was an engineer with higher education, a challenger, a man who wanted to conduct this experiment. It was his super-task.

DP: A challenge.

VA: A challenge. And he pulled the reactor from the iodine pit at once. But it didn’t go up. It’s like a rubber. You pull it but it doesn’t go. So he started to take away all safety control rods from the zone to pull the reactor to criticality, to come to some power. Again, there’s an operational regulation. It has such statistical understanding: there are 240 safety control rods in this reactor. If there are less than 30 rods left, only the chief engineer of the station can give you permission. If there are less than 15, nobody will give you permission. But the operator pulled the reactor and left 6 rods in the zone.

DP: Well done.

VA: The reactor was pushing back, it said “Go away, don’t touch me, give me a two days rest”. So he stabilized it at 200 megawatt of power. It’s less than 10%. And how we found out later, it was… It was a non researched level of power for us in the project. Because a reactor lives with such a power either when it’s launched or when it’s stopping. Later, in the summer of 1986, we studied this mode. What happens in this mode? 200 megawatt. Cold water enters a reactor through the channel with heating rods. So a reactor is boiling. It’s usually 7 meters long and usually 5 meters of it are boiling, the water heats quickly, the steam goes to a turbine and turns it. Also there’s a separator which separates water from steam. But it doesn’t matter. A nuclear power station differs from a regular one, where coal is burning. We have fission energy. So at 200 megawatt this point of transition from water to steam was at the top of the channel. When density changes suddenly… Water, as you know, has density of one. When it transits into steam, it’s a thousand times less. So a so-called void reactivity effect appeared. When the reactor stopped at this level of power and swung between steam and water. It was stabilized. There are two types of stability. For example, take a ball and put it into a valley between two mountains. You can’t kick it out from there. That’s a real stability. But if you put the same ball into the top of a hill or a mountain, it takes a slightest influence for it to be blown out of this mountain. So the beginning of the experiment was like this ball at the mountain. And once it fell, it destroyed the reactor in approximately 4 seconds.

DP: With steam?

VA: No. There was a sudden power increase. This sudden power increase was like a heat stroke. Fuel elements disintegrated to their beads. A bead size is approximately 250 microns. So the chain reaction instantly stopped. But that was a thermal explosion, not nuclear. It was shattered. It was a so-called first explosion. Then the second explosion started. When these incandescent 250-micron particles entered the water, it began to boil on every incandescent particle. So a steam explosion started. It disintegrated these 250-micron particles to 5-micron fine particles. Fine fission. So that was the second explosion. But… Later we calculated the yield of this explosion after studying the destroyed constructions. And it didn’t equal to kilotons or megatons. It equaled to 10 tons of trotyl. A thing that destroyed all that building. Well, not completely. It threw away the upper plate. That’s what actually happened in Chernobyl. Was it the operator’s fault? Yes, of course. But he didn’t know consequences of his future actions. We, the physicists, didn’t tell him. Because we didn’t know that there would be such a huge reactivity coefficient in that point. Only in that point, nowhere else. Then another mistake happened. It was also a human mistake. A physicist is also a human. It was a constructor’s mistake. The safety control rods. During the normal operation mode somebody saves coal and we save neutrons. We wanted to save neutrons, we wanted them to produce more steam. The rod itself consists of neutron absorber. When you input it into a zone, the chain reaction stops. But as its ends are always in this zone, they decided to take away the absorber from the last 50 centimetres or a meter. So it was transparent for neutrons. So, when the rods went down to the zone… When he pushed this button — he did manage to push it — and as every operator knows… When you push the safety control button, everything should stop. But it didn’t because he pushed it too late. This is what I think and what all normal people think. But there also was another reason… When these rods went down… Water is a moderator, too. They displaced the water and there was a small increase of reactivity. It’s like combining accelerator and brake pedals. That was the effect which spur on the reactor. It was a secondary effect but it was also bad. It definitely was a constructors’ mistake, the whole Chernobyl accident, as we know now… We demonstrated it in the IAEA report we made after the accident. We calculated all this. We wanted to understand the steam reactivity effect. We had BESM-6 computers back then.

DP: Well, I certainly know this name.

VA: Great devices. They occupied large rooms, as you can remember. Any modern PC is more powerful now.

DP: Probably any phone is more powerful now.

VA: 800 hours of calculation by these computers let us elicit this effect. 800 hours of non-stop calculation. A man… Is your knowledge sufficient? No. If it’s not, acquire knowledge. Demonstrate that you have acquired it. And only then you can give people high concentrated energy as a gift.

DP: I have a question. You mentioned IAEA more than once. Recently a TV show “Chernobyl” was aired, an American show. Where they once again had told “all the truth” about us. There was the academician Legasov that made this report for IAEA that you mentioned. And for the whole show they tell us it was a lie. That he was lying, he was fooling people. I have a purely technical question. So he came to IAEA. He made a speech. Did the people who listened to him understand what he was talking about? Did they find any lies there thirty years later? Did he really deceive them?

VA: I knew Valery Alexeyevich Legasov very well. All that is shown in this movie about Legasov… Well, that’s a character the film-makers needed for some reason. These people did a lot, in my opinion. They are actually talented people.

DP: Certainly.

VA: They reached their goal to put what they wanted into people’s minds… Mainly young people. The movie is shown now in the internet and so on. There are two ways to demonstrate materials. In my family… My sister’s husband is a really good author, Vladimir Tendryakov. When he wrote about years 1927, 1933, 1937, he had a simple method. He gave an experimental material to his readers. It was pure, without his opinion. He gave people a chance to make their own conclusions from this experimental material. I really like this method. And you can do completely other thing, like these people did. They had their own overarching idea. And this idea should be based on absolute truth, as they say. I have to give them a credit because they studied a lot of information. Certainly. But they didn’t completely understand it. Or maybe they understood something and decided to… Well, for instance. Recently somewhere in American media I have read an article by Dr.Gale who visited our hospital after the Chernobyl accident. He treated first 32 people together with our great doctors, with Dr.Guskova. They were mostly firemen. The doctors had saved some of these people despite their huge doses of radiation. He writes: “They didn’t hide anything from me”. He writes about this TV show: “I came there to teach Russians but I was taught by them. I just helped them technically”. This is how a man should work. You cannot distrust this man. He came there, he saw all this. He lived a life with these people. He lived a life with the dying people. He was happy when some of them were saved. He grieved about the dead and so on. Dr.Guskova showed me the footage from that hospital. I knew her well, God rest her soul. This footage is really painful. But it’s not a horror film. It’s something else. Something more primal. But these people wanted to show that everything was a lie, all initial information. There was not a word of lie in that IAEA report I partly wrote. And when Legasov made his speech, a thousand people in IAEA hall stood up and applauded. A year later there was another report. We wrote joint reports with Americans and French. Americans and French came to check the safety of our stations and found out they’re the same as theirs. Then new safety programs started. They were international because contained expensive experiments. For our country…. I was a head of these scientific programs. And I understood we couldn’t do all that alone because huge amounts of money were needed. So we chose three ways. The first way was to request the databases they already had to use them on our reactors. Secondly, to ask them to perform experiments with their materials on their experimental facilities to create a base for our equipment. It’s not that much different from theirs. And the third way was to become interesting for them to receive the previous two. So we started the most critical experiments by ourselves.

DP: That was brave.

VA: We started the most critical experiments in our Kurchatov Institute. The systems of keeping of the second safety barrier. We need them to show that in case of an accident we can keep all this, a molten corium, inside a reactor vessel. And if we cannot, we should make… Make a core catcher under the vessel. It’s done today. It’s realized in our projects. Russia had to pay 50% for the experiments. All experiments cost was 22 million dollars. These are huge money. But Americans and Japanese paid half of this sum. There’s Atomic Energy Agency of Developed Countries Club. They collect money for such experiments that are interesting for the whole world. Each country pays according to its budget, its national income. For example, a yearly payment for Americans and Japanese was about 400 thousands, 300 thousands. 17 countries took part in it. But, for example, Hungary paid 3700.

DP: It’s also not bad.

VA: It’s also not bad. All these experiments we did… We did fascinating experiments in hydrogen safety. Have you seen all that explosions in Fukushima?

DP: Yes, I have. So I have a question: why did it all flow off into the ocean there?

VA: Nothing flew off into the ocean. You know, my life throws me to places where a normal person shouldn’t be. On the fifth day after the accident I came to Fukushima on the orders of our government. As soon as the Fukushima accident happened… It’s also very interesting. It was not our reactor. Still, our fellows today, having all accounting codes, made a scheme of this old boiling reactor they had. And by Saturday we have already calculated everything and this to the government. Including this case: if the Fukushima operators wouldn’t do anything, the scenario would be like this and when hydrogen explosions would start. Then I come home on Sunday and my wife asks me: “I hope, you won’t fly to Fukushima, will you?” — “Darling, I’m 67, I cannot go anywhere”. Next, on Monday I come to work in a suit. And they call me from the government. From Kirienko. “Vladimir Grigorevich, the plane is waiting for you in Zhukovsky. You have to fly there”. I say: “Just like this?” Later I wrote a funny story about it. It’s called “How I gave orders to Prime Minister”. Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) was the prime minister then. We flew to Fukushima, looked what happened there. Then Vladimir Vladimirovich came to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. And I was delivered there by a charter flight, like a prince… My friend Valery Strizhov was there with me, he’s a professor of the Safety Problems Institute of Academy of Sciences. We worked together in Chernobyl. He’s as young and up-and-coming as me. We came to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and there was a meeting with Vladimir Vladimirovich. He said: “You told us radiation background in Vladivostok wouldn’t increase. Even in case of the worst coincidence of winds. And it didn’t increase. When I was reading your reports about hydrogen explosions, I found that you had mistaken by 40 minutes in one case”. This is the modern level of knowledge. But we didn’t have it back in 1986. Safety is international. Now the joint base of gathered knowledge is like a guarantor of the fact that we do the right thing. We cannot close the nuclear power industry. Though we can stop it temporarily. I recall a situation… Spitak earthquake. The Armenian power station was the only source of power. The magnitude on its site was 6.3. But it kept working all week because it had been made earthquake-resistant. Only later Ter-Petrosyan, our democrat… Well, all democrats use anti-nuclear thesis as their main point.

DP: They save the people.

VA: They save the people from this terrible nuclear power. So he stopped two units of the Armenian power station. I was in Yerevan two years later. The trees were cut, each house had a wood stove. So they asked us: “Launch it again”. Armenia is Armenia. We were able to run only one unit of two.

DP: Well, one is better than nothing.

VA: Yes. I have a story about launching the Armenian station. We made there… Acoustic emission. We wanted to understand if the vessel is buzzing… So we hanged wires around the vessel. We connected it… There were such teflon wires with silver cores. We put them between the remote control and the vessel… Two weeks before the launching we went to Moscow. Then we came back and turned on our devices. White noise. We couldn’t understand anything: we had tuned all them before.

DP: Someone needed the wires?

VA: The wires were cut from the remote control room to the unit entrance. And the whole town was drying their laundry on our wires. They were beautiful, slippery, nice. Great wires. With silver cores.

DP: They didn’t know it.

VA: They didn’t know it. They just liked that they could clean them with a cloth and dry laundry on them.

DP: My relative told me that on their disposal facilities someone had stolen a platinum grid and put it in front of some hole in a hen house.

VA: It’s a well-known story. It was recently told to me, too. These people say “It doesn’t get rusty”. Platinum doesn’t get rusty. Great stuff. This was the main thing I wanted to say. It should be a responsibility of physicists and constructors to be sure they know enough. They must treat themselves critically, plan new ways of research for each new fact, and work and work and work. Now about the movie.

DP: As we get back to this issue, let’s draw a line. If something in this report was a lie, it would probably be known 30 years later.

VA: It would be. Then… You know, the character of Legasov. He was not a physicist. He was a chemist. Physicist and chemist. He researched into completely different things. Construction of reactors. He had an idea. But he researched into global safety. He was really interested in Bhopal explosions, Mexican fires. He and I were in different teams. But… Back then… He offered me to become a head of a global center. I’m a Viktor Alexeyevich Sidorenko’s student, I worked with him all my life. I don’t betray my teachers. Still we had great relationship. In this movie they show that the scientists are like… I should be happy. And this government is so shitty that…

DP: It holds meetings under the picture “Ivan the Terrible killing his son”.

VA: I’ll give you an example. We finished a great report. According to all guidelines of that era, all regulations… There’s a list of information that is of state secrecy. And everything we wrote there was definitely TS. The fuel composition, the construction materials… The report consisted of two parts. One was 75 pages long, like this…

DP: TS, for those who hasn’t understood, means “Top Secret”.

VA: Top secret. And another one was 450 pages long, an extended one, with detailed discussions, with a medical part. We even tried to include there some agricultural fragment, about the area contamination and so on. So we sent 12 copies with another classification code. Not these two letters, but three less frightening ones: “For Internal Use”. FIU. So one August evening the two of us were sitting in Legasov’s office and waiting for a response after doing such a bad thing. The first response was from Defense department of Central Committee of our mother-party (CPSU). I remember it literally, I even wrote in my books about what it said. “Assign the writing of an IAEA report to representatives of MFA and KGB. The authors of this report should be penalized under severe Party and state laws”. We were slightly shocked for about 40 minutes, you understand.

DP: Yes.

VA: But in 40 minutes we received another response.

DP: That meant prison for you.

VA: It was bad. But we received another response from the prime minister Nikolay Ivanovich Ryzhkov. “It’s an only right approach”. So, was one government good and another one bad? People are people. Look at all the mess that is happening today. You trust one person and you would go to the world’s end with them. But you won’t “sit” on one field with another one, pardon me. And this refers to scientists, too. We all are products of our time. But the main thing is… Chernobyl is the main thing for me. If the accident happened 5 or 6 years later and not in 1986, the consequences would be so different, much more calamitous. The democracy… In critical situations, like a war, a nuclear power station accident or something like this, there shouldn’t be any democracy. There should be one authority. It should make decisions, even if they’re wrong. That’s how it was. It’s not shown in the movie. The movie shows… Well, what was the main thing for me. We made decision to release nitrogen for cooling the unit. Valery Alexeyevich and Viktor Alexeyevich Sidorenko went there on the first day… No, not the first. At Saturday, 26th. I came there only in the mid-May. But at the very beginning we made a headquarters in Alexandrov’s office. And we had a permanent direct line. What did we decide? To cut a hole in the pool… There was a safety system with water where the steam should go and condense through special pipes. To cut there a hole under the reactor and release liquid nitrogen under the reactor for cooling.

DP: The entire Soviet Union, as they said in the film…

VA:…sent us nitrogen tanks. We cut the hole in one day. No one was called doomed, these people did their jobs. Legasov called me when I was in Alexandrov’s office: “Vladimir Grigorevich, I have doubts. How will liquid nitrogen behave in strong fields? I heard that Professor Gverdtsiteli in Tbilisi researched into this question. Please find him and give me an answer as soon as possible”. What did I do? I called the Georgian department of KGB. “I need Professor Gverdtsiteli”. How did they find him? He called me in 20 minutes. So I asked him. “Vladimir Grigorevich, don’t release liquid nitrogen. It transforms into a highly poisonous gas in strong fields”. Certainly we didn’t need this. Everything was arranged, the tanks came, the hole was cut, the pipes were laid. But we didn’t release the nitrogen.

DP: It wasn’t shown in the film. I didn’t understand.

VA: It never happened. We didn’t release the nitrogen. Because… And these experiments we performed there in interaction between melted fuel and concrete. We performed them in Pahra. Later we made bigger experiments, in 1989, on a facility in Germany. We released tons of corium. Corium is melted active zone. We released it onto concrete and watched how it burned it, what gases come out, their compositions. We were afraid that if that thing leaks out, it would burn through the underframe and go down. That’s why miners made a cooling plate. But there wasn’t any fop minister. He was a man of 60 who worked hard alongside them.

DP: A miner?

VA: A miners’ minister.

DP: Shchadov?

VA: Shchadov. But in this movie some fop comes. And these naked miners dying of heat? We were hiding from heat in this hole. The sun didn’t heat us. It was the best place, this hole.

DP: It’s cooler underground.

VA: And no radiation. When you go up, there’s all this. But when you go down there… And these dancing naked miners. These soldiers drinking wagons of vodka. It was Ligachyov’s era.

DP: They constantly drink from the neck of the bottle.

VA: Are you OK, guys? There was a dry law. If you ask me: “Did you drink there or not?” Of course, we did. But how did we drink? In the mornings I went to work to the fourth unit where all the devices were, where we measured heat flux, temperature, neutron fluxes — there weren’t any of these but we had to be able to measure them if they would appear. We worked there for 10 hours, then came back to our place… We lived in a gynaecological hospital. Our physicists explored it with a great interest. Because when doctors had left it, they left behind everything. We put two examination chairs onto the porch and often sat there and smoked. I lived in a predelivery room. In the evenings we had a briefing, where each one of our “stalkers” after going into the unit for measuring the radiation burden in different corridors, the heat fluxes, and writing it down on the walls… Then we recorded all this in a special… We had received the first two IBM PC/XT, can you imagine that?

DP: That was huge in that time.

VA: We also had Robotrons from GDR. They were terrible. So we recorded everything there. At ten o’clock we met and told each other who went where. And from half past ten till eleven… Without making a fuss about it, we drank our 100 grams. Well, there were 50 grams of pure alcohol, not vodka. And the water was dirty, but we had plenty of… We had Fanta, we had Pepsi, and also we had some awful Ukrainian mineral water but it was salty and we couldn’t wash the alcohol down with it. Some people mixed their 50 grams with soda: some of them liked the red drink and some of them liked the yellow one. Some people washed it down with red or yellow soda. And the interesting thing is… Well, there’s a device called HIM, human impulse meter which counts how much radiation did you eat with your food and how much did you inhale. And the people who drank their 50 grams had much less radiation inside them than people who didn’t drink. People say it’s better to drink Cabernet. But pardon me…

DP: It wasn’t sold there.

VA: It wasn’t sold there. There wasn’t any. Also there was a very interesting phenomenon. In 1987 after spending a year in Chernobyl we went to Three Mile, to that accident that happened in Pennsylvania. They started the deconstruction only after that. Unlike us, they have prepared for five years, and then started to deconstruct the melted active zone. They checked us with HIM during entering and exiting. Nikolay Shteinberg was there with me. He was the head engineer of the Chernobyl station after the accident. He’s a renowned man in our industry, a very competent specialist. Later he worked as a supervisor, then went to Ukraine and was a minister of nuclear power industry in Ukraine. After Chernobyl we had a great chemical composition of isotopes inside us. We said: “Don’t worry, we won’t pollute your containment”. But all this doses… I’ve lived for 73 years now, I know my dose, it’s rather big. But I won’t die from radiation. I had an interesting encounter with TV host Gordon. He had a show about 10 or 12 years ago on TV.

DP: It was good. They had even published some books. They were great.

VA: So he put in front of me… Yablokov, he was a great academician, an ecologist. So Yablokov started to tell his usual stories that people in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Kiev after the parade died from nuclides. So Gordon asked him: “You can see Asmolov in front of you. He was inside the reactor. And somehow he looks great”. I’m 73 now, then I was about 60. Yablokov gave us a fantastic answer: “There are people who are highly radiation-resistant. People like Velikhov. Asmolov. Adamov. Don’t measure up to them”. So I’m a new mutation type.

DP: As we recalled the miners. There’s an awesome scene in the film, when a naked miner comes to Shcherbina and asks him: “Will they take care of us?” Did they take care of people?

VA: Recently I have had an interview on Echo of Moscow radio station. There are a girl and a boy. Michael Nacke and Masha Myers. Great guys. They said: “This movie has a feeling that a train brings you to stoves where you will be burned”. I said: “You see, we had a fantastic life there. We went there to work”. First, we didn’t think it was a heroic deed. When in the end of 1986 the government decided to award us, all Kurchatov Institute employees denied these awards, beside one man. Beside Valery Alexeyevich Legasov. On the meeting of Party activists of our Institute Anatoly Petrovich announced that the next day the newspaper Pravda would publish Valery Alexeyevich’s photo with a star-shaped medal. And someone told Gorbachyov between this moment and the next morning… I guess I know who it was but don’t want to tell you the name. So the next morning Pravda was sold but without Valery Alexeyevich’s photo. When people say he died because of worrying about the people and so on, that he recorded his films… It’s not true. A small flat with a kitchen… Actually, he lived in a detached house. He had a well-equipped cottage on Pekhotnaya street, not far from Kurchatov Institute. I visited him. There weren’t any KGB agents sitting around the corner… Valery Alexeyevich had a lot of problems. He was a famous man. His peak moment was this speech in front of IAEA. He went through fire and water. He had a certain bravado. Once we had a unique situation. We had cleaned the roof in Chernobyl and reported about it. And the flag. I’d kill that people for the flag and the roof. And several colonels, very good fellows, from the 12 Department of the Ministry went to the room 7001. It was just under the air shaft. They said everything was clean and tried to measure radiation on the concrete from below through the concrete. So they reported to Shcherbina: “There’s more that 400 r-units per hour”. Who does Shcherbina call at at once? The Kurchatov Institute employees. “Measure it as soon as possible”. So Valery Alexeyevich starts to think. How could we measure it? We knew perfectly well it was impossible to clean. How can you clean a bitumen roof from melted fuel? You can only throw down some pieces. Try to clean it.

DP: Use the Lunokhod.

VA: The Lunokhod was another time. So we took a fishing rod, a spinning, put some sensors onto it, ran onto a roof, cast the fishing rod, put a counting time of 10 minutes and reeled it. All the sensors were lit up. That meant we didn’t hit the measure limit. We were counting at 400…

DP: And it was more, wasn’t it?

VA: They measured it later. It was much more. Shcherbina was yelling. Everybody was yelling. Then we planned another operation. We took a huge bed sheet, put that things onto it, ran far onto the roof, put down this bed sheet. One team was running and putting it down. We put a counting time of 2 minutes. The second team ran again and took it away. Valery Alexeyevich, as a work manager, had been standing on that roof for all three minutes. That was his bravado. So what did we measure? In several points the rate was 11,800 r-units. Where the fuel was… That’s how we cleaned roofs.

DP: And what about the Lunokhod?

VA: What about it? Well… They don’t function, these robots… Especially that robot… We also had a problem with taking it down from there. They didn’t do anything. Soldiers were working. We all knew out doses. My official dose is 24.9. But that’s according to a dosimeter I had left in a personnel airlock. Because I had worked there for a year, and if your dose hit 25, they sent you away. But I’m a physicist, I should know all this. I put one dosimeter here, another one on my belly, the third one on my shoulder. And I know my dose according to these three dosimeters. Now there are really good methods to evaluate the dose. For example, studying tooth enamel. It’s really precise. I knew a man with the biggest dose, he was also from Kurchatov Institute, Kostya Checherov. He was a great fellow. He spent there about 3 years. And his accumulated dose for three years was about 1 500 r-units per hour. He died 3 years ago from leukemia. We filmed his interview 3 days before he died to separate myths from reality. And these people who filmed naked miners, alcoholics, repenting Legasov… You asked me in the beginning if I had seen the movie. I don’t like horrors. When I see an announcement… I just don’t turn on this channel. If my bosses didn’t ask me to watch these five episodes till the end, I’d never watch them. My son works in IT, he’s 46. He watched this movie with great interest. He knows me but he also asked: “Did you really lie?” That’s its influence… Somebody has told me recently that it had higher ratings that “War of Thrones”…

DP: “Game of Thrones”.

VA: “Game of Thrones”, yes. I didn’t watch it either. But I watched this “Chernobyl” TV show. I constantly think “What for?” People had brought us some fictional films about this. Amalgama Studio tried to make a movie. They had even filmed several episodes. But they always need some spy plot in the film… For example, that someone wants to steal the fuel. Now I’m told that once again our film-makers…

DP: They have already visited Sosnovy Bor to examine. It was Kozlovsky.

VA: Kozlovsky. Yes. Beside everything else I have been an athlete for all my life. I’m a master of sports, a basketball player. So when I watch this movie about basketball… “Three Seconds”. I can’t watch it. I knew all these guys.

DP: You’re not alone.

VA: I knew all these guys. I guarded Modest Paulauskas when I played for Dinamo Moscow. I knew him since we were young. It’s all wrong. Well, maybe the first movie about Kharlamov… I could watch that.

DP: “Legend №17”

VA: I can’t watch the new “Ekipazh”. I just can’t. When they add so many impossible things, why do they do it? And a new film… I told you when we were talking by phone: “Imagine I’m a contemporary of Peter the Great and I was shown the movie based on Alexey Tolstoy’s novel starring Simonov”. I would say: “Is this Pete? That very Pete I know?” So…

DP: It’s a change of eras. It influences on minds terribly. When early on…

VA: You’re a specialist. Answer me. What’s these guys’ purpose?

DP: I’ll tell you. Long ago, when videotape recorders only started to appear, people visited each other often because someone had it, someone didn’t but had some tape. So my friend called me: “Dima, I have a great movie. Come here quickly”. I came to his place. It was at night. We started watching. It was in English, it was called “Red Monarch”. And the letter R was written like Я, so with a hint of Cyrillic. There was a bloody Stalin and all his henchmen were riding. So we watched it. We were all people of liberal professions, like, artists, sculptors. We were sitting there and watching, and it was like ravings of a madman. They absolutely didn’t understand how things were working here, how people behaved, and why did they behave like this and not in some other way. They had some ravings, filmed them and thought it was how the things were in our country. Then it caused only rejection. Because it was dumb nonsense, you couldn’t even call it an ideology or propaganda. It was rubbish. But now it turns out that people… Especially our… I can’t call them the elite, but the most educated part of the society thinks it’s the truth. “Haven’t you heard of it? The screenwriter said it was almost a documentary, with great respect to factual information”. — “Guys, what are you talking about? This was wrong and that was wrong”. — “You’re picking up details. There are some strange goofs”. Just listen to this, “strange goofs”. They mean it’s not a plot thread but a strange goof, when Shcherbina says to Legasov: “Tell me how a reactor works. And if you won’t tell, you’ve thrown away from the helicopter right now”.

VA: I remember this.

DP: That’s a high level. That’s a conversation between a deputy of prime minister and an academician. Are you insane? How such people can talk like this? Who are you to throw him away? Why do the officers have to obey you and throw him away from the helicopter? KGB in this movie is a strange organization which doesn’t let anybody breath. It doesn’t comply to anyone, it doesn’t want to reconstruct or enhance other reactors. Is that a state inside a state? It’s nonsense. Who are they?

VA: They wanted to close Pripyat and let everything be lost… In the basement… You know what was unique? The great people who came to Pripyat. Leonid Andreyevich Ilyin, an academician and a doctor. Israel, Sidorenko. The decision about evacuation of Pripyat was made… The first trace went through the red forest and past Pripyat. Of course, in the evening there was an increased level of radiation in Pripyat. But it wasn’t really menacing.

DP: The pieces falling onto the bridge.

VA: The falling birds. The people standing on the bridge which all died. It’s nonsense. Today we have information of the UN International health safety commission. There’s an absolutely clear information on how many people from Pripyat died and how many children got some additional iodine to their thyroid gland. But none of them died. Can we consider Kostya dead because of Chernobyl? I could. It happened 27 years after that, but it did happen. But still… If we take the highest numbers, there are 100 or 150 people. I know guys who swallowed a hot particle, who had throat cancer. But I’m telling you again. There weren’t thousands or tens of thousands. It’s like a megaton explosion they mention. The same is with those 40 thousand dead. They’re all like Yablokov then.

DP: Certainly.

VA: What about us, 700 employees of Kurchatov Institute? And what about those soldiers? There really were 17 volumes with classification code: secret. They were the reports of all the ministries and agencies about Chernobyl. They have clear information. There aren’t these deaths. You know… How do I put this? My wife is a doctor. She was terribly worried that I was there constantly. Her health probably became worse because of that. And what about the health of those who… They write that Legasov told to evacuate everyone. But on the contrary, Legasov said: “Don’t disturb the people”. Don’t disturb anyone in places where the radiation level was lower, like, five curie per square kilometer. Because of stress for these evacuated people… Do you consider them victims of Chernobyl?

DP: Certainly yes.

VA: They died from cardiovascular illnesses and other things. These actions were wrong when… 600 people stayed in the 30-kilometer zone. They crossed the border to get salt, sugar and so on… Recently, about 8 or 10 years ago, they were checked. Because they ate potatoes, they had cows, hens. They were clearly doomed.

DP: Of course.

VA: But they are alive and healthy.

DP: There’s another example, more clear. After the fall of the Soviet Union 25 million Russians found themselves in foreign countries. And they had to leave everything and fly to Russia where they wouldn’t be killed at least. Check the health of those people. They had apartments, houses. Then they left everything, came to Pskov region… There’s an Uzbek woman sweeping the yard near my house. She has two higher educations, she’s a former director of a cultural centre. “Now I’m sweeping your yards”. Thank you. I’m not a doctor but I think when people are under really intense medical surveillance finding out what’s happening to them… Do they have a control group which wasn’t irradiated but gets the same intense surveillance?

VA: There are some experiments. For example, a famous Swedish experiment. There were two groups of people. One group was isolated from radiation with all existing ways. And another one lived as we live. Because radiation is everywhere. Particularly in Sweden. There are about 40 or 50 microroentgen and not 13 we have in Moscow.

DP: It’s like on Palace embankment in St.Petersburg.

VA: Or on Lubyanka square in Moscow, around 50. I don’t mention a favourite resort for Russians, thorium beaches in India, Goa. There are 500 microroentgen. And Copacabana beach which has the best football players in the world. Probably their 400 microroentgen make them the best players. Those people immediately fell ill who… Well, it’s our life. The Sun, the Earth… There was another very interesting experiment, in Taipei. I forgot to tell you one of my jobs. I was a president of the International Organization of Operators of Atomic Power Stations. It joins together all atomic power stations in the world. American, French, Russian… I had been a head of this organization for 3 years. So in Taipei where I came to inspect Taiwan… Well, not to inspect… Let’s say so… As in Japan I’d already been as… I was just elected as a president. I visited a center of our organization in Tokyo. We have five centers around the world. Suddenly I saw that Japanese take news from TV channels and stream all around our web like the latest information about the Fukushima accident. It was during my visit. They wrote then that “the elected president has visited us and left very disappointed”. I told them in Russian all I thought about Japanese. And when I came… I came to help them. I said: “Guys, show me your crisis center”. They didn’t.

DP: They are not allowed?

VA: No. There was a really good man. An ex-director of Fukushima, a head of Japanese nuclear forum. We were friends. I had to tell someone my advice about what they needed to do. I had a lot of advices, they were helpful. I’ll tell you now. I say “Why can’t you show it to me?” He says “Vladimir, we don’t have one. How can we show it?” Do you remember the footage? Fire engines standing and pouring water from 100 meters’ distance. I say: “Guys, there are two ways to defend yourselves from radiation: time and distance. Drive a fire engine to the unit, turn on the pump, and let the driver run away. So it will pour water a bit closer”. The Japanese found this thought really interesting. Above all containment domes they have an opening one, a gate. I said “Open it immediately”. Because if turbulent hydrogen flows into the atmosphere, it explodes. And if you open the gate for it to exit slowly, it won’t explode. They say “But we will start eject radiation if we do this”. But in the first case you’ll eject it with an explosion, and in the second case it will go down very quietly. They’ve opened these gates only on the fifth and the sixth units but in the first one everything exploded and ejected radiation. Japanese think… Maybe it’s a consequence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They adopted only one principle of defense in depth. Preventing. They thought an accident couldn’t happen at all. So they didn’t train the staff, didn’t prepare, weren’t ready to face this accident. They didn’t pay attention to all that. They had several visits. Safety systems are constantly upgrading. Something happens in the world. All nuclear power station must exchange information via IAEA and so on. So Three Mile happened. This station was constructed according to mid-1960s design. Three Mile happened. They did nothing. Chernobyl. They did nothing.

DP: Nothing.

VA: Rosenergoatom group of companies invests a billion dollars into safety upgrade every year. But in Japan they thought that it was constructed well in 1970.

DP: And it was so “well”…

VA: There were a lot of papers about that. Americans, Nuclear regulatory commission and we told them that their containment domes are weak. IAEA commissions visited them and told them “Guys, please do this”. It was all recorded. But when we had the Chernobyl accident, they said Russians are to blame. Because only Russians can have an accident.

DP: Complex machines were trusted to savages. Are we savages?!

VA: But Japanese can also be different. There are Fukushima-1 and Fukushima-2, 7 kilometers apart. Not everybody knows there are two of them. They both had four units and the same level of tsunami and earthquake. But if the first director sent all staff away from Fukushima-1 and delegated control to the head organization and it made a Prime minister of Japan the main specialist of the accident.

DP: It was clever.

VA: As he is… a great specialist. The director on Fukushima-2 didn’t send a single person away. They had four units in the same condition. Well, the diesel engines were standing a bit higher. But still, there was a complete blackout of station, a wave passed. And they brought through a field… They even made a movie about it. They brought the cables by themselves, rolled them, energised the pumps. And all four units were saved.

DP: Well done.

VA: No one writes about that. The Japanese published an independent report about themselves. Not the nuclear power specialists. They had a scientific council. They wrote: “Japan made accident”. Here’s their mentality. Hand-made. So when I, as a specialist, am asked about this movie… You compared it with this great movie, “Red monarch”, and for me it’s like “Rambo 3”.

DP: Also a good comparison.

VA: When there are two of them, a colonel and Rambo. A terrible Russian army goes to him, with tanks, cannons, helicopters. He says “Entrap them from this side and I’ll entrap them from another side”. So it’s done in 10 minutes. Some mujahedeen on horseback came, too. And the Russian army is gone.

DP: I was shocked when the screenwriter was told that “People in Russia don’t approve your film”. And he answered: “Why do they defend Soviet Union. Soviet Union is gone. They have a democracy. In my opinion, defending Soviet Union is like if Germans would defend the Third Reich now”. It turns out it’s the same thing.

VA: I grew up in Soviet Union, let’s say so. I grew up in a very intellectual family. My sister is a journalist. Her husband, as I said, is a writer. My younger brother is a renowned psychologist, he’s on TV. My father was a famous power engineer, a real engineer. And I loved… I wrote poetry from childhood. When I was young, two of my poems were published in the Yunost magazine. In that time it was…

DP: Huge.

VA: As I said, I was a master of sports in basketball and so on. When it was time to enter a university, my father said “At least one person in our family should be normal. Go and study physics”. So I went. Still, I have written a book recently. I still write poems. It’s my hobby, I’m interested in it. Believe, I’ve written a good book. I should have brought it here and give it to you.

DP: It’s OK, I’ll find it.

VA: So that’s the story.

DP: You asked “What the point of it?” As for me, it’s an absolutely ideological film. Once I had served in police. If I asked my older colleagues which had served in NKVD before “Why is it so?”, they told me “Dima, if you don’t understand why, that means it’s because of money”. And they never were wrong. I don’t know. They say that Rosatom builds 67% of all nuclear power stations in the world. Maybe they don’t want it to build them. Maybe they need to show it in a disgusting manner. That all Russians are a gang of degenerates. Take the miners. They look like organized criminal gang. And a boss talks for their rights. How can it be that the workers in Soviet Union weren’t gathered in one place? That a director didn’t spoke to you and explain… They (miners) write that “The director spoke to us and told us “Guys, the country needs your help”. And we went there to help it”. How can it be that they speak to only one person? Who are you? Are you telling the will of the party and the nation?

VA: When Soviet Union… You’re right. When they show it as a concentration camp… I don’t justify victims of Stalinism… Every family in our country…

DP: Experienced all kinds of things.

VA: For example, my wife is from Tambov region, from the town of Kozlov. Her family… Her grandfather Sazonych and his five sons worked from 6 a.m. till 10 p.m. They probably worked well, they had horses and cows. And my wife’s mother even went to a girls school in Kozlov. All them were dispossessed. The brothers were killed during the war. Sazonych came out of prison after working on White Sea Channel construction. We have a country house in Abramtsevo. I didn’t meet him… But he still… He came to that country house where nothing grows on clay. But when he lived here, everything grew. He was a kind of man who could work with soil. He got up at 6 o’clock and cultivated that soil. Then he sat near the house and read the Bible. Why did they punish those people who could work with soil?.. Tendryakov has a brilliant short story.

DP: He’s a great, awesome writer.

VA: When his father… It’s an experimental material. He came after the revolution and decided to move the poor men into the rich men’s houses and the rich men into the poor men’s houses. So he did.

DP: And everything went well. The first ones were destroyed and the second ones were rebuilt.

VA: Then he comes there in the evening and see some rich man’s house already without a roof. And its new owner has a bottle of hooch. And the rich man who lived in his house…

DP: Had changed the roof for a bottle of hooch.

VA: It’s fascinating. For me… You read this and make conclusions. “A couple of chestnut horses” is an amazing short story. It’s real literature. And all this… What do these people write for us, pardon me, both ours and theirs…

DP: Our people write worse things now.

VA: I think that what we’re doing now… Let’s say, in an attempt to prove that we’re right in something, is completely unprofessional. I mean, like the way we fight with Ukraine.

DP: It’s all the same everywhere. Big things are alike small thing and the other way around. Thank you.

VA: Not at all.

(Translated by Aleksandra Grigoreva. Edited by Victor Kotov)