“The situation is normal. The radiation level is rising.”
In 1986, Reactor Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant near the Ukraine exploded. Radiation poured out everywhere – sky, ground, underground. It was a disaster that no one prepared for and no one wanted to deal with. The USSR had a face it needed to present to the public and the world may not have known for a long time what really happened except that radiation traveled into Europe and was detected by sensors and traced back to the USSR. They eventually had to reach out after their attempts to fix the reactor and their own men failed.
Midnight in Chernobyl is an eye-opening book about the 1986 disaster. I knew some basic details about Chernobyl, but when I saw this book, I put it on my to-read list as a chance to learn more about it. It took several weeks for the book to become available as an ebook from my local library. It was well worth the wait.
I took my time to read this book, absorbing all the details. While it is a non-fiction book, it is anything but dry. I gasped, I cringed, I shook my head in disbelief – it almost belongs in a horror category.
Higginbotham chronicles the history of nuclear reactors and then takes the reader moment-by-moment through the Chernobyl explosion and all that happened afterword. He interviewed several survivors and writes about peoples’ lives in details and how they were affected by the explosion. He writes about a fire captain who believes his government would not send him into danger. He writes about the men exposed directly to the radiation. He writes about the clean-up effort and the pilots who flew over the radiation plume. It’s a heart-breaking read, but very important history to know about. I would highly recommend it to anyone high school age or older.
Chernobyl today:
What seemed clear from much of the research into low-level radiation conducted since 1986 was that different species and populations reacted to chronic exposure in varying ways. Pine trees coped with it less well than birch. Moller and Mousseau found that migrant barn swallows were apparently very radiosensitive; resident birds less so. Winter wheat seeds taken from the Exclusion Zone in the days after the disaster and then germinated in uncontaminated soil had produced thousands of different mutant strains, and every new generation remained genetically unstable, even twenty-five years after the accident. Yet a 2009 study of soybeans grown near the reactor seemed to show that the plants changed at a molecular level to protect themselves against radiation.
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