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Talk:Zhores Medvedev

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Medvedev's son Dimitri

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What on earth is the point of including details of his son's life, including the fact that he ran a café in London, then moved to Cornwall and has two children - why not tell us their names and give his exact address and phone number while you're about it? This strikes me as an invasion of privacy - and no, the public does not have a "right to know".213.127.210.95 (talk) 13:19, 29 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Report and analysis of the secret nuclear catastrophe in the USSR 1949

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Medvedev wrote up the first Russian nuclear reactor catastrophe which took place in the first large-scale Soviet nuclear reactor, sometimes known as Chelyabinsk-40, during the Soviet atomic bomb program under Igor Kurchatov. The report was probably first published in the late 1970s by his London-based publishing house T.C.D. publications mentioned in the article. I only know of the German version, "Bericht und Analyse der bisher geheim gehaltenen Atomkatastrophe in der UdSSR" which was published by Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 1979. The events are also described in "The Unknown Stalin". A German abstract can be downloaded at http://www.strahlentelex.de/Stx_07_490_S06-08.pdf .

The reactor installation is also described in Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" who mentions certain difficulties in its early stages of operation but makes no mention of a catastrophe incurring major loss of life as well as impacting Igor Kurchatov directly, who died early at only 57 years of age, in 1960, likely related to a very high radiation dose he received in the 1949 event at Chelyabinsk-40.

The graphite reactor's purpose was the production of plutonium, to be used as the fuel for the first Soviet atom bombs. Sometimes known as the objekt and nicknamed Anotchka, it was basically a large stack of graphite blocks in an underground pit for security reasons, read a surprise American nuclear attack. Vertical channels running through it held long, thin aluminium tubes filled with natural uranium. The entire arrangement was water-cooled because of the high power levels needed for a sufficiently fast bomb fuel production.

"Espionage had missed a critical physical process that soon shut the Chelyabinsk reactor down - not Wigner's disease, which Kurchatov knew about from Beria's collections, but the swelling of uranium metal slugs in high-flux reactors. Uranium metal swells under intense neutron bombardment because some products of fission - argon and other gases - accumulate within the structural space of the metal and deform it. Twisted, rippled slugs in the Chelyabinsk A reactor stuck in the discharge tubes and blocked them. Beria came running, alleging sabotage. "Kurchatov was able to parry the blow," reports Golovin, "[by convincing] the necessary people of our approach to the unknown area of natural phenomena, high-power neutron fields, where various surprises could be expected." They stopped the reactor, drilled out the channels, dissolved the entire loading of uranium slugs, extracted the accumulated plutonium, studied the swelling, redesigned and replaced the slug channels throughout the reactor and manufactured a new loading of uranium. The disaster delayed the operation until the end of the year. The big remote-controlled chemical plant needed to extract the plutonium was still under construction nearby in any case and would not be finished until December." (Rhodes, page 331f).

What Rhodes fails to explicitly mention is that freshly irradiated fuel rods are highly radioactive from fission products. You would normally allow these to decay over several months while storing the hot fuel submerged under water in a spent fuel pool. But in 1949, the Soviet program leadership including Kurchatov decided there was no time for that because it would have meant to delay the atom bomb program for months on end. They only had that one single production reactor yet and it was put out of action by the recovery operation, so they wanted to do it as fast as possible. Medvedev describes how they knowingly chose a course of action that traded time savings for a considerable loss of life. All that drilling out of the channels and recovery of the deformed, highly radioactive fuel rods had to be done manually and was accomplished mostly by "zeks", political prisoners from the nearby Gulag that had been used as slave labor since the days the facility had been first erected. Kurchatov himself was among the only ones who actually knew the actual risks of that kind of radiation exposure, yet he himself participated in the separating and inspecting of the irradiated fuel since initially he was the only one to even know what to look for. The unloading operation went on for five weeks, around the clock in six-hour shifts. Kurchatov likely only took two or three of these shifts and still contracted medium radiation poisoning which likely shortened his life span drastically. Of course, none of the thousands of zeks, who received many times higher doses, had the faintest idea what they were being forced to do and what the risks were. Cancun771 (talk) 14:48, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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