Richard D North

There are various pages on this site which intend to do honour to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the extraordinary people who are associated with it. You’ll find them in the category, Chernobyl mini-essays .. 

Here’s a v short YouTube video of an RDN visit to the surviving Chernobyl plant in 2005.

You may be interested in Chernobyl’s cancer death toll, and an account of that appears here.

Jeremy Nicholl, the distinguished British photographer based in Moscow, took an unequalled range of pictures of Chernobyl for the Independent on Sunday. His site is worth a visit. 

If you’re kindly interested in my personal take on Chernobyl, read on…..

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 What happened on 26 April 1986 More »

The reactors at Chernobyl were RBMKs, which moderate their fission processes with graphite and are cooled by water. Hence their common Western name: LWGR, or light-water graphite reactor… More »

In some sense all errors are human. Reactor 4′s design made it fallible, but Soviet secrecy made it impossible for its designers to explain the weaknesses of their work. Soviet bureaucracy also made it likely that the reactor might not be well built and maintained… More »

What happened next? As news of the accident filtered out to the people who ran the Chernobyl plant and its satellite town, and – simultaneously – to Kiev and Moscow, the first problem was that the senior managers of the plant either did not grasp or could not bare to reveal the full extent of the disaster. More »

It is surprisingly hard to allocate blame for the Chernobyl accident. Within the soviet system, nuclear power stations could only have been designed by an ambitious and secretive scientific elite working with an ambitious and secretive technological elite to deliver the national ambitions they all shared and which were guided by a political elite who had complete power to advance a person to giddy heights, or consign them to outer darkness. More »

To a surprising degree, it suited many parties – governments, journalists, and campaigners – to exaggerate the consequences of Chernobyl, and then to blame them on the Soviet regime. More »

From the start, Western governments were keen to accept the Soviet account of the causes and consequences of the accident, and to agree that the Soviets had done their best in the face of it. Blame was not politic. More »

Here’s a timeline list of some of the most authoritative accounts of the effects of the Chernobyl accident. If you’d rather something cripser, try the World Nuclear Association’s sharp and well-referenced account.  More »

Some people promote and millions believe the idea of a very high number for Chernobyl’s cancer death toll. (See the 100,000 figure promoted by some Greens, and that’s almost moderate.) Some others also adduce huge and horrible birth defects and other health effects.  Assessing the cancer toll, and the wider health effects, is complicated……. More »