Saturday, December 28, 2019

Midnight In Chernobyl - Adam Higginbotham

I was a teenager when the explosion in reactor four at Chernobyl happened, and watching the news was not often a priority for me, so reading this as a grown up was a bit eye opening.  A lot of the technical explanations and physics were a bit over my head, but the personal stories made it a fascinating and horrifying read.  The amount of corner cutting and incompetent mismanagement of building and servicing a nuclear reactor were astonishing to read and it is a wonder that more people did not die as a result.  Scary stuff. 4/5

1 comment:

John Bellen said...

Poor quality and corner cutting was - and probably still is - a hallmark of Russian industry. Books about the Communist era there make sad and scary reading, everyone concerned with not being punished for failing to meet quotas, vast waste and inefficiency, no one really caring, so long as they could stop sweating about who will be blamed...