What is in the book
At 1.23 and 40 seconds on the morning of 26 April 1986, the emergency shutdown button was pressed in the control room of Chernobyl's Unit 4. Within seconds there was no reactor left to shut down.
The button was supposed to stop everything. But on this kind of reactor, control rods driven in from the very top could briefly do the opposite of their job. The flaw had been known about since 1983. Nobody had told the men at the desk.
This Turbo History short tells the Chernobyl disaster straight, from a safety test pushed into the small hours to a hole in the arch built to seal the ruin:
- A reactor with two weaknesses, and the warnings that never reached the people running it
- The firemen who fought the roof fires as high as 70 metres up, with no dose meters at all
- A town of about 49,000 people emptied in three hours, a day and a half after the explosion
- The worker in Sweden whose shoes set off an alarm and told the world
- Who was blamed in 1986, and what an international report said six years later
- The argument over the death toll, from the official 31 to a disputed 985,000, and who stands behind each number
- What the television drama got wrong
The reactor exploded in 1986. It is still making news.
Read it in under an hour. Free on Kindle Unlimited.
These are not academic books. You will not find footnotes to chase, family trees to memorise, or ten pages on the logistics of a treaty. Every book ends with a page of proper ones to go to next if you want that depth. If you want the story and the big picture in an hour, you are home.
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More from the series
One figure or one event per book. Under an hour each.
