Chornobyl 40 years on

Are we setting up a repeat of history?

Today, April 28, 2026, marks the fortieth anniversary of one of the world’s greatest nuclear disasters, the accident at the Chornobyl reactor complex near Pripyat, on the Kyiv reservoir in Ukraine. It is especially worth remembering because many of the patterns of behavior that led to that event and made its consequences even worse are observable in our present institutions.

My own education about the disaster started at the time, through media reports and articles in professional newsletters such as Physics Today. When Vladimir Chernousenko’s book [1] came out, I read it immediately and gained insights that were missing from prior accounts, notably about the heroism of the first responders and the “human robots” who sacrificed their lives in large numbers in efforts to contain the catastrophe. Chernousenko, as member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Science, was a leader of the early response and paid for it with his life, a victim of cancer. More recently I read Harvard professor Serhii Plokhy’s wonderful history [2], which clarified the cause of the accident and documented the official response to it. I heartily recommend the book, which incidentally is available in Europe at least as a Penguin paperback.

Here, in summary, are what to me constitute the crucial failings that led to the Chornobyl disaster and its terrible aftermath, with references to current events:

• The accident was due to a design fault in the RMBK reactors, but the operators were blamed and the organization responsible for the design steadfastly refused to acknowledge it. Later, efforts were undertaken by the government to scapegoat the operators.

  • This calls to mind the design fault in the Boeing 727Max, leading to several crashes and hundreds of lives lost. Boeing was quick to blame the crashes on pilot error, and subsequent investigation showed not only that they were lying but also that they had achieved regulatory capture of the FAA, which was supposed to oversee the company.

• The initial reaction of the Soviet government, even Gorbachev, and by their orders the local government as well, was denial: Move along, nothing to see here. It was only when radioactive debris from the plant reached Norway and was detected there and traced to a reactor accident did they finally admit that an accident had taken place. At that point local officials were blamed for the cover-up.

  • A recent event along those lines was the attack on a girl’s school in Iran by US launched Tomahawk missiles, leading to the deaths of nearly two hundred children, and the US government’s efforts at denial and deflection. One thing that is different is that in the USSR there was no pretense about having a free press, while in the US the MSM briefly covered the story before moving on to more urgent topics such as the White House Ballroom. Aside from that, we have a long history of pushing blame to the lowest level, and if possible to the victims. Renée Goode and Alex Pretti as terrorists, for example.

• As news of the disaster spread among the population, a concerted effort was made to convince the public that the risk was minimal, and subsequently to deny medical care to victims and to minimize recognition of the scope of the damage. This was done under the guise of not wanting to cause panic but was more about avoiding liability for the cost of medical treatment and lost lives. This was facilitated by the lack of a national cancer registry in the Russian FSR.

  • One can draw a parallel between this and the activities of the current US administration, by their effort to weaken radiation safety standards [3] while at the same time relaxing the requirements for regulatory approval of new nuclear energy facilities [4], including those of new and unproven design. At the same time, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is undermining medical institutions and medical reporting at the Federal level. It’s as though they are positioning themselves to avoid all responsibility for the next major nuclear accident, and subverting the accountability and compensation processes, even as they act to make such an accident more likely.

I promised to remind my readership of the need for everyone who believes in freedom and democracy to behave in accordance with those beliefs, every day. To remind ourselves of what that means, see

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Notes

[1] Chernousenko, V.M., Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside, Berlin: Springer, 1991

[2] Plokhy, Serhii, Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, New York: Basic Books, 2018

[3] Caffery, E.A. And Brant, A.U. (2026) Resolving the radiation risk debate, Science 392 (6796) https://science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aei0907

[4] U.S. Department of Energy (2025). DOE-STD-171-2025: Authorization Pathway for Nuclear Facilities, August