24/10/2023
Today, October 24, 2023, Viktor Smagin - the former shift chief of power unit No. 4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant - passed away. On the morning of April 26, 1986, it was Viktor and his shift No. 5 that replaced the block shift that was at the Chornobyl NPP at the time of the disaster.
On April 26, 1986, Viktor Smagin woke up at six in the morning, as usual when he had the morning shift at the station. After breakfast, he went out to the balcony of his apartment, which was on the 12th floor of the building at the corner of Kurchatov and Lazarev streets. He saw smoke above the reactor and realized that something was wrong. At that moment, he thought that the separator drum had exploded, but on the already non-working reactor, because yesterday morning Oleksandr Akimov, whom Viktor Smagin was supposed to replace on the morning shift, said that the reactor should have been stopped yesterday afternoon. He ordered his wife to close the windows and not let the children go to school, and drove to the station.
At 7:40 a.m. he was already on the control panel of reactor No. 4. Oleksandr Akimov, from whom Smagin was supposed to take over, held on not even with the last of his strength - they left him a long time ago - he held onto the feeling of guilt, whether direct or indirect, but for him, Sasha Akimov, undeniable, because it was him he was the master here in that fateful night
Smagin, as part of the reserve group, which also included Vyacheslav Orlov, Arkady Tsekov and Oleksiy Breus, took up the primary task at that time - supplying water. They went down to the mark 27.0 and 45 minutes, drenched in sweat, suffocating from steam and dust, opened two fittings of the feeding unit, and then at the backup control point they cut off the damaged section of the pipeline, because water was gushing from every riser. It was there that they saw graphite...
When they returned to the control panel No. 4, Mykhailo Oleksiyovych Lyutov, the deputy chief engineer for science, was there. He asked:
- Smagin! What is the temperature of graphite?
- The temperature of the environment, - Viktor answered.
- How is this? - Lyutov did not believe it.
And then Smagin took him to the place where he saw the graphite.*
The maximum permitted dose on that day was 25 rem - five annual norms per shift. Viktor Smagin received ten maximum permitted doses - that is, fifty annual norms for the shift following the emergency one. He did everything that could be done to prevent more trouble. In December 1986, he was awarded the Order of Lenin for his courage and heroism during the liquidation of the accident at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
According to unconfirmed reports, Viktor committed su***de by throwing himself out of the window of his apartment in Moscow. After the accident, he suffered from the consequences of radiation sickness all his life, and a few days before the tragedy, he told his wife that he had found several new tumors on his body. A su***de note was found in the liquidator's apartment in which he was asking his wife for forgiveness.
*Based on the memoirs of Volodymyr Shovkosh*tny "Chornobyl: I saw"
#чорнобиль
