Chernobyl Miners Quotes

The very next day, delegates from Moscow visited mining towns around the USSR to recruit miners for an operation to cool the ground beneath the destroyed reactor. They were bussed to Chernobyl and began work on the 13th. One miner described the plan: “Our mission was this: dig a 150-meter tunnel, from the third block to the fourth. Then dig a room 30 meters long and 30 meters wide [and 2 meters tall] to hold a refrigeration device for cooling down the reactor.”210 Scientists worried that pneumatic drills would stress the building’s fragile foundations, so the miners were ordered to dig their tunnel by hand. To limit exposure, they dug down 12 meters before heading towards Unit 4. The project took one month and four days, with miners digging 24 hours a day - in a normal mine, that distance would have taken three times as long. Due to the nature of the dig, it wasn’t possible to install ventilation holes, so there was a lack of oxygen and the temperature reached highs of 30°C.

Radiation levels inside the tunnel were around 1 roentgen per hour, but because the work was so cramped and demanding, the miners dug without any protective gear - not even their respirators, which became damp and useless within minutes. At the tunnel entrance, radiation reached highs of 300 roentgens-per-hour. The miners were never warned of the true extent of the danger, and every single one of them received a significant dose. Vladimir Amelkov, a miner who participated in the operation, said years later, “Someone had to go and do it. Us or someone else. We did our duty. Should we have done it? It’s too late to judge. I don’t regret anything.”211 The miners achieved their goal of digging a room beneath Unit 4, but the refrigeration machinery was never installed because the core began to cool on its own. Instead, the space was filled with heat resistant concrete. While no official studies have ever been published, it’s estimated that one-quarter of the miners - who were all between 20 and 30 - died before they reached the age of 40.212 “The miners died for nothing,” laments Veniamin Prianichnikov, chief of the plant’s training programmes. “Everything we did was a waste of time.213