Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an OGONEK interview by Vanda Beletskaya with Academician Anatoliy Petrovich Aleksandrov, former president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Aleksandrov blames the Chernobyl accident on an ill-considered experiment prepared by Donenergo that violated operating instructions. He also describes earlier nuclear plant defects, Legasov's suicide, and his dealings with Beria and Kapitsa. He argues for continued atomic power engineering and a law on nuclear power.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 6 of 16 Page 4 dream such a thing in a terrifying dream. The nuclear power plant operated for 11 hours with a disconnected emergency reactor cooling system! As if the devil supervised and prepared the explosion. 21. OGONEK: But who specifically from Donenergo was the author of the experiment? Is this person now alive? What is his fate? 22. A.P. Aleksandrov: A certain Metlenko. I know nothing about his fate, except that he is alive. I judge no one. 23. OGONEK: Anatoliy Petrovich, but flaws exist in the very design of the type of reactor that is at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant... 24. A.P. Aleksandrov: Yes, they exist. However, the cause of the accident is all the same the ill-considered experiment and the gross violation of the instruction of the operation of nuclear power plants. Reactors of this type are at both the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant and the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant... In all there are 15. Just think, why did an accident occur at Chernobyl, but not at Leningrad? 25. Understand, the reactor has drawbacks. It was developed by Academician Dollezhal long ago, with allowance made for the knowledge of that time. Now these drawbacks have been reduced and offset. It is not a matter of the design. You are driving a car, you turn the steering wheel in the wrong direction--an accident! Is the engine to blame? Or the designer of the car? Everyone will reply: ''The unskilled driver is to blame.'" 26. OGONEK: Where is the guarantee that among the personnel, who service other nuclear power plants, there are no ''unskilled drivers''? For you yourself, Anatoliy Petrovich, repeatedly warned about the need to train such specialists better. I myself heard this from you more than 10 years ago. You said that among the people, who operate nuclear power plants, vigilance had become less keen, that they had become relaxed and are forgetting about the danger, inasmuch as God is merciful and there have been no serious accidents. You spoke about a plan of establishing in Obninsk, on the basis of the first nuclear power plant, an international school. You warned that the calm can inadvertently be broken... 27. A.P. Aleksandrov: I did not speak that foolishly. But, unfortunately, an international school was never established. I believe that now it is still not too late to return to this plan. 28. It turned out that new nuclear power plants went into operation and more and more people were drawn into the system of their maintenance. And--no matter how painful it is to admit this--they
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 22 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.