The Inevitable Disaster

One of the main theses of Midnight in Chernobyl is the idea that an accident was bound to happen in a Soviet nuclear plant, it was just a matter of which one and when, and Chernobyl in 1986 just happened to be it. The book starts at midnight, but the clock had been counting down for a long time. There were problems with the RMBK reactor design from the beginning that were covered up or ignored for the sake of speed and budget. Smaller accidents had already taken place, but been covered up. Though it was human error from Leonid Toptunov that triggered the accident, it was the mechanisms of the design and of the part structure that insured it would become a catastrophe. There were no fail safes in place, and the mistake Toptunov made would not have even been possible to make in a differently...