CHERNOBYL WAS A COMMUNIST DISASTER.

Reason's Ron Bailey recalls the corner-cutting that led to the failed emergency test that destroyed a nuclear reactor.

The world's worst nuclear disaster began 40 years ago at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power generation facility experienced an explosion and meltdown. Ironically, the explosion was caused by a botched safety test.

The point of the test had been to see what would happen if the power plant lost its main electrical supply: Could spinning turbines generate enough power to run the coolant pumps until emergency backup diesel generators could kick in? The experiment had failed three times previously, but never as catastrophically as it did that night.

Before the meltdown, Soviet officials had bragged regularly about the safety of their nuclear power plants and disparaged those in the West.

Oops.  It transpires, dear reader, that the only thing more destructive than capitalist cost-cutting, which presented a few years earlier in the form of exploding Pintos, was communist cost-cutting.

The Soviet system put economic decisions in the hands of planners far removed from both the data people need to make decisions and the immediate consequences of their actions. Gosplan, the economic planning bureau, initially determined that nuclear power was unnecessary because the country had more than enough fossil fuels to produce electricity. When it became clear in the late 1960s that they had miscalculated, the energy planners rushed the development of nuclear power. In the process, they neglected to include the containment buildings used in the West, which are designed to prevent the escape of radioactive materials even during severe accidents.

Containment, you see, would have increased the costs of the plants by 25 percent to 30 percent. The "leaders of the Soviet energy sector faced a choice between disrupting the Party's five-year development plan if they built expensive nuclear facilities or abandoning the project altogether," a group of Russian researchers noted in 2025 (originally in Russian). "Priority was given to the solution that was safe for the officials, but which subsequently created a threat to people's lives." After the disaster, an IAEA engineer told the Los Angeles Times that if the Chernobyl reactor had been housed within a standard Western-style containment structure, "it probably would have made a huge difference." Even if an explosion breached a containment structure, most of the radioactive particles would nevertheless have been trapped.

The Soviet nuclear power industry was plagued by shoddy workmanship, bureaucratic infighting, and a shortage of trained personnel.

"Close enough for government work."  Unfortunately, clean nuclear power was collateral damage to the demonstration of the follies of communism.