William Schull

The nuclear power industry will long remember 26 April 1986. The catastrophic events of this day would destroy whatever belief the public might once have had in the safety of nuclear reactors, a belief that had already been weakened by the Three Mile Island accident some seven years earlier. The site of this nuclear debacle lies 146 kilometers north‐northwest of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, near the Belarus‐Ukraine border. Four reactors made up the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant; the first unit had been built in 1970 and the fourth was completed late in 1983. Workers engaged in an unsanctioned and poorly conceived experiment lost control of the reactor in unit 4. The ensuing accident not only destroyed the reactor but spread radioactive contamination globally because the graphite‐moderated reactor had been built without a special containment structure, which had been deemed unnecessary. Initially Soviet authorities denied that an accident had occurred, but once the plume of contamination crossed national boundaries, containing its political ramifications was no longer possible. The days and weeks that followed revealed how fragmented, uncoordinated, and often ill conceived was the international reaction to a nuclear accident of this magnitude. Some nations immediately instituted countermeasures, such as the distribution of stable iodine tablets; some did not. Some nations began to confiscate and then destroyed potentially contaminated foodstuffs; others did not. The Soviet Union initiated heroic steps to move over a quarter of a million individuals thought to be in harm's way to safer areas and to mobilize over three quarters of a million workers, largely soldiers, to contain the damage. Both efforts were seriously compromised by inadequate preparedness and indecision.Chernobyl Record sets out in admirable detail these actions and, to a lesser extent, the steps taken by other national and international agencies to minimize the accident's effects. It is an important contribution to the documentation of the Chernobyl fiasco and should be an integral part of any library interested in the uses of nuclear energy and the hazards stemming from such uses. The author, Richard Mould, is an English health physicist who has been involved in studies of the Chernobyl accident since shortly after it happened, either as an advisor, a consultant, or a participant. He writes clearly and with authority and sensitivity. The book is generously endowed with well‐chosen figures, photographs, and tables and organized so that it can be read with understanding by the nonspecialist. The opening chapter, for example, offers a brief but helpful discussion of the units of measurement of ionizing radiation and a succinct summary of the health effects of exposure, particularly the immediate or acute ones. The succeeding chapters deal with the design of nuclear reactors; the explosion and subsequent release of radionuclides; the measurement of ground, water, and food contamination; and estimates of the size of the exposed population and the collective effective doses in the three republics of primary concern, Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine. The book's penultimate chapter, “The Legasov Testimony,” is particularly interesting since it recounts the experiences of Valery Legasov as a member of the government commission sent to appraise the seriousness of the accident and to institute those steps necessary to limit its physical and biological effects. Legasov's account is exceptionally candid, detailing the lack of preparation for an event of this magnitude at both the local and the ministerial levels, the failure of the Soviet scientific community to develop good diagnostic and control systems for their reactors, and the virtual indifference of highly placed nuclear engineers to issues of safety. Legasov would commit suicide two years after the accident, no less a victim of the tragedy than those twenty‐eight nuclear workers and firemen who succumbed within three months of the explosion.Arguably the weakest sections of the book are those chapters dealing with the health effects of the accident. This is not unexpected, since the totality of those effects is still poorly known and may remain so for some years to come. Much that has previously been written about radiation‐related health effects as they pertain to Chernobyl has been speculative, frequently based on data of dubious generality, and often stated from a self‐serving perspective. As yet, with the exception of the few hundred individuals who experienced some of the symptoms of acute radiation sickness and the widespread psychological trauma, the only unequivocal effect involves the increase in thyroid malignancies seen in all three affected republics, especially among the young. This reservation aside, Mould has produced an admirable treatise, a lasting contribution to the understanding of the causes and consequences of what one hopes was the last major nuclear accident