"Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster" by Adam Higginbotham

Before reading Midnight in Chernobyl, I knew that Chernobyl was the site of a massive nuclear power plant explosion. I knew that the land surrounding it was abandoned and reclaimed by nature. I knew a lot of people died. I didn't know much.

The book goes into incredible detail about all the missteps--both structurally in the creation of the reactor and operationally on the day of the disaster--that let to the explosion. While many of the operators made mistakes, Higginbotham primarily faults the design and construction of the reactor itself, the shoddy materials and craftsmanship allowed under a USSR more focused on image, speed, and individual prestige than safety and quality.

Even though the errors leading up to the explosion are terrible, so too is the reaction after the explosion occurs. Officials are slow to order evacuations, unwilling to believe that the reactor was truly destroyed. Even more lives were endangered in the confused attempts to quell the reactor fire and to contain the radioactive ash and debris that resulted.

Perhaps what surprised me the most was how little we still know about the effect of radiation. There were a couple dozen nuclear operators and firefighters who died early and relatively quickly of acute radiation sickness. However, estimating the true effect of the nuclear fallout has been difficult, and even understanding its impact--positive or negative--on wildlife and fauna is murky.

For a book awash in technical scientific description of nuclear physics, Midnight in Chernobyl is accessible and engaging. My knowledge of the science is still shaky, but I do have a basic understanding of how and why the explosion occurred.

Similarly, though it can be easy to get lost in similar-sounding Russian names, but the book is surprisingly easy to follow even without keeping them straight. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to be able to describe, even vaguely accurately, more than a couple of the individuals described and their responsibilities, yet I don't feel like my overall comprehension suffered.

This spring my motto has been "everything's a metaphor," and there's plenty of metaphors to be found in the Chernobyl disaster that are applicable to use today as we fight Covid-19. Though battling the disease is quite different than dealing with the fallout of a human-caused nuclear disaster, there's lessons to be learned. There's the fact that we're willing to marshal enormous resources to fix catastrophic problems--but very bad at taking the simpler measures that would have prevented them in the first place. I was also struck by how often people were making life-or-death decisions on incredibly little or incomplete information. There were some bad actors, but more often than not, there were individuals making decisions without any real knowledge of what they were doing. Huge amounts of effort, time, money, and--most importantly--human life, were spent for naught. The book also highlights the huge disparities in our knowledge. Yes, we can harness the power of nuclear energy, but there's so much we don't know about how it works and its effect on humans. That point also resonates during the pandemic. We can build incredible computers and have stunning technology yet everyday it feels like we're getting contradictory information about how Covid-19 spreads and how to treat it.