I thought there were a lot of similarities between the two stories, he says.
I remember the Challenger disaster, which happened [the same year], much more clearly.
So, how did you come to writeMidnight in Chernobyl?It goes back a long way.
Credit: Simon & Schuster
It was only 3 kilometers from the plant.
There was a yacht club, and a disco at the weekend, and a scuba diving club.
It was like a real workers paradise.
How close did you get to the site of the accident?The site of the explosion?
[laughs] Much too close.
About 50 meters away.
There were actually four nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl plant.
[Reactor 4] exploded, and the other three were repaired and brought back online.
The last one wasnt shut down until 2000.
So, I actually went inside the plant itself.
He handed it to me and I said, Well, this isnt working.
You just think that you could be terribly poisoned just by walking down the middle of the street.
Although I wasnt allowed to take it with me when I went into the plant itself.
How worried should we be about Russian nuclear power plants?
Or nuclear power plants anywhere?The fact is that this was a unique historical event.
The proximate cause of the accident was this safety test that went wrong in Reactor No.
But really the cause of the accident lay in the culture and political nature of the Soviet Union.
It would have been impossible really for it to have happened anywhere else.
The Chernobyl accident was the result of a culture of secrecy and lies.
So, that accident is extremely unlikely to happen again.
