More Soviets Punished for Chernobyl Negligence

The Communist Party expelled two senior nuclear power officials and reprimanded four others for negligence in the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the party newspaper Pravda reported Thursday.

Pravda said the party’s control committee took the actions after “considering questions of responsibility of some leading workers.”

G.A. Veretennikov, head of the Atomic Power Workers Industrial Assn., and Y.V. Kulikov, a department chief in the Medium Machine-Building Ministry, “showed irresponsibility in their work to secure safe exploitation of the nuclear power plant, and their management of these organizations was unsatisfactory,” Pravda said.

“Serious failures and mistakes were made in their work with personnel,” the newspaper said, but did not elaborate.

Pravda gave no indication whether the party members would also lose their jobs.

Three officials were given severe reprimands by the party control committee--M.P. Alexeyev, vice chairman of the State Committee for Utilization of Atomic Energy; Viktor A. Sidorenko, a deputy chairman of the committee and for 11 years head of its nuclear reactor division, and A.N. Makukhin, first deputy power minister.

Also reprimanded was Leren P. Mikhailov, director of the power ministry’s Hydroproject Institute.

Pravda said Mikhailov was reprimanded for “failing to secure proper supervision over the testing of a turbo-generator at the Chernobyl nuclear power station.”

The April 26 explosion that ripped open the power plant’s No. 4 reactor occurred during an experiment to test how long a generator could keep the reactor operating in the event of a power failure.

At least 31 people have died as a result of the accident that released a huge cloud of radiation that circled the globe.