Soviet Military Apparently Had Role at Chernobyl A-Plant

There is growing evidence that the damaged nuclear power plant at Chernobyl and others like it in the Soviet Union have been used for both civilian and military purposes.

According to unofficial Soviet sources and Western nuclear officials, the Soviet military has a direct role in managing at least some of the 14 remaining reactors of the same design as the unit that exploded and burned at Chernobyl last April 26. Military authorities appear to have no comparable role in running the country’s conventional, pressurized-water reactors.

In interviews, U.S. and West European officials said that some of the graphite reactors like the four at Chernobyl may be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, but that their most likely military purpose is to make tritium, a rare isotope of hydrogen used in thermonuclear weapons.

New Dimension Added

The indications of a military function add a new dimension to Soviet explanations for the very large commitment Moscow has made to an unusual reactor design that is now acknowledged to have inherent safety flaws.

The leading weakness, which the Soviets say they recognized and tried to counter by writing strict operating rules, is a tendency to produce the kind of catastrophic burst of power--called a “superprompt criticality”--that destroyed one reactor at Chernobyl.

With the prospect of electric power shortages looming this winter, the Soviets are moving urgently to install additional control rods and to make other changes that they say will render these reactors less vulnerable to operator error. The Tass news agency reported this week that the first of two undamaged units at Chernobyl has already begun generating electricity, for the first time since April.

Overall, the 14 remaining units account for half the Soviet Union’s nuclear power capacity and about 5% of its total electricity output. In addition to the three 1,000-megawatt reactors left at Chernobyl, four others are located at the prototype Leningrad plant; four at Kursk, south of Moscow; two at Smolensk, west of Moscow, and one 1,500-megawatt unit is operating at Ignalino in the Baltic republic of Lithuania.

Scaled-up Versions

These graphite reactors are essentially scaled-up versions of military production reactors used by the Soviet Union, the United States and other nuclear-weapons states to produce plutonium and tritium. They are built from blocks of graphite, which moderates or slows neutrons emitted by uranium fuel rods arranged in hundreds of vertical channels, permitting a fission chain reaction to take place.

U.S. officials said that American experts who visited the prototype plant near Leningrad in the early 1970s, when it was still under construction, were told that this design would enable the Soviet Union to build up its nuclear power capacity rapidly without the need for the massive steel pressure vessels and containment buildings required by conventional reactors, which the Soviets found difficult to build.

Up until the Chernobyl disaster, Soviet engineers also maintained that the graphite reactors were safer than Western designs because they were supposedly less vulnerable to catastrophic loss-of-coolant accidents.

Ideally Suited

At the same time, U.S. analysts noted that these reactors, unlike conventional units, could be refueled while in operation, a feature that made them ideally suited for producing weapons-grade plutonium. In military production reactors, uranium fuel in which fissionable plutonium appears as a byproduct must be removed at frequent intervals to prevent the buildup of plutonium 240, which degrades the explosive yield of weapons.

Some Western nuclear officials attending a special session of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna last week, which completed two international agreements on nuclear accidents, said there is evidence that the Soviets have, in fact, used these reactors for weapons production. They said the extent of involvement and precise role of these reactors remains unclear.

“We do know that the Leningrad plant is under military control,” a senior member of a delegation from a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country said.

The official, who asked not to be identified by name or nationality, said the Soviets appear to have ample plutonium from dedicated military production reactors. In view of this, he said, the Leningrad plant is more likely to be producing tritium, which is in shorter supply. Tritium and deuterium, a more readily available form of hydrogen, form the “fuel” of a hydrogen bomb or warhead.

Civilian Unit Exploded

According to Soviet sources with access to information from the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, three of the four reactors at Chernobyl were being used for military production before the April accident. Ironically, this source said, the one purely civilian unit was the one that exploded.

The plant’s military link was widely known in at least one of the academy’s theoretical physics institutes, but researchers avoided discussion of the subject and its exact function was not clear, the source said.

An independent indication of a military link to the Chernobyl plant came in the text of a Politburo statement on the accident published July 20. The statement listed six senior officials who were dismissed or censured for “bad errors and shortcomings in their work,” but it offered no explanation of how they had contributed to the accident.

One official was listed in the statement as “first deputy minister of medium machine building Meshkov.” Western analysts noted that this ministry is the cover name of the state agency in charge of nuclear weapons production.

However, they said it was also possible that Meshkov was the Alexander G. Meshkov listed since 1976 as chief of the main department of the State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy and that he was being punished for failings in earlier work on civilian nuclear plants.

Willing to Open

Officials of the IAEA in Vienna said they are skeptical that the Chernobyl plant had a military function because the Soviets included it on a 1985 list of 15 nuclear power facilities that they were willing to open up to international safeguards inspections.

These inspections, carried out by international agency teams, are meant to ensure that civilian nuclear plants are not used for weapons production. Agency officials said the Soviet offer is one of several largely symbolic gestures by weapons states that are intended to make such inspections more palatable for countries that do not already have atomic weapons. The agency chose five Soviet plants for safeguards inspections, but Chernobyl was not among them and neither was any of the other graphite reactors.

However, a senior West German official was quoted earlier this week as saying there were indications that the Chernobyl plant did have a military function.

Environment Minister Walter Wallman, who headed the West German delegation at last week’s meeting of the international agency, told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag that the Soviet Union were “remarkably” forthcoming in discussing the accident, but that many questions remained unanswered.