Viktor Bryukhanov

Lore & Background

Bryukhanov was the oldest son in a family of four children and the only one of the brothers to receive higher education, taking a degree in electrical engineering in 1959. In 1966 he joined the Slavyansk Thermal Power Plant, where he rose to deputy chief engineer. He resigned in 1970 to build a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The assignment was for four RBMK reactors on the banks of the Pripyat River; he had at first proposed pressurized water reactors, but that proposal met opposition.

On 26 April 1986 he was called about an incident at the station. He had not been told that the rundown test was being attempted again that night.

Passing the fourth reactor block on a bus, he saw that the upper structure of the reactor was gone. He gathered officials in the bunker under the administration building and sent a coded accident message to the Ministry of Energy. Without high-range dosimeters, officials struggled to establish how much radiation had been released, and at 3:00 a.m. he assured a party official in Moscow that the situation was under control.

Reader's Guide

At a Politburo meeting on 3 July he was accused of mismanagement, and operator error was named the primary cause of the accident, with reactor design flaws a further factor. He was expelled from the party, charged on 12 August and imprisoned. Among the case materials he found a letter from an expert at the Kurchatov Institute describing design faults that had been kept from him and his staff for 16 years.

He pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of administrative negligence and contested the more serious ones. He served his sentence in a penal colony in Donetsk and was released early, in September 1991, for good behavior. He later worked for the state-owned energy company of Ukraine on the consequences of the accident, and he had retired by December 2015 because of failing eyesight. In interviews he maintained that neither he nor his employees were to blame.

In the miniseries Chernobyl, a dramatisation, his role is played by Con O'Neill.

Did You Know?

• He met his wife Valentina at the Angren Power Plant.
• He died at the age of 85.
• He appeared in the documentary Radiophobia.