3

Training Nuclear Experts: A Workforce for the Nuclear Industry

To train qualified cadres for the Soviet civilian nuclear power industry, its architects engaged in an ongoing discussion about the kind and amount of knowledge these workers required. How much did a plant operator need to know to safely operate a reactor and prevent an accident? Asked another way, should trainers hold back certain technical knowledge from plant operators to save training time or preserve security? When Sredmash outsourced nuclear power plants to Minenergo in August 1966, these were far from academic questions.¹

In this chapter, I examine how the transfer precipitated the loss of crucial experiential skills, of implicit knowledge, and of practices, routines, and unspoken protocols. Formal accounts of nuclear personnel training seldom acknowledge this kind of unspoken knowledge, except occasionally in the wake of an accident.² But Soviet managers at the time of the transfer were deeply concerned about the loss of knowledge and experience and tried to correct it.

The allocation of all nuclear design and engineering tasks to Sredmash and all nonnuclear construction and planning tasks to Minenergo affected not only which workers knew what. It also reinforced clearly delineated and bounded professional identities among the various strata of nuclear industry personnel. The most prominent distinction was between the specialists working for Sredmash, the so-called atomshchiki, and those working for Minenergo, the so-called energetiki. In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, those who sought to assign blame emphasized the distinction between engineers with nuclear credentials and power engineers with nonnuclear backgrounds.³ Official press reports depicted technical specialists who happened to work for Minenergo at the time of the accident as mere operators and put Sredmash employees in the role of heroic scientists and patriotic engineers whose only mistake had been to entrust civilian operators with a task beyond their level of expertise.

However, such a clearcut distinction between the skills, roles, and expertise of atomshchiki and energetiki is difficult to maintain. In this chapter, I present a more nuanced picture of Soviet nuclear power workers, examining their recruitment, training, roles, and professional identities. I trace how this workforce defined itself through both its work and its organizational alliances, and I contrast the self-concept of nuclear experts working in research, development, and teaching with that of the power industry professionals, who worked at actual nuclear plants, and under the pressures of economic planning.

To fully appreciate these distinctions, it helps to look first at a nuclear power plant as a complex, entangled sociotechnical system that combines human agency and technical operations.⁴ Actual operating experience and specific political, economic, and cultural contexts determine how much weight the different parts of this system have and the interactions among those parts. For example, when the U.S. nuclear power program began, recurring incidents of human error in nuclear plants led to increased automation.⁵ In the Soviet Union, by contrast, encounters with highly unreliable instrumentation at the first nuclear installations led industry leaders to drastically improve training and deliberately increase their reliance on human expertise, experience, and intuition in the control room.⁶ In part because Soviet planners considered their operators so highly skilled, they built their nuclear power plants without some of the redundant safety features most Western plants required. Viewed as sociotechnical systems, Soviet nuclear power plants relied on technical specialists and their efficient performance as redundancy features.

The sociotechnical system didn't consist solely of individuals, technologies, and organizations, but of underlying historical, economic, and geopolitical contexts that actively shaped what designers considered functional, profitable, and safe technologies, what educators deemed certifiable qualifications, and how industrial managers orchestrated complex workplace labor processes. Finally, the Soviet system counted on each individual's contribution to the country's economic productivity and pursued a policy of full employment: the state had a vested interest in employing specialists who had received tuition-free higher education at a level appropriate to their training. While reassignments were quite common, especially in new industries such as the nuclear sector, reassignments to lower posts and layoffs were rare and typically indicated a demotion. These contexts influenced which expert was selected for which position, what knowledge was codified, who received access to which information, and how these different ways of knowing in turn shaped professional (and sometimes very personal) identities.

Most of the scientists and engineers who organized the Soviet nuclear industry were part of Stalin's new intelligentsia of “white-collar technocrats.” Especially in the context of the Chernobyl disaster, their pragmatic attitude and the fact that they cooperated with the Soviet regime—and the Stalinist regime for that matter—raise the question of whether this association corrupted and discredited science. The post-Chernobyl debate allows unique insights into earlier, and more general, attitudes in the nuclear energy community. The intensity that for decades has characterized debates about Chernobyl suggests that rather than cynicism, deep commitment and an often personal conviction of the necessity and rationality of nuclear energy permeated this heterogeneous community of experts.⁷

Soviet scientists and engineers had helped create the industrial base the nuclear weapons project needed. The detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 earned them high honors, and they subsequently enjoyed unprecedented liberties in an otherwise heavily regulated society.⁸ Some of these experts moved into administrative positions, but even those who stayed in research and development enjoyed privileged standing among top decision-making bodies in the state-party system. Recent Russian publications celebrate them as ingenious creators who altruistically devoted their lives and talents to their fatherland.⁹ This spirit of duty and inevitability persisted within the nuclear sector for decades to come. But celebrating an accomplished elite obscures the fact that even during the atomic bomb project, when leaders could quote the motto “nado” (it's necessary) and send anyone with some technical training to a military facility, the military-industrial complex experienced an enduring shortage of qualified cadres.

This may seem surprising, because Soviet leaders had begun early on to train an army of engineers to facilitate rapid industrialization and economic progress, and by the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union had achieved an internationally acclaimed level in engineering education.¹⁰ Not only was technical training among the most prestigious kinds of higher education, it also provided major opportunities for professional and social advancement. The growing nuclear industry promised aspiring scientists and engineers particularly compelling careers.

As I showed in chapter 1, civilian nuclear power needed an enormous industrial base that barely existed when planners charted the program's rapid growth. In addition to bottlenecks in the supply industry, planners faced a significant shortage of qualified personnel to operate the growing number of nuclear power plants. The scale and complexity of the staffing problem in the nuclear industry can hardly be overestimated. The shortage of qualified nuclear specialists began to subside only slowly, as institutions of higher education put together specialized curricula tailored explicitly to the future nuclear power workforce and graduated the first cohorts of students in the early 1960s.

A Career in the Nuclear Industry

As in the United States and elsewhere, the entire first generation of cadres for the Soviet nuclear program was not formally trained in nuclear physics or engineering because such programs did not yet exist.¹¹ A prominent example is Nikolai Dollezhal, a mechanical engineer from a very modest background who advanced from working in the chemical industry to designing the reactors that produced plutonium for Soviet nuclear bombs. Dollezhal subsequently became the director of one of the country's most important, and most secret, research and development institutes for nuclear reactors.¹² His institute, later called Scientific Research and Design Institute of Energy Technologies (NIKIET), built, among many other nuclear things, the RBMK, the Chernobyl-type reactor.

During the weapons program, recruiters hired young specialists with general technical education straight out of college. These young people entered a highly secretive environment and received specialized training on the job. The military, national security, and scientific elements of their new work situation not only shaped the young organization's initial mission, but also determined its qualities once it became a ministry.¹³ Sredmash never answered to the military; rather, it could rely on its own paramilitary units for construction purposes (and, incidentally, for accident mitigation).

Working for Sredmash was not just a job that involved special permits and secured workplaces: working for Sredmash was a way of life. Some of its characteristic features were readiness to abandon work routines at short notice and to sacrifice personal commitments for duties significant to state security. In return for such sacrifice, Sredmash employees usually received good salaries, and, as compensation for a certain degree of social isolation, had access to superior food, exceptional healthcare, free public transportation, and adequate housing.¹⁴ This was true not only for those who lived in secret cities behind barbed wire, but also for those who lived what by Soviet standards were regular lives.¹⁵ Nuclear employees often married other nuclear employees, and it was not unusual for their children to pursue careers in the nuclear industry as well.

Three Communist Party practices affected which individuals ended up in nuclear professions. First, the party had long relied on the practice of vydvizhenie, the promotion of individuals from working-class backgrounds, for recruitment. Arguably, an education in engineering played a similar role in the Soviet Union of the 1920s.¹⁶ Training in engineering allowed ambitious individuals from modest backgrounds not only to establish themselves as members of a revered profession, but to advance quickly into the political elites.¹⁷ Engineering graduates thus benefited disproportionately from the Soviet system, which in turn considered them politically reliable.¹⁸

Specialized programs in nuclear physics and engineering initially appeared within existing engineering departments.¹⁹ Universities formed new curricula that combined theoretical instruction at the country's leading technical colleges with practical training at select research and design institutes, at the nuclear power plant in Obninsk, and at secret nuclear facilities.²⁰ These programs were initially highly restricted, with even lecture notes subject to classification.²¹ Depending on their grades, graduates could often choose among several offers, ranging from jobs at the first industrial-scale nuclear power plants to positions at secret nuclear installations.²² This flexibility in choosing positions was somewhat unusual, given the highly regulated nature of the Soviet labor market.

In return for receiving higher education free of charge, graduates of Soviet universities and polytechnic institutes had to serve for a certain amount of time (usually three years) in a position assigned to them. This system of selecting, training, and assigning recent college graduates was known as raspredelenie. Raspredelenie literally means “distribution,” and refers to the mechanism that matched the least experienced part of the country's workforce with the requirements of the country's economy. The raspredelenie system encountered problems common to the entire Soviet economy: enterprises had to request specialists so far in advance that their needs had usually changed by the time these graduates actually arrived. Gosplan, the agency administering the process, usually assigned fewer graduates than enterprises asked for, which led those enterprises to request more than necessary just in case. On average only half of the young specialists arrived at positions that matched their training (po spetsial’nosti). The others ended up with less suitable work and even janitorial jobs, which understandably prompted many to leave their assignments early. Another problem was that graduates did not always go where they were sent, causing enterprises to increase their requests even more the next time.²³

These problems seem to have affected the nuclear industry less than some others. Many saw the nuclear industry as a prestigious sector, an exciting new area of specialization, and a kind of work highly relevant for society as a whole. Furthermore, the country's need for nuclear experts was so great that those who had successfully completed a college program had very little chance of an inadequate assignment.²⁴

Higher positions in the Soviet nuclear industry generally required Party membership, but most nuclear specialists seem to have considered joining more a ritual than a meaningful procedure. In those experts’ belief system, duty, honor, and patriotism were more important than the Party, and their shared loyalty to these ideals increased cohesion within their field.²⁵ Still, the Party controlled appointments to key positions throughout the Soviet economy through a system called nomenklatura.²⁶

Party functionaries cross-checked a list of appointments with a list of individuals they considered loyal, and, more often than not, qualified.²⁷ For example, the Party had to approve ministers, various top managers in the unions and the army, as well as enterprise directors. In the civilian nuclear industry, the nomenklatura system initially played a negligible role because the cohort of nuclear specialists was small. They were all needed, regardless of how strong their ideological convictions were.²⁸ When the industry grew, however, and especially once Minenergo appointed top-level staff at nuclear plants, an appropriate Party commission had to confirm nominations for plant director, chief engineer, and their supporting deputies.

Sometimes this practice led to considerable conflict and maneuvering—for example, when a Party commission opposed a candidate. Furthermore, the Party controlled the design of all institutions, the allocation of resources, and even the specification of administrative tasks.²⁹ Once the nuclear industry was established, the Party's Central Committee had to confirm, and in some cases even nominate, candidates for top positions. These positions included posts with mostly managerial duties, such as deputy minister, director or deputy director of a Chief Administration, and nuclear power plant director, but they also included technical posts such as chief engineer.

This process may have encouraged the transfer of individual specialists among institutions—after the Party had approved them in one position, chances were high it would approve them in another. Once the nuclear power industry was well underway, the nomenklatura system, although somewhat negotiable, generally required top-level appointees to demonstrate high political reliability in addition to their technical expertise.³⁰

Professionalization: Training, Recruitment, Retention

Nuclear power specialists represented a new profession with its own organizations, institutional culture, and work ethic, and over time they developed a distinct professional identity as civilian nuclear power experts.³¹ Initially, the industry drafted scientists and engineers from many backgrounds and trained them on the job. This practice compensated both for the shortage of highly qualified nuclear physicists and engineers and for the legacy of fear, secrecy, and discipline the nuclear weapons project acquired in the Stalin era. Later, when the emphasis on peaceful applications grew and economic efficiency became nuclear power's main priority, scientific and technical cadres increasingly trained in much more narrow, specialized areas in response to actual needs.

More and more, university-taught skills combined with practical training at relevant facilities became the norm. As training programs for nuclear power specialists expanded and became more standardized, the kind of experiential knowledge early nuclear specialists had been raised with gradually became less prevalent. On-the-job training for each specialist was no longer possible, and students had no way to acquire tacit knowledge without direct, personal guidance.

Educators who required students to do part of their thesis research on site at an actual nuclear plant clearly valued tacit knowledge, or knowledge that cannot be verbalized. This type of knowledge reaches beyond written instructions and codified rules. It's based on experience, on learning by doing, and often more on intuition than formal training.³² For a long time, industry leaders underestimated the significance of these skills and conducted no research into how to preserve and teach them.³³ When Sredmash and Minenergo worked out the details of the civilian nuclear industry, they did not yet understand what tacit skills workers would need. Hence administrators conducted the frantic reorganizations I discussed in chapter 2 and the almost compulsive division of tasks I discuss below. As I have mentioned, when they redistributed tasks, these leaders typically transferred individual specialists and hoped they would bring along their tacit knowledge. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn't. The loss of tacit knowledge during the transfer of nuclear power plants to Minenergo represented one of the fundamental challenges for the emerging Soviet nuclear industry, and I devote much of this chapter to the efforts by Soviet scientists, engineers, and planners to identify and preserve tacit skills.

A personnel initiative that dates to 1956, a decade before the transfer, illustrates the speed with which industry leaders had to train new workers—and how that speed further threatened access to tacit knowledge. Anticipating a series of new nuclear power plants, Konstantin Lavrenenko, director of Minenergo's Chief Administration for the Construction of Atomic Power Plants (Glavatomenergo), launched several personnel initiatives. He was clearly starting from scratch. According to the original schedule, the start-up of the Beloiarsk and Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plants was imminent, but Glavatomenergo had not yet figured out how to staff them: in its 1957 annual report, Lavrenenko's team considered various “management schemes of nuclear power plants, the structure of work shifts and departments, [and] the distribution of personnel within shift teams, which is very different from common power plants.” ³⁴

The team needed to work quickly to ensure the plants would have properly trained personnel. One of the Soviet Union's leading technical universities, the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (Moskovskii Energeticheskii Institut, MEI), had opened the country's first Department of Nuclear Power Plants, along with its own, full-fledged nuclear engineering curriculum, in 1956. The department's creator and first chair was Tereza Margulova, a leading nuclear power expert whose textbook, Nuclear Power Plants, not only later earned her the State Prize, but in five editions would educate several generations of Soviet nuclear power experts.³⁵

Following a decree the Council of Ministers issued on April 4, 1957, Glavatomenergo arranged courses in the design, assembly, and operation of nuclear power plants at MEI.³⁶ Apparently, the students attending these courses were experienced industry specialists: all had higher education degrees; most were mechanical or electrical engineers; and some were physicists and chemists.³⁷ Glavatomenergo handpicked them for their future tasks: according to Lavrenenko's annual report for 1957, “Taking into account the high requirements that a future nuclear power plant employee will be faced with, Glavatomenergo, together with the personnel department of the ministry, conducted a search for qualified power engineers/industrialists and planners at the ministry's enterprises.” ³⁸

Over the course of one or two years, teachers from leading scientific-technical institutes and specialized laboratories gave the students a broad introduction to nuclear technologies. In addition, many students went to Obninsk for more practical training.³⁹ This process often took the form of an apprenticeship, where incoming personnel “shadowed” more experienced colleagues for extended periods of time and slowly accumulated knowledge about “how things were being done.” Future plant division leaders—and in particular, future chief engineers—served in any and all positions at Obninsk before going on to their designated roles at the new plants.⁴⁰

Many freshly minted engineers found immediate employment in the civilian nuclear industry.⁴¹ When the first reactors at Beloiarsk and Novo-Voronezh started operating, the people in the control room came from three realms: plutonium production reactors (Sredmash), the regular power industry (Minenergo), and nuclear submarines.⁴² And while these communities typically mingled on site, personnel from the power industry dominated at the Beloiarsk site, while most specialists at Novo-Voronezh happened to come from Sredmash.⁴³ These specialists continued their training on site, complemented by visits to research and design institutes, as well as other plants.

In addition to the technical schools in Moscow (the aforementioned MEI and the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute, MIFI), specialized technical colleges (so-called VTUZy, Vysshchie tekhnicheskie uchebnye zavedeniia) in Obninsk, Tomsk, and Sverdlovsk started preparing students from more traditional technical disciplines—such as power engineering, communication engineering, and materials science—for the nuclear industry's specific requirements.⁴⁴ But this formalized education provided little more than basic training that often did not prepare these young specialists for actual conditions at one of the country's new nuclear plants. This training did, however, normalize the path into the nuclear industry, by offering standardized professional expertise. Replacing experiential knowledge with standardized training for aspiring nuclear specialists, then, left a critical gap in the process of producing new nuclear knowledge.

Transfer and Normalization

At the time of the transfer in 1966, both ministers, Slavskii at Sredmash and Neporozhnii at Minenergo, shared technocratic visions of progress, despite their deep suspicion of each other's work and expertise.⁴⁵ Although the civilian nuclear sector had a growing number of qualified specialists, Slavskii's experts were ambivalent about the transfer. For example, they frequently complained about Minenergo's inadequate construction practices; Neporozhnii's engineers, in turn, expressed frustration about how Sredmash's design and engineering institutes would impose delays and last-minute changes to the construction plans. The dual legacy of secrecy on the one hand and the demands of industrial production and electrification on the other informed a highly selective transfer of responsibilities for nuclear power plants and ultimately facilitated in Sredmash's experts a condescending attitude toward Minenergo's engineers. Sredmash's military-influenced work ethic relied on quick decision making and a relentless focus on prioritizing and accomplishing a task at hand—a “shock-style” (akkordnyi stil’) approach Minenergo's workers were unfamiliar with.⁴⁶

The differences between the two bureaucracies had even more impact during difficult transition regimens (such as start-up and shutdown) and crisis situations. When Sredmash transferred responsibilities for nuclear power plants to Minenergo, representatives from Sredmash's design, research, regulatory, and engineering institutes still staffed the start-up commissions discussed in chapter 2. Future control room operators took part in the start-up process, and they received theoretical and practical training either at other units of the same plant or at a different plant with similar reactors. But although the Soviet nuclear navy used simulator training by the 1960s, training centers for nuclear power plant operators did not have simulators until the late 1970s.⁴⁷

However, the Sredmash leadership did implicitly acknowledge the need for continuity and the significance of tacit knowledge by transferring individual specialists to civilian organizations. But empirical knowledge (for example, how to deal with a specific emergency situation that operators had previously encountered) is not always attached to a single individual; more typically, it involves the expertise, skills, and memories of a group of people.⁴⁸

As the industry's organizational and legal framework took shape, workplace safety regulations grew more specific. To refine workers’ skills and competence, planners established certification and recertification procedures for nuclear personnel. And yet, experts in the field knew that the best training and the most diligent compliance with regulations needed to be complemented at times by professional judgment and improvisation. Just as a good Soviet manager would find unorthodox ways to tinker with his accounting system so he could report he had fulfilled the plan, so would a nuclear reactor operator balance written rules and ad hoc occurrences. Especially in the industry's early years, Soviet civilian nuclear experts from the managerial level to the reactor control room navigated this tension between following bureaucratic prescriptions and using their professional judgment, between written rules and on-site improvisation.

Planners hoped that by creating bureaucratic structures—routine, efficient, reliable processes and a clear, hierarchical division of tasks—they would make improvisation skills less crucial and eventually superfluous. But since these structures never reached stabilization, improvisation remained imperative, and individual nuclear experts acted as a balancing factor in the face of changing, and overly bureaucratic, administrative structures. This was especially true for the cadres molded by the early years of the nuclear program. Administrators expected these cadres to improvise where and when bureaucratic structures proved inadequate.⁴⁹

In practice, then, the idea that bureaucratization would guarantee a rational form of organization went hand in hand with the use of individuals capable of improvising. Administrators appointed such individuals, usually experienced engineers and managers, to key positions because they had access to relevant networks. They were expected to circumvent the very bureaucratic structures whose efficiency they were supposed to guarantee. This implicit expectation, and often necessity, of decision making in the face of uncertainty and of standing by those decisions nurtured a sense of autonomy and responsibility among the nuclear industry's leadership.⁵⁰ By the same token, however, it emboldened workers—again, from the management level down to the rank and file—to take action in response to unexpected situations without initially attempting to seek approval.

Increasingly, the tacit knowledge that the industry had been so careful to pass on to the people working at nuclear facilities was becoming formalized, and where that seemed insufficient, it was compartmentalized and strategically added on to normal operations. This resulted in a rigid and contradictory structure of accountability that still envisioned expert judgment as the ultimate redundancy feature, while simultaneously restricting operators in their actions and undermining their preparedness to exercise their judgment.

International Comparisons

In the late 1960s, the broad scope of the United Nations conferences on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, which had so successfully reunited the international scientific community after the hiatus of World War II, gradually gave way to more specialized meetings. Some of them discussed the training of an effective workforce for the emerging nuclear power industry.⁵¹

In 1968, Minenergo systematically compared Soviet power plants with foreign ones, specifically those in France and the United States, according to a document it sent Gosplan that year. The report's main insight was that the number of technical and engineering personnel was several times smaller abroad, “but a direct comparison cannot be made due to the completely different structure of management and the limited functions of the personnel operating foreign power plants.” ⁵² For example, France and the United States usually outsourced repair work to specialized contractors, whereas these tasks fell to power plant employees in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, French and U.S. equipment was higher quality, which allowed better performance with less personnel involvement. Whereas Soviet managers typically had to make do with whatever material or equipment was in store at the plants or risk exceedingly long wait times, the supply for French and U.S. plants was centralized and could deliver requested items within a few days. Moreover, most of the fuel inventory and supply was mechanized and the majority of equipment automated, in stark contrast to Soviet plants.⁵³ Minenergo justified the higher Soviet numbers with the imminent transition to larger-power reactors, which would require large reservoirs of highly trained cadres.

International comparison was just one more indication of the industry's increasing professionalization. Along with assessments like these came detailed plans on how the Soviets could emulate achievements in foreign nuclear industries. The initial shortage of qualified cadres seems to have ended by the late 1960s, even to the extent of having overstaffed plants. By 1970, increased power capacities per reactor unit required fewer control room operators per kilowatt hour, and Minenergo started reducing personnel in an effort to lower overall construction costs: fewer people meant fewer housing units and a smaller social infrastructure in a plant's satellite town.⁵⁴ Neporozhnii reported in a 1970 letter to the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, Mikhail Efremov, that Minenergo had reduced the operating personnel at the Smolensk nuclear plant from 1,240 to 1,025 individuals and intended to make similar changes at all plants with RBMKs.⁵⁵ Only three years later, the Smolensk nuclear power plant noted problems hiring and retaining workers. Among the reasons the writer of the plant's 1973 annual report gave were the small salary and the lack of bonuses, the unavailability of housing, the lack of consumer goods, and other aspects of the social infrastructure.⁵⁶

Cynical Career Choices?

Who pursued careers in the nuclear industry? In addition to the highly visible scientists and engineers introduced above, many appeared in the ministries’ reports as numbers and percentages, as the nameless, faceless workers and employees that the state needed to train, house, and pay. What drove young Soviet men and women to study nuclear physics or power engineering, or, if they had received another kind of training, what motivated them to move into the nuclear industry? Nuclear engineering programs at the country's top schools were by no means open to everyone, but the practice of vydvizhenie allowed talented and ambitious students from the provinces opportunities all but unheard of within the constraints of Soviet society.⁵⁷

The utopia of a nuclear-powered communist future did not directly inspire educational choices.⁵⁸ Like any other technical education, a university program in nuclear engineering appealed to individuals inclined to do applied work.⁵⁹ Most technical specialists entered the nuclear power industry with pragmatic expectations it would be an interesting area to apply their skills, and a branch of industry that would likely ensure stable salaries and generous social programs.

In contrast, duty and patriotism motivated those who had joined the nuclear weapons project during or immediately after World War II. Once Soviet nuclear weapons were a reality, some of the older, highly decorated generation of nuclear specialists moved up into important political or managerial functions in the Soviet polity; others used their clout to influence decision making in the country's highest political circles.⁶⁰ Still others ended up creating college curricula and training the specialists who would eventually join research and design institutes or become leading nuclear power experts. Throughout, Sredmash's workforce continued to believe in their organizational mission, the protection of the homeland, even as they slowly added nuclear power technologies to their portfolio.

Even later, in the 1960s and 1970s, planning a career after having received a technical education in the Soviet Union became difficult not only due to the state's authority to assign and reassign people to different positions (raspredelenie) and the sometimes unpredictable whims of Party politics. It was also challenging because the training Soviet engineers received often served as little more than a starting point, especially in the nuclear industry.⁶¹ Few of them anticipated—nor could they have anticipated—what awaited them in the emerging industry. On-the-job training could vary greatly because different work assignments required different kinds of workers.

But did this limited control over their career trajectories turn bright, eager young engineers into cynics, eventually leading to the “pervasive apathy of the Brezhnev era”?⁶² In his analysis of the Soviet Youth League, the Komsomol, Steven Solnick found rampant cynicism among active members of leading Soviet institutions:

Komsomol secretaries who were supposedly in charge of indoctrination were actively squelching any members’ expressions of zeal that might require special attention on their part. VUZ [colleges] and labor ministry officials were criticizing university graduates for shunning job assignments in their chosen field even as these same officials inflated labor demand figures and wasted those specialists who did show up. Military officers in charge of conscription similarly castigated youth who sought to evade service even as they dispatched ill or lame young men to work alongside hardened criminals in brutal conditions.⁶³

Contrary to what we might expect, Solnick showed that this cynicism and apathy did not threaten the stability of the regime. Komsomol activists, rather than promoting the regime's political rhetoric, nurtured an attitude of indifference to it.⁶⁴ Solnick's conclusion that cynicism was a pervasive reality of Soviet life by the early 1970s led him to dismiss ideological decay as a reason for the collapse of Soviet institutions in the late 1980s: ideology, in his analysis, was dead long before then. In a similar vein, Stephen Kotkin pointed out Gorbachev's curious “socialist romanticism” that made him hold on to the October revolution's ideals, “a world of abundance, social justice, and people's power”—values that in the mid-1980s no longer resonated with most Soviet people.⁶⁵

Such views led many Western analysts to expect that any intellectual would eventually turn against the Communist Party. But Soviet nuclear specialists do not quite fit this picture: they were part of the Soviet Union's technical intelligentsia, which produced more leaders than dissidents.⁶⁶ Soviet nuclear scientists and engineers may have held cynical views of some aspects of Soviet life, but by and large, they considered themselves privileged participants in the construction of a rational society and able contributors to the industrialization and progress of their country.⁶⁷ Confident in their technical expertise and technocratic legitimacy, most of them saw opportunities to contribute constructively to state policies. They acknowledged the significance of nuclear power for the country's, and ultimately the world's, energy supply and saw their task as helping to realize the vision of a large-scale nuclear industry.⁶⁸

Many nuclear specialists, and technical experts in general, were critical of managerial decisions within the nuclear industry and bewildered by the intricacies of the planning process, particularly the blatant contrast between how managers defined plan fulfillment as an executive ideal yet practiced it merely as a rhetorical ritual.⁶⁹ And yet, even university graduates who ended up in the nuclear industry by chance usually treated their work with respect and a high sense of responsibility. They saw themselves as an integral part of a state that embodied their very own professional ethos. Had they turned cynical about the state, they would have turned cynical about their own work, their own values.⁷⁰

Their faith in technology as the rational answer to society's problems aligned with the state's ideological goals, but most of the nuclear specialists saw science and technology as something clearly distinct from politics. In this culturally specific definition, “political” and “ideological” both referred to the goals and rules Communist Party ideologues set and the public rhetoric used to disseminate them. Nuclear specialists dismissed as unsound and irrational such “political” decisions as for example the moratorium on new nuclear power plant construction in the wake of Chernobyl (and later, the decommissioning of the Lithuanian reactors as part of the European Union accession process).⁷¹ But they did not see progress itself as a political concept: rather, the logical, rational outcome of scientific research was technical, and ultimately societal, progress. Nuclear specialists, then, shared the Soviet state's technocratic views of societal development—that is, practical, applied versions of scientific development for industrial and foreign policy under the direction of scientific experts.⁷² This deep trust in scientific rationality made nuclear experts less vulnerable to apathy and cynicism than other groups and institutions (figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Operating an RBMK was no easy job: notoriously unreliable instrumentation made operations difficult even under the best of circumstances. Control room teams typically consisted of highly trained, experienced nuclear specialists necessary to operate the reactor safely. While the architects of the Soviet nuclear industry relied on their reactor operators’ expertise to handle unexpected situations, they paradoxically also expected them to obey ever-changing rules and operating procedures. Shown is a control room operator at the Kursk nuclear power plant.

Source: Courtesy of the Publishing House “Master,” Moscow. Originally published in Elektroenergetika (ed. A. I. Vol'skii and A. B. Chubais, series Stroiteli Rossii: XX vek (Moscow: “Master,” 2003), 239). Reprinted with permission.

The nuclear sector, both military and civilian, produced very few dissidents—although those that did emerge were formidable opponents for the Soviet leadership and suffered the state's merciless response.⁷³ If there was disagreement among nuclear specialists, it remained limited to very narrow technical circles—a practice sustained by the nuclear specialists themselves, not just imposed on them through pressure from above.⁷⁴ Apparently, these technical intellectuals found the ideals of a liberal polity far less appealing than the vision of progress driven by scientific rationality and the relative intellectual freedom within their own scientific community.

Historian David Holloway has pointed out that “Russian intellectuals before and after the October Revolution regarded science as a force for rationality and democracy. They believed that it had a cultural value in and of itself, above and beyond the knowledge that was accumulated.” ⁷⁵ Perhaps more than other groups, nuclear scientists and engineers subscribed to a regime of discipline and to a system of accountability ultimately based on a deep sense of duty and responsibility. Their goal was to fit in seamlessly, to function elegantly as part of a large machine.⁷⁶

Professional Communities: Tacit Knowledge and Improvisation

In his comparative study of the nuclear specialists behind the wartime reactors in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, and the development of nuclear power industries since then, Sean Johnston has shown how professional identities emerged, stabilized, and reconfigured over several decades.⁷⁷ He argues that the specific needs of the emerging field of nuclear energy cut across established categories of occupations, disciplines, and professions. Nuclear energy “required the skills of nuclear engineers, technologists, and technicians, ‘atomic scientists,’ radiochemists, and health physicists, before they bore those names.” ⁷⁸ The new specialists came from backgrounds that were both familiar and new: some had professional skills that translated easily, others needed to thoroughly transform their skill sets to perform in the nuclear industry, and finally some—for example reactor engineers—had utterly new skills. In addition, these nuclear professions developed in the context of national security and Cold War secrecy. Johnston notes that although the expertise for both reactors and bombs originated in secret terrain, distinct goals led to an early division of labor between reactor designers and bomb designers.⁷⁹ In each country, these distinct goals, along with changing career constraints and institutional contexts, concerted government management, secrecy, and other factors led heterogeneous configurations of nuclear specialists to form.⁸⁰

Johnston's analysis consciously eclipses the Soviet experience, in part because it remained “invisible to Western practitioners until the mid-1950s, and so played little part in constructing early nuclear know-how in the Anglo-Saxon countries.” ⁸¹ However, he finds that the state's role in “creating technical alliances, controlling the circulation of knowledge, and mediating professional roles” revealed broad similarities between English-speaking democracies and the Soviet state—a provocative claim that nevertheless resonates with this book's argument.⁸²

Soviet professional identities developed together with the nascent organizational framework of the nuclear power industry. Diverse communities of technical specialists collaborated in this new branch of industry, producing its own community of cadres, who shared ideas, goals, training, success, and setbacks. The cooperation among nuclear energy cadres proved rhetorically and organizationally flexible and involved constant boundary work between the atomshchiki of Sredmash and the energetiki of Minenergo.⁸³

As an example shows, the distinction between these two categories remains alive and well. On May 29, 2003, in a live interview on the radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow), Aleksandr Rumiantsev, then minister of Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation, was asked about the danger of sensitive nuclear knowledge finding its way to Iran:

Rumiantsev: We are training nuclear power plant operators … just like operators of conventional power plants … it's the same … you won't notice any difference between the control panels of … a nuclear power plant and a gas power plant. None of the operating regulations are in any way connected with nuclear physics … The person who designs and builds the nuclear power plant, who supplies its fuel and then extracts and reprocesses it afterwards, that's the [one who actually has the] nuclear technology.

Interviewer [in audible disbelief]: So in other words … these people don't know what's going on … in the nuclear reactor?

Rumiantsev: … the operators are allowed not to know. I think the majority of people don't know what … an internal combustion engine is, and yet they drive. … They drive just fine.⁸⁴

Rumiantsev's words illustrate the persistent idea that nuclear reactor operators should be highly qualified and capable of making the correct decisions under difficult conditions but at the same time should be subject to rather arbitrary constraints.⁸⁵ The boundary is tricky to draw between protecting sensitive technical know-how on the one hand and educating as many specialists, as thoroughly as possible, on the other. When the goal is safety and security, when should administrators “black box” technological processes and when should they provide general transparency?

The work of nuclear power plant operators can be dull and routine—not exactly the challenging environment a highly qualified specialist would be looking for. But rather than merely observing the rules and passively adjusting to the technology the designers developed, operators actively interact with the reactors on a daily basis and by doing so, they constantly generate new, experiential knowledge and develop skills to efficiently maneuver around design deficiencies.⁸⁶

The operators of Soviet nuclear power plants, perhaps not unlike nuclear reactor operators elsewhere in the world, were thus expected to perform an almost schizophrenic task: as highly trained, competent experts, they were qualified to make correct decisions under difficult conditions, but at the same time they were required to limit their decisions to the options designers put in writing.

Written instructions and rules can capture certain experiential knowledge, but tacit knowledge can also entail knowing how to deal with rules and instructions, which ones are “hard rules,” under what circumstances an action counts as following a rule, and what deviations are acceptable in any given context. For example, in his autobiographically inspired novel Ivan II: Top Secret, Mikhail Grabovskii described an accident at the EI-2, the Siberian dual-use reactor and predecessor of the RBMK. The young operators on duty struggled with handling an unfamiliar situation and finally turned to an experienced senior engineer, whose quick reaction prevented the accident from getting out of control.⁸⁷ Even if there had been written guidelines, consulting them would have taken too much time.

Tacit knowledge is fundamentally at odds with the idea of standardization—the holy grail of modern industry.⁸⁸ Despite attempts to standardize reactors, simplify production of technical components, and streamline operator training, each reactor is different and unique, even when several reactors are of the same kind. A veteran of the Soviet nuclear complex put it this way: “Reactors are like children … you get to know their peculiarities while spending time with them; you've got to feel how the reactor breathes.” ⁸⁹

Tripartite Structure of Nuclear Power Plant Management

The transfer of nuclear power plants to civilian authorities led to a new standard division of labor that relied on scientific, administrative, and economic best practices that had proven successful in other industries. Specifically, this process entailed a tripartite organization of labor, and a distinction between scientific director (nauchnyi rukovoditel’), chief design engineer (glavnyi konstruktor), and chief project manager (generalnyi proektirovshchik).⁹⁰ Originally, Sredmash had performed all of these tasks, and as I have noted previously, it remained in charge of the actual nuclear reactors even after the decision to transfer nuclear power plants to Minenergo.

The Scientific Director

The Institute of Atomic Energy, under Kurchatov and then Aleksandrov, served as scientific director for most Soviet nuclear power plants.⁹¹ Kurchatov and Aleksandrov developed the VVER, and after 1966 the institute served as scientific director of the RBMK.⁹² In 1971, Aleksandrov was appointed chairman of the Interdepartmental Technical Council (MVTS), and he remained in that post until the MVTS was abolished in 1986.⁹³ In addition, Aleksandrov was single-handedly responsible for research and design conducted at the Institute of Atomic Energy and for presiding over the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Some interpreted this situation as a de facto absence of scientific leadership for nuclear power reactors because Aleksandrov had to attend committee meetings and handle other bureaucratic tasks instead of visiting plants and consulting with engineers, designers, operators, and the like.⁹⁴ Of course, a number of deputies supported Aleksandrov, but it is still noteworthy that he chose to hold on to all these positions: each was crucial to the nuclear industry and each provided enormous power and access to the highest-level decision makers. Aleksandrov closely collaborated with Efim Slavskii, the influential leader of Sredmash, and any suggestion, any proposal, in the area of nuclear energy had to pass this powerful duo's review. Making a decision without their consent was literally impossible.⁹⁵

One other research institute performed well as scientific director in nuclear power engineering: Laboratory V in Obninsk. Laboratory V took on the scientific directorship for the reactors at the Beloiarsk, Bilibino, and Shevchenko nuclear power plants—all innovative prototypes that ultimately did not manage to reach the critical threshold of standardized production. Following Kurchatov's death, Laboratory V (renamed the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering, FEI) gradually lost its leading role in designing thermal reactors. It did, however, consolidate its status as the country's unmatched leader in developing fast neutron (breeder) reactor technology.

The Chief Design Engineer

Research and engineering institutes and construction bureaus usually performed the role of chief design engineer (glavnyi konstruktor). In close cooperation with the scientific director, the chief design engineer was responsible for reactor core computations, for coordinating the production of all components pertaining to the nuclear part of the plant (most importantly, the fuel elements), for subjecting all components to rigorous quality control tests, and for supervising the implementation of their technologies (both material and processes) on site. The latter task was also referred to as avtorskii nadzor, a kind of ongoing quality control: inspectors from the chief design engineer's institute would spend months on the construction site of a new nuclear power plant, supervising every step of the construction and assembly process, and signing off on required certificates.⁹⁶ When these inspectors did not sign a certificate, the construction process had to be halted and a meeting with the scientific director called.⁹⁷

The engineering and construction bureaus that performed the role of chief design engineer in the civilian nuclear industry reported to Sredmash. One of the leading institutes was Dollezhal's Scientific Research and Design Institute of Energy Technologies, NIKIET.⁹⁸ Another institute, the construction bureau OKB Gidropress in Podolsk near Moscow, became chief design engineer for pressurized water reactors, the other major design for the Soviet civilian nuclear industry.⁹⁹

The General Project Manager

The general project manager's task was to plan, supervise, and administer the construction and assembly of the nonnuclear parts of a nuclear power plant. In particular, the project manager was in charge of the planning and logistics regarding construction materials for a plant and for designing an occupational health and safety zone (sanitarnaia zona) around the plant's territory. The general project manager also coordinated human resources and oversaw the construction of the plant's entire infrastructure (roads connecting the plant with other industrial sites and nearby cities, transmission lines linking the new town and plant to existing grids, a sewage system, specialized cleaning and decontamination services, and so on). Last but not least, the general project manager was responsible for building the plant's satellite town, including childcare facilities, schools, shops, canteens, basic medical infrastructure, clubs and movie theaters, and public transportation. The general project manager coordinated contractors and was accountable for the overall progress on site. Usually, Minenergo oversaw the organization taking on general project management.¹⁰⁰

As I have mentioned, official reports after Chernobyl alleged a distinction between atomshchiki, the nuclear experts who worked for Sredmash and designed reactors, and energetiki, the nonnuclear power engineers who worked for Minenergo and operated those reactors day to day. These reports characterized the former as highly qualified, diligent, and disciplined, and the latter as less diligent, somewhat less qualified, and less disciplined.

Atomshchiki

Atomshchiki belonged to an elite that sometimes worked on both military and civilian applications, on cutting-edge research and mundane operations, in secret Sredmash facilities and public electrical power plants. Many of them built, operated, and experimented with research reactors, developing and testing novel paths in reactor engineering. Unless they worked in one of the secret cities or one of the research centers elsewhere in the country, their research and design institutions tended to be concentrated in Moscow.¹⁰¹

Atomshchiki often worked at reactor design engineering bureaus—that is, the institutes assigned to computations and the experimental testing of nuclear reactors. Among the most prominent of these institutes were NIKIET, Gidropress (in Podolsk), and the Experimental Design Bureau for Machine Building (OKBM) in the city of Gorky (now Nizhnii Novgorod), which also developed naval reactors and specialized in fast neutron reactors.¹⁰²

Characteristically, the specialists at nuclear research and design institutes and engineering bureaus worked closely with the operating authorities at any given plant during construction. But unless the operating personnel reported problems that required the designers’ attention, once a reactor reached the target power output level (a process that could take several years), the atomshchiki retreated and turned operation over to the plant's personnel, typically energetiki.

When nuclear power plants were transferred to Minenergo, atomshchiki who moved into top administrative positions in the civilian nuclear industry felt obliged to pass on their sense of duty, responsibility, and patriotism to the enthusiastic, hard-working energetiki. This was Sredmash's attempt to preserve some of its professional culture within the changed organizational framework and to maintain the connection between nuclear power plants and their front- and back-end infrastructure (uranium enrichment facilities, fuel manufacturing, and spent fuel and waste management), a connection that the transfer had weakened.¹⁰³

The numerous reorganizations of responsibility that followed the transfer show clearly that initial plans did not accomplish the desired goals. Concepts of safety and reliability as well as specific organizational structures kept changing, and that fact made the division of labor outlined above even more tenuous.

Energetiki

After 1966, most nuclear power plant operators were Minenergo power engineers.¹⁰⁴ Those working shifts in the reactor's control room were only a small segment of a plant's operating personnel. Plant operators also coordinated and controlled the reactor's connection with the nonnuclear part of the plant, the steam generators and turbines. Furthermore, plant personnel included maintenance and repair engineering teams, scientists and technicians in chemical laboratories, physicians and other medical professionals, radiation control specialists, and many more.

Planners envisioned that a cadre of civilian engineers—young technical specialists, sometimes with but more often without specialized training in nuclear engineering—would operate nuclear power plants on a day-to-day basis. As a rule, energetiki did not enjoy the same privileges as their peers in Sredmash. Nevertheless, constructing, managing, and operating nuclear as well as conventional power plants gave Neporozhnii unusual leeway in developing and pursuing his own agenda.¹⁰⁵

Differences and Commonalities

Even though these two professional groups, atomshchiki and energetiki, exhibited clear differences, they were also intertwined in many ways, and their cooperation seems to have worked. The civilian nuclear industry profoundly relied on the sound judgment of these engineer-operators (figure 3.2). Precision instrumentation was still scarce, and automation of reactor operation remained an elusive goal.¹⁰⁶ Operators’ judgment was a key element built into a complex sociotechnical system of technologies, practices, and rules. Numerous devices served to train operators and to ensure they performed reliably—for example, voluminous instruction manuals and regulations that required strict adherence to these instructions and all other written rules and procedures.¹⁰⁷ In addition, annual exams tested operators’ technical proficiency and familiarity with rules and regulatory changes. A detailed system of rewards and reprimands tied test scores and performance on the job to bonuses and even to a considerable part of an operator's base salary. In case of a mishap or a violation of work discipline, managers could pull rewards and issue formal reprimands.¹⁰⁸

Figure 3.2 Inside a reactor hall of the Leningrad nuclear power plant in Sosnovy Bor, Russia. Nuclear power plant staff performed a variety of duties that often involved individuals with different levels of training. In the image, a team is shown standing next to the reactor's biological shield. During refueling, a tall, remotely controlled machine would move on top of one of the gray squares, pull out the spent fuel element, and insert a fresh one.

Source: Photograph by Alexey Danichev, 2008. Provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Russian International News Agency (RIA Novosti) as part of a cooperation project. RIA Novosti archive, image #305011/Alexey Danichev/CC-BY-SA 3.0.

The most striking difference between the two groups appears to have been that only atomshchiki tended to understand the consequences a severe accident at a nuclear power plant might have; several of them witnessed, managed, and mitigated nuclear accidents at military installations prior to the Chernobyl accident. In fact, Sredmash had handled some serious accidents at military as well as civilian installations: an explosion at a radioactive waste storage facility near Kyshtym in 1957, and the partial core meltdown at the Leningrad nuclear power plant in 1975, to name but two.¹⁰⁹

By contrast, energetiki generally assumed that Soviet nuclear power plants were safe.¹¹⁰ These engineers no doubt knew that they were dealing with a high-risk technology, but their instructions on how to respond if something went wrong only covered design-basis accidents. Minenergo inspectors regularly reviewed nuclear power plants starting in the early 1970s. These inspectors listed the overall number of accidents, calculated the resulting loss of electricity generation, and identified which accidents operator error had caused.¹¹¹ Interestingly, their reports always attributed manufacturing errors (brak) to the personnel, not to the technology or compressed production schedules.¹¹² Inspectors emphasized the short-term loss of energy supply rather than any flaws in the plant's safety system that an accident might have revealed.¹¹³

Minister Neporozhnii clearly understood that nuclear power plants were special—if nothing else, his ministry was required to establish safety zones around them, though not around conventional plants. From the outset, nuclear industry planners had clearly seen that the nuclear workforce had distinctive education requirements: “The execution of their assigned functions, however, requires from the … senior operator[s] intricate knowledge of physics, thermodynamics, electrical engineering, that is, theoretical knowledge that [only] persons with a specialized higher education from a technical school or a college possess.” ¹¹⁴ Despite having once compared nuclear reactors to ordinary boilers at conventional power plants, Neporozhnii treated nuclear power plants differently from conventional plants; reportedly, he started his day by calling each nuclear plant to check their operational status.¹¹⁵

An episode from one of the first industrial-scale nuclear power plants illustrates how administrators channeled, sanitized, and ultimately buried knowledge about problems and failures in modified operating regulations. In February 1968, the operators at the “Beloiarka,” as they fondly referred to the Beloiarsk nuclear power plant, confronted an unanticipated problem: after repair work, cooling malfunctioned in one channel and it melted when power was rising.¹¹⁶ In response, a Glavatomenergo commission inspected the plant and its labor organization. In March 1968, Ivan Emelyianov, NIKIET's deputy director, signed a document that admitted critical mistakes in calculating the power distribution to individual channels.¹¹⁷ The commission decided that in the future, two experts would conduct independent computations and a computer would repeat the computations twice; only if all results agreed would designers trust the numbers and use them for further computations.¹¹⁸ In September 1968, the chief design engineer decided to introduce new control rods every year to balance out any potential computing mistakes.¹¹⁹ No one attempted to record and disseminate this experience-based, case-specific learning process. Instead, NIKIET implemented new guidelines for conducting these computations, altered some technical parameters, and updated the operating regulations.¹²⁰

Another unanticipated problem confronted teams of operators at the Novo-Voronezh nuclear power plant. In September 1971, Minenergo reported to the Council of Ministers that accidents at reactors 1 and 2 there prompted significant changes in the technical design of unit 3. They hoped that these changes would make maintenance and repair work at unit 3 easier.¹²¹ They did not, however, utilize the accident experience systematically to help operators better understand the technologies they were running.

As in Beloiarsk, resolving unanticipated problems required a combination of subject expertise, experience, and improvisation. Nuclear industry managers attempted to incorporate early experiences with problematic and even dangerous situations into rules and instructions, but neither the authorities nor the operators themselves cataloged, analyzed, or tried to integrate any of the lessons they had learned into future operator training. Once the management changed (and reassignments were frequent), the experiential base of this formal knowledge was lost. Every new generation of nuclear power plant operators had similar experiences with accidents because they got rules rather than stories and abstract rather than concrete knowledge.¹²²

And when in the 1970s problems with the RBMK control rods first came to light, a topic I return to in chapters 4 and 5, the designers reacted by modifying operating instructions for control room staff—that is, they revised regulations and insisted that operators follow instructions to the letter. They never explained why this was important or what might happen if operators ignored or bent these rules. They also did not modify the control rods’ physical design until after Chernobyl.¹²³ In other words, they tried to fix a sociotechnical system by addressing neither the social factors (operator expertise) nor the technical specifications (the control rod design). Instead, they focused on the organizational mechanisms that governed the interaction between humans and machines.¹²⁴ And while this was not an incorrect response per se, it reflected norms and routines rooted in the specific institutional traditions of the secret nuclear weapons complex.¹²⁵

With hindsight, it seems obvious that if human operators were the key to the safe operation of the RBMK, they needed access to all information, including that pertaining to problems and accidents. Also, it is hard to comprehend why no one fixed a critical piece of equipment after problems with it arose. And yet, postponing major redesign until the next planned maintenance shutdown was an accepted industry practice—not only in the nuclear sector. Furthermore, the Cold War made tight information control seem not only necessary but also reasonable, especially with nuclear materials. Fear of espionage and sabotage influenced the decisions about how much knowledge, and what kind of knowledge, reactor designers were willing to share with reactor operators.

Only in reaction to the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 did researchers begin to consider that design flaws might cause accidents at civilian nuclear facilities. In the Soviet Union, Sidorenko reports, nuclear physicists at the Sector for Nuclear Reactors at the Institute of Atomic Energy began to analyze the possibility of severe accidents at nuclear power plants in the late 1970s.¹²⁶ It is unclear whether the physicists shared this emerging information—particularly information about the potentially catastrophic scale of an accident at a nuclear plant—with Minenergo and the operators, and if so, in what form.¹²⁷

Official reports after the Chernobyl disaster contended that if Sredmash had been in charge, the accident would not have happened. As I have mentioned, the Soviet delegation that reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the summer of 1986 also concluded that the operators, not the designers, were to blame for the disaster.¹²⁸

Maybe Sredmash's personnel were better trained, reacted faster, and made better decisions, but maybe they were just lucky or better able to cover up mishaps. Be that as it may, atomshchiki tended to see potential human error as the main risk to reactor safety, while energetiki tended to perceive the capricious technology the designers created as the main risk and as an obstacle to meeting Minenergo's production goals.

Secrecy

Nuclear power's technical sophistication, the secrecy surrounding it, and the utopian promises associated with nuclear energy's future sometimes evoked a certain romantic idealism about the industry. Sredmash maintained the bomb project's secrecy by classifying much of the information its employees worked with and so preventing them from taking that information out of an office or talking about it with outsiders. Often, Sredmash classified even the name of a work site, and employees would refer to it only by a number. Such so-called post office boxes (pochtovye iashchiki) included not only facilities located in “secret cities” but also institutes in Moscow and Leningrad.

This secrecy was a handy mechanism to regulate access to knowledge, and—at least in theory—to manage risk perception in the light of rumors about accidents and safety problems in the nuclear industry. Organizational constraints also determined the role of trust in the relationship between Sredmash and Minenergo. In important ways, Minenergo had no choice but to trust Sredmash; questioning decorated military heroes was decidedly not an option. The reverse was also true. Sredmash had to trust Minenergo to manage sensitive nuclear materials.¹²⁹

In one way or another, the secrecy established during the atomic bomb project affected all internal technical communication in the civilian nuclear industry, even in areas of knowledge that many technical specialists considered unproblematic. When in the early 1980s the newly established State Oversight Committee for the Safe Conduct of Work in the Nuclear Power Industry (Gosatomenergonadzor) attempted to create a database of incidents and accidents at nuclear power plants to help operators learn from mistakes and avoid them in the future, NIKIET categorically rejected the initiative. Its representatives argued that even though Minenergo was already operating these very reactors, such information was confidential and should be kept within Sredmash.¹³⁰

But Soviet nuclear experts did revisit the problem of information sharing on a regular basis, and the constant administrative changes in the nuclear industry affirm their efforts to improve and refine the existing division of labor and the resulting principles of information control. Ultimately, they retained a conservative model, giving a “need to know” approach preference over a “need to tell” attitude, which privileged those with better access to information. Only after the collapse of the Soviet system did multiple specialists, including Sidorenko, openly identify secrecy as one major stumbling block for the creation of a professional culture that included awareness that both humans and machines were fallible.¹³¹

But was secrecy justified in some cases and not others? Was Sredmash's restrictive information control based on legitimate differences in technical expertise between it and Minenergo, or simply on bureaucratic protectionism? Should only specialists experienced at handling radioactive materials—that is, specialists trained in the nuclear weapons program—manage specific processes?¹³² Among Soviet nuclear energy experts, secrecy was both the glue that bonded a heterogeneous group of technical specialists together and a divisive element that introduced doubt and suspicion. Ironically, secrecy may have reinforced such values as diligence, responsibility, and faith in scientific rationality.

Nuclear specialists understood the secrecy attached to any and all Sredmash projects, even civilian ones, in the context of a Cold War political, technical, and economic showdown between competing doctrines. Secrecy seemed necessary, even if their work would ultimately benefit the public good, and nuclear specialists considered disagreement with official policies justified only when it would serve this overarching national interest. In other words, secrecy protected specialists and their work from public scrutiny, and simultaneously protected their work for the common good.¹³³ By the same token, it helped mask the significance of tacit knowledge and prevented learning across organizational boundaries.

Conclusion

Atomshchiki brought dutiful, authoritarian, and patriotic attitudes to their work in the civilian nuclear power industry, while energetiki brought technological enthusiasm, openness, and utopian fervor. Eventually, the two groups came to share a set of values, even emotions, relating to nuclear energy. Both groups acknowledged nuclear power's importance for the country's, and ultimately the world's, energy supply. They saw their task as helping to realize the vision of a large-scale nuclear power industry that would, by virtue of its beneficent applications in medicine, science, industry, and transport, contribute to and even drive social progress toward a modern and just society. The centralized, priority-driven economy in which they worked created an atmosphere of rigid accountability and encouraged both groups to nurture such values as diligence, responsibility, and duty. Nuclear specialists from both backgrounds experienced the sudden, fierce public opposition to nuclear energy that followed the Chernobyl tragedy as a personal attack.

A nuclear specialist could achieve excellence and develop a strong commitment to the nuclear energy sector whether his or her original training or initial work assignment was with Sredmash or Minenergo. No doubt some energetiki viewed a nuclear reactor as little more than another way of boiling water. But for others, nuclear energy was the fulcrum of the power industry, the ultimate driver of progress, and the pinnacle of scientific and technical prowess. Likewise, the atomshchiki were anything but a homogeneous group. Nuclear specialists developed competing reactor types that reflected, perhaps inadvertently, these specialists’ ideological priorities. Depending on the design they promoted, these specialists chose specific rhetorical strategies that tapped into different repertoires of justification—invoking national security, scientific novelty, or technoeconomic prowess. Despite the many differences, atomshchiki and energetiki ultimately shared expertise, risks, and rewards. The problem of creating, advancing, and sharing nuclear knowledge affected them all, as did the loss of tacit, experiential knowledge and its consequences.