There are many reasons why nuclear power — with billions in investments and the full-throated support of Congress and the Supreme Court — has plateaued for the past forty years, but one thing that tipped the scales took place half the world away: Chernobyl.

Adam Higginbotham’s 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster does just that, tells an “untold” story. It was at first suppressed by Soviet authorities for weeks. When that proved no longer possible, facts that came to light were buried in government files, some of them highly classified, until the present day. Midnight in Chernobyl is the product of dogged detective work, spun into a story that takes us from one harrowing moment to the next. A page-turner, a thriller.

It started with a simple maintenance test of Chernobyl’s Reactor Number Four. The hypothetical was an electrical blackout, and it went well for a few seconds and then the lid blew off … literally:

“At 1:24 a.m., there was a tremendous roar probably caused as a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen that had formed inside the reactor space suddenly ignited. The entire building shuddered as Reactor Number Four was torn apart by a catastrophic explosion. The blast caromed off the walls of the reactor vessel, tore open the hundreds of pipes of the steam and water circuit, and tossed the upper biological shield into the air like a flipped coin; it swatted away the 350-tonne refueling machine, wrenched the high-bay bridge crane from its overhead walls, demolished the upper walls of the reactor hall, and smashed open the concrete roof, revealing the night sky beyond.”

Dead silence from Moscow for three days. Then came an admission that there had been an (unspecified) “accident,” but the situation was “now under control.” Meanwhile, the government was rushing untrained and unprotected troops to the area to move out the inhabitants of Pripyat — a charming city at the time. They were all exposed to radiation in the air, the soils, the milk of cows, the leaves of plants and trees. They started to feel ill.

The most immediate fatalities were of the Reactor Four crew that night. One by one they died agonizing deaths. Their red blood cells had dropped to zero. Their hair fell out. Their radiated lungs collapsed, leaving them gasping for breath. The plume of debris and radioisotopes included strontium 90 and plutonium 239, “among the most dangerous substances known to man.” Tons of them headed west in a swath 30 kilometers wide to Sweden and then south through what is present-day Ukraine and northern Europe.

To this day there is no accurate account of Chernobyl’s mortality. Several months after the blowup the official toll stood at (an unbelievable) 31 deaths. This figure does not include those victims downwind, near and far.

Investigation into the causes was hampered by the fact that much of the problem related to the “entrenched cronyism” of the Community Party that had made a loyalist with zero experience no less than the deputy plant director at Chernobyl. Apparently, he took an evening course in nuclear physics to take up the slack.

Years later, author Higginbotham would discover that, beyond the general sloppiness of the Soviet nuclear program, there was a serious design flaw in the reactors. The rate of fission in nuclear reactors was controlled by rods containing a buffering agent, boron carbide. Should the reactor get too hot, the rods were inserted to cool it down. Unfortunately, the Soviets had decided to tip them with (less expensive) graphite, which had the opposite effect, speeding up the fission. Per Higginbotham, it was like “wiring a car so that slamming on the brakes would make it accelerate.” The operators of Reactor Four that evening were, quite unwittingly, committing suicide.

What’s left of the Chernobyl plant now lies inside a 1,000-square-mile “Special Zone” where, in Higginbotham’s words, “wildlife flourishes in a radioactive Eden.” What this all leads to generations from now remains a large, if unintended, experiment.

What Higginbotham is quite correct in concluding, though, is that Chernobyl sent confidence in nuclear power plummeting. France has remained glued to it, with no reported accidents, but that too has changed to squeamishness after the subsequent meltdown of the Fukishima nuclear reactor, which has unglued Japan as well. Perhaps the most important impacts of these disasters has been on the United States, which, too, boasted a thriving nuclear energy program.

After obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Second World War, nuclear power strode the American landscape like a God. Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission to promote “Atoms for Peace.” As in the Soviet Union, electricity would be “too cheap to meter.” Welcome news. Promotional films in movie theatres and public schools showed children rushing to greet daddy, home from the nuclear power plant — “but wait” says the narrator, until he goes to the sink to wash his hands and arms. Reddy Kilowatt, a cartoon character, appeared on every electric bill, hand outstretched, welcoming us to an all-electric future.

The AEC and Congress advanced a suite of projects that were, even now, rather dazzling. Operation Pluto would have built a fleet of missiles propelled by nuclear power, which soon morphed into a nuclear-fueled fleet of airplanes, made more palatable by the use of aging pilots expected to die of natural causes before the radiation could kill them. Other operations would dig navigation canals and bomb open a port in Alaska. What could possibly go wrong?

Better yet, who would know if something did? A whole industry of nuclear engineers appeared, highly committed to the enterprise. Those who expressed skepticism, however, found themselves blackballed. The same say-no-evil followed near-misses at the Fermi prototype reactor in Detroit and the Damascus nuclear missile accident in Arkansas (threatening an intercontinental ballistic war). After the big scare in 1979 at Three Mile Island (which almost took out Philadelphia), nuclear bomb physicist Edmund Teller authored a two-page ad in the Wall Street Journal (guess who paid for it) entitled “I Was The Only Victim Of Three Mile Island.” In the same vein, one British expert explained in “The Tolerability of Risk from Nuclear Power Stations” that, “if there is a Chernobyl-scale accident in this country, no one will die. We shall merely suffer some degree of life shortening.”

With all of this secrecy and cover-up, how did the United States escape a Chernobyl of its own? One answer of course is simply luck, which is all we had going for us at Three Mile Island. Another answer took some courage. Despite go-along-get-along pressures in academia and industry, several highly-respected nuclear engineers began revealing the severe risks, one famously concluding that “we have struck a Faustian bargain.” Their message was picked up by the media and communities where the plants were going in, who armed with lawyers and independent experts intervened in the construction and licensing hearings that followed. Each one a little war.

At the same time, these same lawyers and experts were petitioning the AEC to resolve generic problems that plagued the field. One was the permissible risk from low-level radiation, which in response was lowered by a factor of 100. Another was water quality impacts from thermal discharges of plant cooling water, which led to cooling towers and recycled water instead. A third was an emergency core cooling system, which had been totally absent in Chernobyl. Yet a fourth was the obvious conflict between AEC’s promotional and safety functions, which led to splitting it into a Department of Energy (promotion) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (safety). Yet a final was the National Environmental Policy Act’s requirement to consider alternative sources of energy and conservation in lieu of new construction, or even relicensing. All of these developments made nuclear power, if it had to happen, more safe, more expensive, and less viable as renewables and natural gas came on line.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was backing nuclear energy to the hilt. One academic study of 15 separate opinions, all favoring the AEC, reports that the justices found Congress’s endorsement of the program to be “determinative”; that they were concerned not to “impede technological progress”; and they were “highly influenced by the lingering mystique of the armed services.” In short, a fan club.

All the more wonder then that a citizen-based, science-based, and lawyer-based counterattack worked so well. It has been decades since a new nuclear plant has come on line in the United States. We have not had a Chernobyl, and with a little luck we never will. Lacking the transparency that American administrative law provides, Russia does not inspire the same confidence.

As if to prove this point, in a review of Higginbotham’s book posted on Amazon, a medical doctor reported that he had been a member of a UN group touring several hospitals in Kiev where “hundreds of victims” were still being treated for, inter alia, thyroid cancer and leukemia. At a visitor center they were given a speech about Russia’s outstanding record of nuclear safety. “Of course,” said the speaker, “there was this one small incident that the world tries to blow out of proportion.”

Higginbotham provides a more candid view, from the bottom. Some seven years after the disaster, a Russian engineer named Bocharov was returning from the “Special Zone” wearing the fur-collared combat jacket issued for wear there. When the train pulled into the station there was no one there to greet him, only his wife — and a soldier “just back from the Afghan quagmire,” who recognized the engineer’s jacket:

“Khandahar?” the soldier asked.

“Chernobyl,” Bocharov said.

The soldier put his arm around his shoulder. “Brother, you had a tougher job.”

Oliver Houck is professor of law at Tulane University. www.oliverhouck.com.