53. Adam Higginbotham — China Syndrome II: The True Story of What Happened at Chernobyl

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this discussion with the author of the newly published book Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham tells what really happened at Chernobyl, by far the worst nuclear disaster in history, and why it took so long to discover what really happened. Human error and technological design flaws in the reactor are only proximate explanations for the core meltdown and explosion. The ultimate explanation is to be found in Soviet secrecy and lies. The book reads like an adventure novel, but it’s a richly researched non-fiction work by a brilliant storyteller. Don’t wait for the motion picture based on the book, which is years down the line. Get and read this gripping account to understand why people are still so afraid of nuclear power.

Adam Higginbotham was born in England in 1968. His narrative non-fiction and feature writing has appeared in magazines including GQ, The New Yorker and the The New York Times magazine. He is the author of A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2014 and optioned as a film by Warner Brothers. He recently completed Midnight In Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, which will be published in the US by Simon & Schuster on February 12th 2019. The former US correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph magazine and editor-in-chief of The Face, he lives with his family in New York City.

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This Science Salon was recorded on February 5, 2019.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Science Salon Podcast. I'm your host Michael Schirmer. We post these conversations on average once a week as part of the larger mission of the Skeptic Society and Skeptic magazine.
0:10.0	We are a 501c3 nonprofit educational organization devoted to promoting science and reason.
0:17.0	And as such as a nonprofit, we appreciate your support any way you can, in amount you can through the usual sources at
0:25.7	Skeptic.com slash donate you can use PayPal or patron donate monthly or just once a year you can do it by our own site at Shop Skeptic and or by check or even just phone us up and give us your credit card number That would be great. So my guest today is Adam
0:46.0	Higginbotham. He is a New York Times and the New Yorker essayist and he's also written for Wired, GQ and the Smithsonian. He lives in New York City.
0:58.0	And as you'll discover at the end of this podcast, he's been working on this book for the last four years so he hasn't
1:05.0	been doing much essay writing or article writing as he's been devoted to this one
1:08.8	project which I can relate to the book is called Midnight in Chernobyl, the untold story of the
1:16.1	world's greatest nuclear disaster. And it is a phenomenal read and as I found
1:22.0	out in talking to him he has sold the screen rights and
1:25.7	they're gonna make a major motion picture about this which doesn't surprise me
1:29.8	because the book reads like a novel it it reads like a science fiction or adventure.
1:35.0	Because it's an amazing story, I lived through that.
1:38.0	I remember when that happened, but I didn't know all the details and in part nobody knew the details because of the secrecy of the Soviet Union
1:45.1	that didn't want to tell people that the Soviet nuclear program was badly
1:49.6	managed.
1:50.6	Adam gets into all that we talked about mostly Chernobyl, a little bit about how nuclear power works, how do you get energy out of atoms and converted into electricity.
2:00.0	Whose fault it was, the design or the engineers or the managers that were running it.
2:05.6	The problems with the Soviet system and its secrecy and lies, the role Gorbachev
2:11.6	had in navigating his openness, his Glassnos, with letting the West know, what the dangers were after the disaster.
2:21.4	And then we talked just a little bit about current politics and
2:25.8	what it's like to write a book like this and we did have a few technical difficulties
	...

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