Anatoly Dyatlov


Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov was deputy chief-engineer of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. He supervised the safety test which resulted in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, for which he served time in prison as he was blamed for not following the safety protocols. He was released as part of a general amnesty in 1990.

Biography

Dyatlov was born in 1931 in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. His parents were poor individuals who lived near the Yenisei River and the penal settlements of Krasnoyarsk. He ran away from home at the age of 14. He first studied in a vocational school, at the electrical engineering department of the Mining and Metallurgical Technical School in Norilsk, and worked three years as an electrician before he was admitted at the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute where he graduated in 1959 with honors.
After graduation, he worked in a shipbuilding plant in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in Lab 23 where reactors were installed into submarines. During a nuclear accident there, Dyatlov received a radiation dose of 200 rem, a dose which typically causes mild radiation sickness, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue and reduction in resistance to infections.

Chernobyl

In 1973, he moved to Pripyat, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, to work at the newly constructed Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. His fourteen-year experience working on naval reactors in the Soviet Far East made Dyatlov one of the three most senior managers at the Chernobyl station. He was in charge of the Units Three and Four.
On 26 April 1986, Dyatlov supervised a test at Reactor 4 of the nuclear plant, which resulted in the worst nuclear plant accident in history. During the accident, Dyatlov was exposed to a radiation dose of 390 rem, which causes death in 50% of affected persons after 30 days, but he survived. Together with Nikolai Fomin and Viktor Bryukhanov, Dyatlov was tried for failure to follow safety regulations. In 1987, all three were found guilty of gross violation of safety regulations leading to an explosion and were sentenced to ten years in prison. He was granted amnesty in late 1990.
He wrote a paper published in Nuclear Engineering International in 1991 and a book in which he claimed that poor plant design, rather than plant personnel, was primarily responsible for the accident. In later reports, it was found that Dyatlov had threatened some power plant workers with job terminations if they did not proceed with the test that night in Chernobyl. Nevertheless, IAEA's Report by their International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group from 1992 supports Dyatlov's evaluation about the RBMK reactor's design flaws, but also criticises the lack of a safety culture in the Soviet nuclear industry.
Anatoly Dyatlov died of heart failure caused by radiation sickness in 1995.

In media

Dyatlov was portrayed by Igor Slavinskiy in the 2004 series Zero Hour: Disaster At Chernobyl, by Roger Alborough in 2006 BBC production Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and by Paul Ritter in the 2019 HBO Miniseries Chernobyl.
Dyatlov's memoirs were recorded in 1994, a year before his death on 13 December 1995. The recording was made by an unknown operator and appeared on YouTube in 2016.