The famous photo from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is a selfie with a long exposure.

^{Arthur Korneev, Deputy. Director of the Shelter at the Chernobyl NPP, studies nuclear lava (the so-called “elephant foot”), Chernobyl, 1996. Photo: US Department of Energy}

At first glance, it is difficult to understand what is happening in the photo. A giant mushroom grew from under the floor, and ghostly people in helmets seem to be working next to it.

Something inexplicably creepy in this scene, and for good reason. You see the largest cluster of probably the most toxic substance ever created by man. This is nuclear lava or corium.

For days and weeks after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, just entering the room with the same pile of radioactive material — it was gloomily nicknamed “elephant's foot” - meant certain death after a few minutes. Even a decade later, when this photo was taken, the film probably behaved strangely due to radiation, which was manifested in the characteristic granular structure. The man in the photograph, Arthur Korneev, most likely visited this room more often than anyone else, so he suffered, perhaps, the maximum dose of radiation.
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Surprisingly, in all likelihood, he is still alive. The story of how the United States gained possession of a unique photograph of a person in the presence of an incredibly toxic material is itself shrouded in mystery - as well as the reasons why someone needed to take a selfie next to the hump of melted radioactive lava.

The photo first came to America in the late 1990s, when a new government of Ukraine, which gained independence, took control of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and opened the Chernobyl Center for Nuclear Safety, Radioactive Waste and Radioecology. Soon the Chernobyl Center invited other countries to cooperate in nuclear safety projects. The US Department of Energy ordered assistance by directing an order to Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL), a crowded research center in Richland, PA. Washington.

At the time, Tim Ledbetter was one of the newcomers to the PNNL IT department and was assigned to create a digital photo library for the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Safety Project, that is, to show photos to the American public (more precisely, for that tiny part of the public which then had access to the Internet). He asked the participants of the project to take photos during trips to Ukraine, hired a freelance photographer, and also asked for materials from his Ukrainian colleagues in the Chernobyl Center. Among the hundreds of photographs of clumsy handshakes of officials and people in laboratory lab coats , however, there are a dozen shots of ruins inside the fourth unit, where a decade earlier, on April 26, 1986, an explosion occurred during the testing of the turbogenerator.

When radioactive smoke rose above the village, poisoning the surrounding earth, the rods liquefied from below, melted through the walls of the reactor and formed a substance called corium.


Corium flows out like a lava from a steam distribution system valve.

Corium has been formed outside of research laboratories at least five times, says Mitchell Farmer , a lead nuclear engineer at the Argonne National Laboratory, another US Department of Energy institution in the Chicago area. Once corium was formed at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979, once at Chernobyl and three times during the melting of the reactor at Fukushima in 2011. In his laboratory, Farmer created modified versions of corium to better understand how to avoid similar occurrences in the future. The study of the substance showed, in particular, that watering with water after the formation of corium in reality prevents the decay of some elements and the formation of more dangerous isotopes.

Of the five cases of corium formation only in Chernobyl nuclear lava was able to escape outside the reactor. Without the cooling system, the radioactive mass crept through the power unit during the week after the accident, absorbing molten concrete and sand, which were mixed with molecules of uranium (fuel) and zirconium (coating). This poisonous lava flowed down, eventually melting the floor of the building. When the inspectors finally penetrated into the unit a few months after the accident, they discovered an 11-ton three-meter landslide in the corner of the steam distribution corridor below. Then he was called the "elephant foot." Over the following years, the “elephant foot” was cooled and crushed. But even today, its remains are still several degrees warmer than the environment, as the decay of radioactive elements continues.

Ledbetter can not remember exactly where he got these pictures. He compiled a photo library almost 20 years ago, and the website where they are located is still in good shape; only thumbnails are lost. (Ledbetter, still working at PNNL, was surprised to learn that the photos are still available online). But he just remembers that he did not send anyone to take pictures of the "elephant's foot", so that it was most likely sent by one of his Ukrainian colleagues.

The photo began to spread on other sites, and in 2013, Kyle Hill came across it when writing an article about “elephant foot” for Nautilus magazine. He traced its origins to the PNNL lab. On his tip, I went to this site in search of new information. Rummaging a bit in the CSS code, I found a long-lost description of the photo : “Arthur Korneev, deputy. Director of the Shelter, is studying nuclear lava "elephant foot", Chernobyl. Photographer: unknown. Autumn 1996 ". Ledbetter confirmed that the description matches the photo.

Arthur Korneev is an inspector from Kazakhstan, who is prone to dark jokes and has been engaged in the education of employees, telling and protecting them from the “elephant foot” since its inception after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. As far as I can tell, the NY Times reporter spoke last with him in 2014 in Slavutych, a city specially built for evacuated personnel from Pripyat (Chernobyl NPP).


Enlarged image of Korneev

I was not able to find Korneev for an interview, but you can put together the clues that are in the photo to explain it. I saw many other similar photos of the destroyed nucleus, and all of them were taken by Korneev, so this picture can be considered an old, kind selfie. It is probably made with a longer shutter speed than other photos, so that the photographer has time to appear in the frame, which explains the effect of the movement and why the headlamp looks like lightning. Photo grain is probably caused by radiation.

For Korneev, this particular visit to the power unit was one of several hundreds of dangerous trips to the core from the moment of his first day of work on the following days after the explosion. His first task was to detect fuel deposits and help measure radiation levels (the “elephant foot” initially “glowed” more than 10,000 x-rays per hour, which kills a person at a distance of a meter in less than two minutes). Shortly thereafter, he headed a clean-up operation, when sometimes it was necessary to remove whole pieces of nuclear fuel from the path. More than 30 people died from acute radiation sickness during the cleaning of the unit. Despite the incredible dose of radiation received, Korneev himself continued to return to the hastily constructed concrete sarcophagus again and again, often with journalists, to protect them from danger.

In 2001, he led the Associated Press reporter to the core, where the radiation level was 800 roentgens per hour. In 2009, famous fiction writer Marcel Theroux wrote an article for Travel + Leisure about his trip to the sarcophagus and about a crazy guide without a gas mask, who mocked the fears of Theroux and said that this was “pure psychology”. Although Teru referred to him as Viktor Korneev, Arthur was probably the person because he dropped the same black jokes a few years later with the NY Times journalist.

His current occupation is unknown. When the Times found Korneev a year and a half ago, he helped build a sarcophagus vault, a project worth $ 1.5 billion, which should be completed in 2017. It is planned that the vault will completely close the Asylum and prevent isotope leakage. At 60 years old, Korneev looked painful, suffered from cataracts, and he was forbidden to visit the sarcophagus after repeated exposure in previous decades.

However, Korneev’s sense of humor remained unchanged. It seems that he does not regret the work of his life at all: “Soviet radiation,” he jokes, “is the best radiation in the world.”