Savannah River Site employee who visited says Chernobyl was used for weapons production

• By Matthew Christian mchristian@aikenstandard.com
• September 23, 2022

Could the Soviet military have been using the Chernobyl nuclear plant to produce plutonium or tritium for nuclear weapons?

Brittany Williamson, a senior criticality safety engineer at the Savannah River Site who visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone in October 2021, said Wednesday evening at an American Nuclear Society event in Aiken that it’s something of an open secret that the facility was or was planned to be used for weapons production in addition to power generation.

Williamson cited the fact that the Soviet reactors used at Chernobyl, the RBMK, used live fueling, meaning the reactor does not have to be shut down to add fuel into it and, later, she would add that it’s easier to collect the plutonium produced.

In 1986, unnamed U.S. and European officials said in a Los Angeles Times story that the Soviet military was involved in the operation of some of the RMBK reactors in other parts of the Soviet Union.

The officials speculated that the reactors operated by the military could be used to produce plutonium or tritium and others added evidence was provided at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting held after the accident that the Soviets had used RMBKs for weapons production.

Later, the story adds that the military link to Chernobyl was known at least one Soviet theoretic physics institute.

Also, the World Nuclear Association has said that the RBMK was based on a military design that was used to produce plutonium.

However, the Times story also said an unnamed Soviet official with access to information said three of the four reactors online at the Chernobyl facility – two more were being built – were used for military purposes and one, the one that exploded, was used for civilian power.

The story also notes that the Soviets were willing to have the plant inspected by international observers, something they may have not been willing to do for a military production plant.

Whether the Soviet military actually was or was planning to use Chernobyl for weapons production is unknown.

Williamson implied that officials investigating the accident may have never asked for all the information about the plant. She said one of the first things she learned upon arrival in Ukraine was an adage to only ask questions that one wants to know the answer to. 

The Chernobyl plant uses the Dnieper River, the river that essentially bisects Ukraine, as a water supply and that it was natural to suspect that some radioactive contamination would have gotten into the river.

But, Williamson said, officials didn’t want to know about possible contamination in the river (and the effects on people downstream), so they never tested it.