Top 40 Andrew Leatherbarrow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Radiation’s most well-known pioneering researcher, Marie Curie, died in 1934 from aplastic anaemia brought on by her decades of unprotected exposure to the faint, glowing substances in her pockets and desk drawers.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

2. “NASA scientists calculated in 2013 that nuclear power has actually prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning between 1971 and 2009.68.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

3. “Radiation had made any ordinary course of action impossible, pushing them to acknowledge that the use of even one nuclear bomb – let alone the 65,000 in existence in 1986 – was unconscionable. Five.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

4. “During the first few minutes of the accident, more than 100 alarms went off, and there was no system for suppressing the unimportant signals so that operators could concentrate on the significant alarms.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

5. “Watch and clock faces, fingernails, military instrument panels, gun sights and even children’s toys glowed with radium, hand-painted in factories by young women working for the United States Radium Corporation. The unsuspecting artisans would lick their brushes – ingesting radium particles each time – to keep the tips pointed during the precision work, but years later their teeth and skulls began to disintegrate.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

6. “Those whose bodies were recovered are buried in welded zinc coffins, to prevent their radioactive remains from contaminating the soil. Even.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

7. “Soldiers handling reactor graphite by hand shows how uninformed people were in the early days of the clean-up operation.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

8. “For those first months, futile attempts to avoid a mass panic took precedent over people’s lives. As.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

9. “I am sure that at the end of the world, in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence, the last man will see what we have just seen.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

10. “Even before the Chernobyl incident of 1982, there was another serious accident involving the RBMK design at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant in November 1975, when its Unit 1 suffered a partial meltdown.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

11. “Viktor Bryukhanov, along with Nikolai Fomin, who approved the test, paid the price with a sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment in a labour camp and expulsion from the Communist party.97 Countless others paid for it with their health and their lives.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

12. “France is the country most dependent on nuclear power, providing roughly 75% of its electricity through nuclear power plants, while America and Russia both hover around the 20% mark.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

13. “Time and time again Bryukhanov and Fomin were told that the reactor was completely destroyed, and time and time again they disregarded everyone who warned them.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

14. “For six months following the accident, as the Sarcophagus was under construction, a team of courageous scientists from the V. I. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy re-entered Unit 4 as part of an investigation aptly named Complex Expedition.242.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

15. “Vladimir Shevchenko, a filmmaker from Kiev, died within a year of filming harrowing roof-top footage of the ruined reactor and Bio-robots entirely without protection. His cameras became so radioactive they had to be buried.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

16. “The event was later depicted in the movie ‘K19: The Widowmaker’, starring Harrison Ford.52.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

17. “Adding a proper pressure vessel, built to the standards and complexity required by the RBMK design, was estimated to double the cost of each reactor.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

18. “All told, approximately 100,000 people were examined in the days and weeks after the accident, 18,000 of whom required hospitalisation. It took the combined efforts of 1,200 doctors, 900 nurses, 3,000 physicians’ assistants and 700 medical students working in shifts to provide round the clock care.185.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

19. “The team were in for a surprise; the reactor was empty, its smooth metal interior wall clearly visible. They were shocked. After drilling another hole through the bottom of the reactor, they discovered a few graphite blocks, but the fact remained that the reactor was essentially bare.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

20. “An unofficial estimate of Liquidator fatalities from the Chernobyl Union, a union of former Liquidators, is 25,000, with as many as 200,000 crippled because of their exposure to radiation.240.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

21. “May Day festivities were held throughout the country on May 1st. Countless people marched through Kiev’s streets celebrating, just as the radiation intensity reached its peak. There had been no public warning; they were all contaminated. Who knows how many people developed health problems from being out on that day and those that followed. On May 15th, far too late, the city of 2.5 million people was evacuated of its children, their mothers, and pregnant women for four months.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

22. “Decades of information control proved difficult to cast off in such a short time, however, and while the report was made available in the West, it was classified in the Soviet Union. This meant those most affected by the disaster knew less than everyone else.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

23. “In 1973, the first high power RBMK-1000 reactor – the same type used at Chernobyl, which was under construction at the time – started up in Leningrad.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

24. “On September 20th, 1996, then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin posthumously conferred on Legasov the honorary title of ‘Hero of the Russian Federation’ for the, “courage and heroism,” shown in his investigation of the disaster.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

25. “On April 28th, helicopters dumped 300 tons of sand into the reactor. On the 29th: 750 tons; on the 30th: 1,500 tons; on May 1st, May Day, a popular annual holiday in the Soviet Union: 1,900. In total, around 5,000 tons of materials fell into the reactor. By the evening of the 1st, the daily number was ordered to be halved, as there was a growing fear that the foundations wouldn’t hold under the strain of so much additional weight.193.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

26. “I knew that the town had been evacuated forever,” wrote Legasov in his memoirs, two years later, “but I couldn’t find the moral strength to tell it to the people. Besides, if we told them that they were leaving forever, it would take them quite a while to pack their bags. The radiation levels were already very dangerous, so we told them it was a temporary move.”172.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

27. “The RBMK control rods are incredibly slow by Western standards, taking 18-21 seconds to fully insert from their uppermost position.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

28. “The automatic safety systems would have, under normal circumstances, shut the reactor down a few times by now. At 01:22:30, minutes from disaster, Toptunov noticed the computer readings demanding that the reactor be shut down.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

29. “In what would be considered a suicide mission under any other circumstances, the scientists’ first aim was to find out what happened to the nuclear fuel, and then determine if further spontaneous nuclear reactions were possible. They explored the plant’s ruined and unpowered sub-levels with flashlights and cotton masks.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

30. “The 1991 report to the USSR State Committee for the Supervision of Safety in Industry and Nuclear Power also touched upon another critical issue – that there was no consistent top-level responsibility for the nuclear industry at all, which was one reason a dangerous reactor like the RBMK-1000 was approved for production.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

31. “While American purpose-designed robots for high-radiation environments did exist, they were never sent to Chernobyl, despite the joke. The United States offered their services, but the Soviet Government declined.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

32. “The New York Post, meanwhile, decided to one-up the hysteria by printing the ludicrous and provocative May 2nd headline, “Mass Grave for 15,000 N-Victims.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

33. “In total, around 116,000 people were moved from 170 villages and towns during 1986.174 After 1986, a further 220,000 people from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus were relocated.175.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

34. “Each half of the arch is made from several sections. Enormous jacks, whose only prior job was raising the sunken Kursk submarine in 2001, were used to lift each stage higher and higher until it reached its full height of 110 meters. Inside are remotely-operated heavy-duty overhead cranes, to be used for moving people and equipment.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

35. “Nearly one in three of all the newborn babies have deformities, mostly internal,” said Alexander Vewremchuk, of the Special Hospital for the Radiological Protection.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

36. “Two things were needed to minimise the risk. First, the pool had to be drained, but its two valves in the basement – which could only be turned by hand – were now submerged under radioactive water from the firemen’s failed attempt to extinguish the reactor fire. Second, the commission decided that the earth beneath the reactor building should be frozen with liquid nitrogen to harden the ground, support the foundations and help to cool the superheated core.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

37. “A government commission into the accident found serious faults with the design, and in 1976 recommended that the void coefficient be lowered, the control rod design be altered, and for ‘fast-acting emergency protection’ to be installed. New designs were drawn up for the rods, but were never installed on any reactors.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

38. “Within 4 seconds, the reactor’s energy output had soared to several times its intended capacity. Runaway heat and pressure deep inside the core ruptured fuel channels, then water pipes, causing the pumps’ automatic safety valves to close. This stopped the flow of coolant, increasing the rate at which steam was forming from the core’s diminishing water supply. The reactor’s own safety valves attempted to vent the steam, but the pressure was too great and they, too, ruptured.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

39. “The team next needed a closer look at the reactor itself, so they brought in oil industry engineers to drill through the reactor’s reinforced-concrete containment structure. They finally broke through in the summer of 1988 after 18 months of drilling in harsh conditions.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

40. “I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully, but if you’re staring straight at the core of a shutdown reactor you’re going to get quite a bit of radiation.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

41. “That all three survived for so long after the event is quite a revelation, as the story of the divers who sacrificed their lives to save the plant is one of the most well-known legends to emerge from Chernobyl.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

42. “Because engineers could not manually screw on connecting bolts or weld seams in many places, nor resolve instances where the underlying building sagged under the additional weight as sizeable components were laid down, the Sarcophagus has many unintended holes.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

43. “Firemen stationed at nuclear plants in western countries are specially trained and wear specific equipment to help protect them from radiation. In the USSR, nuclear power station firemen wore no special clothing to minimise radiation exposure – not even a basic respirator, only a facemask with an air filter.149.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow

44. “Continuing the experiment after falling to such a low power level resulted in the reactor becoming unstable enough to explode, and Dyatlov holds all the blame for this one crucial decision.”

— Andrew Leatherbarrow