Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences

The Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences became a crucial measuring and reporting center after the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Accident: its specialists could detect contamination that residents could neither see nor reliably recognize in ordinary food and surroundings. The institute’s testimony presents scientific work as both urgent public service and an institutional predicament. Staff measured the danger, reported what they found, and sought protective action, yet orders, political faith, and interference obstructed the passage from evidence to response.

Mandate and research capacity

By the end of May, about a month after the accident, the institute was receiving products from the thirty-kilometer zone for testing. Its staff worked around the clock, and it was the only institution in Belarus with the specialists and equipment needed for this work. The remit was wide and concrete: measure milk and other products, examine animal tissues, and establish whether goods entering ordinary circulation were safe. The results rapidly unsettled the categories on which daily life and official production depended. What arrived as meat, staff concluded, was better described as radioactive byproducts.

The work placed the institute between laboratory measurement and public exposure. In the contaminated area, livestock were tended in shifts; shepherds came and went, while milkmaids were brought in only to milk the animals. Milk factories continued to meet the government plan even as institute staff tested their output. Measurements did not themselves stop production or distribution. The tension between what the instruments established and what institutions continued doing became one of the institute’s defining circumstances.

Field measurements and the contamination record

On an early trip into the affected zone, a researcher measured background radiation in the forest at five to six times the level on roads or in fields. High readings were not confined to remote patches: tractors continued working and farmers dug their plots. In several villages, measurements of thyroid activity in adults and children reached one hundred times, and in some cases two or three hundred times, the allowable dosage. Breast milk was radioactive too. A radiologist in the group became hysterical on seeing children playing in a sandbox, an ordinary scene made newly alarming by the measurements around it.

The institute’s testing followed contamination into village shops, where clothes and food were displayed together, uncovered. Staff examined salami and an egg and found that they could not be treated as food. They also tested products from the Rogachev milk factory. For a long time, institute lecturers used its dry milk powder and cans of condensed and concentrated milk as standard radiation sources. Those same products were being sold in stores. When customers stopped buying cans marked with the factory’s name, unlabelled cans appeared; the account notes the change without claiming to know who ordered it. Scientific samples and consumer goods had become parts of the same chain, but the public could not necessarily see what the laboratory had learned.

Signals, orders, and political discipline

The institute’s own instruments registered the emergency before its cause was clear. Dosimeters showed heightened activity; readings on air-cleaning filters rose to 200 times their normal level, and the dose rate near the entrance approached three milliroentgen per hour. Staff considered possible failures inside the institute, including a damaged heat-generating element or a contaminated container from a radiochemical laboratory. Neither explanation fit. An internal announcement advised workers not to leave the building, and the spaces between its separate buildings emptied.

The contamination was not confined to the institute. Staff called the nearby Ignalinsk nuclear plant and found that its instruments were also registering abnormal readings. When they called Chernobyl, no one answered. By lunchtime they had learned that a radioactive cloud lay over Minsk and determined that the activity was iodine in nature, indicating a reactor accident. The instrument readings had turned a vague warning into a specific diagnosis, but they did not automatically authorize protective action.

Staff asked their supervisors what to do and were told to take measurements and watch television. On television, Mikhail Gorbachev said immediate measures had been taken. One engineer, with twenty years’ experience and knowledge of physics, believed everyone living in the area should leave, at least temporarily; nevertheless, he and his colleagues continued measuring and watching. Their silence did not mean they lacked evidence or professional judgment. They compiled reports and explanatory notes, but the account attributes their compliance to Party discipline and a deeply rooted faith that the system was fair and placed human life first. The collapse of that faith, the engineer later reflected, had grave consequences for some people, including heart attacks and suicides.

Warnings, obstruction, and institutional legacy

The institute’s leadership also tried to carry its findings beyond the laboratory. Its director spent about two hours trying to reach Nikolai Slyunkov, then General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus. Calls over a government line were cut off as soon as the accident was discussed. When the director finally conveyed his assessment, he urged iodine prophylaxis for the population and evacuation of everyone living within one hundred kilometers of the station. Slyunkov replied that a fire had occurred but had been put out. The director rejected that account, arguing that graphite was still burning and that the danger could not be dismissed.

In a subsequent meeting, Slyunkov cited assurances from Moscow and the presence of a government commission, prosecutors, and military equipment at the station. The director answered with the scale and physical character of the release: thousands of tons of radioactive substances, including cesium, iodine, lead, and plutonium, and 450 types of radionuclides in all. His comparison was the equivalent of 350 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. Rather than address the physical implications, he said, officials spoke about enemies and the search for enemies. The disagreement was not over whether the institute could produce measurements; it was over whether those measurements would govern decisions.

After access to official offices narrowed, the institute’s scientists continued sending reports, maps, and figures up the chain of command. One account describes four folders, each with 250 pages of facts, copied so that one set could be kept at the institute and another hidden at home. The institute made repeated trips into the affected areas and produced the first map of contaminated territory; its southern region was marked red. The radiation-measuring equipment was later confiscated without explanation, and scientists faced threatening calls and pressure to stop alarming people. The sequence makes the institute’s role more than technical: it gathered evidence, tried to make that evidence legible to decision-makers, and persisted even when its tools and access were taken away.

The institute’s former chief engineer, Marat Filippovich Kokhanov, and former laboratory head Valentin Alekseevich Borisevich represent distinct perspectives within this account of institutional work. Kokhanov’s testimony links measurement and reporting to the discipline that kept scientists quiet despite what they knew. Borisevich, reflecting on physics and the atom as an era that had shaped his generation, describes wanting to write about the power of physics and the possibility that it could reshape life. Together, these accounts show an institution whose scientific authority was indispensable to recognizing the disaster, but insufficient to overcome secrecy and administrative obedience. Its record rests on the readings it took, the warnings it tried to transmit, and the maps and reports that preserved evidence even when official action lagged behind it.