It was 10 a.m., 16 days into Russia’s war on Ukraine, and a land-line phone rang inside the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The site of the world’s worst nuclear-power disaster had become an impromptu prison, and an increasingly dangerous one.
The signalman on duty lifted the receiver and passed the call to shift supervisor Valentin Heiko, a veteran of the defunct facility. Mr. Heiko told managers on the other end of the line that the 210 technicians and support staff were in a desperate situation, held hostage while keeping watch over thousands of spent fuel rods.
The night before had brought another standoff between the exhausted technicians responsible for safeguarding the nuclear waste and the Russian soldiers who have been holding them on the job at gunpoint since the first hours of the war.
“The psychological situation is deteriorating,” Mr. Heiko said, updating managers in an office 30 miles away, two people on that call recalled. Some technicians, demanding to go home, were threatening to walk out, past the Russian tanks parked outside.
The supervisor, who celebrated his 60th birthday in captivity last week, said it was his duty to toil on as long as required. “Everyone wants to go home, but we know we need to stay.”
Since Feb. 23, Chernobyl’s technicians and support staff have been working nonstop. After arriving at 9 p.m. for a single night shift to monitor electrical transmission levels and the temperature inside the plant’s gigantic sarcophagus housing radioactive waste, they are approaching 500 hours on the job—snatching sleep on chairs in front of beeping machinery and on piles of clothes next to workstations.
Their diet has dwindled to porridge and canned food, prepared by a 70-year-old cook who at one point collapsed from exhaustion. Their phones have been confiscated and they are trailed by Russian soldiers through the nuclear plant’s labyrinth of reinforced-concrete corridors.
For weeks, the world’s nuclear energy regulators have been trying to understand what is happening inside the Chernobyl complex, where the condition of the facility and its crew has been shrouded by competing Ukrainian and Russian narratives.
The Wall Street Journal heard from workers trapped inside, reviewed videos and texts they sent to family members and spoke to more than a dozen relatives, friends, plant managers and local officials. The Journal was also able to access recordings of a daily 10 a.m. phone call, which connects the plant to an office in the town of Slavutych, built by the Soviet Union to house Chernobyl workers after the disastrous explosion of Reactor No. 4 in 1986.
The picture that emerges is of a skeleton crew of nuclear technicians that has been working under duress for nearly three weeks. One has a thyroid problem and needs medicine, as do several with high blood pressure. In the one-minute calls Russian soldiers allow workers to place to family members, they have told of extreme fatigue, dizziness, nausea and terrible headaches.
That exhaustion is mutating into rebellion, with staff members arguing with their captors over the nature of Russia’s war and staging acts of defiance. Every morning at 9, the national anthem, ‘Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished,’ blares through the loudspeaker. The Ukrainian workers stand, palms pressed to chests, then return to work.
Their families, meanwhile, are running low on heat and power, trapped by a Russian military encirclement around the Atomic City, as Slavutych is known, where locals clang church bells or honk car horns to sound the alarm whenever warplanes approach. Their calls for a safe corridor to evacuate the exhausted Chernobyl workers and replace them with other staff are backed by Ukraine’s government but rejected by Russia.
“I didn’t recognize his voice,” said the wife of a plant worker who spoke to her husband on Friday. “I could tell someone was standing behind him. Very short phrases.”
What is the point of this except to create nervousness in the rest of the world that this thing could go sideways in the worst possible way.
The Ukrainians say Russia may be planning a false flag blaming them for a nuclear accident. Russia says that Ukraine is building a dirty bomb. But really the true threat is an accident.
Chernobyl stopped producing electricity around 2000, yet it still needs staff to keep cool water circulating over thousands of spent fuel rods kept in four-story-deep basins lined with steel and reinforced concrete.
The pumps pushing new water over the spent nuclear fuel now rely on diesel generators. High-voltage power lines connecting the plant’s cooling system to the electricity grid were cut during fighting.
“If the pumps do not work,” a memo by a Ukrainian nuclear association official reads, “the water in the pool may boil, which will lead to the formation of radioactive steam, followed by the melting of the fuel assemblies, which will lead to a severe accident.”
On Wednesday, Ukrainian officials said that could happen in as little as seven days.
Western nuclear experts say this is unlikely because the spent fuel has been cooling for a long time so there won’t be a melt down. They believe the real risk is that a power outage will compromise ventilation and expose this staff and soldiers to high levels of radiation. And they are much more worried about the risk of accident at the still-active six-reactor Zaporizhzhia plan, the largest in Europe.
But these worker/hostages are in serious danger with no breaks, little food and isolation. Again, what is Putin playing at with this stuff?