Friday 9 September 2016

Relic Environments Trilogy: Book II, Part 3.i

from Book II, Part 3, Resurrection Suite


1. The Dead Zone

North from Kiev, empty roads…
  
The light of other summers opens
among the pages. In the photograph, your face,
fragile as pink shells washed along the beach;
the light moves, your face more
the face of my memory,
not the face I knew, your image clouding over,
a shadow across these chapters.
  
At Chernobyl, in the first days after the explosions, places around the reactor emitted 30,000 roentgens per hour. To kill a human, a dose of 500 roentgens within a few hours is sufficient.

 The cyclotrons divide
atom and soul, everywhere a sense
of madness and decay.

We shall wait a hundred years
to weigh the losses, behind the fence
Apocalypse
beside us
comfy on the garden seat.


April 26, 1986

12:28 a.m.

The Chernobyl staff received permission to resume the reactor power reduction. One of the operators made a mistake. Instead of keeping power at thirty percent he forgot to reset a controller causing the power to plummet to one percent because of water now filling the core, and xenon (a neutron absorber) which was building up in the reactor. This amount of power was too low for the test. The water added to the reactor is heated by the nuclear reaction and turned into steam to turn the turbines of the generator.

1:00-1:20 a.m.

The operator forced the reactor up to seven percent power by removing all but six of the control rods. This was a violation of procedure and the reactor was never built to operate at such low power. The RBMK reactor is unstable when its core is filled with water. The operator tried manually to take over the flow of the water returning from the turbine, which is very difficult as small temperature changes can cause large power fluctuations. The operator was not successful in getting the flow of water corrected and the reactor was getting increasingly unstable. The operator disabled emergency shutdown procedures, because a shutdown would abort the test, which would have to be repeated.

1:22 a.m.

By now, when the operators thought they had the most stable conditions, they decided to start the test.

 I see through my hands, their taut nerves.
I have become more ancient than silence.
  
1:23 a.m.

The test begins. The remaining turbine was shut down.

1:40 a.m.

Power in the reactor began to gradually rise because of the reduction in water flow caused by the turbine shutdown which leads to an increase in boiling. The operator initiated manual shutdown, which led to a quick power increase due to the control rod design.

Spade at the ready, Death at my shoulder
sneers,
For you.
When whispers condemn, where
is salvation?

On the streets,
a crisscross of people, cars,
the celebration continues, the traffic light’s
ritual change, its sly wink
towards those disappearing deeper
underground.

The jabber
of politicians, their jabber
of the public good a seepage
we sink through.

Sinking through.

A gamma burst whitens flowers,
a mystery brightness surrounding
bitter colours
in quiet lanes.

The gag of fruit
ripens too early, plump poisons.
One taste
to send us to the wards.


1:23:44 a.m.

Disaster Point − the reactor reached one-hundred-and-twenty times its full power. All the radioactive fuel disintegrated, and pressure from all of the excess steam which was supposed to go to the turbines broke every one of the pressure tubes and blew off the entire top shield of the reactor.
  
We came to the ocean, saying
Heal us,
but the seas were waste, vast
with our disbelief,
with our sinking through.
We believed the master plan, relentless,
all we were, the debt
at first we failed to notice
we became.

The day passes, and the world, too,
pale leaf sickly with this dew,
passes.

We look for blame, for reasons.

Crows boil up from the dead land.

Where are our senses, that we
may recognise our peace, the love
that has passed from us.

I have dreamed a dream,
and the dream returns, as if this sadness
could be named.

I watch the crows, above the city
their smoky flights, circling,
anxious.




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