Black hole

The reader has the right to laugh at the “bourgeois press, greedy for sensations” and the “jackals of rotary machines” - they have nothing more to say, so they compete in the originality of the headlines. Not at all: black out, or “black hole” is the name of an accident with a complete loss of electricity supply to the outside. In recent years, the United States and Canada have fallen into this “hole,” followed by Italy, but this name is not new in the professional jargon of those who work with dangerous objects—let’s say, nuclear scientists. They, of course, know that there are worse things. For example, power flash and thermal explosion. Or the melting of the reactor. But the third point is black out. After all, if the main circulation pumps that pump cooling water into the reactor stop working, things will go wrong for him. In this case, backup power sources are provided - powerful diesel generators with an appropriate supply of diesel fuel.

The safety of nuclear power plants has always been taken seriously, not only by the rotten West, but also by our then-sixth part of the landmass. Security is never enough. For example, here’s a problem: it takes a little less than a minute to start diesel engines. And in these tens of seconds, what do you want to do? The problem is so serious that in order to solve it, one could demand several hundred, or even a thousand or more “wooden” ones from the ministry. The solution seemed obvious: in those very tens of seconds, the turbine rotor was still rotating by inertia. What if the current generated in this short time is supplied from the generator terminals to the internal needs of the power unit, to those same pumps? And then diesel engines will arrive...

Bureaucrats from the ministry reacted to the initiative from below without enthusiasm. Of course, it was possible to contact the designers of the power unit or - take it higher - with the scientific supervisor, and jointly prove the relevance, significance and economic effect. But then we would have to share, and the required amount of the bonus is already written down on paper: “The old people get a small share, the younger ones get a fair share too.” Rubles from thirty and above...

The ruling party then taught: “Practice is the criterion of truth.” In order to pinch the office rats, they conceived an experiment “to justify”: stop the power unit at full speed and, with a stopwatch at the ready, show the enemies of progress how much the turbine shaft will rotate. Just at this time, it was time to take the power unit, which had been in operation for three years, out for scheduled preventive maintenance. They were going to do this on Friday, but due to an overload of the energy system, they ordered from above: to supply the country with electricity until Saturday. And it was spring outside, everything was already planned and prepared for the weekend: fishing, vodka, barbecue... In short, the experimenters had a night for everything. The night of April 25-26, 1986. Further, everything is known: the “black hole”, item three on our list of emergency situations, caused item one - a flash of power and a thermal explosion of the fourth unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

The incompetent intervention of the “skillful hands” circle in complex technology caused considerable problems, and then they were superimposed on them by the incompetence and unpreparedness of the authorities to combat man-made disasters, and then by the willingness of politicians to use the consequences of the disaster for their own purposes - of course, noble ones...

Nuclear energy, growing in the shadow of the nuclear mushrooms of Hiroshima and Bikini Atoll, aroused fear and mistrust among the average person even before Chernobyl. For scientists and engineers, this meant the need to provide for and prevent severe accidents in the project. For the industry economy, this meant, firstly, additional capital investments in safety (from concrete protective shells-domes to the same diesel engines) and, secondly, hefty insurance contributions (because it is still not possible to reduce the likelihood of an accident to zero ). Over the past twenty-five years, following the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, these costs have risen, but not enough to make nuclear power uncompetitive.

What am I talking about?

Wednesday, May 25, opened another “black hole” from which streams of righteous anger against Anatoly Chubais poured out. The discovery was made personally by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, saying his weighty “Atu!” What is especially pleasing are the president’s words about the personal responsibility of the head of the energy monopoly. Even more admirable are the subsequent initiatives to compensate for the damage, which has already been counted for a billion that are not at all wooden...

They warned in advance about the wave of man-made disasters that was supposed to cover the country in 2003. And the fact that the Lord had mercy until last Wednesday is, let’s be honest, either a miracle or the result of someone’s work.

During these same years, Russia was hit by another wave - a terrorist one. Explosions of residential buildings in September 1999, Nord-Ost, explosions on trains, subways and airplanes, and finally Beslan. And what do we have here with personal responsibility? Where is our chief counter-terrorism director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev? Not quartered, not arrested, not exiled, not even deposed!

During the “counter-terrorism operation,” the entire Chechnya was sent back into the past without electricity and water for many years, but attempts to bring personal lawsuits were fruitless. In extreme cases, the state pays meager compensation. No one is to blame...

If something collapses in the rest of Russia, then the insidious enemy, or, in extreme cases, the “switchman,” is to blame for everything. For example, in August 2003, when a kamikaze on a truck blew up a hospital in Mozdok, it was not the director of the FSB, not the commander of the United Group, not the Regional Operational Headquarters who was declared guilty - but the head of the hospital itself: it turns out that he did not surround the building with concrete blocks. Let’s leave aside the dubious value of this kind of “protection” (in Ingushetia, administrative buildings were surrounded in abundance with this kind of obstacles, and on the night of June 22, 2004, militants fired at these objects, hiding behind those same concrete barricades), something else is important for us: Responsibility lies with the site manager.

What if the same hospital were without power? Or not a military hospital, but a completely civilian hospital? Such a local black out - it doesn’t matter why. The wind knocked a tree onto the wires. Who is last? Hydrometeorological center? Or Chubais again? Since people’s lives depend on the uninterrupted supply of electricity to intensive care units, operating rooms, and so on, the hospital must have an emergency autonomous power supply for this case. In Moscow, only a few hospitals had backup generators - why?

If the apocalypse is universal, then even more so the hospitals should work. In this regard, reserve diesel engines should be provided by the Civil Defense Department. And autonomous filter ventilation in the metro is an object of the same defense! And where is everything, emergency power supply to vital facilities, ventilation? Somewhere out there, at the bases of the “Ministry of What Happened,” there are machines in orderly rows, designed to provide us with light after the end of this very world. Or are they not worth it? I would like to know what’s going on with the copper windings of the generators and the tanks of diesel fuel stored for the “special period”? But Sergei Shoigu is not seen or heard, because not before the elections and it is harmful for the rating...

On May 25, the power engineers themselves gradually restored the supply of electricity, pulling the city out of the “black hole.” As it turned out, we do not have backup systems both at individual key facilities and in the capital as a whole. And Yuri Luzhkov, who is at the forefront of civil defense in Moscow as the head of the region, also does not think to respond - or rather, he attacks himself! Threatens lawsuits! I would like to ask: have you already paid for the water park? And for “Nord-Ost”? No, here we have to turn not to the state, but to terrorists or who knows who!

In fact, civilized practice involves compensation mainly from insurance funds and the state, and only partly through lawsuits. For insurers, there is no end to the work: some will communicate with energy workers and authorities, determining where there is an insured event and where there is force majeure, others - with victims, finding out to what extent a specific person, individual or legal entity, should be compensated for anything at all. Here you, reader, are sitting at the monitor right now - so you know what a surge protector and an uninterruptible power supply are, and you won’t blame Red for the loss of every file? And if you are also a car enthusiast, then you know very well that in the event of an accident it is a good idea to be wearing a seat belt, having passed a technical inspection and, above all, being sober - otherwise it is not clear who else will be to blame. So, the wave of popular anger against RAO UES can simply subside as we check how well those seeking it did not make a mistake, relying on God, and how reliable the local gods, talismans and amulets turned out to be.

But this is under normal conditions, when there is a legal basis for determining the perpetrators, and for compensation for damage there is a material basis, that is, working laws and insurance funds. Otherwise, lawsuits against energy companies will collapse the economy. Like on May 25, a “cascading blackout” will occur in power grids, the result is a “black hole.”

Some of Chubais’s professional critics have already compared the events of last Wednesday with Chernobyl. Politician, what to take from him. A comparison with the American accident rather shows the professionalism of RAO compared to its overseas colleagues. It seems that problems in the energy sector are not the worst thing for us. On May 25, powerlessness in the face of an emergency situation as such was revealed - in a country that throughout the last century did nothing but prepare for a global war, and in recent years has returned to this favorite pastime. It seems that soon it will become clear that the financial system is unprepared for emergencies. But the main and most dangerous thing is the small-town intrigues, which for some reason are called politics: they are our most dangerous black hole.