Anatoly Dyatlov

Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov was a Soviet nuclear engineer, born on 3 March 1931 in the Krasnoyarsk region and educated at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. After graduating in 1959 he worked on installing nuclear reactors in submarines, then moved in 1973 to the newly built Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, where he rose to deputy chief engineer for operations responsible for Units 3 and 4. He supervised the turbine rundown safety test of 26 April 1986 at Unit 4, which ended in the Chernobyl disaster. The International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group traced that accident to several interacting factors, among them the RBMK reactor design, its control rod deficiencies and weaknesses in operating procedures. Dyatlov was tried in 1987, sentenced to ten years in prison, released in 1990 on health grounds and died in 1995. He is included in this atlas as a figure of nuclear power operations whose career shows how reactor design, operating practice and responsibility interact.