Anatoly Dyatlov

Who was Anatoly Dyatlov?

Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov was vice chief engineer of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and the supervisor of the fatal experiment which resulted in the Chernobyl disaster.

Dyatlov was born in 1931 in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. In 1959, he graduated from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. After graduation he worked in a shipbuilding plant in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, installing reactors into submarines. In 1973, he moved to Prypiat, Ukraine to work at the newly constructed Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

On April 26, 1986, Dyatlov supervised a test at Reactor 4 of the nuclear plant, which resulted in the worst nuclear plant accident in history. In 1987, he was found guilty "for criminal mismanagement of potentially explosive enterprises" and was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in five years. He wrote a book in which he claimed that poor plant design, rather than plant personnel, was primarily responsible for the accident.

During the accident, Dyatlov received a radiation dose of 550 rem. He died of heart failure in 1995.