Anatoly Dyatlov

Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov (; 3 March 1931 – 13 December 1995) was a Soviet nuclear engineer who was the deputy chief engineer for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. He supervised the safety test which resulted in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, for which he served time in prison as he was blamed for not following the safety protocols. He was released due to health concerns in 1990, and died in 1995 at the age of 64, most likely attributed to radiation exposure.

Biography Dyatlov was born in 1931 in Atamanovo, a village in the Sukhobuzimsky District, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. His parents were poor. They lived near the Yenisei River and the penal settlements of Krasnoyarsk. He ran away from home at the age of 14. He first studied in a vocational school, at the electrical engineering department of the Mining and Metallurgical Technical School in Norilsk, and worked three years as an electrician before he was admitted at the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute where he graduated in 1959 with honors. Some have theorized that this accident was an explosion in the reactor of the docked submarine K-389, which Dyatlov may have been a first responder to.

One of his two sons died of leukemia at age nine, potentially due to radiation exposure.

While withdrawing a dangerous number of control rods, the operators could only reach 200 MW due to xenon poisoning. During the test, Akimov called for the AZ-5 scram button to be pressed to shut down the reactor. The trial began on 6 July 1987 at the Palace of Culture in the town of Chernobyl. Only people invited by the state were allowed to witness the proceedings. There were six defendants; Bryukhanov, Fomin, Dyatlov, station shift supervisor Boris Rogozhkin, reactor division chief Alexander Kovalenko, and inspector Yuri Laushkin.

From prison, Dyatlov wrote letters trying to explain RBMK reactor flaws he had discovered, as well as to restore his and the other operators' reputations.

Dyatlov wrote a paper published in Nuclear Engineering International in 1991 and a book in which he claimed that poor plant design, rather than plant personnel, was primarily responsible for the accident.

This program had to be executed; that was a demand of regulations and the project design documents[...] The accident was caused by completely inappropriate characteristics of the reactor which weren't clear enough at that time[...] They blamed us that we had violated the regulations by increasing the reactor power after power loss. There was no violation. Everything had been done according to the regulation demands[...] the reactor protection system designed to stop the fission in an emergency situation[...] played the role of[...] atomic bomb detonator. — Anatoly Dyatlov — However, the operators were found to have deviated from operational procedures, changing test protocols at will, as well as having made "ill-judged" actions, making human error a major contributing factor.

In media Dyatlov has been depicted several times in dramatization of the disaster and its aftermath. He has been portrayed by Igor Slavinskiy in the 2004 series Zero Hour: Disaster At Chernobyl, by Roger Alborough in the 2006 BBC production Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and by Paul Ritter in the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl.

Dyatlov's memoirs were recorded in 1994, a year before his death. The recording was made by an unknown operator and appeared on YouTube in 2016. A version with English subtitles was provided in 2019.