Donated to the FEI Institute Archive by the Bekova family estate, 2071. Digitised 2074. Excerpt, entries 11–14 March 1998. Translated from Russian; minor idiomatic adjustments for clarity, no content alterations.
11 March 1998 — 22:00
We are in the control room. All of us. People who have been doing this for six years, and Morozov who has been doing it for twenty, and the young ones from the second team who have been here since August and still get the coffee orders wrong. Someone has taped a paper sign above the main board that says СЕГОДНЯ — “today” — and nobody has taken it down, so I suppose we all believe it now.
Sasha Chirkov is pretending to read a manual. He has been on the same page for forty minutes.
The flux readings are steady. The sodium temperature is climbing in exactly the way the models predicted. This is the thing I keep having to remind myself: it is doing what we said it would do. The model works. After the years of the model being the only thing that existed, the physical reactor is agreeing with it. The reactor is saying: yes, you were right, here I am, I am doing what you calculated.
I am writing this because I don’t know what else to do with my hands.
11 March 1998 — 23:14
Criticality confirmed at 23:07. Serov shook everyone’s hand in alphabetical order, which took some time. Morozov was crying. He keeps saying he is not crying. Nobody is arguing with him.
We stood around and looked at the instruments for a long time. There is not much to see. The numbers don’t look dramatic. They just look like numbers that are the right numbers.
Komarova from the second shift brought a bottle of something she had been keeping in her locker for two years waiting for this. It was very bad cognac. It was the best thing I have ever tasted.
I called my mother. She asked if I was warm enough.
12 March 1998 — 07:30
Morning shift. The reactor is still running. This seems obvious but it did not feel obvious at 04:00 when I woke up convinced that something had gone wrong in the night and lay awake until 06:00 when I could finally call the night supervisor. Nothing had gone wrong. The numbers were the right numbers. I went back to sleep for twenty-five minutes and then gave up.
Serov has already sent the preliminary report to Moscow. He told me he expects a formal acknowledgment in two to three weeks and a ministerial visit “sometime before summer, when they’ve had time to decide whether to be proud of us.” I told him that seemed cynical. He said he has been working in Soviet science for thirty-eight years. I said I understood.
The BN-T1 is running. The thorium cycle is real. Whatever comes next — the BN-T2 design, the ministry approvals, the decade of scaling work ahead — starts from the fact of this morning, 12 March 1998, with the reactor doing what we said it would do.
I should sleep. I will probably not sleep.
14 March 1998
TASS published the announcement today. The wording is precise and a little cold, the way official language always is. It says “sustained criticality.” It says “imminent milestone” in the earlier reporting. It does not say: six years, four rebuilt fuel assemblies, two complete restarts of the sodium loop, the argument in 1995 that I thought would end the programme, the winter of 1996 when the institute heating failed for three weeks and we worked in our coats, Morozov in his hat, the models, the arguments about the models, the models being right.
It says: “the Soviet Union achieves.”
That is correct. It is a true sentence. I have decided it is enough.
— T. I. Bekova, FEI Obninsk, March 1998
Related sources: TASS Dispatch: BN-T1 Criticality Announcement (1998) | BN-T1 First-Cycle Operational Data (Morozov et al., 1999) | Neporozhny Memo — Programme Origin (1990)