Staff history

Wojciech is born in Poland in 1961. The town is not a public matter. The year is recorded because the file requires a beginning.

He completes the school in the ordinary way and is admitted to the Politechnika Warszawska, Faculty of Power and Aeronautical Engineering. He continues at AGH in Kraków in nuclear energy and the materials which that energy requires. The diplomas remain in the drawer. He does not display them.

At Warsaw he receives the rector’s distinction for a thesis on the behaviour of graphite-moderated systems under uneven cooling. At AGH he is awarded the faculty medal for laboratory-scale work on isotope separation, and a commendation from the Institute of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology in Warszawa-Żerań for a paper the committee called unnecessarily exact. He accepted the wording. Exactness was the point.

In the early 1980s, after the last examination, he takes a short posting in Pripyat. The work is on RBMK units then in ordinary operation: instrumentation, the reading of the gauges, the keeping of the shift book. He is young. He is not in charge of the plant. He is responsible for a clipboard and a shift that ends when the next man arrives. The posting is brief. He completes it and he leaves.

He has nothing to do with the failure at Chernobyl.

He returns to Poland. He works at Świerk, and later in a private laboratory which does not yet carry a sign. The sign comes in 1998. Between Pripyat and that sign there are years of dokumentacja: fuel-cycle paper, the handling of research materiał, the unfashionable labour of finishing a sentence before the sentence is allowed to travel.

It is necessary to state this a second time, without decoration. Wojciech was not on the unit. He was not on the night. He did not write the test programme. He did not disable a protection. He did not stand in the control room on the 26th of April 1986. His posting in Pripyat ends before that date. The accident is a fact of the century. It is not a fact of his file. When inspectors have asked, the file is short on that point because there is nothing to enter.

What remains from those years is a method. He still prefers the analog needle. He still does not improvise with the materiał. The man who left school in the early eighties is the same man who now waits for the book and the needles to agree before a shipment is permitted to leave. The geography changed. The standard did not.

Dolfinian Hipolit Szczepan Bonawentura Przybyszewski-Kołłątaj is born in Poland in 1966, five years after the man who later sits as CEO. The full name is used in the file. The shorter form is a concession to the badge, not a change of identity.

He is admitted to the Politechnika Gdańska, Faculty of Chemistry, in chemical technology. He completes a first-class diploma. After Gdańsk he spends two years at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, in the laboratory for isotope separation. This is not the same school as the CEO, and the paper is not the same paper.

The diploma work concerns cascade enrichment of uranium hexafluoride at laboratory scale. For this he receives a prize of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences later awards a distinction for a study of solvent extraction of actinides from process solutions. The State Atomic Energy Agency grants the professional qualification for the handling of sealed and unsealed radioactive sources. The certificates remain with the dokumentacja. They are not hung on the wall.

Before he comes to the house, he works in radiochemical halls: glove-box transfer of the materiał, weighing, conversion, the movement of packages from the hot cell to the store. He later supervises an experimental enrichment cascade — the adjustment of the stages, the taking of samples, the writing of the mass balance until the numbers close. He is responsible for the physical custody of the material, not for the speech that accompanies it.

In 1999 he joins the zakład. Wojciech had already opened the door. Dolfinian is given the operations: the handling, the enrichment work which the house still conducts in-house, the condition of the gloves and the filters, the book that must agree with the needles before a crate is permitted to move. The title on the card is Chief Physical Operations Manager. The work is the same work he did before the card existed.

He does not improvise with the materiał. He does not treat enrichment as a conversation. If the balance does not close, the shift does not end.