Nikolay Dollezhal


Nikolay Antonovich Dollezhal was a Russian engineer of Czech origin whose career was spent in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons and later played an influential role in developing the commercial nuclear power industry of Russia.

Biography

Dollezhal was born in Omelnik in Ekaterinoslav Governorate of the Zaporizhzhia Oblast in Ukraine on 27 October 1899. According to the GlobalSecurity.org investigations, Dollezhal was of Czech origin—his grandfather, Ferdinand Dollezhal, a Czech, was also an engineer who married a Russian woman in the middle 19th century. In 1917, he attended the Bauman Moscow State Technical University where he studied heat engines, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, electronics, heat exchanger and refrigeration under Nikolay Zhukovsky. In 1923–24, Dollezhal earned his engineer's degree and worked with Moscow's authorities to rehabilitate the civil engineering and transportation infrastructure.
While teaching at MVTU, he joined PJSC Heat and Power and worked with Soviet establishment to design new heat engines and turbines under the GOELRO program. In 1929–30, Dollezhal visited various factories in Germany and Austria under the sponsorship of Supreme Economic Council. Upon returning, he soon fell under the espionage investigations by Soviet establishment and was imprisoned until being acquitted in 1932. From 1932 to 1943, Dollezhal worked with Soviet bureaucracy, serving their chief design engineer, and oversaw many of the nitrogen production factories in Russia and Ukraine, and filled positions by hiring graduates of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute.
Until 1946, Dollezhal was completely unaware of Soviet program of nuclear weapons and it was Nikita Khrushchev who had assigned Dollezhal to Laboratory No. 2 to build a plutonium production reactor. Dollezhal supported the Soviet program and designed the first reactors, graphite moderated types A and AI, that produced plutonium used in Joe 1 nuclear test of 1949 and subsequent nuclear weapons deployment. After 1950, Dollezhal founded the NIKIET on nuclear marine propulsion. His first proposal, Type AM, was not practical for marine uses but became the core of the first nuclear power plant in Obninsk, commissioned in 1954. In the same year, he produced a viable draft of a light water submarine reactor.
Dollezhal pioneered the concept of the pressurized water reactor, which led to numerous military and VVER-type civilian designs. In 1957 Dollezhal Institute launched their first dual-use powerplant, Type EI, and seven years later, the first truly industrial Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station. All subsequent Soviet reactors also originated from his firm making him personally responsible for signing off the dangerous flaw in the design of the RBMK reactor which ultimately lead to the Chernobyl disaster.

Honours and awards