[4] He later became the only one of his brothers to receive higher education attaining a degree from the Energy Department of the Tashkent Polytechnic in electrical engineering in 1959.

Between 1970 and 1986, he was repeatedly elected member of the regional district office of Kyiv, Chernobyl, and Pripyat city committees of the party.

[4][2] In 1971 the energy minister offered Bryukhanov a new assignment – build an atomic power plant consisting of four RBMK reactors on the banks of the Pripyat River in Ukraine.

Bryukhanov presided over the response to fuel element damage at Reactor 1 on 9 September 1982, when contaminated steam was vented into the atmosphere.

Bryukhanov, assisted by chief engineer Nikolai Fomin, instructed the operators to maintain and restore coolant supply, unaware that the reactor had already been destroyed.

[2] The civil defense chief told him that radiation had reached the maximum reading of the military dosimeter of 200 roentgens per hour.

[2] At 5:15, deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, who had been overseeing the test, staggered into the bunker with the operating reports showing power levels and coolant pressure charts.

Only later, when the helicopter flew around...[8]Bryukhanov remained nominally in charge of the plant in the weeks that followed, although he now slept at the Fairy Tale Pioneer Camp.

After Bryukhanov went on a week's leave on 22 May to visit his family, party officials made arrangements to remove him from his position as power plant director permanently.

[9] In attendance was the RBMK designer Anatoly Alexandrov, Efim Slavsky of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building (Sredmash) and Valery Legasov of the Kurchatov Institute.

Bryukhanov was accused of mismanagement and it was decided that operator error was the primary cause of the accident, while reactor design flaws were also a factor.

At first, he refused legal representation since he regarded the verdict as pre-determined, but his wife, during her permitted monthly visit, changed his mind.

Bryukhanov also found a letter written by one of the Kurchatov Institute experts, which revealed the perilous design faults that were kept hidden from him and his staff for 16 years.

[2] On 20 January 1987, after he sat in isolation for six weeks, the prosecutor's office filed their closing indictment with the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union.

[2] Bryukhanov was charged with gross violation of safety regulations, creating conditions that led to an explosion, mismanagement by understating the radiation levels after the accident and sending people into known contaminated areas.

[14] In 1995, Bryukhanov worked as an employee of Ukrinterenergo, Ukraine's state-owned energy company, in charge of liquidating the consequences of the Chernobyl accident.

[2] Bryukhanov stressed in various interviews that neither he nor his employees were to blame for the Chernobyl disaster, and claimed the accident was caused by "the imperfection of technology.