Chornobyl present and future: a scholar's personal view (01/10/93)

Chornobyl present and future: a scholar's personal view

by Dr. David R. Marples

Information about the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster has varied from spasmodic to abundant, lucid to muddled. According to some observers, Chornobyl has been responsible for the collapse of the Soviet system and for the eventual emergence of an independent Ukraine. It is generally accepted that it was an event of epochal significance.

At the same time, the passing years have hardly brought clarity to the question. An international study group headed by members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was given a carte blanche by the former Soviet government to conduct a more definitive investigation of the health effects caused by radiation fallout, but failed, lamentably to draw any pertinent conclusions.

There have been several types of study of Chornobyl of which the following have been most important:

1. Studies of the extent of the radiation fallout from the damaged fourth reactor.

2. Studies of the health consequences of the disaster.

3. Studies of the state of the fourth reactor and its temporary covering.

4. Studies of the economic, social, and political impact of the disaster.

Such studies have also been conducted on several levels: scientific, scholarly, and popular. Ukrainian writers, for example, have focused on Chornobyl as the most recent in a century of tragedies. They have added an emotional element that emanated from the grass-roots. This has added a necessary perspective to the strictly scientific studies, many of which seemed to transpose the accident from its location at the heart of Soviet energy planning and construction; and from its context within the Soviet administrative command system that originated in Moscow.

The studies of the radiation effects have suffered from various limitations. First of all there were problems with the classification of information. Second, many areas even today have simply not been examined. In Phoenix last month, at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies conference, I heard from Philip Pryde the poignant story of a team of geographers from the University of Oregon who examined individual fields for radiation in the Russian province of Bryansk. They were shocked at the high levels of cesium contamination they discovered. Previously there had been few efforts at definitive testing of a single field. Geiger counters might have been used at one end of the field or another. In any event, they would not necessarily have been used at all in Bryansk. The point is that there is scope for new studies of the precise areas of fallout, even in 1992-1993.

Curiosity about the direction of the fallout has taken me from Ukraine to Belarus, because the April 26-30 fallout that spread northward, clearly affecting regions as far afield as eastern Poland and southern Germany, appears to have had its worst effect in the northeast. While observers were looking at Volyn, for example, for low-level fallout, it transpires that there was massive fallout in Gomel and Mogilev in Belarus, and into Bryansk in Russia.

Logically, further studies should be undertaken in Sumy in Ukraine, north of Chernihiv, and presumably as far north as the Moscow region in Russia. Of course there is no logic to radiation fallout, but it would be surprising if the above areas were simply bypassed in some sort of miraculous fashion.

I have no doubt that in the mid-21st century, when historians are allowed to re-examine the Chornobyl accident, it will become apparent that in terms of magnitude the main fallout area was Russia, followed by Belarus and then Ukraine. But that is supposition. And Ukraine, in any event, had the largest population in the vicinity of the reactor. Chornobyl will always be a Ukrainian tragedy.

In terms of health effects, a disturbing non-pattern has continued for years, namely the impossibility of ascribing anything with certainty to radiation, particularly at what are usually termed low levels.

Two years ago, Yuriy Risovanny, a member of the Prypiat Industrial and Research Association at that time, (though today he regards the leadership of that former association with disgust as a collection of self-serving Komsomol members) informed me that cleanup workers were dying in significant numbers from heart attacks, which could not be related directly to radiation.

Casualty figures

The Chornobyl clean-up workers' own union has produced casualty figures from 7,000 to 10,000 as the result of Chornobyl radiation. But these figures have been questioned by various sources, and they remain uncorroborated.

For several years, the Western press seemed prepared to accept the increasingly ludicrous Soviet statement that the casualty figures from Chornobyl had somehow remained limited to 31, as though the numerous deaths of officials involved in the clean-up and of the clean-up workers themselves could be related to other causes. New diseases were "discovered" by the Soviet authorities to account for such deaths and serious illnesses.

Ukraine has seen a significant number of villages that have belatedly fallen into the contaminated zones, many of which were homes to evacuees earlier. A recent example of this phenomenon was disclosed in early October 1992 in the village Holubiyovychi, in Zhytomyr Oblast, which was supposed to have been evacuated in 1991, but the decision had never been carried out.

Dozens of villages fall into this category. There are still reportedly about 700 elderly people living in the 30-kilometer zone around the damaged reactor. The Belarusian side of the zone has been the subject of several forest fires this year, which have served to disseminate radioactive products widely as they were carried by the fire and wind.

In Belarus, there are two levels of investigation that can be distinguished quite simply as official and non-official. The former was a belated effort to come to terms with a situation that was already out of control. The government, beset with economic and political problems, aped Ukraine's own program in imposing much stricter limits for popular tolerance in irradiated areas, specifically the 0.1 annual additional rems to the natural background, as opposed to the 0.5 rems originally established by the central authorities in Moscow.

The non-official studies in Belarus suggest that by 1992, it was possible to discern a direct correlation between increased incidence of brain and thyroid tumors and irradiation of southern and southeastern regions of the republic. Again, the statistics remained difficult to corroborate, though the multiplication of thyroid tumors, especially among children, was easy enough to establish.

The end of the Soviet regime did not make matters any more straightforward with regard to the health inquiry. The new governments faced urgent problems that took priority over the effects of Chornobyl. New revelations about environmental degradation and infant mortality made it difficult for researchers to isolate the effects of Chornobyl from those of other hazards. Indeed, to the most often asked question over the last few years, "Is it safe to live in Kiev," the only possible answer was an equivocal "Yes, but..."

In addition, as I have argued at some length, the change of regime did not signify a change of bureaucratic structure. The old machinery remained in place in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus: this ensured that each new regime remained, if not autocratic, at least strongly authoritarian. In Ukraine's case it has meant a reversion to presidential rule in a virtual one-party state rather than a system in which Parliament might initiate decision-making. In Russia and Belarus, the Parliament is somewhat more effective, but much more rigid and conservative, acting as a brake on economic and political reform.

Turning to the nuclear issues, the question of the fourth reactor has remained a moot one. Those observers who speculated that cracks had appeared in the covering were justified when this reality was acknowledged by the Ukrainian Nuclear Safety Inspectorate, led by the director of the Chornobyl station, Mikhail Umanets.

The fear that a freak accident such as a plane crash or a tornado could lead to a new dispersal of radioactive dust was a real one, but the effort to harness scientific efforts to construct a new covering launched in the Ukrainian Parliament in December 1991 collapsed into farce with accusations that former First Deputy Prime Minister, Konstantyn Masyk (newly appointed as Ukraine's ambassador to Finland), had already made a firm offer to a French firm to build such an edifice. The lifespan of the present covering is estimated at a maximum of 15 years.

Effects of irradiation

Of all the social effects of Chornobyl, the most protracted has been a growing fear of the effects of irradiation, which the authorities in 1987 had termed "radiophobia." Psychological tension was one problem that even the IAEA inquiry felt obliged to recognize. In the IAEA team's view, it could be deemed worse to evacuate families than to leave them in a mildly irradiated area because of the tension caused by such uprooting (particularly when the evacuees had neither apartments nor jobs to which to go).

In Belarus, where the extent of the fallout has reached national dimensions (i.e. 40 percent of the total area of the republic is contaminated by more than a curie of cesium per square kilometer in the soil, as opposed to about 5 percent of Ukraine), the opposition Popular Front has reacted with fury to the apparent lack of action from the Communist-dominated Parliament. Non-government organizations are thus taking the lead in offering aid to the Chornobyl victims, and above all to the children.

The social problems remain among the least researched of all Chornobyl-related topics. Although reaching a stage in my own academic career at which I felt it wiser to leave the issue of Chornobyl for some time, I found myself drawn to this question like no other, and particularly to the southern regions of Belarus. Families there with children are facing what for them is an almost impossible dilemma: they cannot live in such areas, and yet they cannot move. Their children may have swollen thyroid glands or other ailments, but they can neither obtain sufficient medical aid nor be certain as to the cause of such illnesses. How do people react in such circumstances?

In Minsk in April, a woman by the name of Nikitchenko spent an hour informing me of the predicament of the people on her collective farm in the Gomel region. For some reason even the unofficial organizations had somehow "missed" their farm: she was witnessing with some bitterness the discussion at the Children of Chornobyl sponsored conference over whether the current aid to victims was sufficient. As far as she was concerned, there had been no aid.

Aid to victims

This brings this brief reflective piece to the question of aid itself, and a great deal of ink has been expended over the usefulness or usefulness of such aid. Scandals have been uncovered in Kiev and Moscow, whereby officials have dipped into funds that were intended for Chornobyl victims, or else children of the "nomenklatura" (which still exists, let there be no mistake) have been sent abroad for periods of "recuperation" through funds designated for Chornobyl children.

It would seem from my own experience that such aid is beneficial only when the benefactors or their representatives are on the spot, that is at the airport upon its arrival; or the respective villages upon its dissemination. It is even more preferable for qualified doctors to administer such aid. Even so, the stories of warehouses full of unpacked medical equipment in Kiev are familiar to many.

Some time ago, I suggested at one lecture the possibility of "pooling" aid into one central organization, located in North America or Europe. It seemed there were simply too many parallel bodies, all offering similar remedies to unfamiliar symptoms. Indeed, the name of Chornobyl has grown beyond a nuclear disaster. It has already become a symbol of international aid and concern. There is a Ministry of Chornobyl in Ukraine; in Belarus, the Foreign Ministry has a special section devoted to Chornobyl, led by a radiobiologist).

In addition, there is a long list of political casualties of Chornobyl, both directly and indirectly, some of which are barely explicable. Dr. Yuriy Shcherbak, for example, whom some Greens wished to censure at their recent congress for alleged abuse of his duties as the former minister of the environment; Mr. Masyk, noted above; even Volodymyr Yavorivsky has not remained above criticism.

And in Minsk, the chairman of the Parliament, Stanislav Shushkevich, once regarded as a pioneer in the effort to make the effects of Chornobyl known to Belarussians, is now widely regarded as a traitor to that cause, who is seeking - and this has been confirmed - the construction of a new nuclear power station in the republic, which would be the first to be completed. A station, in short, in the country most affected by the world's worst nuclear disaster.

Subject of further study

The best studied aspects of Chornobyl have been those of the causes of the disaster itself and the immediate aftermath. It is doubtful whether a satisfactory account of the medical results will be written in this century, because some of the most endemic consequences are only just taking root - leukemias and cancers in particular.

Scientists will also continue to study the damaged reactor, and the possibilities of a more permanent covering. The graphite-moderated reactors in the former Soviet Union are now almost universally condemned, belatedly but firmly by the G-7 countries.

At the same time, economic and energy problems within the newly independent states with Soviet-made reactors have caused these states to re-examine the question of curtailing their nuclear power programs: Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus are the three most blatant examples (in Ukraine's case, comments made by President Leonid Kravchuk last fall suggested that, at the least, the issue would be considered in some depth and hinted strongly that Ukraine would retain the use of its existing reactors.)

Thus, one can await new studies of the possibility of rendering more safe the water-pressurized (VVER) reactors that constitute all Ukraine's nuclear-generated power aside from that produced at Chornobyl itself.

The social and psychological effects of Chornobyl have not only been insufficiently studied - it can be argued that until such studies are undertaken, the effects of the disaster upon the victims cannot possibly be surmised.

In the final analysis it becomes immaterial how severely Chornobyl did or did not affect the surrounding regions; the question is what the people in the areas considered to be the case. How often must we continue to encounter a scene in which a forlorn villager with sick children is assured by some foreign scientist that radiation is not the root cause of her problems? Chornobyl may not always have been the direct cause of such predicaments; but it remains an indirect cause, and at the very least, a symptom of the pathetic life in the former Soviet village.

Finally, for my own part, I have resolved to wander "northward" for a while, both figuratively and literally, into the Republic of Belarus. I think that for all its problems today, Ukraine has some distinct advantages over its neighbor, especially in terms of awareness of issues, public discussion, national consciousness, and the cooperation and aid from its diaspora on tragedies such as Chornobyl. Though the old administration of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky and Oleksander Liashko was as corrupt as any in the former Soviet regime, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, from the literary elite to the factory level, was catalysed by what was perceived as a national tragedy for Ukraine.

But what of a republic in which any manifestation of national consciousness had long ago been eradicated; which has the straitjacket of the old system; which had no widely spoken national language; and little or no unity in the face of a new neighbor called Russia. I do not even know what one would call the patois that is spoken in the villages of Gomel, other than a peasant language. But in 1992 one thing was clear: it was a language of despair that appeared to have no means of alleviation.

Dr. David Marples is associate professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Alberta and a senior research scholar with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. He is the author of two books on the Chornobyl nuclear accident: "Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR" and "The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster." As well he wrote "Ukraine Under Perestroika: Ecology, Economics and the Workers' Revolt" and the newly released "Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s."

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