COMMUNITY COMMEMORATIONS OF THE CHORNOBYL ANNIVERSARY

Toronto University symposium discusses accident's legacy

by Andrij Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - "Chornobyl: The Legacy," a one-day symposium held at the University of Toronto on April 27, was a microcosm of concerns raised by the world's most infamous industrial accident, thanks to the sense of balance and drawing power of its principal organizer, Dr. Luba Komar, an assistant professor of pediatrics.

Held as an extension of the Chornobyl Project run by the host institution's medical faculty, the symposium featured four panels, on geopolitical consequences, international aid, energy and technology, and health consequences of the disaster of April 26, 1986.

Dr. Arnold Aberman, dean of the University of Toronto's faculty of medicine and Dr. Jay Keystone, director of the faculty's Office of International Health Programs, offered words of greeting.

Dr. Wolodymyr Medwidsky, the OIHP's coordinator for Ukraine, thanked the co-sponsors of the symposium, including the Toronto Branch of the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America, the Children of Chornobyl Canadian Fund, the Prometheus Foundation, the Shevchenko Scientific Society (Canada), the Toronto branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and Dr. Maria Fischer Slysh.

Prof. Peter Solomon, acting director of the host university's Center for Russian and East European Studies and moderator of the geopolitical consequences panel, said the disaster at the Chornobyl Atomic Energy Station was the first event in the chain that brought about the eventual delegitimization of Soviet authority, which eventually resulted in the USSR's dissolution.

Rise and decline of anti-nuclear movements

Prof. Jane Dawson of Wellesley College and Harvard University focused on the role of anti-nuclear activism in this process up until 1991, and the ensuing pendulum swing back to grudging acceptance of nuclear energy in the post-Soviet period.

The political scientist described the shift from broad public acceptance of nuclear power prior to the Chornobyl disaster to the outright hostility and the mobilization of movements around virtually every nuclear station in the USSR by early 1988.

Prof. Dawson's central thesis was that the former USSR's anti-nuclear movements had a dual nature, being closely tied with a resurgence of nationalism. Prof. Dawson maintained that in Lithuania there was little interest in the specifics of the issue other than to focus enmity on Moscow's invasive presence.

In Ukraine, the site of the disaster and of the best organized of all anti-nuclear movements in the former USSR, she said, the situation was much more complex. Based on her visits to the former Soviet Union, Prof. Dawson said the lesser level of ethnic identification in Ukraine enabled the two movements - nationalist and anti-nuclear - to work symbiotically.

For Prof. Dawson, this background made the post-1991 shift understandable, when the symbolism associated with nuclear plants changed completely. She said they were no longer associated with Moscow's malignant influence, but were seen as a source of energy self-sufficiency and autonomy.

By 1993, she recounted, the moratoria on construction of new plants had been reversed, and the inactive reactors at the Chornobyl plant brought back on line.

Essentially, the indigenous environmental movement simply died, Prof. Dawson said, with deputies elected to Parliament on anti-nuclear platforms (particularly the nationalistic ones) openly changing their positions, and former leaders of the movement (such as Zelenyi Svit leader Yuri Shcherbak) being given government appointments or diplomatic postings abroad, effectively decapitating it.

Prof. Dawson said the anti-nuclear movement in Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union now exists on the "artificial life-support" of foreign funding from organizations such as Greenpeace. She concluded that its members have also come to accept their role as watchdogs of the industry, rather than advocates of the closure of all reactors.

Ukraine's missed opportunities

Prof. Roman Serbyn, a historian from the University of Quebec at Montreal, began with an examination of the development of nationalist sentiment in Ukraine's environmental movement and ended by focusing on the missed opportunities of President Leonid Kravchuk's administration in the area of nuclear disarmament

"Ukraine mishandled the renunciation of nuclear weapons completely, and squandered the country's potential for taking the moral high ground by making a gesture of sanity in an insane world," Prof. Serbyn said. He faulted Ukraine's former president, Leonid Kravchuk, and the Parliament of the day for sending contradictory signals on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and fumbling the hand-over of its missiles.

Prof. Serbyn said these errors led to Ukaine's credibility problem, which continues through today when it presents petitions for assistance in dealing with the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster, closure of the plant and refurbishing of the sarcophagus.

Media misunderstood, jaded and wary

The final member of the panel was Victor Malarek, a co-host of CBC TV's investigative newsmagazine "The Fifth Estate," who presented an analysis of the media's coverage of Chornobyl. The Toronto-based journalist said that, initially, the Soviet regime's initial cover-up tactics and the U.S. media's combination of morbid exaggerations and "it can't happen here" attitudes resulted in distorted coverage, later compounded by the tug-of-war between environmentalists and the nuclear energy lobby.

Mr. Malarek, who covered the August 1986 post-Chornobyl International Atomic Energy Agency conference for the Globe and Mail, asserted that disinformation spread by both the pro- and anti- nuclear sides has made many reporters jaded and wary.

Ukrainians also are at fault, he said. During a 1990 visit to a pediatric hospital in Kyiv, he was told a certain girl was "a Chornobyl victim," but later discovered her cancer had been diagnosed in February 1986. "It only takes one incident like that to seriously jade a reporter," Mr. Malarek said.

And yet, it appears he managed to resist. The veteran journalist said his experience as an occupational health and safety reporter covering Canada's uranium mines for the Globe in the 1970s taught him basic concepts such as latency periods in the development of ailments after radiation exposure, while many others are duped by experts who claim, for instance, that chronic low-level radiation does not affect health.

Mr. Malarek said basic ignorance about how the press works has led to "overrationalization of the media," which, he claimed, is an inherently irrational and undisciplined forum for the rapid transfer of information.

The CBC co-host pointed out that perceptions of unfairness and lack of balance also abound, since matters of constant import are pushed out of attention by the latest breaking news. "Editors have to make daily judgements as to what's news, and often what is 'news' is not always newsworthy, but that's the nature of the beast," he added.

In closing, Mr. Malarek identified what, to him, should be the five most important areas of concern for the international news media: 1. the "ticking time bomb" of the sarcophagus and the un-neutralized atomic fuel buried beneath; 2. the serious operational problems that exist with the Chornobyl reactors currently on line and the design flaws that persist despite modifications; 3. the "time bomb ticking inside people" exposed to the explosion's as-yet-unquantified ill effects; 4. the legitimate fear, stress and anxiety suffered by the millions who live near the contaminated zone - an effect on the human psyche that cannot be dismissed; 5. the serious environmental degradation in Ukraine that Chornobyl has compounded.

International aid panel

The first speaker of the panel on international aid, chaired by University of Toronto faculty of management member Prof. Bohdan Kalymon, was the International Monetary Fund's alternate executive director Dr. Oleh Hawrylyshyn.

He led off by saying that, given the magnitude of the Chornobyl tragedy, discussions of economic aid for reforms have "a surreal philistinic character," which seem to disregard the suffering endured.

In hard-nosed fashion, Dr. Hawrylyshyn pointed out that after an initial reformist spurt from the fall of 1994 to the spring of 1995, Ukraine has been backsliding into inflationary policies, continuing drops in production and signs of contraction rather than growth in its economy - all markers that tend to make the IMF nervous.

The IMF official suggested that the international community has been generous in providing aid to Ukraine (behind only Mexico and Russia in terms of the IMF's GNP quota system) despite the perception that its requests for assistance are not being met.

The Washington-based economist then addressed specifics of Chornobyl's aftermath. He said Ukraine has committed a strategic error in allowing the international agenda to shift from safety concerns and the rebuilding of the sarcophagus sealing the damaged No. 4 reactor, to a focus on closure of the plant, replacement of energy supply and national energy efficiency.

Dr. Hawrylyshyn echoed Prof. Serbyn's sentiments about lost opportunities, saying that if the need for economic recovery had been stressed in 1994, and a level of 4 percent growth maintained (as in Russia, Poland and other Central European countries), the GNP earnings might have gone a long way in paying for repairs to the sarcophagus.

Another drastic strategic error, according to Dr. Hawrylyshyn, was the decision not to pursue Chornobyl reparations in negotiations over the former Soviet Union's assets. Now that Russia has been allowed to claim all of the USSR's liabilities and assets without filing some sort of lien for damages incurred, the opportunity is irrevocably lost.

Dr. Hawrylyshyn concluded by saying that Ukraine's best bet is European public opinion, to which it increasingly has access by way of the European Union and other institutions.

He said that treatment of Ukraine has been unfair in some sense, because demands have come for Chornobyl's closure, and yet equally if not more dangerous reactors, such as the plant near St Petersburg and in Armenia, do not attract as much international concern.

However, Dr. Hawrylyshyn claimed that Chornobyl's hold on the European imagination should make the continent's citizenry far more amenable to special levies to secure the crippled plant. Given the experience with Mikhail Gorbachev, he suggested, public opinion could be mobilized to spur hidebound political representatives into appropriate action.

Red Cross programs

Mary Murphy, the Canadian Red Cross's learning, development and special projects advisor, followed with an outline of her agency's "Chornobyl Humanitarian Assistance and Rehabilitation" and "Solidarity Assistance" programs.

Under the CHAR program, the Red Cross has been deploying six mobile diagnostic labs since 1992, measuring radiation contamination in the air, soil and agricultural produce. "In 1995, despite the length of time since the accident," Ms. Murphy reported, "32 percent of the food tested in the [Rivne] region registered higher than the normal limits" of radiation. She said one medical official told her he would not feed his children local produce, but "at $8 American for imported broccoli, you can understand that this is not an option for most of the population."

Thus, the Red Cross official said, while many registered ailments are not be attributable to radioactivity from Chornobyl, poor nutrition surfaces in part due to avoidance of produce.

Screenings of adults and children have also been conducted since 1992, including an examination of 53,617 people for thyroid ailments in 1995, registering measurable increases in tumors among children. A whopping 50 percent of the people being screened were diagnosed as ill, and 18 percent were referred for further examination and treatment.

Ms. Murphy described a Red Cross program conducted in September and October 1995 to assist pregnant women. She noted that a drastic decline in Ukraine's health care system has resulted in a skyrocketing infant mortality rate (14.3 per 1,000, or three times the European average). According to her statistics, only 30 to 40 percent of deliveries are described as normal.

The Red Cross official also noted that international medical aid has gone through several crises in credibility, as local medical officials complained of having to throw away up to 75 percent of supplies because expiry dates have long passed. This feeds the black market and demoralizes the population, Ms. Murphy asserted.

She also proudly reported that Canada and Japan are the only countries against whose agencies no such complaints have been registered.

Bleak portrait of Ukrainian health

Paulette Schatz, a program officer of the Partners in Health Program of the Canadian Society for International Health's, provided a sobering profile of Ukrainian health in a comparative analysis with Canada.

Accidents and traumas are the principal cause of death in Ukraine, preventable communicable diseases like cholera and tuberculosis are up, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are rising, the number of drug addicts is exploding because of the country's new status as a transit point for narcotics, a trend of 153 abortions per 100 live births has taken root - a bleak portrait.

Ms. Schatz then outlined the PIH's ambitious eight-project program to reorient Ukraine's health infrastructure from its exclusive focus on treatment and cure to health promotion and preventive measures, and establish a measure of pharmaceutical and educational self-sufficiency.

Réal Lalande, an official of the PIH's sponsoring Canadian Industrial Development Agency, and only recently appointed to his responsibilities vis-à-vis Ukraine, rounded out the panel by providing a general sketch of the government's assistance programs, saying that "about 20 percent of the $180 million Ottawa sends to Kyiv can be Chornobyl related."

Reactor design faults revisited

For the energy and technology panel, three representatives of Canada's nuclear energy industry, two of whom were senior officers of the Crown (government-owned) corporation Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), addressed questions concerning the design of nuclear power stations, spill management and waste management respectively.

The first speaker was Dr. Jerry Cuttler, president of the Canadian Nuclear Society and the manager of engineering integration for the country's current reactor program. Dr. Cutler began by saying that humans have lived in a radioactive environment for 2 million years, that "we are used to radiation, and we have adapted to radiation," and complaining about persistent ignorance on the subject.

In dealing with the differences between the CANDU (Canadian) and RBMK (Soviet) power plants, he said simply that Canada benefitted from good design codes, many defenses in depth and a superior safety culture that precludes it from allowing its "[nuclear power] plants to enter into unfamiliar regions of operations."

Dr. Cuttler also asserted that Canadian technicians were the first to point out the design flaw in the Chornobyl reactor's control rods. This flaw, he said, had made the reactor "unforgiving of a reasonable variance in operator performance."

The Canadian engineer contended that the Chornobyl station's operators had been unfairly scapegoated. "These people performed heroically," Dr. Cuttler said, adding that "there was nothing that told the operators they couldn't operate [the way they did]."

Straying from his topic, the CNS president then offered comments on the medical consequences of the accident. He berated "political activists" for claims of a 125,000 death toll, reiterating the official figure of 31, claimed by Soviet authorities and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and asserted that all other plant workers treated within the first few weeks for radiation syndrome "recovered."

Drawing on his reading of a National Geographic issue devoted to the subject, Dr. Cuttler offered his own set of statistics to claim that of an estimated 7,000 children who inhaled airborne radioactivity and drank contaminated milk, 680 developed thyroid cancer and three have died.

The nuclear engineer also stated that "the dose rates in fallout areas have declined by large factors to the point where they are comparable to the natural background in places in the U.S., India and China."

"The medical consequences do not seem so terrible until we consider the fear," Dr. Cuttler continued. He asserted that terror and outrage against the nuclear industry in the aftermath of the accident prompted many women to seek abortions, for livestock to be destroyed and produce to be dumped, implying that these were, in large measure, over-reactions.

In conclusion, Dr. Cuttler blamed the media for spreading misinformation. "How long will it take to change people's attitude about nuclear radiation and nuclear power? I wish I knew what to tell you," he said.

An accident index

Next up was Dr. Keith Dinnie, from the Reactor Safety and Operational Department of Ontario Hydro, the provincial government-owned energy utility, who outlined Canadian practices in nuclear spill management and provided a brief history of nuclear accidents.

Dr. Dinnie mentioned that Canada has the dubious distinction of being the site of the world's first civilian nuclear accident, at a time when power plants were still relatively small but had no containment structures. The incident occurred at the Chalk River, Ontario, plant in 1952.

Dr. Dinnie also presented the International Events Scale devised by the IAEA and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1990 as "a means for promptly communicating to the public in consistent terms the safety significance of events reported at nuclear power plants."

In a range from 1 to 7, the levels serve as indicators of the degree of damage to the reactor core and breaches of "defense-in-depth," the exposure of plant workers, and the exposure of the outside environment and population, and the level of emergency plas implemented. Level 1 events are described as "anomalies"; Level 2 and 3 as "incidents"; and Levels 4 to 7 as accidents of increasing severity.

The Windscale/Sellafield accident at a military installation in England (1957) and the Three Mile Island station in Harrisburg, Pa., (1979) both rated a 5 because of damage to the station, although they varied widely in the extent of radiation released.

The Chornobyl accident was a 7 because it involved catastrophic damage to the reactor, a major release of radiation with acute health effects to both plant workers and local population, and a large-scale and long-term implementation of emergency plans.

The Ontario Hydro technician also outlined procedures for plant and environment decontamination. "There's no way around it, if you have contamination of the environment, it's expensive, it takes a long time, it's highly disruptive and ... you have a very large amount of waste to deal with," Dr. Dinnie said.

The Canadian spill management engineer also said that at Chornobyl "they [Ukrainian authorities] still haven't come to grips with the question of the long-term destination of the waste and contaminated material."

"Awareness around the world about the importance of a safety culture that includes a questioning attitude and a conservative approach by plant technicians... arose from Chornobyl," Dr. Dinnie said, "and has been applied to improve the safety of operations of all nuclear power plants."

The final member of the energy and technology panel was Dr. Ken Dormuth, director of the AECL nuclear fuel waste management program, who presented a proposed concept for disposal deep under the stable bedrock of the Canadian Shield, which was technically interesting and offered additional assurance of his country's safe approach to the problem. However, by Dr. Dormuth's admission, this held little relevance to problems faced by Ukraine.

Radiation's impact

Dr. Komar, also a staff emergency physician at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, led off the health panel she moderated essentially by providing a presentation of her own.

Dr. Komar provided a basic explanation of the different kinds of ionizing radiation (as opposed to the non-ionizing radiation found in the background from radon gas, the sun, etc.) that affects human health and attempted to allay the confusion engendered by the many terms, from rems to Sieverts, that "tend to make the literature more complicated than it needs to be."

Dr. Komar also surveyed the known health effects of radiation exposure, underscoring the thesis that no dose is a safe dose. She said Chornobyl was unique because it involved the highest recorded release of radionuclides into the environment, that the widely scattered fallout will predispose people to effects over the long and short term. "We have no experience with toxins that hang around for as long as, for example, radioactive cesium does - 40 years."

In conclusion, Dr. Komar said study of the disaster's effects have been complicated by every possible variable that distorts epidemiological data - doses received were not measured but calculated; screening procedures were changed after the incident, as the clean-up was conducted, and revised since; Soviet policies in widely recruiting and then dispersing clean-up workers, evacuation policies and the mass migration of the affected population following the break-up of the Soviet Union make follow-up very difficult.

Industry official on health effects

In Dr. Norman Gentner, the nuclear industry had its second spokesman to offer a perspective on the Chornobyl accident's effect on human health, but from a position of somewhat greater medical authority. Dr. Gentner is the AECL's senior science advisor in its Health and Environmental Sciences Branch and a member of the United Nations' Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).

Dr. Gentner said UNSCEAR's determinations on the doses people received and the accident's health effects would be ready for publication in 1999 or 2000, adding that his presentation was based on data from eight consensus documents sponsored by the European Commission, the IAEA, the World Health Organization, a host of other international agencies and representatives of the three most affected countries (Belarus, Ukraine and Russia).

He identified those to be studied as the up to 800,000 workers involved in the clean-up and the 134,000 evacuees from the 30-kilometer exclusion zone.

As Dr. Komar pointed out, the overlapping terms of rems, rads, Sieverts and Grays often makes assessment of doses and effects of radiation confusing. Dr. Gentner's presentation did little to allay this confusion. In fact, he persisted in "providing the context" of doses of background radiation (non-ionizing) and radiation released by nuclear accidents, tests and bombs explosions (ionizing).

On one hand, Dr. Gentner spoke of a lack of leukemias emerging in the expected period following the accident, and on the other attributed the recorded rise in cancers to a sharpening of the screening process. He asserted that the only observed health effect that could be ascribed to the accident was the rise in thyroid cancers among children.

Liquidators "didn't become immortal"

Worrying at the Chornobyl accident's official death toll of 31, Dr. Gentner said that 26 of 28 of those who died while under observation at Moscow Clinic No. 6 had "severe burns over three-quarters of their bodies which compromised their ability to survive." He also asserted that no additional deaths "have been correlated with the severity of acute radiation sickness."

"Time and time again over the last three or four years we have read reports of 6,000 to 8,000 deaths having occurred among the liquidators, due to their participation in the accident clean-up," Dr. Gentner said, and with a deft statistical stroke demonstrated that given the "lesser longevity" observed in Ukraine, about 18,000 of the clean-up workers could have been expected to die.

The AECL official blamed Ukrainian law for ascribing all deaths among clean-up workers to the Chornobyl accident although "credible studies indicate that it's nothing more or less than the normal rate of death."

"They didn't become immortal because of their participation in the clean-up of the accident," Dr. Gentner said.

He contested the accuracy of recent claims that 125,000 have died in Ukraine as a result of the accident (also calling into question the figure of 148,000 cited by Dr. Vladislav Torbin of the Chornobyl Ministry at the Yale/Columbia conference). "This arose from a mis-translation from a Ukrainian Ministry of Health document, which was actually referring to the total number of deaths from all causes whatsoever in all persons residing in the regions of Ukraine affected by the Chornobyl fallout in the period 1988-1994," Dr. Gentner said.

He also asserted that people had been evacuated from some areas of the exclusion zone because of "a questionable averted dose and can never go back, even though it's safe to do so, quite safe." Dr. Gentner called them pawns in the hands of politicians who "substitute countermeasures [to the accident's alleged effects] for social policy."

Leukemia and thyroid cancer

Dr. Sylvia Asa, a University of Toronto professor of pathology and a staff pathologist at the city's Mount Sinai Hospital, gave a presentation on the clinical aspects of thyroid cancer development and the influence of iodine, as well as its radioactive isotope.

Dr. Asa outlined the correlations of age and proximity to the stricken reactor as factors that enabled researchers to attribute the emergence of tumors in children to radiation exposure. She traced the oncogenetic (cancer-causing) effects of radiation.

Dr. Asa mentioned that experts had not expected thyroid cancer to emerge in the aftermath of the accident, because it had been previously thought to be a primarily genetic disorder.

Dr. Asa also explained that while the thyroid papillary (infolded) cancers which have developed among Ukraine's children are aggressive, they are among the most treatable forms of the disease if caught at an early stage. This, in turn, accounted for the happily low mortality levels among affected children.

Dr. Alvin Zipursky, a colleague of Dr. Komar at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor of pediatrics at the symposium's host university, followed with a presentation on the treatment of children with leukemia at Kyiv's Hospital No. 14.

Dr. Zipursky opined that it will probably never be known whether the incidence of leukemia went up as a result of the Chornobyl accident because "the quality of diagnosis has gone up so dramatically, and the incidence of death has gone way down because of the vast improvements in treatment."

Dr. Zipursky gave an account of the UNESCO-sponsored project to bolster leukemia treatment at the Hospital No. 14, which handles Ukraine's entire hematology patient load. He was happy to report that the survival rates had gone up to 80 percent, close to Western standards, thanks to the dedication of Ukrainian personnel and the constant flow of donations from foreign groups, such as the German Evangelical Church.

Dr. Zipursky said Ukraine's need for funding is ongoing for supplies (particularly drugs) and for upkeep and support of medical machinery. The veteran hematologist said Ukraine's gross deficiency in up-to-date library resources could be easily remedied by establishing a stable computer connection to the Western MED-Link network. In conclusion, Dr. Zipursky said, "Define the needs specifically and communicate continuously, then solutions can be found."

Chornobyl's "invisible threat"

The symposium's final speaker was Dr. Klaus Kuch of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and also a University of Toronto medical faculty member, who gave a professional appreciation of the psychological trauma to Ukraine's population engendered by the Chornobyl accident.

Dr. Kuch defined psychological trauma as the overwhelming of an individual's or a group's ability to adapt to a radical disturbance, originally modelled on the experience of shell-shock by soldiers in World War I.

Paradoxically, the psychiatrist explained, the trauma caused by the accident has been heightened by the fact that most did not witness the actual explosion and that its effects are imperceptible to the five senses. Dr. Kuch said that humans under stress scan their surroundings and become increasingly anxious if the threat they face is invisible.

Dr. Kuch drew the analogy of being startled in a dark room, where one is unable to scan for the origin of the stress, which is markedly alleviated when the light is turned on.

To complicate matters, in Ukraine the threat has been identified as a long-term one, because of knowledge about lasting effects from radioactive contaminants, and the creation of exclusion zones, Dr. Kuch said.

He also pointed out that about 15 percent of any given population are susceptible to anxiety disorders, including about 6 percent who are prone to develop depressive disorders. Dr. Kuch said the wide-ranging trauma caused by an incident of such deep implications as Chornobyl would most likely exacerbate these predispositions.

Dr. Kuch said symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder could surface in behaviors such as hyper-vigilance, and that the continued checking for signs of cancer (in itself quite stressful) could easily evolve into compulsions and phobias.

On a wide societal scale, trauma is most often registered in a dissolution of traditional community bonds, a sense of suspension of societal rules and generalized contempt for authority.

Dr. Kuch concluded by saying that the only solution was for psychiatrists to work in concert with other health service providers and social scientists to "replace speculation with information, to turn the light on so that people in the affected society can see the threat, and address it appropriately."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 2, 1996, No. 22, Vol. LXIV

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