Turning the pages back... April 21, 1996 (04/25/99)

April 21, 1996

Turning the pages back...

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Chornobyl catastrophe, a conference titled "Chornobyl: Ten Years After" examined the multifaceted consequences of the world's worst nuclear accident, its effects on public health and the environment, its social and political impact, energy alternatives for Ukraine, and the response from the international community. Sponsored by the Chornobyl Challenge '96 coalition, the commemorative conference was hosted at Yale University by the Council on Russian and East European Studies and the Chopivsky Family Foundation, and at Columbia by The Harriman Institute.

The April 21, 1996, issue of The Ukrainian Weekly reported on the conference's major revelations:

Dr. Vladislav Torbin of the Ministry of Chornobyl and the Medical Department of Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers provided an updated official figure on the number of deaths in Ukraine directly attributable to the Chornobyl accident. Since the meltdown at the nuclear power plant through the end of 1995, 148,000 persons, among them 2,800 liquidators, had died in Ukraine alone.
Dr. Alexander Sich, a nuclear engineer who lived and worked at the Chornobyl complex for 18 months, reported that the accident management actions taken in the first days after the nuclear disaster were ineffective or were not accomplished as reported by the Soviets. In particular, the helicopters dumping boron, lead, sand and other materials into the reactor core had largely missed their target and the core remained mostly uncovered. In the end, the reaction in the stricken reactor simply ran its course within 10 days, and the active phase of the accident came to an end. Dr. Sich also reported that the amount of radioisotopes released as a result of the accident was at least three times, and possibly four times, the 50 million curies originally reported by Soviet authorities.
Crusading journalist Alla Yaroshinska of Moscow, who in 1992 uncovered secret protocols of the Kremlin that proved the Soviet leadership knew much more about the severity of the Chornobyl accident than it admitted, said there is no doubt that a "global deception was under way" as the Politburo had made a political decision to take steps to make the consequences of the Chornobyl accident seem less severe. For example, the government made great efforts to get hospitalized people released. The Politburo's minutes indicate there were 10,000 persons hospitalized in Ukrainian hospitals in the first two weeks after the accident, and the Politburo decided to raise the lifetime permissible dose of radiation by 10-fold, and in some instances 50-fold. Thus, in an instant, she noted, "all these people were deemed to be healthy." Different information was released to the press for internal consumption and for dissemination abroad. "There were different levels of deception" for the internal USSR audience, for the Warsaw Pact states and for the West, she said. The two-day conference also featured opening addresses by Dr. Yuri Shcherbak, Ukraine's ambassador to the United States, and Anatolii Zlenko, the country's ambassador to the United Nations, as well as luncheon speeches by Ivan Kuras, deputy prime minister for humanitarian affairs of Ukraine, and Volodymyr Yavorivskyi, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament who has been intimately involved with the Chornobyl issue since day one.

Ambassador Zlenko provided some sobering statistics regarding the aftermath in Ukraine: 3.5 million persons, nearly one-third of them children, were affected by the disaster; 160,000 were resettled, which means that 50,000 families lost their homes. The ambassador cited a figure of 6,000 dead, but cautioned that the exact figures are unknown.

What is known, however, is that "there will be lasting consequences," Mr. Zlenko stated. For example, 800,000 liquidators, mostly young men sent to "eliminate the consequences of the accident," now face an uncertain future in terms of health. "Chornobyl is not in the past. Chornobyl lives with us today, and it will be with us in the future."

Source: "Yale/Columbia conference examines latest information on Chornobyl's impact" by Roma Hadzewycz, The Ukrainian Weekly, April 21, 1996, Vol. LXIV, No. 16.

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