FOR THE RECORD: The Chornobyl disaster - a summary after 18 years (11/14/04)

FOR THE RECORD: The Chornobyl disaster - a summary after 18 years

by Dr. David Marples

David Marples, Ph.D., is director of the Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. This paper was prepared for a press presentation at HBO in New York on September 7, which took place before the HBO premiere of "Chernobyl Heart," the Oscar-winning documentary by Maryann De Leo, on September 9.

As reported in The New York Times on September 8: "Ms. De Leo's film "Chernobyl Heart," which won the 2003 Academy Award for best documentary short, is not easy to talk about or watch. It takes the viewer into children's hospitals in Belarus and Ukraine and into the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the reactor. According to the United Nations, birth defects in Belarus have increased 250 percent since the accident, and the lives of the children in the film are tragic."

The documentary was screened earlier this year at the United Nations during commemorations of the 18th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. (See Andrew Nynka's report in our May 9 issue.)

The Chornobyl disaster was the world's worst ever accident at a civilian nuclear plant. Located in the northern part of central Ukraine, in the Kyiv Oblast, the Chornobyl plant was based on an inherently unsafe graphite-moderated reactor - known by the Soviet acronym RBMK - that became unstable if operated at low power. On April 25, 1986, the Soviet authorities had demanded an experiment to see how long safety equipment would continue to operate in the event of a shutdown, dismantling seven safety devices to prevent the reactor from shutting down automatically. A mistake by an operator in the early hours of April 26 led to a sudden power surge and chemical explosion that blew the roof off the fourth reactor block.

Very little information about Chornobyl today is definitive. Most accounts concur that about 50 million curies of radiation were released into the atmosphere. Some scientists, however, have maintained that the amount was much higher, possibly as much as 200 curies. The reactor core, despite efforts to smother it, remained open for 10 days after the accident, releasing radio-nuclides into the atmosphere.

The initial cloud moved in a northerly, northwestern and northeastern direction, contaminating about 80 percent of the territory of Belarus, and later turned south, affecting the northern and western regions of Ukraine. The initial problems occurred as a result of radioactive iodine, but subsequent dangers arose from strontium-90 and cesium-137, which settled in the soil of farming communities in the above-mentioned regions, in the Briansk and Smolensk regions of Russia, as well as westward into Poland and the Baltic states, and the mountain regions of continental Europe and the United Kingdom.

In the former Soviet territories, the area affected by high-level fallout was around 100,000 square kilometers. The greatest impact fell on several groups:

first, firefighters and first-aid workers at the accident scene in the early hours of the morning of April 26;
second those evacuated from designated zones' of a 10-kilometer radius and after May 2, 30 kilometers around the destroyed reactor - and particularly the town for plant workers, Prypiat, located two miles to the north - as well as those subsequently evacuated after 1989, a total of around 500,000 people, some of whom later returned to their homes without permission; and
third, the clean-up crews, first of all commandeered labor from various parts of the USSR, and later military reservists numbering up to 600,000 and working both at the reactor site and in various parts of the 30-kilometer zone.

One should note at the outset some characteristics of the Chornobyl accident that are far too often ignored by Western scientists. First, no action was taken at the local level, as most of the party officials on the spot fled from the scene. The government commission appointed to oversee the clean-up campaign destroyed six pages from the official report presented to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, which concerned the amount of radioactivity released in Belarus, as well as information about radiation fallout in the Briansk Oblast (Russia). Some, but not all, clean-up workers had Geiger counters, but they were confiscated later by the KGB in order that the readings on them were never made public. All health information about the liquidators was officially classified by the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. All those other than the 237 official sufferers of radiation sickness referred to in Soviet reports had their ailments attributed to other factors; mostly they were reported to be suffering from something called "vegeto-vascular dystonia."

Outside the 30-kilometer zone, the population was not even aware of the high-level radiation in the soil until the spring of 1989. Indeed, the Chornobyl clean-up was for a time harnessed to a government propaganda campaign that compared the situation to the victory over the Germans in World War II, except now radiation had become the new enemy.

Because of what was later termed a Soviet-style cover-up, the official death toll of Chornobyl in the first weeks after the disaster is at best highly ambiguous. The figure of 31 dead, including 28 deaths from radiation, never rose even as dozens of other deaths occurred during the ensuing months, including two heads of the Soviet government commission and many clean-up workers. A computer file of health data on accident victims in Belarus simply disappeared.

However, by the year 1990 the Green World ecological association in Ukraine maintained that 5,000 clean-up workers in Ukraine were already dead, and that same figure was cited more precisely by the Ukrainian National Committee for Radiation Protection in 1995, as 5,722 liquidator deaths and 100 deaths among residents of Prypiat, who had taken no protective measures in the first hours after the explosion. By 1996 the Ukrainian Health Ministry put their death toll at 125,000, though not all these deaths would have been related directly to Chornobyl.

The potential death toll from cancer also gave rise to debate and speculation. A report sponsored by the IAEA based on studies of 28 villages in the contaminated zone saw no significant health impact from Chornobyl in 1989. However, by 1990 the incidence of thyroid cancer among children in Ukraine had begun to escalate from a rate of 4-5 per 1 million children in 1981-1985 to 45 per million in 1986-1997, and with 64 percent of the patients under the age of 15 and living in the most contaminated regions. In Belarus the incidence grew even more rapidly from almost zero cases per year in 1985 to more than 300 by the early 1990s.

Today over 6,000 children have the disease, almost all of them born or conceived after Chornobyl, but under the age of 15 (and mostly under 5) at the time, with girls suffering more than boys. Several studies have linked the rise in thyroid tumors directly to Chornobyl, including a German study cited in the journal Cancer (2000) and a Japanese study cited in Lancet in 2001. In young children the cancer shows a high capacity to metastasize into the lymph nodes and other parts of the body.

Clean-up crews who received an estimated dose of 100 mSv in the first decade after the accident have undoubtedly suffered the most. Liquidators also suffered skin ailments, respiratory problems and loss of libido, and suicides among them were common. Anxiety and stress permeated this group and the group of evacuees, as well as those still living in contaminated zones - an estimated 3.5 million people today.

The impact on the economy of the republics affected was exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The costs of Chornobyl in Belarus were estimated by one scientist as 32 entire annual budgets for the economy, but that republic eventually dropped its quota of the total budget devoted to Chornobyl from 22 percent to less than 10 percent. The collapse of the Soviet Union had an enormous impact on the lives of those in the contaminated zones, as the new governments were initially impoverished and, in the case of Belarus, only too anxious to begin re-cultivation of the polluted soil.

By 1991 monitoring of food supplies from contaminated regions had virtually ceased. Indeed, under the Soviet authorities, contaminated food was shipped throughout the USSR in order to spread its impact more lightly and in order not to cause panic. Mostly, the high contaminated regions encompassed farmland, territories that grew flax and potatoes, but cities such as Homiel (Belarus) and Kyiv were also affected. Areas such as Smolensk and Briansk (Russia) received little attention, and the accident did not affect agricultural life in any significant manner.

Politically, the accident saw the disaffection of large communities that resented the official secrecy about the effects of Chornobyl, as well as what they perceived as the concealment of the real picture by the IAEA and other observers who supported nuclear power. A trial of the Chornobyl management in the summer of 1987 was held mostly in camera. The director, chief engineer and several officials received terms of hard labor of two to 10 years (the director and chief engineer were not present at the time of the accident). The Minister of Medium Machine Building (the atomic weapons industry) of the USSR was fired. A new Ministry of Nuclear Power was formed. Civilians took over the management and running of RBMKs, and no more were commissioned. Units 5 and 6 at Chornobyl were abandoned.

More than in any other period of Soviet history, the population took matters into its own hands, mounting demonstrations that led to the closure or stoppage of construction of various current and prospective nuclear power stations, including reactor blocks in Rostov, Armenia, Lithuania, Crimea, Chyhyryn and others. In 1990 the Ukrainian government placed a moratorium on the building of new nuclear reactors.

The informal associations and political parties formed after Chornobyl had a significant influence on the unfolding political events, the rise of the national republics and the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1991.

In the year 2000 Ukraine belatedly shut down the Chornobyl nuclear plant. Yet problems remain, not least with the destroyed reactor unit, the concrete shell over which is collapsing and requires a new roof, a declining population affected with an acute rise in general morbidity, high infant mortality rates and a decrepit health system.

Chornobyl changed the way the people in these regions viewed the world, destroyed communities, and left families in a state of profound psychological anxiety and stress. Dr. Yuri Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, once remarked that the people now see life in two eras: before and after Chornobyl.

Eighteen years later, Chornobyl's aftereffects are still felt.

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