After the explosion, 50,000
“liquidators” were sent onto the roof of the reactor to “clean up” the surface.
Lethally close to Chernobyl,
the abandoned city of Pripiat in Ukraine.
Testing the levels of soil
contamination in the exclusion zone.
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The world’s first
radioactive reserve
In the weeks after the accident, coniferous
trees and mammals that ate ground vegetation received the highest doses of radiation.
Trees died and were buried by the liquidators. Cows grazing heavily contaminated
grass near the reactor died. So too did most of the mice in the exclusion zone. Most
intriguingly for scientists, the survivors were almost all female. Only after four
generations did male numbers begin to recover.
Mona Dreicer, a U.S. researcher who collated material for a major international conference
held on the Chernobyl aftermath in 1996 (Vienna), says that levels of radioactivity
in surface soils had fallen by a factor of a hundred by the autumn of 1986, and “by
1989 the natural environment had begun to recover.” Badly damaged conifers were making
cones again and the rodent population was growing fast.
Today, the roll call of wildlife includes wild boar, elk, deer, foxes and some 200
wolves. The list of animals failing to return is relatively short: pigeons and rats,
which rely on human leftovers to flourish, as well as swallows, which have apparently
fallen prey to genetic disorders.
But the region remains heavily contaminated, particularly soils, vegetation, the
tree wood and leaf litter on the forest floors that cover roughly a third of the
exclusion zone. The zone has become, in effect, the world’s first radioactive nature
reserve. It is a fantastic laboratory to analyze the impact of radioactive fall-out.
Yet says the head of the reserve, Nikolai Voronetsky, most researchers have avoided
travelling there, fearing for their own personal safety. It is not surprising, perhaps.
Three out of a team of ten botanists who visited in 1986 are now dead, he says.
Voronetsky’s own researchers have shown that the internal organs of the wolves and
most other creatures remain radioactive. The wolves are particularly worrisome as
they stray outside of the reserve, hunting for sheep and horses. The boar tallied
the highest geiger-counter readings, says Vorontesky, because they dig into contaminated
soil in search of food.
Rosa Goncharova of the Institute of Genetics and Cytology in Minsk says that she
has observed increased “genetic anomalies” in rodents and fish in the contaminated
zone. Dreicer downplays such reports. “The frequency of these reported defects was
shown to be similar in highly contaminated and non-contaminated regions... Leading
to the conclusion that they were not due to increased radiation dose,” she says.
But critics see this as UN “spin.” For one thing, you would not expect a close correlation
between defects and crude fall-out levels because, as Dreicer herself has pointed
out, the vagaries of local soils can lead to grazing animals receiving high doses
even in areas that had low fall-out.
There are many ways that radioactivity can “leak into the wider environment.” Earlier
this year there were fears that fires raging across peat bogs in the contaminated
zones could unleash radioactive clouds of smoke. The U.S. embassy sent a team to
check for fall-out, but reportedly none was found. Water, however, has proven to
be a serious conduit for contamination.
During spring flooding, concentrations of radioactive materials in local rivers increases
by up to four times. In fact, the contaminated zone had been flooded six times since
the accident, each time washing radioactive material down river, especially along
the banks of the Pripyat, which drains into the Dneiper and ultimately the Black
Sea. With nine million Ukrainians drinking water from reservoirs on the Dneiper and
many more eating food irrigated by the river waters, a European Commission report
has concluded that radioactive water is the most important environmental threat still
posed by the accident.
Fourteen years after the disaster, radioactive materials are remaining mobile within
soils and ecosystems much more than scientists had expected. Jim Smith of the British
government’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology reported in May this year that “the
environment is not cleaning itself of the pollution at the rate we previously thought.”
In places, he said caesium was being “re-released into the ecosystem” as the Chernobyl
legacy begins a new cycle.
F.P.
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Just how bad was the world’s worst
nuclear disaster? The answer lies hidden within a web of politics and scientific
uncertainty enmeshing the UN and eastern European governments
 A sigh of relief ripples across Europe as
engineers prepare to shut down Chernobyl, the world’s most feared nuclear power plant,
on December 15th. Politicians have finally brokered a deal in which Western donors
foot the bill of about two billion dollars to close and fully entomb the Ukrainian
reactors. Yet for many ordinary citizens, the nightmare continues.
Just a few months ago, on April 26th, thousands marched solemnly through the towns
of Belarus, Ukraine and eastern Russia to commemorate the dead from the nuclear disaster
14 years before. At 1:26 am bells tolled to mark the moment when a Chernobyl reactor
blew and a deadly radioactive fall-out began to blanket their fields and towns.
But as well as mourning, there was fear. Fear of the continuing radiation, which
could claim thousands more. And fear of speaking out of turn. That night, Yuri Bandazhevsky,
rector of the Gomel Medical Institute in Belarus until his arrest last year, was
in forced internal exile in the capital of Minsk. He is one of many researchers who
say their work has been suppressed or ignored by governments anxious to play down
the radiation risks their citizens still face.
Estimates of the death toll to date range from the 32 offered by UN
nuclear scientists to the 15,000 suggested by some Ukrainian researchers. In June,
scientists at the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of
Atomic Radiation (unscear) reported that “there is no evidence of a major public
health impact attributable to radiation, apart from a high level of thyroid cancer
in children [from which] few should die.” Yet the previous day the UN
Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, appeared to disagree when he said: “The catastrophe
is far from over. It continues to have a devastating effect not only on the health
of the people, but on every aspect of society.” So what is the truth? And how do
these disparities arise?
The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant reduced the Number Four reactor
to an inferno spewing out a radioactive cloud for ten days. It released a hundred
times more radioactivity than the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
For several days there was total silence, before the panic evacuation of some 116,000
people from an exclusion zone that stretched up to 30 kilometres from the plant.
Only years after the accident did the public learn that a larger zone some 150 kilometres
away near the Belarus town of Gomel and extending into Russia suffered heavy fall-out
in rain shortly after the accident. It emerged in 1989 that a fifth of Belarus had
been significantly contaminated. Some 400,000 people were resettled. And today around
four million people still live in areas with some acknowledged contamination.
Official secrecy inside the Soviet Union and its successor governments about the
extent of the contamination continues to bedevil the task of keeping people safe,
says Greenpeace’s Chernobyl specialist Tobias Muenchmeyer. Researchers inside the
affected countries agree. “A regime of secrecy was accepted in our country from the
very first second the catastrophe happened,” says Vladimir Chernousenko, the Ukrainian
scientist who co-ordinated the post-accident clean-up.
A partial information blackout by governments, combined with scientific caution,
has helped lead UN agencies into seriously underestimating
the death toll, Muenchmeyer believes. Critics of the nuclear industry such as Rosalie
Bertell, president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health in
Toronto, say there is another political reason. They point to a 1959 agreement between
the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, which said
that “the IAEA had the primary responsibility for encouraging, assisting and co-ordinating
research on, and the development and practical application of atomic energy.” According
to Bertell, “the IAEA has since considered itself to be the watchdog over information
about radiation health effects which is distributed to the public.” Bertell and other
organizations this year called for the who to amend the agreement.
The most important radioactive isotopes released at Chernobyl were iodine and caesium.
Iodine-131 has a half-life (the time it takes for half the atoms of a radioactive
isotope to decay) of eight days. It was mostly inhaled and eaten in contaminated
food. Caesium-137 has a half-life of some 30 years. It is still present in soils
and vegetation and continues to contaminate people through foodstuff. Some lesser
isotopes have half-lives of hundreds or even thousands of years.
Controversy
over the casualty list
Who suffered? In the front
line were the “liquidators”–the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 soldiers and public
employees drafted in to make the reactor safe and bury contaminated waste. Some 50,000
of them worked on top of the reactor. “They were supposed to stay on the roof to
fight the fire for only 90 seconds, then be replaced. One can easily guess this did
not happen,” says Jean-Pierre Revel, senior health official at the International
Federation of the Red Cross. As a result, 237 liquidators were hospitalized; 32 died.
But since then, the Soviet Union and its successors have been unable or unwilling
to keep track of this most-at-risk group. According to Leonid Ilyin, a former Russian
member of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, “none of these
men was registered by name. None was checked [for subsequent health] on a regular
basis. They all went back to their homes.” This failure is probably the largest organizational
cause of the disputes over Chernobyl’s death toll. Last April, Viacheslav Grishin,
president of the Chernobyl League–a Kiev-based organization that claims to represent
the liquidators–said 15,000 liquidators had died and 50,000 were handicapped. His
source was a controversial estimate by Chernousenko, based on likely cancer rates
from radiation doses that he believes the liquidators received.
Cancers have been the biggest long-term medical fear. By 1991, doctors were reporting
many cases of thyroid cancer among children under four at the time of the disaster.
In 1992, a group of Western researchers, including Keith Baverstock of the who, agreed
that Chernobyl was the likely cause. Yet it was only in 1995, after some 800 cases
had emerged, that the UN system formally accepted the finding. This
delay had serious implications in finding and treating the disease, which is not
fatal if caught early enough.
Playing
politics and crushing dissent
The conclusion had been
initially controversial partly because the evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggested
that there should be far fewer cases. But politics also entered the equation. The
Economist magazine speculated that “if the health risks have been underestimated
or understated, the American government could face new lawsuits on everything from
the Nevada [nuclear] tests to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.”
At any rate, there are now some 1,800 recorded cases of thyroid cancer attributed
to Chernobyl. In the most contaminated districts, such as Gomel, childhood rates
are 200 times those in western Europe. Estimates of the total number of cases expected
to arise in the future range from a “few thousand,” suggested by the IAEA, to the
66,000 predicted for a single group–Belarusian children under four at the time of
the disaster–by who scientist Elisabeth Cardis, who stressed that “the risk estimates
are very uncertain.”
What about other cancers which take longer to develop? Officially, the who stands
by its assessment of 1996 that while “there have been some reports of increases in
the incidence of specific malignancies in some populations living in contaminated
territories and in liquidators, these reports are not consistent and could reflect
differences in the follow-up of exposed populations.” But some of its scientists
are sceptical. They ask not what can be proved, but what can be expected on the basis
of known science.
Based on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Baverstock expects an “excess” of some 6,600 fatal
cancers, including 470 leukaemia cases. But a team of Belarusian doctors claims to
have found leukaemia rates four times the national average among heavily exposed
liquidators. And there are fears that, as with thyroid cancer, rates could be far
higher than expected.
But scientific uncertainty should not detract from the fact that there are political
reasons why the truth about the disaster may remain hidden, says Muenchmeyer of Greenpeace.
National governments, who act as gatekeepers for most of the statistics reaching
UN
agencies, have a political agenda, he says. The Ukraine is running 14 nuclear reactors
with another four under construction, according to the IAEA. “So the Ukraine doesn’t
want to ruin the image of nuclear power by stressing the harm done by Chernobyl,”
says Muenchmeyer, “but they also want aid for health programmes. So then they are
interested in showing the burden. Often they contradict themselves within a few days.”
The Belarus government has consistently downplayed the disaster, even though the
country received an estimated 70 per cent of the fall-out. “They decided that the
territory and the number of people affected are so great, and the government so poor,
that they cannot solve the problem. They decided to shut down dissent,” says Muenchmeyer.
This has hampered research and apparently prevented findings by local scientists
from reaching UN agencies.
Two years ago, Rosa Goncharova of the Institute of Genetics and Cytology in Minsk
reported evidence that congenital abnormalities were turning up in the children of
those irradiated by Chernobyl. She told a conference that since 1985, cases of cleft
palate, Down’s syndrome and other deformities had increased by 83 per cent in the
areas most heavily contaminated, 30 per cent in moderately contaminated areas and
24 per cent in “clean” areas.
But two years later, when contacted for this article, Cardis of the WHO said she
had “not received copies of the paper” by Goncharova. Nor had she received copies
of work by the director of the independent Belarusian Institute of Radiation Safety
(Belrad), Vasily Nesterenko. He had found that in the most contaminated areas, the
incidence of diseases of the circulatory system had risen fourfold and deaths among
children from respiratory diseases were up 14-fold (see interview).
The dangers
of the twilight zone
And consider the fate of
Yuri Bandazhevsky, whose case has been taken up by Amnesty International. As rector
of the Gomel Medical Institute, he carried out autopsies at the city’s forensic morgue,
on bodies whose deaths were not considered connected to Chernobyl. He examined their
internal organs and compared them to the organs of rats that he had fed grain containing
radioactive caesium. He was shocked by his findings: “The pathological modifications
of the kidneys, heart, liver and lungs was identical to those among the experimental
rats.” From this he concluded, “that accumulation of radiocaesium in the organs played
a major role in the triggering of pathological responses.” In other words, it made
them ill and even killed them.
His paper went ignored. His subsequent criticism of the post-Chernobyl research conducted
by the Ministry of Health brought him more enemies. And last summer he was arrested
on unspecified bribery charges, and locked up for six months. His computer and all
his files were confiscated and he remains confined to Minsk “under investigation.”
People are still being exposed to radiation from Chernobyl. In large areas of Belarus
in particular the environment is still heavily contaminated. The who says “some foods
produced by private farmers do exceed [who limits].” But it points out that most
large farms minimize take-up of radioactivity in soils by deep ploughing and applying
fertilizers. “No food produced by collective farms now exceeds the limits.”
But thousands of people rely on private farms, according to Belrad’s Nesterenko,
who maintains that a quarter of the food grown inside the contaminated zone supersedes
official radioactivity limits. More than 500 villages are drinking contaminated milk.
Moreover, many people rely on “wild” produce such as mushrooms, berries and hunted
meat–the most risky food of all says the who’s Baverstock.
And, of course, there are the people who return to live a twilight life inside the
exclusion zone, replanting their contaminated gardens, gathering food from the forests
and raiding abandoned food stores. Most are old women, who judged that the radioactivity
could do them little harm at their age. But there are recent unconfirmed reports
of a baby being born there. The tragedy, as Kofi Annan said, goes on.
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