Ten Years After Chernobyl: A Witness to the Devastationby Joanne Dufay, Greenpeace CanadaIn the early hours of April 26th, 1986, operators at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant noticed that things were going drastically wrong in the core of reactor number four. They began an emergency shutdown - a procedure which takes just 20 seconds. Too late. Seven seconds after the shutdown began, a massive explosion took place in the reactor and the 1,000 tonne lid was blasted aside. Fire and steam billowed into the control room and a huge column of radioactive steam and debris shot high into the air. As the flaming debris landed, it started more than thirty fires and the cloud of radioactivity travelled northwest, contaminating the environment as it passed across the Ukraine, Byelorus and the Russian territories. Even more distant countries were affected - on the Canadian prairies people were advised not to drink rain water or un-monitored ground water, and in Britain, even today, some farms are still under orders not to produce certain crops because of radioactive fall-out from Chernobyl. More than 30 people at Chernobyl died as an immediate result of the accident. The long-term consequences of the Chernobyl explosion are not yet fully known, but already the toll has been horrific. The World Health Organization estimates that the blast released 200 times more radioactive material than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Large areas of land are still unusable and the governments of the three most affected countries state that nine million people have been affected by the accident. Perhaps most tragically, the children exposed to radiation are showing huge increases in certain types of cancer and other illnesses, the situation is expected to get worse. In early February, 1996, Greenpeace's Joanne Dufay visited Chernobyl. Ten years after the accident, here is what she experienced. There is a thirty kilometre ring around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant which is known as the "Exclusion Zone". Initially set up to cordon off the most severely affected areas and limit the human exposure to radiation, it also serves as a reminder of the awful human, environmental and economic costs of a nuclear accident. Passing through checkpoint at the border to the exclusion zone I had expected to see few signs of life, as all the residents of this huge area were evacuated after the disaster. In fact the snow-covered countryside showed a remarkable degree of human activity - much of it focused at cleaning up the worst contamination. Sadly, though, some of the footprints that we saw in the snow were from people who have chosen to move back into the area. I spoke with one elderly woman in the small village of Opachichi, within the exclusion zone. "Why did you move back?" I asked. "Do you have bread in your country?" she replied. She receives a pension of just $10 a month, but here in the almost empty countryside she can grow her own food and the authorities provide her with bread and other staples in an attempt to limit her consumption of radioactive produce from the land. The administrators of the zone tolerate about 600 people who live in this way. Most are elderly, but we were told that in the summer many have their grandchildren stay with them, sometimes for weeks. Ten kilometres from the reactors there is another border - this time more secure - and another checkpoint. Everyone had to take off the outer layer of clothes and don protective gear. This appeared to be somewhere between a formality and window-dressing, only for visitors. The administrator accompanying us did not change, and the brand new decontamination centre with its rows of empty lockers is not for the people who work in the zone - they are not given access to a similar safety procedure each day. In a different bus (to avoid taking the worst contamination out of the area) we approached the reactors from the south. Stopping several times to check radiation levels we had a good view of the power plant. Reactors 5 and 6 were under construction at the time of the accident. They sit surrounded by cranes, unfinished and too contaminated to work on. The partially completed towers looked almost elegant above the power plant's cooling ponds, steaming as the warm water met the -12 C air. The cement sarcophagus which encases reactor number 4 dominates the view from the north of the plant site. I noticed it had recently been painted black. This fresh coat of paint gave the impression of neatness - that things were being looked after and somehow under control. But looking up it was clear that the real problem had not been addressed. Our radiation meters gave the clearest indication that all is not well, and no amount of paint will help. Standing 300 meters from the sarcophagus we detected levels of gamma radiation 30 to 50 times the normal background dose - and this after extensive clean up measures. Even more alarmingly, the levels will be three times higher in the summer - without the thick snow to keep the radioactive dust down.
Ironically, it is the reactors themselves which are the most concentrated site of human activity. About 6,000 people work there now. Despite significant safety concerns from the International Atomic Energy Agency, reactors one and three continue to function - and the Ukrainian Government plans to re-start unit two this summer. One and two are even older than the unit which exploded. Unit three is identical to the now entombed reactor four, and sits back to back with it in a duplex arrangement. I wondered how the operators felt, facing a wall and knowing that operators just like them once sat on the other side in a mirror-image room. I remembered an engineer from Ontario's Pickering nuclear power plant telling me about his visit to the same reactor. "It was such a simple, safe design," he said. "A design that made me think nothing could go wrong." The engineer had been visiting Chernobyl as part of a Canadian aid package in 1994. The aid package involved supplying Canadian technology for the storage of nuclear fuel rods -- technology which was directly responsible for enabling reactors one, two and three to continue operating. The politics are hard to ignore. A 1995 aid package which was signed in Canada this year by the G7 countries (United States, France, Japan, England, Germany, Italy and Canada) provides money for building new nuclear reactors in exchange for closing down Chernobyl, but it does not provide for clean-up or help with the human and environmental consequences of the disaster. And it does not address the reality that there are non-nuclear ways for Ukraine to meet its energy needs. Outside the administration building at Chernobyl there is a statue of Prometheus. Prometheus, according to Greek myth, stole fire from the heavens, gave it to humans and was punished severely for his deed. After seeing the consequences of a nuclear disaster, ten years after Chernobyl exploded, Prometheus seems an appropriate metaphor. As a colleague remarked "The nearest safe nuclear reactor is 93 million miles away - it's the sun." Chernobyl was the world's worst nuclear accident to date - but it's not the only one and almost certainly won't be the last. The near-melt down at America's Three Mile Island facility in 1979, only 200 miles from New York City, is known as the worst commercial nuclear accident in United States history. A sequence of equipment malfunctions and operator errors lead to the accident and industry officials attempted to cover up the full extent of the accident, and the amount of radioactivity released into the environment has never been ascertained. The reactor was permanently shutdown. Other accidents at the Sosnovy Bor reactor in Russia, Japan's Monju fast breeder reactor, Argentina's Atucha reactor, Spain's Vandellos reactor, and France's Superphenix fast breeder reactor and Canada's NRX reactor in Ontario, all demonstrate the potential for future nuclear accidents with catastrophic human and environmental costs. Given the safety risk of nuclear reactors, the fact that nuclear power is more expensive than other forms of energy and the immediate need for a global commitment to alternative forms of energy for the future, Greenpeace is campaigning to end the nuclear power threat and to work for safe, clean energy alternatives. Please join us in this effort. |
