PRIPYAT, Ukraine
Before the fire, the vomiting, the deaths and the vanishing home, it was the promise of bumper cars that captured the imagination of the boys.
It will be 30 years ago Tuesday that Pripyat and the nearby Chernobyl nuclear plant became synonymous with nuclear disaster, that the word Chernobyl came to mean more than just a little village in rural Ukraine, and this place became more than just another spot in the shadowy Soviet Union.
Even 30 years later – 25 years after the country that built it ceased to exist – the full damage of that day is still argued.
Death toll estimates run from hundreds to millions. The area near the reactor is both a teeming wildlife refuge and an irradiated ghost-scape. Much of eastern and central Europe continues to deal with fallout aftermath. The infamous Reactor Number 4 remains a problem that is neither solved nor solvable.
[…]
“We knew this,” he says. “Three years earlier we’d sent out a warning to all plants with reactors with these absorbers, warning of this problem. But no actions had been taken. This was our arrogance at the time. We believed we were the masters of the atomic reactions. It was a horrible mistake.”
When Chernobyl’s operators raised the control rods into the reactor to absorb the flying neutrons and slow down the reaction, the action took only about 15 seconds to complete. But in those seconds, the reaction, instead of slowing, sped up and the temperature inside the reactor reached 3,000 degrees, turning the water used to cool the uranium into steam.
In the sealed environment of the reactor, the steam had no place to expand. That’s when the roof blew, and an estimated 10 tons of the 200 tons of enriched uranium blasted into the atmosphere.
After the roof blew, the walls collapsed and the superheated uranium melted and consumed all that fell into it. The long-term problem was forming, a 2,000-ton mass of metal, concrete and uranium that was pooling below the reactor.
But that was a long-term problem. The more immediate concern was the 10 tons of enriched uranium streaming into the atmosphere above Chernobyl, and spreading out in all directions over northern, eastern and central Europe. Eventually, a scientific report commissioned by the European Parliament would estimate that, to some extent, Chernobyl radiation contaminated 40 percent of Europe.
The time was 1:23 a.m. The world had changed. But those sleeping just downwind had no idea.
[…]
Earlier, in the dark, the bridge had been crowded with adults watching the multicolored flames of burning graphite from the reactor. They’d “oohed” and “aahed.” It was beautiful. They’d also been soaking up a radiation dose determined to be about 500 roentgen, or two-thirds of a fatal dose. The legend is that none of those who stood on the bridge that morning survived.
Sirota says that isn’t true. He survived. He saw others who survived. Still, as he left the bridge, he was leaving behind many who would soon die agonizing deaths.
All told, about 4,000 people would eventually die from the accident, according to a report by the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Others say those numbers are wildly low. Alexey Yablokov, a former environment adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, estimated the global death toll to be 1.44 million. Other reports placed the cancer death totals at 30,000 to 60,000. Belarusian physicist Georgiy Lepin, a vice president of the association of liquidators of Chernobyl, the men brought in to fight the fire and clean up, estimated that within a few years, 13,000 rescue workers had died and another 70,000 were left unfit for work. The official number of disabled Chernobyl rescue workers today in Ukraine is 106,000.
A United Nations study says that “5 million people currently live in areas of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine that are contaminated with radionuclides due to the accident; about 100,000 of them live in areas classified in the past by government authorities as areas of ‘strict control.’ ” About 4,000 people, mostly children, developed thyroid cancer from the radiation, the U.N. says; the survival rate for the cancer is 99 percent.
[…]
All of central and eastern Europe was at risk. Even today, in Bavaria in southern Germany, wildlife officials warn hunters not to eat the meat of wild boars, which continue to show high levels of radiation contamination.
Across Europe, children were advised to stay indoors that April and May. In East Berlin, shoppers were astonished to find grocery shelves teeming with fresh lettuce, which usually would have been sent across the wall for wealthier West Berliners. But West Berliners didn’t want the tainted stuff, so East Berlin had salad.
Chernobyl changed the way nuclear engineers viewed nuclear power. “Safety culture” – the idea that protecting the people and the environment should be emphasized over all other goals – became the watchword.
[…]
Sirota had hoped beyond reason to gain it back when a few years ago he bought a small house at the end of a gravel lane just outside the the exclusion zone imposed around the old reactor. Move the modest but sturdy house across the pasture and it would be inside an area identified as unsafe for human habitation for the next 3,000 years.
There are several reasons he moved back to the area. For one, his house, on a decent plot of land, cost the equivalent of just $125. Even in poor rural Ukraine, that’s cheap.
It would be even cheaper inside the exclusion zone. Ukrainian officials are known to have turned a blind eye to a small group of very poor, and illegal, residents who returned to the homes standing inside the forbidden zone. Officials estimate that 197 squatters hide there. And for short spells, workers can live inside the zone. There’s even a hotel for overnight visits.
[…]
Sirota worries, but he’s drawn to this place. He lives with a Geiger counter around his neck. He carries a second one in case the first malfunctions.
The constant clicking as the Geiger counter measures the local radiation serves as a soundtrack to his life. The faster the clicking, the higher the radiation levels. When the clicking goes into overdrive, he moves on, to find a place where the levels are safer.
Even at home, resting or cooking, the clicking is constant, click . . . click . . .click.
His work these days is showing visitors around the irradiated area. A couple of days a week he passes through the heavily guarded gates into the contaminated zone. It’s how he earns a living.
“People want to see this,” he explains. “I can understand the curiosity, but there isn’t much to see.”
[…]
Reactor Number 4 today is essentially an unplanned nuclear-waste dump. To serve in that role requires it to last for 3,000 years. That means the area surrounding Chernobyl will be safe to inhabit by people again in the year 4986.
How likely is that? To get an idea of what it means to contain and control a deadly and potentially devastating radioactive pile in Ukraine for 3,000 years, consider what the world looked like 3,000 years ago:
The Iron Age was beginning. The Trojan War was fairly recent news. Egypt had Pharaohs. King David was succeeded by his son, Solomon. Canaanites were the big world traders. Christ was 1,000 years from showing up. Muhammad was 1,500 years away.
The legendary founding of Rome, of Romulus and Remus and the wolf, wouldn’t take place for 300 years.
It’s not simply that a lot has changed in the last 3,000 years, it’s that almost everything has.
And yet, Detlef Appel, a geologist who runs PanGeo, a Hamburg, Germany, company that consults on such nuclear storage issues, notes that 3,000 years probably isn’t long enough. He suggests that truly safe radioactive waste storage needs to extend a million years into the future. Think back to when man’s earliest relative began to walk the Earth.
