A summary of 10 years beginning April 26, 1986
On the night of April 25, 1986, operators at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in the northern part of the Ukrainian SSR conducted a test on the generators in the plant's fourth reactor. In order to run the test, power to reactor No. 4, a 1,000-megawatt RBMK-1000 design, was reduced and its power systems disabled to curtail interference with test results.
The RBMK-1000 has a design flaw that makes operation at low power unstable. At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, realizing that the running of the test had become hazardous, an operator pressed a button to activate the automatic protection system, which should have shut the reactor down.
Instead, power production in the reactor's core surged to 100 times the normal maximum level, causing a drastic increase in temperature. Within seconds, two powerful explosions blew off the 2,000-metric-ton metal plate that sealed the top of the reactor, spewing radioactive debris one-half mile into the atmosphere.
In his article "Ten Years of the Chornobyl Era" (Scientific American, April 1996), Dr. Yuri Shcherbak, Ukraine's ambassador to the United States, wrote that the blasts released both aerosolized fuel, consisting mostly of uranium mixed with plutonium, the most toxic element known, and radioactive fission products - iodine-131, strontium-90 and cesium-137 - into the atmosphere.
Winds carried the radioactive debris north and west, showering radioactive particles over the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Byelorussia and Russia, most of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and as far away as Japan and the United States.
Military personnel and "volunteers" were immediately bused in to contain a fire that resulted from the second explosion. That fire, fueled by the hundreds of tons of graphite which had served as a moderator in the reactor, burned for 10 days. By the end of the summer, over 600,000 clean-up workers would be dispatched to Chornobyl.
Within 12 hours the Soviet government had set up a high-level commission to ascertain the damage to the plant, the largest nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian SSR and the fourth largest in all of the Soviet Union, and to direct recovery operations. A 30-kilometer evacuation zone surrounding the plant was erected. On April 27, the government began relocating the 49,360 residents of the neighboring town of Prypiat.
A full 48 hours would pass, however, before the Soviet government, prompted by the discovery by Swedish authorities of unusually high radiation levels in that country, acknowledged, in a terse, four-sentence announcement by Radio Moscow on April 28, that a nuclear accident had taken place at Chornobyl. It would be another two weeks before Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev provided more details on the accident in a televised speech on May 14.
The West responded to news of the disaster with offers of financial and medical assistance. On April 30, the Soviet government formally refused an offer of aid from the International Red Cross, claiming that it had the situation under control. Ukrainian Americans and Ukrainian Canadians launched mass protests at the United Nations and Soviet diplomatic missions in New York, Chicago, Washington and Ottawa.
In the days following the explosion, the Soviet government did not warn its people to stay indoors, or refrain from drinking tap water and eating fresh produce. Instead, on May 1, authorities in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, 80 kilometers south of Chornobyl, permitted the annual observance of May Day. While hundreds of children marched in a parade honoring the working man, high-ranking officials scrambled to send their children out of the country.
In June, the head of the Chornobyl power plant was fired and expelled from the Communist Party. The chairman of the State Atomic Power Inspection Ministry, the deputy minister of the Power Engineering and Electrification Ministry, the first deputy minister of the Medium-Machine Building Ministry and the deputy director of the Scientific Research and Construction Institute were dismissed as well.
On August 25, during a special International Atomic Energy Agency conference on Chornobyl held in Vienna, the Soviet government tried to rebuild its credibility by reporting more fully on the explosion at Chornobyl, submitting a 382-page report on the medical, environmental and energy consequences of the disaster. The report blamed the accident on human error - workers violating safety measures while conducting an authorized experiment. Five years later, in 1991, the Soviets would admit that a design flaw in the RBMK-1000 was the cause of the explosion. The Soviets claimed that 50 million curies of radioactivity were released in the explosion. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, based on 18 months of research and released in January 1994, however, puts the figure at over 150 million curies.
Six months after the explosion and fire, in October, reactor No. 1 of the Chornobyl plant was put back on line. In November, reactor No. 2 was put back on line, and a 10-story, concrete-and-metal protective casing, commonly known as the "sarcophagus," was completed around reactor No. 4.
Human consequences
In 1986, the Soviet government officially recognized 187 people as suffering from acute radiation sickness, 31 of whom died. Burn victims were treated in Kyiv hospitals as early as April 26, while those suffering from radiation exposure were treated in Moscow by Dr. Robert Gale, a bone-marrow specialist from UCLA. At that time, Dr. Gale was the only specialist from the West allowed to treat Chornobyl victims.
During the IAEA conference held in August, the Soviet government had predicted that in the 70-year period following Chornobyl, 6,500 more people would die of cancer as a result of direct radiation exposure and an additional 30,000-40,000 from indirect exposure from contaminated food supplies.
Ten years later, those figures ring strikingly untrue. Dr. Shcherbak cites the following statistics in Scientific American:
In the four months following the explosion, 135,000 people were evacuated from contaminated areas in Ukraine, Byelorussia and Russia and resettled in temporary housing or new communities. In a herculean, Soviet Union-wide effort, the city of Slavutych was built to house Chornobyl-area evacuees. Today, Slavutych is home to Chornobyl plant workers and boasts a population of 26,000, 11,000 of whom are children.
The 10-year aftermath
In the 10 years following the Chornobyl disaster, new information would continue to arise regarding the dangers of radiation exposure. International institutions like the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the Group of Seven industrial states would offer first Soviet Ukraine and later independent Ukraine assistance in combating Chornobyl's aftermath. Hundreds of Ukrainian community organizations in the United States and Canada would spring up with offers of donated vitamins, medicines and medical equipment. In February 1990, the Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund based in Short Hills, N.J., would launch the first of 16 airlifts carrying medical equipment and supplies to Ukraine.
In 1987, the World Health Organization acknowledged that the explosion at Chornobyl had elicited five main concerns: the contamination of forests, long-term disposal of contaminated topsoil, contamination of lakes, consumption of contaminated food products and the danger of spring flooding bringing contaminated ground water into the river systems.
On July 4-29 of that year, six officials from the Chornobyl plant stood trial for violating safety regulations during the April 26 test; the head of the plant and two aides were sentenced to 10 years in labor camps.
In 1988, the first demonstrations protesting Chornobyl took place in Kyiv in April, November and December. At the December 4 mass rally, speakers Oles Shevchenko of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union and Dr. Shcherbak, then chairman of the environmental association Zelenyi Svit (Green World, formed in 1988) called for full disclosure on Chornobyl by the Soviet government.
By 1990 Ukrainian SSR government officials were publicly admitting that official Soviet secrecy surrounding the Chornobyl accident and its aftermath had given rise to health and environmental problems in Ukraine.
In May, for the first time since the explosion at Chornobyl, the Soviet Union, the Byelorussian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR applied for international assistance to combat the accident's aftermath. The republics turned to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to expand international efforts concerning Chornobyl. On July 13, ECOSOC adopted a resolution that appealed to the international community for cooperation and assistance in mitigating Chornobyl's consequences.
During the summer months, hundreds of Chornobyl children were hosted for medical treatment and recreation in Belgium, Czecho-Slovakia, Cuba, France, Germany, Israel, Poland and the United States.
In the fifth anniversary year of Chornobyl, on January 22, 1991, the World Health Organization endorsed a plan to set up an international center for radiation monitoring and treatment in Obninsk, 60 miles southwest of Moscow.
On February 7, the USSR Procurator General announced that he had launched a criminal investigation into the handling of the Chornobyl accident. He charged that officials in charge of clean-up operations had failed to evacuate people quickly, ignored dangerous radiation readings, used slipshod methods to bury contaminated waste, and built resettlement homes in contaminated areas.
On April 12, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) pledged $100,000 for the creation of an international UNESCO laboratory in Kyiv for the psychological rehabilitation of Chornobyl children. Future UNESCO-Chornobyl projects would include fellowships for radiobiology and radioecology research, preservation of culture in the Chornobyl zone, and the study of safe water supplies and land use in contaminated regions. By 1995, nine psychological rehabilitation centers would be set up in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
On the eve of the fifth anniversary, the State Industrial Atomic Inspection of the USSR released a report which demonstrated that the explosion at Chornobyl was due almost entirely to the design of the reactor and control rods. The IAEA published the 57-page report, "International Chornobyl Project: An Overview," which many Chornobyl experts found incomplete as the agency did not have access to data controlled by a secret department of the Ministry of Health and because the project had studied only a limited group of those affected by Chornobyl.
On April 22-25, the Euro-Chornobyl II conference in Kyiv reported on new medical findings in contaminated regions. It was at this conference that Dr. Gale, who had treated the earliest victims of radiation exposure, announced that "radiation is less dangerous than cigarettes to the population in Kyiv."
On April 26, Parliament issued a moratorium on building new nuclear power plants on Ukrainian territory.
On October 11, an electrical fire broke out in reactor No. 2 of the Chornobyl plant, causing 1,800 square feet of the reactor's generator room to cave in. The reactor was shut down indefinitely.
On October 29, Ukraine's Parliament voted to shut down the Chornobyl plant no later than 1993. Reactor No. 2 was to be taken off-line immediately, while reactors No. 1 and No. 3 were to be shut down by 1993.
Faced with an energy crunch, however, independent Ukraine was forced to restart reactor No. 3 at the Chornobyl plant one year later, on October 16, 1992, despite protests from the European Community. In December, reactor No. 1 also was restarted. (Chornobyl's two reactors produced 5 percent of Ukraine's power; nuclear energy produced 40 percent of Ukraine's electricity.)
In 1994, Alliance, a consortium of French, German, British, Russian and Ukrainian firms led by Campenon Bernard of France, won an international competition to build a "supersarcophagus" over Chornobyl reactor No. 4, whose sarcophagus had begun to crack. It was estimated at the time that design work would cost $20 million to $30 million, and construction, which would take five years, over $300 million. New estimates put the cost of construction at $1.5 billion.
On July 8-10, a G-7 summit in Naples pledged $200 million to close down the Chornobyl plant and strengthen Ukraine's energy sector.
In April 1995, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma made a political commitment to close the Chornobyl plant by the year 2000. On December 20, Ukraine signed a memorandum with the G-7 industrial states that would provide Ukraine with $2.3 billion in financial assistance to close the plant and explore alternative means of energy.
On December 13, the U.N. General Assembly designated April 26, 1996, "International Day in Memory of Chornobyl" and called for improved international cooperation in providing aid for Chornobyl's aftermath.
In April of this year, at a conference held at Columbia and Yale universities, a Ukrainian Cabinet minister revealed that 148,000 people, among them 2,800 clean-up workers, have died in Ukraine as a direct result of the Chornobyl accident.
- Compiled by Khristina Lew
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 21, 1996, No. 16, Vol. LXIV
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