Chornobyl: the 20th anniversary debate (04/23/06)

THE 20th ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHORNOBYL NUCLEAR DISASTER

Chornobyl: the 20th anniversary debate

by David R. Marples

Twenty years after the worst industrial accident in history, we are as far away as ever from any definitive conclusions about its effects. Chornobyl was a difficult accident to monitor, first because of the secrecy of the Soviet regime, which classified much of the data available, particularly on health and casualties; second, although the Soviet authorities agreed to share some information with the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations body that it had joined in 1985, and which from that point took on the role of the leading international institution dealing with Chornobyl, the IAEA lacked credibility in some quarters; third, because of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the formation of 15 independent states only five and a half years after the catastrophe; and lastly because of the profound psychological effect of the accident that for different reasons has prevented any consensus as to its effects.

Let us examine briefly each of these aspects in turn, before analyzing the conclusions of the two main scientific reports released in conjunction with the 20th anniversary.

The secrecy of the Soviet regime

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of the way in which the Soviet regime operated. It had successfully concealed several earlier accidents, including the explosion of an atomic waste dump in Kyshtym in 1957, as well as an accident resulting in the release of significant amounts of radiation beyond the confines of the station at Chornobyl's No. 1 reactor on September 9, 1982. The latter was only revealed with the release of documents filed by the Ukrainian KGB in 2003, but spread radiation at least 8 miles beyond the confines of the Chornobyl nuclear plant.

This innate secrecy is also evident in the discussions among Politburo members that took place after the Chornobyl accident, particularly on the number of early victims, the number of people seriously irradiated, the number of people moved to various hospitals, and concerning responsibility for the mistakes that led to the two major explosions that blew the roof off the fourth reactor building.

This same secrecy was applied to the current radiation situation surrounding the plant and health information, and resulted in the classification of subsequent deaths. No information was made available about the thousands of volunteers who came to Chornobyl in the first days and weeks afterwards to assist with the clean-up operation, and prior to the arrival of the military reservists that we today term "liquidators." In Belarus, a computer file listing "victims" of Chornobyl mysteriously "disappeared."

Chornobyl occurred prior to the onset of glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev and, in fact, may have served as the catalyst to glasnost. Ukrainian KGB documents indicate that the serious flaws in the RBMK-type reactors were well-known to the scientific authorities, and that the official optimism regarding the safety of the nuclear power industry was not mirrored by the reality at the building sites.

Even after the accident, there were serious problems during the clean-up campaign, such as the lack of Geiger counters, or the presence of Geiger counters with only limited scales so that overexposure was commonplace. The workforce became almost mutinous, such was its dissatisfaction with conditions, including the lack of clean clothing or even showers after a day spent removing radioactive deposits. Official information was misleading - the most notorious example is the Ukrainian Health Minister Anatoly Romanenko advising people to go and swim in the Dnipro River - or could not be trusted.

Precisely because of the lack of faith in official reports, particularly by the late 1980s when both Belarus and Ukraine had begun to develop their own informal associations dealing with Chornobyl and other issues, the cooperation between the Soviet authorities and the IAEA was flawed from the beginning. The problems started with the Soviet report on the causes of the accident to the IAEA in Vienna, which blamed the accident solely on human error and ignored the various design flaws. They were compounded by the 1988 suicide of Valery Legasov, the disillusioned scientist who had led the Soviet delegation at that time, and whose memoirs issued posthumously reflected his deep anxiety about the safety of the RBMK reactors.

The IAEA was never accepted outside the scientific community of the affected nations as an impartial arbiter into the effects of the accident mainly because of its role as a promoter of the development of civilian nuclear power.

The IAEA and the Chernobyl Forum Report

The IAEA's role, as an integral part of the United Nations, has been to promote the safe operation of nuclear power, as well as to safeguard the world from random nuclear proliferation. The agency has played a role in the authorship of several scientific analyses of the effects of Chornobyl. It also continued to monitor improvements made to the station after 1986, but had resolved by 1994 that the Chornobyl reactors were inherently dangerous and that the plant should be shut down.

Ukraine complied six years later, after difficult negotiations with the G-7 countries and the European Bank to ensure that it would get some form of compensation for taking this step, as well as starting up new reactors, Khmelnytsky-2 and Rivne-4, both VVER-1000-type reactors. The new capacity would match the loss of the two remaining reactors at Chornobyl after 2000, namely the first and third units.

The scientific studies promoted or authored by the IAEA have appeared on or just prior to significant anniversaries and have generally sounded an optimistic note regarding the health effects and direct link between enhanced radiation to the affected population and illnesses arising.

The most recent account, authored with seven other U.N. agencies (including the World Health Organization), as well as with selected departments from the governments of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, has been the Chernobyl Forum Report (2005), which like earlier reports has suggested that the overall health and environmental impact of the disaster was less than initially feared.

The main conclusions of the Chernobyl Forum Report are as follows: up to 4,000 people could eventually die from radiation exposure from the accident, but by mid-2005 fewer than 50 deaths had resulted. Some 2,200 deaths are to be expected among the 200,000 liquidators who were in the area in 1986-1987, and 4,000 children have contracted thyroid gland cancer, but the number of deaths among them to date has been only nine. The most important health effect from Chornobyl has been the impact on mental health and psychological concerns, and a critical aspect has been poverty and the problems caused by evacuations. The report called for redefining contaminated zones and stressed that programs introduced to help Chornobyl victims should not promote dependency among the population.

Though the report did not receive lasting media attention in the West, the general reaction was fairly critical. It also elicited strong and adverse reactions in the three countries of its concern, including from government officials and institutions, despite its claim to be representative of these same governments. The adverse reaction reflects in part the often disparate views and research of different government agencies in the three post-Soviet countries most concerned.

Several leading scientists and doctors are reportedly putting together an alternative version of the impact of Chornobyl that disputes the Chernobyl Forum Report's conclusions. It will posit that the number of deaths from long-term cancers will exceed 30,000 (a further report from Greenpeace has cited a figure of 90,000), and that among those 2 million people classified as Chornobyl victims - evacuees, liquidators, those living in zones contaminated by radioactive cesium - up to 500,000 already have died.

Among liquidators specifically, this alternative report suggests that 34,499 who took part in the Chornobyl clean-up have died subsequently, according to Mykola Omelianets, deputy chairman of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine. Many died of cardiac arrest, and their deaths have fueled a new debate about the links between radiation and heart disease.

Evheniya Stepanova of the Ukrainian Scientific Center for Radiation Medicine claims that infant mortality has increased 20 to 30 percent since 1986 as a result of chronic exposure after the accident, and that cancers, genetic mutations and leukemia are overwhelming the Ukrainian health authorities. The alternative report also lists various other diseases that have emerged in the contaminated regions, including as far west as the Rivne Oblast. Nearly one in three babies born in this area has deformities, most of which are internal.

How is it possible that such contrasting pictures, all based on scientific data, have emerged? Equally problematic has been the attitude of IAEA spokespersons to such reports. For example, one official responded to the Ukrainian scientists' findings with the questions: "Do they have qualified people? Are they responsible?"

These questions encapsulate the fundamental problems of the U.N. agencies today, namely the propagation of science as a monolithic concept in which only one version of events has any credibility. In this way the IAEA and other allied agencies - especially the World Health Organization - have perpetuated a negative stereotype of their activities that began with the investigation into Chornobyl, particularly when they are not prepared to discuss views contrary to their own.

The Chernobyl Forum Report has been criticized also for its nebulous language, its omission of the long-term impact of Chornobyl radiation outside the three countries studied (which would have an impact on the long-term casualties as well), and the way it has accepted at face-value some of the patently false - as now demonstrated by newly released archival documents - information issued by the Soviet government about immediate casualties and the extent of the radiation fallout, particularly the attribution of Chornobyl-related deaths to other causes.

Above all, the elitist attitude of the Chernobyl Forum spokespersons tends to belie what is a very detailed and overall credible report in some respects Nevertheless, the notion that this report or any other on the 20th anniversary can be described as definitive is naïve and non-scientific.

The collapse of the USSR

The collapse of the Soviet Union led to immediate economic and financial problems in the newly formed states that had a negative impact as far as attention to Chornobyl was concerned. Centrally planned schemes simply collapsed, even though the new governments in Moscow, Kyiv and Miensk vowed to work together to deal with the massive health and environmental problems that developed. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus took markedly different attitudes to Chornobyl.

For Russia, it represented an important but not the most significant environmental problem. Contamination was widespread but affected only 0.5 percent of the Russian Federation.

For Ukraine, besides widespread contamination, the key issues became a new moratorium on the commissioning of new reactors and the shutdown of the plant and eventual construction of a new shelter over the destroyed reactor. These issues were clearly undermined by the sudden and almost catastrophic economic decline that occurred in the early years of independence. The economy was also affected by the strong environmental movement (Zelenyi Svit, led by Dr. Yuri Shcherbak and Dr. Dmytro Hrodzynskyi) that brought about the abandonment of many reactors under construction, including completely new programs at Chyhyryn, Crimea and other locations.

For Belarus, on the other hand, the effects of Chornobyl were almost overwhelming, with about 80 percent of the republic initially affected by fallout of radioactive iodine and about one-fifth contaminated with longer-living radio-nuclides. A republic of 10 million people could hardly have been expected to deal alone with a catastrophe on such a scale. At one point Chornobyl-related issues occupied more than one-fifth of the entire health budget of Belarus.

The fall of the Soviet Union has tended to obscure the administrative aspects of the Chornobyl disaster: the fact that two Moscow-based ministries controlled civilian nuclear reactors prior to 1986: Medium Machine-Building and Power and Electrification. The former ministry was responsible for the atomic weapons program and thus for the conversion of the RBMK for civilian purposes. The Ministry of Power had to oversee a vast program under the auspices of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) to build nuclear power stations throughout the western USSR and Eastern Europe that could all be harnessed to the MIR grid.

The Ministry of Atomic Energy was founded only after the disaster in 1986. Nuclear power was transferred to the same frenetic timetable that typified Soviet industry in general. Corners were cut. Reactors were constructed in unsafe regions - including earthquake zones - and without adequate safety mechanisms, including fallout shelters and adequate evacuation procedures. Emergency shutdowns were frequent, and there was a dearth of sufficiently skilled personnel.

After the dissolution of the USSR, however, all these difficulties were exacerbated. Most of the well-qualified nuclear experts moved from Ukraine to Russia. Belarus did not have an operating nuclear power plant, the full effects of Chornobyl were revealed much later than in other republics, and the number of medical victims was too high even to monitor adequately.

The psychology of Chornobyl

The Chernobyl Forum Report has focused on psychology, and with justification. From the outset, Chornobyl was an accident that elicited extreme emotions. Soviet reports compared the drama with that of the second world war, except that this time the enemy was invisible.

The evacuations were traumatic enough, but many of the 350,000 people who left their homes between 1986 and 2000 found life in their new environs very difficult. Often they were not welcomed. Local residents thought they were infectious, others were incensed that they were occupying apartments that others had awaited for years. Many could not adjust to life in a new home. Jobs and careers were also difficult to find.

For those who remained behind, the situation was equally difficult. They were visited by teams of scientists, reporters, filmmakers and others. They began to attribute all illnesses to Chornobyl, to decline to have families and eat properly, and often fell victim to alcoholism. All these facts are well-known, and they form part of the Chornobyl syndrome. The Chernobyl Forum Report maintains that a dependency on the state has developed.

It could be equally determined that such dependency was an integral part of the Soviet system and has been consolidated in the post-Soviet period, at least in Belarus with its dictatorial government that has forced students and military reservists to re-cultivate contaminated land and persecuted scientists for research studies that contradict the official version of an accident that has been overcome.

What is manifest by 2006 is that there are at least two parallel scientific conceptions of Chornobyl that do not make contact with each other. There is, in addition, a large body of opinion that distrusts any information provided by the IAEA as lacking in objectivity. This complex rift undermines efforts to come to terms with the alarming health problems among the population affected by Chornobyl, which no one doubts are much more serious than 20 years ago.

The affected population includes 80 percent of young children classified as "not healthy," a significant rise in childhood diabetes, pervasive respiratory and digestive illnesses, and, above all, heart disease, in addition to the one illness that has been accepted universally as a consequence of Chornobyl - thyroid gland cancer among children, which encompasses around 10,000 children today (not the 4,000 specified in the Chornobyl Forum Report).

Aside from thyroid gland cancer, are these massive problems linked to a rise in radiation, background (low-level radiation) or have they resulted from other factors? It is still open to debate, but the traditional comparison with the victims of Hiroshima appears to be inadequate and even irrelevant in many respects. The results are very different. Among liquidators the various ailments and subsequent deaths could also be the direct consequences of high-level doses, many of which went unrecorded. To what extent are traditional lifestyles blamed for psychological problems and stress today? And could stress be considered a medical illness that results from enhanced radiation rather than forming a response to it? There is at least one study from France that posits so.

Unfortunately no definitive answers have emerged to these questions.

It is clear nevertheless that the health problems in the contaminated zones are considerably worse than in "clean" areas, and that the incidence of morbidity and infectious diseases is far higher than it was 20 years ago.

Conclusion

What we do know 20 years on is that the effects from Chornobyl continue to have an enormous impact on the affected population of between 5 million and 7 million people. The number of precise deaths probably cannot be known, but the figure of "less than 50" to date is not taken seriously by most analysts. Conversely, there are also a number of victims who have survived heavy doses of radiation, including firemen, first-aid workers and even operators at the scene of the accident.

The accident changed irrevocably the landscape, economy and habitation of a large zone of forests and agricultural land. It had a limited negative effect on the development of nuclear power in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but ultimately it did not halt existing programs or preclude new and even more ambitious programs for the longer term.

The Chornobyl region has been depopulated, and the loss of the 350,000 evacuees has been further complicated by internal migration from the affected regions, leaving many empty villages and tracts of land.

The shelter has yet to be erected through an international consortium, but costs are already over $1 billion.

Lastly, the principal victims of Chornobyl today are now young adults or people of middle age. Thyroid cancers affected primarily children born or conceived before the 1986 accident. Liquidators today are in their 40s and early 50s. Like all victims of the disaster, they tend to perceive the world as an epoch divided by the event: before Chornobyl and after it.

Nothing was ever the same again.

David R. Marples is professor of history and director of the Stasiuk Program on Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. He is author of 10 books, including three on Chornobyl, with others on Stalinism in Ukraine, contemporary Belarus and the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the University of Alberta, he was awarded the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research in 2003 and a Killam Annual Professorship in 2005-2006.

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