May 13, 2016

Chornobyl+30

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It took 25 years to plan, design and build a fancy and very expensive movable sarcophagus for the Chornobyl nuclear power plant’s reactor No. 4, officially termed the “New Safe Confinement” (NSC). Sometime at the end of 2016, the NSC will be moved to cover the existing primitive concrete and steel sarcophagus that was hastily constructed, between May and November of 1986, in the aftermath of the explosion 30 years ago at the Chornobyl plant. Thousands worked frantically to contain the fire and radiation in that reactor, and many paid dearly for their heroism in the days and weeks after the explosion.

In 1992 Ukraine announced an international competition to design a permanent containment facility. Of the 394 entries, only the British design proposed a novel sliding arch option that was ultimately selected. In 2007, a joint French-Italian consortium was selected to construct the NSC. It will cost close to $2.5 billion, mostly as aid and grants by the European Union and the Group of Seven. As a condition of funding, the G-7 required that the other three nuclear reactors at Chornobyl be decommissioned. Still, there are 15 other reactor units operating in Ukraine today, providing about 50 percent of its energy needs, and several more are under consideration.

Immediately after the catastrophe, Dr. Yuriy Shcherbak noted, in his book “Chornobyl – A Documentary Story” (1989): “…now, every stove in the Polissia region had been converted into a fourth little reactor.” After Chornobyl, the normal manner of staying warm in the winter, and cooking  meals, i.e. burning leaves and wood in stoves, aggravated the dispersal of radiation. Villagers now had to burn expensive coal to stay warm in the winter.

For 5 million people in the surrounding villages, the daily rhythms and routines of life had changed immeasurably. They couldn’t plant their vegetable gardens or gather their mushrooms, eat their chickens or drink cow’s milk. In 1986, everything changed for them, for Ukraine and the USSR. The era of glasnost was just beginning to take shape. For Ukrainians, Chornobyl, combined with glasnost, led to a new democratic awakening and ultimately, to independence.

Thirty years later, what were the costs and lessons of this catastrophe? A 2005 U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) report predicted that about 4,000 will die from long-term cancers caused by the radiation, in addition to the 50 workers who died immediately during the initial containment. The predicted deaths will come from among the 600,000 people most contaminated by the accident – the 200,000 clean-up workers, the 116,000 evacuated from around the plant and the 270,000 residents of the most radioactive areas in Ukraine and Belarus.

For the  millions who still live in the contaminated areas, their daily radiation dose, which is higher than pre-Chornobyl background levels, is considered to be within acceptable limits. According to WHO, recent studies suggest a slight increase in the incidence of leukemia among emergency workers, but not in children or adult residents of contaminated areas. A slight increase in cancers and possibly circulatory system diseases was noted, requiring further evaluation because of the confounding factors of smoking, alcohol, stress and unhealthy lifestyles of Ukrainians that have caused average life expectancy to decline steadily in Ukraine since the 1960s.

“Brave new Soviet world”

In 1986, few people in Ukraine understood the power and danger of nuclear energy. The Soviet system spewed out a barrage of propaganda touting the bright future of nuclear energy. Only the scientists working at Chornobyl understood, but they seemed oblivious to the dangers and arrogant about their technologies, their abilities and their place in this “brave new Soviet world.” Carelessness followed hubris.

Dr. Shcherbak concluded that the Soviet educational and administrative systems, mainly their emphasis on blind obedience and conformity to authority, were to blame, along with the arrogance of the scientific community. “We knew, with certainty, with arrogant certainty, that we were in control of the power we were playing with. This was the day… we learned we were wrong,” said Sergiy Parashyn, a Chornobyl engineer since 1977.

One didn’t need the Union of Concerned Scientists, formed in 1969 by several Western Nobel Laureates, to caution Soviet scientists about the inherent dangers of nuclear energy. Surely the small community of nuclear scientists and engineers in Chornobyl must have known about the comparable nuclear accident at the huge nuclear complex in Kyshtym in 1958. Kyshtym is on the eastern side of the Ural Mountains, not far from Chelyabinsk, where a meteor exploded in 2013.

Vague reports began appearing soon after in the Western press, in 1958, of a “catastrophic accident” causing radioactive fallout over the Soviet Union and many neighboring states. But it was only in 1976 that Zhores Medvedeev made the details of the disaster known to the world. Surely, the nuclear scientists of Chornobyl and the prestigious Kurchatov Atomic Institute must have had some inklings of this accident, and several other smaller events throughout the USSR. At that time, nuclear scientists throughout the world were deeply concerned about safety issues and nuclear proliferation, and Soviet scientists routinely participated in conferences at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) formed in 1956.

Prypiat, not far from the Chornobyl reactor, was a planned community, like Levittown, N.Y., and Columbia, Md. This community was to be the model for the bright future of the Soviet Union. It was great to be living among the chosen elite, working on exciting research on the future energy source of the USSR. On April 26, 1986, the scientists and engineers of Prypiat undertook a series of experiments, tinkering with reactor No. 4 to test its limits.

There was a trial of those accused of being responsible for the Chornobyl catastrophe in July 1987. At the trial, it came out that the experiment which resulted in the accident was part of a series of research experiments devised by higher-ups at the Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute, which resulted in a similar near mishap in 1985. The experiments were initially proposed for the Irkutsk and Leningrad nuclear power plants, but those locations refused and the experiment was transferred to Chornobyl.

Legasov’s reports and suicide 

In 1984, Academician Valery Legasov, who was first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, published an economic analysis on the risks of nuclear energy. He stated unequivocally that there was no risk from normal operations or from catastrophes, such as earthquakes or a plane crashing into a nuclear power plant. He didn’t account for the design flaws of this particular nuclear reactor model, or for the arrogance of his Soviet scientist colleagues.

In June, 1986, Legasov was a key member of the government’s commission formed to investigate the causes of the disaster and to plan the mitigation of its consequences. In August 1986, he presented the report of the Soviet delegation at the special meeting of the IAEA in Vienna, conceding certain human errors and violations of protocol.

On July 29, 1987, after a three-week trial held in Chornobyl, the head of the nuclear power station and two of his aides were sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp – the maximum possible for the disaster. Three other officials received shorter labor camp terms. No higher-ups in the chain of command were charged – i.e., those who insisted on conducting the very risky experiments. It was a cover-up.

Even now, after 30 years have passed, nuclear physicists familiar with the disaster disagree on what went wrong. The only area of agreement appears to be that somehow, when the engineers attempted to slow the nuclear reaction by inserting control rods into the reactor core, the process actually sped up.

On the second anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster, April 27, 1988, Legasov, 51, committed suicide by hanging himself from the stairwell of his apartment. He alone did the honorable thing. Before his suicide, he left a recording revealing undisclosed facts about the catastrophe. Legasov claimed political pressure censored the mention of Soviet nuclear secrecy in his report to the IAEA – a secrecy that forbade even plant operators to have knowledge of, or be informed about, previous accidents and known problems with reactor design.

The secretive and totalitarian system that was the USSR had not allowed its scientists to join the Union of Concerned Scientists or to ponder these philosophical issues, and those of nuclear safety and nuclear proliferation. But, such is the nature of totalitarian regimes: it does not allow its citizens to question “learned” academicians and higher authorities. That’s why Chornobyl happened, and why the Aral Sea is now a lake.

The power of the atom

But a century before Chornobyl, scientists were questioning the power of the atom. In 1886, Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie discovered a series of radioactive elements. A year later, in 1887, Volodymyr Vernadsky, a geochemist by training and the first president of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences (1918-1921), mused about the unknown properties of minerals yet to be discovered and exploited. “…will they not reveal to us a whole series of new powers…and give us opportunities to apply them in new ways and increase tenfold the power of mankind? Is it not possible to arouse unknown, terrible powers in various substances…?”

By 1910, Vernadsky had his answer, after spending a year travelling through Europe and meeting with the top scientists of that era, including the 1903 co-Nobel Physics Prize winners Curie and Becquerel in Paris, to propose an international study of the radiography of the earth’s crust. Vernadsky wrote: “And now, before us, discovered in the phenomenon of radioactivity are the sources of atomic energy, which exceed by a million times all those sources of powers which human imagination depicted to itself. What will happen when we are able to obtain them in any quantity?”

By 1986, the USSR was already disintegrating, hence Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of glasnost and perestroika. The USSR could probably have survived for another decade or so, before collapsing chaotically. Chornobyl may have been a perverse blessing in disguise, for it triggered a political awakening that led to an evolutionary political outcome, rather than transitioning to more chaotic failed state syndrome and civil war. All of a sudden, citizens were openly questioning the actions of their officials and government.

Dr. Shcherbak began Ukraine’s Green Party, and many other quasi-political movements joined. Their widespread cynicism and disgust could not be suppressed, and the public unrest that followed removed whatever fig leaves remained that covered the fiction of the Soviet system. The radioactive clouds of Chornobyl turned into the winds of democracy.

Just as in the “Great Patriotic War” (World War II in Soviet parlance), Soviet authorities indiscriminately threw tens of thousands of its citizens, with minimal protection and even less information into the breach of reactor No. 4 – first to put out the fires, then to build the sarcophagus to contain the radiation. The people of Ukraine and Belarus bore the brunt of the catastrophe, as they had during the second world war. Nor was there much relief from Soviet health authorities in mitigating the health effects of the hundreds of thousands of victims suffering from radiation poisoning. Despite perestroika, their health care system was in shambles and could not cope with the disaster.

Caring for Chornobyl’s victims

During a trip to Ukraine in 1989, to survey the state of care for Chornobyl victims, Dr. Zenon Matkiwsky noted that he was “… appalled to see the Soviet health care system at least 70 years behind that of the Western world. As chief of surgery in one of the major health care systems in the United States, I was immediately struck by the lack of essential medical supplies, medications and diagnostic medical equipment. Most poignantly, we recall the parents and children in the hospitals who seemed to exist in a state of despair.”

The Ukrainian diaspora throughout the world mobilized its resources to assist in whatever way they could. There were scores of individuals in the U.S., Canada and Europe, who provided significant technical, medical and financial aid during the critical early period. I can highlight only the few efforts that I knew well.

First and foremost was the inspirational, dogged and highly effective humanitarian work of Dr. Matkiwsky and his wife, Nadia. They organized and managed the Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund (CCRDF) beginning in 1990. Their rapid response and early aid was critical in alleviating the worst health impacts, primarily among the children. During the 20 plus years of their existence, this ambitious and successful humanitarian relief effort raised over $65 million and organized a series of in-country programs of direct medical aid to the victims of Chornobyl and set up clinics for dispensing medical assistance.

Dr. Ihor Masnyk was director of the Chornobyl Research Project of the U.S. National Cancer Institute. He played a very important behind-the-scenes role in developing post-Chornobyl medical surveys and studies, and providing numerous grants to researchers in the United States and Ukrainian research institutions. Dr. Masnyk designed, funded and managed a broad and innovative U.S.-Ukraine partnership that devised and implemented a series of very important long-term studies on the health impacts of Chornobyl radiation.

One of the medical scientists who worked closely with Dr. Masnyk during that period was Dr. Daniel Hryhorczuk, of the University of Illinois. Dr Hryhorczuk is now professor of environmental health and epidemiology, and until recently was director of the Great Lakes Center of the School of Public Health. He first became involved in Chornobyl studies in 1992, with colleagues in Ukraine, investigating thyroid cancer in the most highly contaminated areas. Through his pioneering work, he obtained a 20-year grant from the Fogarty International Center at the U.S. National Institutes of Health to undertake studies on Chornobyl victims.

The immediate humanitarian assistance of the CCRDF, and the vitally important follow-up medical studies conceived by Drs. Masnyk and Hryhorczuk, and many of their associates and colleagues, helped to minimize a great deal of the worst possible health outcomes of Chornobyl. There were scores of other humanitarians and scientists who assisted the victims of Chornobyl, greatly reducing the projected initial dire health consequences of this radiation disaster.

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