Chernobyl

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CHERNOBYL.

CAUSE OF THE ACCIDENT
HEALTH CONSEQUENCES
HISTORICAL LEGACY
CHERNOBYL TWENTY YEARS LATER
BIBLIOGRAPHY

On 26 April 1986 one of the four nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev, Ukraine, exploded. The explosion generated a huge fire that spewed tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere and made the surrounding towns of Chernobyl and Pripyat uninhabitable. The explosion released four hundred times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Most of the radioactive material fell in Ukraine and the surrounding countries of Belarus and Russia, while lighter contaminated material blew as far away as Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, as far south as Greece and Yugoslavia.

The implications of the Chernobyl explosion lie not only in the fact that it was the worst nuclear accident of the modern age but also that it was a significant trigger for the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the communist bloc. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary at the time of the accident, came to power in 1985 at a time when the world was still dominated by a bipolar geopolitical structure led by the United States and the Soviet Union. For centuries the Russians, during the tsarist monarchies and later under the Soviets, had a tradition of intense secrecy and lack of transparency in their governing bodies. Gorbachev announced a new policy of openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika) soon after he came to power. But old habits die hard, and Chernobyl was a test of Gorbachev's ability to follow through on his promise to be more progressive. Despite the goals for a more open, democratic society, the Chernobyl accident revealed the extremely conservative and rigid nature of the Soviet government. Gorbachev had made a powerful impression on the Soviet people when he first came to office. He was by far the most accessible leader they had ever known. Chernobyl threw Gorbachev off course and he was never able to fully recover.

Firefighters and volunteers were not able to bring the fire and meltdown under control for nine days, and Gorbachev waited for eighteen days before publicly addressing the catastrophe. On 27 April, thirty-six hours after the accident, residents of Pripyat, a town four kilometers away and closest to the reactors, were evacuated. Residents in other surrounding villages were not informed of the accident and continued to go about their daily lives unaware of the fatal levels of exposure. Forty-eight hours after the accident Moscow authorities admitted there had been an explosion but insisted that the radiation situation was not harmful to inhabitants in the area. May Day festivities with parades and speeches in the surrounding villages (except Pripyat) went on as if nothing had happened. Not until after the May Day celebrations, from 2 to 4 May, were more than 100,000 people living in villages within a thirty-kilometer radius informed of the contamination and forced to leave their homes immediately and resettle. On 14 May, in a speech that revealed nothing about the causes or the impact of the accident, Gorbachev slid back into an anti-Western diatribe that claimed the United States used the accident as a launching point for an anti-Soviet campaign. This speech, the lack of transparency in revealing the true extent of the radiation poisoning, the denial and delay in evacuating residents and alerting the world, all added to the Soviet public's deep distrust and suspicion of its leaders.

CAUSE OF THE ACCIDENT

The official explanation for the accident is that it was the result of a flawed reactor design that was operated by inadequately trained personnel. The less publicized explanation for the catastrophe is far more complex and dates back to the Soviet Union's rush to industrialize the nation in the 1920s and 1930s after the Bolshevik Revolution. Dozens of giant hydroelectric plants, factories, and later, nuclear plants were rushed prematurely into service. Historically the Soviet Union's occupational accident rate was the worst of any industrialized nation.

The reactor that exploded was known to have a problematic design structure; there were many of this same model in use and scheduled to be built all over the Soviet Union. The inadequacies and deficiencies of the reactor design were ignored and hidden by managers of the plant in order to fulfill the demands of the nation's economic plans for more nuclear energy. Following the accident, these design problems were acknowledged and no more of this model were built.

HEALTH CONSEQUENCES

The terrible environmental contamination resulted in the forced resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people and the loss of crops and cropland in the rich area of the Belarusian and Ukrainian black earth region known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Over the next year another 300,000 inhabitants were forced to leave their homes and resettle. More than two thousand villages and towns were razed and covered over to prevent further radiation exposure. Hundreds of other villages were abandoned and still lie empty in 2006. Billions of rubles have been spent on the cleanup, decontamination efforts, and the resettlement and health care costs of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffered radiation poisoning.

The long-term health effects of such high radiation exposure are still a subject of intense debate. In 1986 and 1987 an estimated 200,000 "liquidators" from all over the Soviet Union came to help control the fire and clean up the area so the remaining reactors could continue to operate. The workers who were either forced or volunteered to help with the immediate cleanup operation in the early days before the fire was contained either died soon after the accident or died prematurely, primarily from cancer. The other liquidators also suffered high rates of cancers, but there is no conclusive data on all of them. In 2005, a report by a group of experts called the Chernobyl Forum attributed a total of fifty-six deaths directly to the explosion and the immediate aftermath. The Forum also greatly reduced the estimate of subsequent deaths related to radiation poisoning to 4,000 from previous estimates as high as 100,000. Children are disproportionately affected by radiation poisoning because they are more physically vulnerable. Although there have been extremely high rates of thyroid and other cancers among children exposed to the Chernobyl fallout, and very high rates of congenital birth defects and mental retardation, the link between radiation and these health consequences is still debated by nuclear experts in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other countries. As the Chernobyl Forum report reveals, debates about death rates and the effects of radiation poisoning remain inconclusive and will continue for decades after the disaster.

HISTORICAL LEGACY

Because there were many signs of decay in the Soviet economy and society even before the Chernobyl accident, the explosion acted as a catalyst that propelled the Soviet Union toward collapse by 1991. Imminent signs of the breakup included rising national consciousness in the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union, a failing war in Afghanistan that had caused deep-seated anger among the populace, and an economy that had been stagnating and declining for at least twenty years. Environmental damage and its impact on human health were hidden under Soviet rule and never publicly discussed nor acknowledged. For seventy years Soviet policies had wantonly destroyed the environment through the overuse of pesticides and chemicals for agriculture, the rush to industrialize, and the buildup of a militaryindustrial complex to compete with the United States in the Cold War. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl sent shock waves through the country that were irreparable. Chernobyl forced the issue into the public sphere and led to a widespread civil awakening. After the accident, for the first time in Soviet history, civil society spoke up, protesting and forming environmental associations to protect the Soviet Union's remaining natural resources. No peaceful civil gatherings of this nature were allowed before.

CHERNOBYL TWENTY YEARS LATER

After the fire was contained, a concrete sarcophagus was constructed to keep the radioactive material from leaking out. The sarcophagus was supposed to last for twenty to thirty years, but began to show dangerous signs of decay in the 1990s. A new shelter was scheduled to be completed by 2009, which is supposed to contain the reactor and the hazardous material for another hundred years. The remaining three reactors continue to operate. Concerns about possible leaks from leftover nuclear fuel in these three reactors remain.

After the Chernobyl accident the world became far more cautious about the use of nuclear energy and the design of nuclear power plants. International nuclear commissions were formed not only to research and examine the accident and the mechanisms for cleanup but also to ensure that this kind of accident never happens again. Globally, public trust in nuclear energy as an alternate source of power declined dramatically after Chernobyl, and that faith in the potential for nuclear power to solve the world's energy needs has never been fully restored.

See alsoAtomic Energy; Gorbachev, Mikhail; Soviet Union.