Most of the arguments, much of the tone and many of the actual participants were unchanged: this was an event which was pretty similar to hundreds of others held over the past 20-odd years.

Of course some things are different. Over the years, it may be that more of the world’s educated people have come to believe in the climate catastrophe theory. What is striking is that the powers-that-be seem to accept that (having tested the proposition) there is a real but quite slight will to act on the matter amongt their peoples. Arguably, command and control polities will be able and willing to act more decisively than the democracies. In the past 20 years, I hazard, politicians have been chastened by their voters’ reluctance to care much. In short, when push comes to shove, climate concern is, as it always was, an elite concern.

The other big thing which has happened is that, at least in the UK, nuclear power has become less unattractive to elite (and some green), and even mass, opinion. Fukushima may have dented this shift a little for now, but its effect may be quite short-lived.

So far as we know, nega-watts (conservation) and low-carbon mega-watts are less attractive or more expensive than fossil fuels at least for now. Working out which will work best will take some time, and had better be done as cheaply and conveniently as possible if the public is to support the adventure. As a right-winger and a pragmatist, I reluctantly accept the solutions will necessarily be mandated by government, but should involve as little government intervention, and as much market implementation, as possible.

Nuclear is the obvious odd man out. Right now, it could do a huge amount of heavy-lifting, whilst alternatives really get sifted and effective. We might have what one might call the French option: a large-scale technology which delivers lots of low-carbon electricity, probably at greater expense than its fans suppose but fairly safely, barring accidents.  I have no idea how the public will balance the near-certainty of the occasional nuclear catastrophe against their reading of the horrors of climate change. So far, they seem to face both with some equanimity. My assumption is that – rationally and fairly - the more one takes climate change seriously, the more one has to accept that the occasional Fukushima is worth enduring.

It is tempting to suppose that a small population of nukes is useful and poses a statistically smaller risk of catastrophe. But one might argue that several issues – both technological and managerial - might tempt one toward doing a lot of nukes effectively rather than a few ineffectually.

One curiosity. I noticed that several participants felt that if the public didn’t “get” climate change or the horrors of nuclear or the need to conserve energy, or more spending on cleaner energy, then that was a failure of communication. Maybe. I prefer to suppose that the public has understood a fair amount and just doesn’t care much. More communication might make them care even less.

Another curiosity. A couple of people said that the next wave of persuasion ought to be amongst women, as though females were less persuaded than men but might become better activists for the cause once they were. I said, good luck with that. It seems to me that women are, on the whole, rather less inclined than men to get engaged in rather abstract issues such as climate change and insofar as they do, consider it quite narrowly from the point of view of their own families. And, oh, I added jauntily, modern mothers seemed more inclined to argue (within the family) for a bigger Chelsea Tractor to keep their little ones safe than (out there on the hustings) for  more bike lanes.

But I want to be clear. My un-PC remarks about women were what they were. A bad joke, say. My scepticism about climate change enthusiasm, however, does not flow (I think) from my politics (or sense of humour) but from my reading of the politics of my fellow citizens. That’s why I think it bears repeating: climate change policy must be as cheap and convenient (and as useful on many counts) as possible. That sort of policy may not work very well, but nothing else stands a chance of happening at all. That I am, as a right-winger, drawn to such a point of view should not blind people to its chance of being an accurate account of reality.

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Here’s a v short YouTube video of an RDN visit to the surviving Chernobyl plant in 2005.

You may be interested in Chernobyl’s cancer death toll, and an account of that appears here.

Jeremy Nicholl, the distinguished British photographer based in Moscow, took an unequalled range of pictures of Chernobyl for the Independent on Sunday. His site is worth a visit. 

If you’re kindly interested in my personal take on Chernobyl, read on…..

My interest in Chernobyl really began in 1995 when I was invited on a press trip to Chernobyl organised by my friend, the PR Paul Seaman, who was seconded to the plant to prepare the ground for the West’s revived anniversarial interest in the disaster. I spent several weeks researching the issue, and especially asking IARC and NRPB specialists about the cancer effects of the 1986 disaster. The rather upbeat result was published in the Independent on Sunday Magazine in April 1996. Perhaps because I checked my facts with the scientists I quoted, this account has never been challenged.

The the expert discussion of long-term cancer and other health effects from the Chernobyl disaster is phenomenally difficult to assess. It depends on bad data (so the epidemiology’s a nightmare) and heroic assumptions about the effects of radiation (so the toxicology’s a nightmare). I give my best reading of the material in #9 of my mini-essays on Chernobyl.

A few dozen of Chernobyl’s remarkable people died in the immediate aftermath of the accident in April 1986, mostly after firefighting and plant management work (very similar to what we have seen at Fukushima). Some more died in the following years. Many, many more Chernobyl staff (many new to the plant after the accident) kept on working or living in the immediate vicinity of the disaster-site, most of them in the surviving nuclear power stations, some of which ran until 2000. So far as I know, there are perfectly healthy. The undamaged reactors went on working until 2000, and since them have employed people in dealing with spent fuel and plans for decommissioning of plant.

 Then there are the thousands of people who were moved away from the 10- and 30-kilometre exclusion zones,  and had to make new lives. Amongst the most extraordinary are those who wouldn’t move or who began to return. For a flavour of all this (highly coloured, since it’s a thriller), I recommend Wolves Eat Dogs, a crime novel by Martin Cruz Smith.

I also recommend Piers Paul Reed’s Blaze and Grigori Medvedev’s The Truth About Chernobyl.

Chernobyl is an extraordinary place and many extraordinary people have worked there and work there still. I’ve been there twice and loved every moment of the visits. This is tricky. A lot of suffering has happened at and because of Chernobyl. It is not more beautiful than the rest of its region. One should be careful before one celebrates places of disaster, dereliction or desertion (and Chernobyl is all three). One might descend into the kitsch, or the mawkish. 

There is a further issue. Chernobyl (as Martin Cruz Smith taught me) is a place with layers of sadness: it was a scene of the murder of Jews, for instance. Those of us who know nothing of the place but its nuclear disaster project all kinds of things on to it, but we have also hijacked the very name of the place.

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Much of what happened at Chernobyl in the early hours of 26th April 1986 is clear.

The plant’s senior management had undertaken a required safety test – an experiment, really – on the reactor in Unit 4, and it went disastrously wrong.

There was a least one explosion of hydrogen gas and a huge blast and fire which wrecked the reactor’s highly-radioactive core and blew it and its protective concrete shield onto their sides. The roof of the building (never designed as a shield) was ripped off and, in the intense heat, a funnel of highly radioactive material – metals, gases and building fabric – was shot a mile high into the sky. A plume of radioactivity spread patchily, mostly north-west. An aberrant sub-plume dumped stuff in an area to the south west of the plant.

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The reactors at Chernobyl were RBMKs, which moderate their fission processes with graphite and are cooled by water. Hence their common Western name: LWGR, or light-water graphite reactor.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/rbmk.htm”>http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/rbmk.htm

It was a type unusual in the West but was common throughout the old Soviet Union, not least because it could be adapted to produce weapons-grade uranium as well as heat. Its design had an inherent weakness: the reactors needed to be managed with special care when at low power.

The two year old Unit 4 was a version of the station’s four Soviet-designed RBMK plant Though up-to-date, it was not built to the highest standards, and some of its safety devices (especially a particular emergency switch and its circuitry) were dangerous in that they did not do what their name implied.

But design flaws and faulty manufacture did not cause the explosion. The accident happened because a fatal dose of bad management was added.

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In some sense all errors are human. Reactor 4’s design made it fallible, but Soviet secrecy made it impossible for its designers to explain the weaknesses of their work. Soviet bureaucracy also made it likely that the reactor might not be well built and maintained. If top people were over-confident (at least in public), junior people were over-confiding, and had to be so in private as well as in public.

The design and planning elites were secretive about their failings. The plant’s managers were both rule-bound and aware that many rules were flawed and had to be over-ridden in some circumstances, including on the fatal night.

The Soviet elite and their servants
The RBMK was designed and managed by the elite of a sprawling network of institutes, ministries, and military organisations, some of which over-lapped, and all of which thrived by their ability to deliver the goals of the most senior echelons of the Communist Party, which itself had complicated and competing channels of power.  

Mostly designed within powerful institutes run by powerful Academicians of the soviet science establishment, the RBMK reactors went on to be built and run by ministry officials, many of the most powerful of whom worked with the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which was a secretive military-industrial complex with covert operations, and which controlled cities and plant throughout the Soviet Union. But there was also a competing energy ministry (which actually ran the Chernobyl plant). All these bodies were committed to maintaining a supply of nuclear-generated electricity.

The designers not only produced a fallible reactor, but they wrote a manual for its operation which diverted attention away from its weaknesses and helped its operators miss the warnings signs about them.  

This was a culture in which senior people, including designers, were not frank with the people who had to work their machinery and those who ran the machinery could not rigorously interrogate the designers.

There was little regulatory tension. Though following the Three Mile Island scare in the US one Academician had been charged with producing an institute with a regulatory role, it was weak. There was no-one outside the nuclear bureaucracy charged with seriously challenging it, and certainly no challenger who was feared as much as those demanding that power keep flowing.

It would be quite wrong to paint these people as careless or stupid. Far from it, there was idealism, intelligence and passion in many of them. Unit 4 blew up because it was routine to try to improve safety procedures. The same Soviet apparatus which produced the April 26 accident, also managed a vast amount of nuclear generation with few major accidents (though it denied those it had). It was a similar apparatus, after all, which first put a man in space, and has always been able to service its space stations.

Alcohol was probably as important as subservience in defining how things used to be run. And then there was the problem of over-manning, which ensured that whilst there was a very large team to run everything, elementary good sense required that how the real power structures worked, and who the real workers were, be clear and understood.

But within their lights, almost everyone was conscientious. In a typically Soviet manner, they were required to be obedient, politically-correct, but capable of ducking-and-weaving as well.

Indeed, one might argue that every country produces a nuclear elite which mirrors the strengths and weaknesses of its national culture. It became fashionable to argue that what the Soviet Union most lacked was a “safety culture”, and there’s merit in the argument. This is to say that everything everyone does around the plant should be predicated on alertness and caution. There is a sense, too, that an industry cannot have a safety culture unless it is institutionally challenged by regulators. Actually, even a “safety culture” may produce its own problems: for instance, a box-ticking devotion to precaution, with imagination gradually stifled. Anyway, for intelligence, ingenuity and courage, it would be hard to beat the Soviet machinery which found itself with the Chernobyl accident on its hands. We see that, arguably, in the extraordinary response of the soviet system to the crisis.

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For several hours, they sent out messages to their staff and bosses saying that there had been an accident, but nothing catastrophic, in terms of physical damage or radiation releases. Meanwhile, the first-responders – fire crews – valiantly and conventionally fought the conventional fires which had broken out around the plant. They had no anti-radiation protection and several died hideous deaths within hours, days and weeks.

Partly because they misunderstood what had happened, and partly because they seem not to have understood the nature of their plant, the plant’s managers attempted to cool the burning reactor by flooding its lower regions with water. This turns out to have been somewhere between redundant and disastrous.

Because officials sought to reassure their citizenry, which was enjoying a May Day celebration at the time, the dormitory town’s 50,000 people were not warned that the fire they could see from their windows was highly dangerous. Outdoor life at Pripyat went on as usual, and ensured that many more people – especially vulnerable children – got an elevated dose of radiation. For most, this was not particularly hazardous, though many children did go on to develop thyroid cancer.

As dawn broke on 27 April (30-some hours after the accident), in a swift and well-organised evacuation, 1100 buses emptied Pripyat with the minimum of outdoor exposure for the inhabitants. Arguably, the timing of this process was ideal.

Meanwhile, the USSRs nuclear elite from top to bottom threw themselves into understanding and tackling the crisis. Senior people descended on Chernobyl and largely took over from the local managers.

Military helicopters and crews took on the hazardous work of “bombing” the reactor with sand and boron. This was the beginning of several months intensive work in which hundreds of thousands of men were deployed to handle radioactive material. Some, working with the most highly radioactive materials, could only operate for few tens of seconds before being exposed to the maximum permissible dose.   

Within the 30 kilometre zone immediately around the plant, one could argue that the necessary work was done. There are places which are hazardous, and a few of those are not properly marked. But it is reasonable to suggest that – granted the available resources and the desire not to over-expose workers – a pretty good and even a very remarkable job was done.

However, and it’s a big however, this relaxed view probably depends on accepting that the 30 kilometre zone ought to stay a No-Go or at least a heavily controlled area. This has advantages, however. It is probable that the decommissioning of the reactor waste at Chernobyl will not be done to a “green field” standard, and therefore the whole area will probably always require strong security measures.

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The design elite could only then hand their plans over to builders who worked in a system both corrupt and inefficient. The resulting plant could only be operated by a technological class which wanted to shine in front of its masters, and dare not question them.

There were highly educated people all along this chain, but they were working to production targets and in the dark.

By definition, everyone in this chain of processes was compromised. They would not have survived without being alert to the main chance.

The lower you look in the chain of command, the more trust and obedience of, say, the station’s control room operators was both impressive and dangerous. Some of them rather bravely questioned some of the steps towards disaster. They did their best as they pressed their buttons and flicked their switches. As you go up to the shift managers, and as the test went wrong, you find people who did their best to see past the increasingly redundant manuals and tried to work out what to do in the increasingly uncharted circumstances which were unfolding. When you arrive as high as you can go within the plant, you find the people who authorised the tests with a quite scary lack of awareness of their potential danger. But even they were diligent.

One might argue that culpability should rest at this level, within the plant’s senior managers. They authorised a test whose riskiness it was their business to understand, even if the power structure around them resisted questioning. But they could argue that the tests were part of unfinished business from the reactor’s commissioning and that they were fulfilling a duty.

Besides, it is arguable that at this level – within the plant – there was no-one with the authority to doubt the bland confidence and reassurance which came from the plant’s designers and the authorities which ordained that RBMKs were safe and robust.

In the end, the Soviet regime only branded as criminal half dozen people, all at plant level, and did not distinguish between their seniority. But many other much more senior people did feel the cold winds of official disapproval, even if amore propre often required that they stay in their posts.

What’s more many senior people within the old Soviet system felt intensely guilty about their role in the accident. One of them – and very far from the most blameworthy amongst them – killed himself.

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Chernobyl became part of the means of beating the dying old regime (and later its memory) but it also became a rallying point for the nationalism of the newly-independent states of Belorussia and Ukraine and a means to secure funding for them.

So, in the late 80s, the new owners of the Chernobyl plant – the Ukrainians – found it convenient to note that the plant had been designed, built and run (and regulated) by a Soviet system whose real power lay in Moscow. It was often convenient, in those years, to push for approaches which seemed “Ukrainian”, and designed to help Ukrainians, rather than  “Soviet” and designed to suit the system.

Thus, for instance, it suited Kiev to claim that Moscow had been dilatory about evacuation of contaminated people and places – and to press for action. But actually, it was very far from clear that evacuation made much sense.

Chernobyl and the end of the Soviet Union

In the last years of Soviet rule, it suited the USSR to claim that there was no safe dose of radiation. It was able to cover up its own nuclear accidents and their fall-out, but to emphasise both the dangers of accidents such as Three Mile Island, in the US, and of nuclear warheads (which it said it was keen to dismantle in the face of US intransigence)…

In the last years of Soviet rule, it suited the USSR to claim that there was no safe dose of radiation. It was able to cover up its own nuclear accidents and their fall-out, but to emphasise both the dangers of accidents such as Three Mile Island, in the US, and of nuclear warheads (which it said it was keen to dismantle in the face of US intransigence).

Come the Chernobyl accident, and there were varied responses within the Moscow elites. The immediate problem was to mobilise the forces of the state to stop the fire, seal the station, help the afflicted, and manage the news. All but the last were quite well done (though mistakes were of course made).

The state had to decide where to lay the blame for the accident. But almost as big was the problem of deciding what the consequences were, and – very differently – what to say about them.

The decision was taken to lay the public blame for the accident as far down the chain of command as possible – that is to say, on the ChNPP management and staff. In private, the state punished more senior designers and planners. But in public, the overwhelming blame attached to people working at the plant.

Once that was done, it became safer to admit that the consequences were serious. Indeed it fitted the pattern of discussing radiation as a diabolical force (which, in very different circumstances, the West might well unleash).

What is more, so far as the consequences went, it suited both the West and the Soviets to stick as closely as possible to some agreed “facts” about the consequences.

Chernobyl and Western politics

Many Western politicians were in no mood to beat-up Moscow too severely about the Chernobyl accident. They were mostly quite keen to support Mikhail Gorbachev as a man one “could do business with” (in Margaret Thatcher?s words), and who was trying to take the USSR in broadly the right direction…

Many Western politicians were in no mood to beat-up Moscow too severely about the Chernobyl accident. They were mostly quite keen to support Mikhail Gorbachev as a man one “could do business with” (in Margaret Thatcher’s words), and who was trying to take the USSR in broadly the right direction. They thought he was being quite open about Chernobyl and that his being so was a sign of improvement on a wider front. Piling on the agony might backfire by slowing his wider political progress.

The Western public, however, were alarmed, and highly precautionary measures were taken when the radiation from Chernobyl reached northern Europe. At least in the UK measures which were arguably excessive (very strict controls were put on meat produced on “contaminated” grass, with very little evidence that anyone faced anything like a problem from it).

But there was another reason why Western leaders were anxious not to overplay Chernobyl. While they did not believe that it was likely to be replicated in their own countries, no-one could say that such a thing would not happen. And in any case, anxiety about radiation was something which could get out of hand, whatever its source. Western leaders, on the whole, had a good deal to gain from a rational approach to this hazard.

But whilst some countries (Sweden, Austria and Germany, in particular) became more or less officially anti-nuclear, many – including some which said they wanted to renounce it – were stuck with running nuclear power. In many countries, it was not a technology which could be safely rubbished. Nor could they risk exaggerating the effects of its radiation, whether planned or not.

They neither wanted panic about Chernobyl’s fall-out nor increased anxiety about the risks of Western nuclear power stations.

There was a good deal of concern about the risks – real and imagined – of Soviet (shortly to be ex-Soviet) nuclear power stations, not least the remaining three plants at Chernobyl.

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It happens that the United Nations has always been the location of a pro-nuclear body, the International Atomic Energy Authority, which seeks to oversee civil nuclear power and to limit the degree to which it is used as a source of fissile material for military use.

Almost immediately after the accident, Moscow agreed to discuss the Chernobyl accident – its causes and consequences – within this forum. This approach had the merit for all parties that it was not overtly political and was overtly scientific.

Focussing attention on this forum seems to have involved a sort of deal: Western governments would not criticise the Soviets for causing the accident, and the Soviets would be as open as possible about their handling of its consequences.

This was a sensible approach because not only was the accident history (and there was no point crying over split milk); but

• Moscow did respond fairly well to the accident;
• Moscow did agree with West about the effects of the fall-out;
• Moscow did agree to modify the RBMK (not least with Western help);
• Moscow did embrace the idea of a “safety culture”.

The UN’s response

From the start, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Authority sent task forces to Chernobyl, Belorussia, Ukraine and other affected parts of the Soviet Union. It held meetings of Western and Soviet experts in Kiev and Vienna, and issued reports. This process continued after the fall of the USSR.

The results were often disputed. The greens hated the relative optimism of the reports. So too did Ukrainian nationalists, who for various reasons were inclined to think that the reports understated the damage down to their innocent fellow countrymen by an oppressive Soviet regime.

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1986, August: UN-IAEA-USSR assessment meeting, 25 August (and an IAEA  document INSAG-1)
This was the crucial meeting at which Soviet specialists gave a surprisingly frank but still slanted account of the causes and effects of the accident. It seems to have provided the acceptable common ground which allowed the West to work with the Soviets as honest partners in the cleanup.

The western experts accepted that the USSR had been right to evacuate the 50,000 inhabitants of Pripyat, and people from the 30-kilometre Zone around the plant. They accepted more reluctantly that it may have been right to evacuate 135,000 people from land under the “plume” or radiation. They accepted that children had received iodine (which should have guarded them against thyroid cancers), though they were worried about the doses and timing of the medication.

Editor’s note: I can’t find this online now, 2011

1988, May: Kiev meeting of Soviet and international health experts
The scale of the disaster was presented for perhaps the first time. Soviet scientists admitted that “17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously affected areas of Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine. 135,000 had been evacuated from Pripyat and the 30-kilometre zone. Pregnant women and as many as 350,000 children had been sent to sanatoriums, rest homes and Pioneer holiday camps”. [a316] 25,000 square kilometres of land and 2,225 towns and villages were affected – 1,846 in Belorussia alone. [a320]

The Soviet scientists insisted, though, that the initial assessment of casualties remained accurate: 31 dead, with 209 under observation for varying degrees of radiation sickness. But, said one: “One must say definitely that we can today be certain that there are no effects of the Chernobyl accident on human heath”. A318

Editor’s note: I’m afraid I can’t now find the reference for the quotes above. But there is a useful NYT account of the upshot of the conference’s work:
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/23/world/fear-of-chernobyl-radiation-lingers-for-the-people-of-kiev.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

1992: IAEA:  IAEA  document INSAG-7 (updating the earlier INSAG-1)
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pdf

1996: Chernobyl, IAEA Bulletin, Volume 38, Number 3 – a report of the International Chernobyl Conference, Vienna,  April 1996
http://www-ns.iaea.org/projects/chernobyl.asp

2005, September: UN assessment, Chernobyl’s Legacy: health, environmental and socio-economic impact
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf

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