Chernobyl: an 1996 assessment

I wrote this for the Independent On Sunday Magazine, April 1996

This piece was the result of several weeks research amongst conventional and open sources such as the UK's National Radiological Protection Board and the UN. That was followed by my participation in a press trip to the site of the accident which was organized by the Chernobyl plant's operators and the Western nuclear industry, and funded by the latter.

It is fair to say that it is the most up-beat piece that had ever appeared about Chernobyl.

Piece begins:
In a northern corner of the now-independent Ukraine, the River Pripyat wanders through marshlands on its way to the Sea of Kiev, a vast inland lake. It is 120 kilometres from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, and shares borders with Russia and Belorussia.

This is the region which blasted itself out of obscurity when an industrial site named after one of its towns, Chernobyl, became infamous. In the small hours of April 26, 1986 Chernobyl reminded people that nuclear power could go badly wrong. It released radiation on a scale which dwarfed Windscale's fire (1957), and the accident at Three Mile Island (1979).

At one of the plant's four reactors, their electricity-generating turbines cooled by water from the River Pripyat, operators had been testing safety issues surrounding the electricity generating turbine's behaviour in the event of a loss of reactor power. It was known to be an aspect of the plant's operation during which its design made it prone to sudden, contrary, vast increases in power and eventual explosion. Perhaps because the plant was even more fallible than anyone supposed, perhaps because the (overwhelmingly Russian) operators had not been told the full story by the Russian designers, and probably because of their own foolhardiness, the heat of the reactor's fuel roads increased hugely. A lethal combination of water, heat and graphite (used to "moderate" the fission process) led to an immense blast, and fire of searing heat, as the graphite burned, as one commentator has it, "like a giant barbecue - and eventually with just that intense, almost flameless heat". The fuel-rods' radioactivity, and that of some spent fuel stored nearby, was sent soaring, some of it a mile, into the sky, and headed - mostly - north west. By good fortune, the wind spared Kiev (population, 2.5 million). The city of Pripyat, which housed 50,000 of the plant's staff and their families, was also spared the worst, though it was later evacuated.

Nothing was known of the blast in the West until an operator at the Forsmark nuclear power station in Sweden turned up for work at about 8.30 am on the 28th. He had just passed into the area of the plant where personnel were subject to formal radiation dose monitoring when he realised he had forgotten something in his car and - doubtless cursing - realised he must go back outside with all the rigmarole of testing himself. His shoes set the monitor's buzzers going. He realised he must have been contaminated from the outside. Anxiously the plant's operators checked that their own plant had not spewed something into the air. But everything seemed normal. Maps were fetched, and the wind direction checked. Way down to the south-east, they plotted Chernobyl's four reactors. The news travelled quickly around the western world. Twelve hours later, Moscow TV transmitted a terse message acknowledging an accident.

At Chernobyl, all hell had broken loose. Reactor number Four - most of its roof and one wall blown away - was the centre of frenzied activity. Fire-fighters were drafted in. Already, one man, an operator, was declared missing, and two young Kievian firefighters received astonishingly high radiation doses as they tried, with mad courage but without success, to find him in the chaos. They died within days.

In the days that followed, hundreds of men received very high doses and 237 suffered acute radiation sickness (ARS). This can cause death within hours or days through extreme damage to the brain or gut, and within weeks from damage to bone marrow, or severe burns. Twenty-eight of the ARS sufferers died within months, with a further ten deaths, whose causes are much less obviously to do with radiation exposure, by 1993. These are the only adults who are known - or are even likely - to have died so far as a result of the accident's release of radioactivity.

From the earliest days until now the myth-making machine of the western media has resolutely refused to grasp this. It has failed to accept a simple fact of exposure to radiation. At intense levels it kills within days and weeks. Many people, and they will include the majority of even those with ARS, survive even very high doses and then join those who receive lower doses in having an increased chance of dying of cancer after a latency period of ten, twenty or many more years. Only in children, whose latency periods for some cancers are much shorter, is the story substantially different.

Hundreds of miles away, in the Urals, Artur Korneyev was a health physicist who understood RBMK plants such as Chernobyl, because it was a type based on the plutonium-producing military reactors he worked on. Artur Korneyev volunteered to help and was flown to the stricken plant. He worked there, helping to organise the hundreds of men who were sent on to the roof of reactor number Three (which is number Four's neighbour) to clear it of highly radioactive debris. The manual workers wore lead-lined clothes, had lead soles on their boots, and were given one minute and ten seconds in which to find and shovel whatever they could manage back down into the damaged reactor hall or the ground.

These men were amongst the 600,000 workers and soldiers - the "liquidators" - from all over the Union whose activity peaked in 1987 and began to tail off in 1989. There were drafted in to help with clean-up operations.

The courage of the people who helped Chernobyl is one of the most moving aspects of the whole affair. Probably hundreds volunteered. Out of a sense of honour mixed, one speculates, with a degree of guilt at having been involved in Russia's rather slapdash involvement with the atom, they came hundreds and thousands of kilometres to the disaster zone. Only in 1989 did the public become aware that in Chelyabinsk 40, where Artur Korneyev, the Chernobyl manager in charge of the Sarcophagus, worked and where his son is a engineer, a major accident in 1957 released heavy contamination. One lake in the Urals is reported to have accumulated huge quantities of contamination in the 50s and 60s. These were large releases, but "only" a twenty-fifth and less than half respectively of the Chernobyl release.

In 1995, Artur Korneyev displayed a degree of sang froid as he showed a party of British journalists and academics around the less contaminated parts of the Sarcophagus, which now shields the burnt out reactor number Four, and which is in his charge. Asked if all the helicopter pilots who flew the first horrendously dangerous missions over the reactor have since died, he replies, "No, indeed. I was in Moscow last month with one of them. We drank some vodka and talked. He was fine!" So far, anyway.

In some parts of the Sarcophagus - a building almost as famous as the Pyramids - one can walk with minimum precautions (a cotton suit and mask, and a hard hat). The control room of the blasted reactor is about 24 metres from the molten core, with its intense radioactivity. It sustained more damage from souvenir-hunters than from the blast. Ten years after the event, radiation levels in the control room have fallen to the point where a hour's visit yields a dose of about a 500th of the allowed (but seldom achieved) annual dose to a nuclear worker, or about a tenth of the annual dose western regulators believe is tolerable for a member of the public.

The numbers of people affected by the accident, and the speed with which their movements were organised, testify to the power - and even the merit - of the old Soviet state. Beginning almost immediately, mass evacuations took place. Perhaps 400,000 people moved out of the contaminated areas, 25,000 of them as late as 1990. A thirty kilometre exclusion zone was established around Chernobyl, in which no-one was supposed to live.

It is generally and authoritatively believed that the "liquidators" worked under fairly strict control to limit their exposure to radiation, as they bulldozed heavily contaminated soil into pits, or covered less contaminated material with clean soil. British researchers at the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), made a study of blood samples from about 850 liquidators and came up with averages doses of a few tens of millisieverts up to 300 millisieverts. The top end of those exposures is high, but perhaps justified in the first three months after such an emergency. They imply that efforts were made to limit the men's doses and it seems to have worked. The authorities declared no-one should get more than 250 millisieverts.

To put these numbers in perspective: a British nulcear worker may not receive more than 50 millisieverts in any single year, and the figure will shortly be reduced to 20. In practice, very few nuclear workers receive anything like these doses.

At a dose of 50 millisieverts, one runs about a one in 1000 extra risk of eventually dying of a cancer. Because most of the liquidators experienced these high doses for only a short period of time, it is likely that their chances of dying of a cancer at some time have risen from the 20-25 percent of a western European to - on a pessimistic view - perhaps 21-26 percent. Work by Dr Richard Peto, the leading cancer epidemiologist, implies that the average liquidator's chances are actually somewhat worse than that because East Europeans are heavy smokers.

Anyway, this picture is very different to that promoted in the West, in which serious newspapers and TV documentaries marked the accident's fifth anniversary in 1991 by giving prominence to the views of a disaffected middle-rank non-nuclear specialist, Vladimir Chernousenko, who declared that 7,000 (later the figure escalated to 15,000) of the half million or so liquidators had died as a result of the accident. It is true that perhaps that number have died: that would be normal in so large a population, without excess radiation.

This is not to say some people who worked in the area in the aftermath will not die as a result of their exposure. We all stand at risk of dying of cancer, and part of that risk stems from our living on a naturally-radioactive planet. We are all exposed to varying degrees of natural radiation which alter these risk factors. Any and all additions to background radiation (and dozens of other factors) must be taken as increasing risk. Men like Artur Korneyev, whose dose in the first two years was about 1200 millisieverts, have certainly elevated their risk, but not colossally - unless he has been heavily exposed in the years since. The NRPB studied blood from men from a Russian nuclear institute, who volunteered to explore tunnels bored into the heart of the remains of the foundations of the burned-out reactor hall to try to understand what had become of the molten core. These men got dosages ranging from 500 millisieverts to, in one case, 13,000 millisieverts. So that last man possibly has about a 50 percent risk of dying of cancer over the normal. In other words, he has a seventy or seventy-five percent likelihood of dying of a cancer. In fact, it is pretty likely he will die of a cancer unless he walks under a bus. These men took the view that a job had to be done, and they were just being very brave. They were specialists and made the very point that they should do the work, and not just send in casual fodder.

Though the release of radiation from the Chernobyl accident was "only" a twentieth of all the post-war atmospheric atomic weapons tests, it affected thousands and millions of people in neighbouring countries, and especially the farmworkers and peasants who were forced to move, or remained to live on land where the plume of radiation passed.

Many of the evacuees were peasants who were deeply bound to the land, and who were often found flats in towns. This is amounts to family and personal misery on a huge scale, and a few thousand of the sufferers have since drifted back. But the awfulness of the situation can be exaggerated. It is routinely stated in the western press, not least citing a UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs report prepared for the UN's fiftieth anniversary in October 1995, that seven percent of the Ukraine (a country the size of France) is unusable because of the accident. This is complete nonsense.

In most places, farming appears to go on more or less normally, as it probably should. Even within the 30 kilometre exclusion zone established around the stricken plant, peasants began quite quickly to return to some of the villages and this is tolerated because the authorities believe they are on relatively uncontaminated land.

Britain's National Radiological Protection Board was involved with several studies of the contamination of the wider population and countryside affected by Chernobyl, its workers suggested that whilst wide areas were indeed contaminated, the doses are not now a major problem. Outside the 30 kilometre zone workers did not find villages which now have a serious radiation problem. Even in settlements described as contaminated, the average doses were well below 10 millisieverts in a year. These are the sorts of levels caused by naturally-ocurring radon gas in Cornwall.

Even in the case of food contamination, one of the potential long term hazards of radiation release, the picture is quite encouraging. An NRPB worker found it has been reduced by changing farming methods, for example by applying chemicals to the soil, or growing crops which do not take up so much radioactivity. Food supplied to the public even from so-called contaminated areas is pretty safe.

By a quirk of nature, the most traditional local activity, gathering and eating mushrooms in autumn, gives people a disproportionate dose of whatever radiation remains. That, and drinking milk from private cows, which are often grazed on marginal land which no-one has been able to decontaminate. The West has helped with veterinary treatments which can dramatically reduce the hazards of consuming meat and milk from private cows.

Naturally enough, the accident of 1986 and its aftermath are perceived very differently by different victims. The Belarussians particularly are within their rights to feel aggrieved. The Russians designed and operated Chernobyl, and Ukrainians at least benefitted from its power. Both suffered contamination. But a far greater proportion of Belarussian land suffered. There is, however, a feeling amongst some western experts that the Belarussian authorities have not been above playing to the undoubted suffering of their people: that way international funding may lie.

One experienced research worker remarked: "It can do more harm than good to get things out of perspective. If one over-emphasises the risks from radiation one worries people unnecessarily and disrupt their lifestyles unecessarily. And you may find yourself spending money fighting radiation when you could help them far more directly."

One helpful course of action is increasingly followed: UNESCO has set up centres in all three countries to try to help people understand better what is happening to their health and land. This especially matters when a peasant population, starved of information for generations, and strongly connected to the traditions of the land, finds itself subject to what was the ultimate technological disaster, which precisely affects their soil, and then further become the victims of a worldwide - and a newly-liberated local - media which can't be bothered to get beyond the drama of the horror of it all. Dr Keith Baverstock of the World Health Organisation wrote a wounded letter to the Times in the summer of 1995. It talked of misinformation leading to "psycho-social effects" which are "already diminishing the quality of life and well-being of millions of people, and are even leading to illness and premature death".

For almost everyone outside the zones described as contaminated, the effects of Chernobyl are in fact negligible. In cities such as Kiev, Minsk and Moscow, the annual radiation dose from the accident is equivalent to about a month's stay in Cornwall. About a third of the radiation fallout from the Chernobyl disaster drifted out into the wider, non-Soviet, northern hemisphere. Finnish researchers studied the effects on one of the most affected western European populations, their own. They took the most contaminated fifth of Finnish children and reported that the excess risk of leukaemia (itself one of the most sensitive indicators) was "not significantly different from zero". The rest of us Europeans should simply ignore the incalculably minimal effects.

But it is certainly the children born around the time of the accident we should worry about most. Firstly, it is important to stress that only at very big doses does a man's sperm become genetically altered to the point where his offspring will be deformed. Secondly, there is no evidence that there has been an increase in deformities or any other genetically-influenceed disease in the children born anywhere after the Chernobyl accident. The deformities and sufferings, such as that featured in June 1995 in the Network First documentary "Igor - Child of Chernobyl", of children in the contaminated areas are family tagedies, sure enough. They were also, according to Dr Baverstock (a man who has worked for three years on childhood disease in Belarussia) occuring there at rates which are not merely normal to that country, but to Europe as a whole.

Workers at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon frankly admitted in 1995 that they expected that youngsters would develop leukaemia earlier than any other disease, and that it was a surpise that rates of thyroid cancer rose so very fast. Elisabeth Cardis, head of the institute's programme on radiation and cancer, said: "In Belarussia there have been about 400 cases in five years in a population of two million children. In the UK in 30 years there's been something like 154 cases. It's possible the radiation alone doesn't explain it. Possibly there are genetic factors, or it may be a matter of iodine deficiency which is increasing the childen's susceptibility to radiation-induced cancer. Basically we were quite surprised to see how early and large were the number of cases. We knew that children were quite susceptible, but normally the cancers appeared when they became adults." There is informed gossip that the authorities in some places may have administered dosages of "stable" iodine (the standard preventative treatment for exposed children) which were inappropriately large and late. Thyroid cancer is treatable, and few "children of Chernobyl" are known to have died of it.

There is fairly good news about childhood leukaemia. Max Parkin, head of descriptive epidemiology at Lyon, said in 1995 that in Europe, including Belarussia, there had been no detectable effect. There had been a small increase in the past ten years but it did not fit the Chernobyl radiation profile. Something else was causing the drift in the numbers.

Dr Parkin's evidence did not at all rule out an increase in leukaemia in children from Chernobyl: medical opinion predicts that a five per cent increase might be expected in the most affected country, Belorussia, but the statistics are so shakey that no-one could ever be sure they have detected such an effect. The upshot of this work is relatively encouraging: increases in childhood leukaemia at undetectable levels implies that increases in adult cancers of any kind will probably be so small as also to be undetectable.

Even so, probably several thousand people, none of whom will be certainly identified, will have cancers as a result of the accident. By definition, as reported to a WHO conference on the health effects of Chernobyl in November 1995, the peak of cancers lies ahead of us, but we already have a good idea of its scale.