Failure and fallout: Remembering Chernobyl

It’s been called the “largest anthropogenic disaster in the history of humankind” (Viktor Sushko, deputy director general of the National Research Center for Radiation Medicine).

Today marks the 37th anniversary of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, formally known as the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, on April 26, 1986, which most of you probably remember. During a systems test, a meltdown of a reactor within the plant caused two explosions. The first at 1:23 a.m. blew the 1,000-ton roof off the reactor and sent a fireball into the night sky. This led to 50 million Ci of radionuclides being released into the atmosphere.

Formerly part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), an area of 1,040 square miles surrounding the plant was isolated as the “exclusion zone,” and remains such to this day. Twenty-three percent of what is now Belarus is considered contaminated land, along with 4.8 percent of Ukraine and 0.5 percent of Russia. Almost 100,000 people were evacuated from the area in the months after the disaster.

The initial blast at Chernobyl killed just one plant worker and over the next few weeks, 30 workers and firefighters died as a result of acute radiation poisoning. However, that was just the beginning. The National Research Center for Radiation Medicine based in Kiev, Ukraine, estimates that around five million citizens of the former USSR, including three million in Ukraine, have suffered as a result of Chernobyl. Belarus registered 800,000 people as being affected by the explosions.

In 2019, the BBC reported that the Ukrainian government was paying benefits to 36,525 women considered to be widows of men who suffered due to the Chernobyl incident. Also, as of January 2018, 1.8 million people in Ukraine, including 377,589 children, had the status of disaster victims. Among this population, there has been a sharp increase in the number of people with disabilities, from 40,106 in 1995 to 107,115 in 2018.

The effects of radiation exposure are numerous and varied, among them cancer, neurological defects, reproductive system damage, genetic mutation, birth defects and child mortality. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions of Belarus, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20 percent.

As bad as the statistics are, the full impact of the disaster will remain unknown as it can take years for negative health outcomes to develop and they can’t be definitively linked to Chernobyl, even if many of them are.

Kate Brown, a science historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a book called “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future” discussing all the ramifications from the Chernobyl fallout, including health effects, and how scientists and government officials from multiple countries tried to cover up what was happening. She found that contaminated food was spread all over the USSR. The government set radiation limits for produce, so if the produce had too much radiation, it had to be frozen until that level fell and it could be used. But, people found ways around that. For example, Brown heard of blueberries that were over the acceptable radiation limit being mixed with cleaner blueberries so the whole batch would fall under the overall limit. People could “wake up to a breakfast of Chernobyl blueberries” and be none the wiser.

The whole Chernobyl incident speaks to the gross incompetence on the part of the Soviet government. The night shift workers who were on the job at the time of the explosion purportedly never received instructions on how to run the systems test they were running at the time. The International Atomic Energy Agency scientists blamed the accident not only on human error and a subpar safety culture, but also on Soviet reactor design flaws.

The incident also speaks to the indifference to human need shown by the Soviet government in its response. The firefighters and police officers who first arrived on the scene had no knowledge of the radiation and wore no protective clothing. It took 36 hours before Soviet officials told residents anything about the disaster and finally began evacuating the almost 115,000 people from Pripyat, a town about three miles away from the reactor site, and the surrounding towns and villages. Residents were told it would be only temporary and just to take vital documents, belongings and some food. However, soon after that, the exclusion zone was created and the residents weren’t able to get back. These are just a few examples of many.

Chernobyl also shows the capability of nuclear power and how we as human beings don’t grasp the full consequences of playing around with it. Although largely abandoned, Chernobyl is open to guided tours since the Ukranian government opened the site in 2011. Although it is technically illegal to live in the exclusion zone today, around 1,000 live in Pripyat. “Even if it’s poisoned with radiation, it’s still my home. There’s no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest!!” one resident said.

That quote came from “Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster” by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first to document personal accounts from this tragedy. I read this book in college and found it to be quite compelling — not that the content was all pleasant, far from it, but it was eye-opening to read the stories of the awful things these people experienced and yet how they showed resilience. So, if you want to dive further into this catastrophe, I would recommend “Voices from Chernobyl.”

In 2006, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote that “even more than my launch of perestroika, (the Chernobyl disaster) was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Information taken from “Chernobyl Aftermath: How Long Will Exclusion Zone Be Uninhabitable?” by Robyn White, Newsweek; “The true toll of the Chernobyl disaster” by Richard Gray, BBC Future; “Chernobyl: Timeline of Events” from AtomicArchive.com; and NationalToday.com.

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