Fukushima may not turn into another Chernobyl but that disaster does offer painful lessons

Olzhas Auyezov reports from Prypyat, Ukraine, 25 years after the nuclear disaster

ANY Ukrainian over 35 can tell you where they were when they heard about the accident at the Chernobyl plant.

“I remember calling my husband. There had been rumours for days about a nuclear accident. We had even hung blankets on the windows to stop radiation because we didn’t know what to do,” said Natalya, a 46-year- old financial analyst in Kiev, whose husband was a journalist on a daily newspaper.

“He told me there had been a fire at the atomic plant in Chernobyl. That was for me the first confirmation that the reactor had collapsed,” she said, seated at her desk in her Kiev office.

“We had no idea what to expect. It was awful.”

As Japan battles to prevent a meltdown at its earthquake-hit Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, the people of Ukraine are preparing to mark the 25th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident next month.

The physical and financial legacies of that disaster are obvious: a 30km uninhabited ring around the Chernobyl plant and billions of dollars spent cleaning the region.

Just as powerful are the scars that are less easily seen: fear and an abiding suspicion that despite the reassuring reports by authorities and scientific bodies people may still be dying from radiation after-effects.

While debate about the health impact continues, there is little doubt people in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus carry a psychological burden. Repeated studies have found that “exposed populations had anxiety levels that were twice as high” as people unaffected by the accident, according to a 2006 United Nations report. Those exposed to radiation were also “3-4 times more likely to report multiple unexplained physical symptoms and subjective poor health than were unaffected control groups”.

There are, of course, crucial differences between Chernobyl and the disaster unfolding in Japan.

The Chernobyl accident was the product of human error when a test was poorly executed, while the Japanese failure was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami.

Chernobyl occurred in a secretive Soviet society which reformer Mikhail Gorbachev was only just opening up. The authorities embarked on an attempted cover-up and only partly admitted the truth three days later, denying themselves the chance of rapid international aid.

Despite criticisms that Tokyo could be a lot more transparent, Japan’s disaster has taken place in a relatively open society and international help has been quick to come.

Most importantly, thick containment walls at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant shield the reactor cores so that even if there was a meltdown of the nuclear fuel it’s unlikely to lead to a major escape of dangerous radioactive clouds into the atmosphere.

At Chernobyl, there was no containment structure.

“When it blew, it blew everything straight out into the atmosphere,” said Murray Jennex of San Diego State University.

Despite those differences, though, the Chernobyl experience still contains lessons for Japan and other countries, says Volodymyr Holosha, the top Ukrainian Emergency Ministry official in charge of the area surrounding the Chernobyl plant.

“We were not ready for it — neither technologically nor financially,” Holosha said. “This is a priceless experience for other countries.”

In the early hours of April 26, 1986, in the model Soviet town of Prypyat, a satellite of the much bigger Chernobyl, workers at a nuclear power plant demobilised the safety systems on the number four reactor, which had come on line only three years previously.

It was a risky experiment to see whether the cooling system could still function using power generated from the reactor alone in the event of a failure in the auxiliary electricity supply.

It could not. There was a massive power surge that blew off the reactor’s heavy concrete and metal lid and sent smouldering nuclear material into the atmosphere. Dozens of plant staff died on the spot or immediately afterwards in hospital.

Hundreds of thousands of rescue workers, including Soviet Army conscripts, were rushed to the site to put out the fires, decontaminate it and seal off the damaged reactor by building a concrete shell around it.

At first, authorities denied there was a problem. When they finally admitted the truth, many thousands of inhabitants simply picked up a few of their belongings and headed off — many of them to the capital Kiev, 80km to the south, never to return. Iryna Lobanova, 44, a civil servant, was due to get married in Prypyat on the day of the explosion but assumed all ceremonies would be cancelled.

“I thought that war had started,” she said. “But the local authorities told us go on with all planned ceremonies.” Nobody was allowed to leave the town until the official evacuation was announced on the Sunday” — 36 hours later — “following an order from Moscow,” she said.

Lobanova went ahead with her wedding — and left the next day with her husband by train.

The make-shift concrete shelter hastily thrown up in the months after the explosion is often referred to as a “sarcophagus”, a funeral term made even more fitting by the fact that it houses the body of at least one plant worker who rescuers were unable to recover.

The official short-term death toll from the accident was 31 but many more people died of radiation-related sicknesses such as cancer. The total death toll and long-term health effects remain a subject of intense debate even 25 years after the disaster.

“[The disaster] brought suffering on millions of people,” said the Emergency Ministry’s Holosha.

“About 600,000 people were involved in mitigating the consequences of the accident. About 300,000 of them were Ukrainians. Out of those, 100,000 are disabled now.”

A 2008 United Nations study cited a “dramatic increase in thyroid cancer incidence” in the Ukraine and just across the border in Belarus. Children seemed to be especially vulnerable because they drank milk with high levels of radioactive iodine.

“One arrives at between 12,000 and 83,000 children born with congenital deformations in the region of Chernobyl, and around 30,000 to 207,000 genetically damaged children worldwide,” German physicians’ organisation IPPNW said in a report in 2006.

Those figures are far lower than health officials had predicted. Indeed, the UN says that overall health effects were less severe than initially expected and that only a few thousand people had died as a result of the accident.

But a 2009 book by a group of Russian and Belarussian scientists published by the New York Academy of Sciences argued that previous studies were misled by rigged Soviet statistics.

“The official position of the Chernobyl Forum (a group of UN agencies) is that about 9,000 related deaths have occurred and some 200,000 people have illnesses caused by the catastrophe,” authors Alexei Yablokov, Vasily Nesterenko and Alexei Nesterenko wrote in Chernobyl: Consequences of the catastrophe for people and the Environment.

“A more accurate number estimates nearly 400 million human beings have been exposed to Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout and, for many generations, they and their descendants will suffer the devastating consequences.”

The authors argued that the global death toll by 2004 was closer to 1 million and said health effects included birth defects, pregnancy losses, accelerated aging, brain damage, heart, endocrine, kidney, gastrointestinal and lung diseases.

“It is clear that tens of millions of people, not only in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, but worldwide, will live under measurable chronic radioactive contamination for many decades,” they wrote.

The most severe contamination occurred in the so-called Exclusion Zone, a circular area around the power plant with a radius of 30km that has been deemed unsuitable for living and is closed to unsanctioned visitors.

Yury Andreyev, shift chief at the plant’s number two reactor on the night of the explosions and now head of a non-government body representing the interests of those who fought to control the disaster, sees no danger of the Japan drama taking on the seriousness of Chernobyl.

“The scale of the destruction [in Japan], both nuclear and radiation, is 10,000 times lower than what happened to us in Chernobyl. About 30 tonnes of nuclear fuel were discharged [at Chernobyl]. Here [in Japan] there was not the same discharge,” he told journalists this week.

The disaster and the government’s handling of it highlighted the shortcomings of the Soviet system with its unaccountable bureaucrats and entrenched culture of secrecy. Journalists subsequently uncovered evidence that the children of Communist apparatchiks had been evacuated well before others and some staff died at the plant because they had not been given orders to leave.

Mikhail Gorbachev has since said he considered the disaster one of the main nails in the coffin of the Soviet Union which eventually collapsed in 1991. The nuclear disaster in Japan is unlikely to break the country’s political system. But Tokyo should not underestimate the profound power of a nuclear meltdown — physical and political.