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When the No 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station blew up
on 26 April 1986, the radioactivity released was equivalent to at least
90 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The radioactive plume drifted for weeks across
the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, Eastern and Western Europe, forcing hundreds
of thousands of people to flee from northern Ukraine and southern Byelorussia.
Many more are still waiting to be evacuated from contaminated areas and
learning of the effects on their health of exposure to radiation.

The Soviet authorities are only now beginning to acknowledge the gravity
of the Chernobyl disaster. It is the first step in tackling the after effects-a
task made all the more difficult by the Soviet Union’s present economic
and political crisis. The authorities’ greater openness has also allowed
the media access to hospitals treating children with cancer and leukaemia
and to communities living in the so-called ‘zone of strict control’ in northern
Ukraine.

The Chernobyl power station stands at the centre of an exclusion zone,
a fenced off territory encompassing 2800 square kilometres on the border
of Ukraine and Byelorussia. The zone’s 135 000 inhabitants, including the
residents of the nearby town of Prypiat, were evacuated in April and May
1986. The zone is now administered by the Prypiat Scientific and Production
Association, which is responsible to the central government in Moscow. The
power station, which has kept operating for the past five years, is run
by 4500 shift workers who commute daily from Slavutych, a purpose-built
town on the edge of the zone.

Decontamination crews have worked intensively at the power station and
within its immediate vicinity. The station’s No 3 unit, which shared ancillary
equipment with the No 4 unit, was badly contaminated by fallout and damaged
by fire. Of the three surviving reactors, it took the longest time to be
returned to electricity generation. Plans for another two units have been
abandoned. While the station’s managers insist that the radioactivity around
them is within tolerable limits, they admit that the hastily built concrete
sarcophagus that entombs the remains of the No 4 unit needs attention.

The concrete walls of the sarcophagus-60 metres high, 60 metres long
and 6 to 18 metres thick-have become brittle and are breaking up as a result
of their continual irradiation and the significant temperature difference
between their inner and outer faces. Dmytro Hrodzinsky, head of the Ukrainian
National Radiological Protection Commission, has warned that the structure
could collapse in an earthquake and release more radioactivity to the environment.
As a preventive measure, some Soviet scientists have proposed building an
additional layer over the existing sarcophagus. Hrodzinsky says that the
sarcophagus, together with the entire power station, should be dismantled.

About 800 dumps of radioactive waste also threaten to contaminate the
environment. Scattered around the exclusion zone, the dumps are usually
open pits lined with about 10 centimetres of clay, containing everything
from soil to timber, vehicles used in the original rescue and clean-up efforts,
and domestic items, such as fridges and clothing. There are more burial
sites for the so-called ‘red forest’ that surrounded the power station and
absorbed huge amounts of radioactive particles. These particles threaten
to infiltrate the water table, which lies just 60 centimetres below ground
in some places in the exclusion zone.

The region’s hydrography is dominated by the Prypiat River, which flows
into the Dnieper River. The Dnieper provides 35 million people, including
Kiev’s residents, with drinking water. Ukrainians are concerned that the
annual spring floods will breach the dykes and other fortifications built
in 1986 and 1987 to prevent runoff from contaminated fields reaching the
region’s streams and rivers.

Soviet scientists mapping Chernobyl’s contamination have found that
the pattern of fallout from the plume streaming out of the stricken No 4
reactor was patchy and uneven. Its principal components were iodine -131,
strontium -90 and caesium -137. Iodine accumulates in the thyroid gland;
strontium, which is chemically similar to calcium, is readily absorbed through
the walls of the intestines and collects in the bones; while caesium is
chemically similar to potassium, and is distributed throughout the body.
Radioactive iodine was only a temporary hazard because it decays quickly:
iodine -131 has a half-life of about eight days. Strontium -90 and caesium
-137 decay slowly; their half-lives are about 30 years.

While gravity brought down a fine sprinkling of these radioactive particles
over a broad territory, rainfall washed them out of the plume onto some
places in much greater concentrations. The most contaminated patch of land
recorded to date lies not inside the exclusion zone, but beyond it along
the westward path taken by the plume in its early days. Last year scientists
tested soil samples from this farmland between the evacuated village of
Volodymyrivka and the still inhabited town of Poliske in northern Ukraine.
They found radioactivity of 2667 curies (100 million million becquerels)
per square kilometre. This level of radioactivity is more than 170 times
the level that Soviet authorities regard as tolerable. They estimate that
people exposed to radioactivity of 15 curies per square kilometre will absorb
a tolerable lifetime dose of radiation of 350 millisieverts. Since 1987,
Britain’s National Radiological Protection Board has recommended a maximum
dose of 0.5 millisieverts a year for members of the public.

Establishing control

In the confusion and chaos following the accident, the authorities could
not determine quickly the precise contours of contamination nor evacuate
the large numbers of people affected by it, except from the exclusion zone
around the Chernobyl power station. Instead, they established a set of guidelines.
Using the slowly decaying isotope, caesium -137, as a measure of the concentration
of radioactivity, they defined three classes of zone outside the exclusion
zone that surrounds the power station. The ‘zone of strict control’, covering
10 000 square kilometres and on which about 272 000 people live, is contaminated
with a radioactivity of more than 15 curies per square kilometre. Early
last year, the authorities said that all inhabitants of this zone should
be evacuated as soon as possible, and certainly before the end of 1990.
The evacuation continues. In the meantime, people are forbidden to eat any
locally grown food and are expected to rely on specially imported ‘clean
food’. Children are fed three meals a day at school. Their school days are
extended and they are not allowed to play outside except on land that has
been decontaminated and, usually, covered with asphalt.

Stringent controls on food consumption and outdoor activities are also
in force over an even broader territory, known as the ‘zone of permanent
control’, which covers 21 000 square kilometres. The radioactivity of the
land is between 5 and 15 curies per square kilometre but the territory’s
1.5 million inhabitants will not be considered for resettlement until the
zone of strict control is first cleared of people.

The third zone covers areas contaminated with more than 1 curie per
square kilometre of radioactivity. Here all food produced is meant to be
checked regularly by health inspectors. This is an enormous undertaking,
given that at least 2.2 million people in Byelorussia, another 1.5 million
in Ukraine and more than 3 million in the Russian federation live and work
in such areas.

Poliske district illustrates the kind of problems that are being encountered
in the worst-hit areas. Settlements here with a level of radioactivity of
more than 40 curies per square kilometre were evacuated in 1986 and their
territories fenced off. Areas contaminated with between 15 and 40 curies
per square kilometre, including the district capital of Poliske, are now
due for evacuation. The rest must adapt to the requirements of permanent
control.

The past five years have shown that it is extremely difficult to regiment
the lives of people living on contaminated land, especially in their traditional
patterns of farming, foraging and fishing. The government issued instructions
in May 1986 requiring everyone engaged in fieldwork adjacent to the exclusion
zone to wear special clothing and face masks. Tractors with hermetically
sealed cabins were also promised to the most vulnerable farming communities.
None of this seems to have been acted on. Poliske peasants say that many
village households keep a cow and consume its milk. Practically all of them
grow vegetables and fruit on their private plots and forage for mushrooms
and berries in the forest. They say they eat this locally produced food
because the government fails to provide an alternative. According to one
resident, ‘life itself forces us to keep a cow’.

The district capital of Poliske displays in its central square a prominent
billboard noting that in the five years since the Chernobyl disaster peppered
the area with radioactivity, milk production has climbed back steadily to
the pre-disaster levels, and meat, potato and grain production now exceed
the 1986 level. According to Hrodzinsky, milk should not be produced here
at all.

How is it produced? Peasants living in Dibrova, near Bober and on the
outskirts of Poliske town say that some hay is mown on the heavily contaminated
land of villages already fenced off and evacuated. This hay is left standing
for several months in the fields where it is mown. Then it is moved to an
intermediate field to stand for several more months and finally it is recorded
as grown on unrestricted land. It is mixed with industrially produced feedstock
and given to the dairy herds. The farm workers milk these cows and deliver
the milk to dairies, such as the one at Krasiatychi in Poliske district.

Most of this milk is consumed by urban populations to the south. Hrodzinsky
says that the contamination levels in milk delivered to the Ukrainian capital
of Kiev are sometimes ‘just on the limit of the temporary permitted norm’.
Some of the milk is distributed in cartons as ‘clean milk’ to the farming
communities where it was produced. Similarly, meat, grains and other crops
produced in the district are distributed all over the Soviet Union after
they have been mixed in with other batches of the same foodstuff to dilute
the overall radioactive content.

The drama surrounding the imminent resettlement of the 10 000 inhabitants
of Poliske town illustrates another set of problems in the strict control
zone. The highest level of contamination recorded inside the town after
the accident was 370 curies per square kilometre, the average was 26 curies.
Of the 5670 Poliske children examined by doctors, 2440 have enlarged thyroids,
a condition that appears when the dose of radioactivity of iodine -131 to
the gland exceeds 200 rems (2 sieverts). Nine children absorbed more than
1000 rems. People, particularly children, continue to suffer from the high
level of radioactivity in the environment. The most visible complaints are
nosebleeds, headaches, impaired vision and heightened susceptibility to
infections and colds.

So why have those at risk not yet been resettled? Local people blame
all three levels of government-the all-union, the republic and the district
authorities. For the first four years after the disaster, they recall, the
Soviet government’s leading spokesmen refused to acknowledge the gravity
of the situation in the zone of strict control. They say the Ukrainian and
Byelorussian republic governments were reluctant to take any initiative
without Moscow’s approval and so refused to consider evacuation until last
year. And residents of Poliske district charge their local politicians with
not allowing an evacuation because they feared they would lose the network
that formed the basis of their power structure.

Economic difficulties have played an important part in the governments’
failure to act. But that cannot be the whole story. Since the accident,
the authorities have introduced new sewerage systems and natural gas piping
to Poliske, replaced all the roofs in the town and most of the fences, repaved
roads and school playgrounds, and built new apartment blocks-all to the
tune of 220 million roubles ( £220 million). They doubled the salaries
and wages of its inhabitants and increased the volume of foodstuffs delivered
to the town. Many people are now asking why so much money was sunk into
a doomed town and not into the new settlements to which Poliske’s inhabitants
are now destined to be sent.

Still waiting to go

Only a small proportion of the inhabitants of the zone of strict control
have been resettled so far. On the Ukrainian side, it is less than a quarter
of the 60 000 people living there, and possibly even less in the Byelorussian
and Russian sections, each containing more than 100 000 people. The prospects
for resettling people living in the zone of permanent control, where contamination
is between 5 and 15 curies per square kilometre, seem very remote indeed.
And yet specialists argue that farmland contaminated with more than 1 curie
per square kilometre of radioactivity should be abandoned. According to
Anatoli Ostavnenko, a geochemist and a member of Protium, the Association
of Independent Radioecologists of Ukraine, the sandy soil contains little
organic material and so plant roots absorb radionuclides instead.

There are four groups of people whose health has been affected by the
Chernobyl accident. The first are former employees of the power station,
an undisclosed number of whom are now invalids.

The second group, numbering about 600 000 people, is known among the
Soviet public as the ‘liquidators’. They put down the blaze, cleaned the
power station and surrounding vicinity, built the sarcophagus and tried
to decontaminate Prypiat and other nearby villages. Most of the liquidators
were young conscripts in units of Soviet chemical warfare troops. The worst
affected among them are known as ‘partisans’. These 800 or so young men
did the most dangerous decontamination work. For example, they tried to
clean the roof over the No 3 unit of its graphite debris after robotic machines
broke down. According to Chernobyl’s firefighters who were in hospital with
them, the government has never acknowledged that these young men were forced
to go into the exclusion zone against their will nor has it disclosed the
extent of casualites among them. Surviving invalids of this futile clean-up
campaign put the number of dead partisans at around 350, so far.

The third group are the 135 000 evacuees from the exclusion zone, about
20 000 of whom received large doses of radiation. The fourth group are the
inhabitants of the zone of strict control.

The Soviet government initially put the accident’s death toll at 31.
It raised the toll to between 250 and 350 on the fourth anniversary of the
accident. This revised estimate is ridiculed by many people connected with
work in the exclusion zone over the past five years. By 1990, they say,
the number of deaths was at least 5000.

Vladimir Bebeshko, deputy director of the All-Union Centre of Medical
Radiology in Kiev, says there are no grounds for believing that Chernobyl’s
fallout has increased the rate of cancer, leukaemia or other serious diseases
in the population, although he admits this may occur in the future. He argues
that it is impossible to separate the impact upon health of, say, herbicides
and heavy metals from that of radiation.

The centre is responsible to the central government for examining and
treating evacuees from the exclusion and strict control zones and for referring
them elsewhere. It maintains records on thousands of people, beginning with
their earliest dosimeter readings, and it has equipment to conduct whole
body radiation counts. The diagnoses of its doctors determine whether someone
is classified as an invalid as a result of Chernobyl, a classification that
entitles a patient to special compensation and benefits. According to local
doctors, however, the centre’s information and sophisticated equipment are
not shared with other hospitals in Kiev, even if they are treating a person
who has been referred to them by the centre.

Doctors in Kiev are divided over the impact of the Chernobyl disaster.
While they largely agree it is too early to draw firm conclusions, some
say that the impact is already beginning to show in the children they are
treating. Svetlana Kireyeva at the haematology ward of Kiev Children’s Clinic
No 14 helped to treat casualties among the 12 000 children evacuated from
Prypiat immediately after the accident. Her examinations revealed changes
in the concentration of the constituents of their blood that were similar
to those observed among people who fought the fire at Chernobyl. The children
also suffer damage to the liver, pancreas and intestines, enlarged thyroid
glands, skin burns, bronchitis and tracheitis. Kireyeva attributes these
effects to prolonged exposure to radiation. While it is too early to speak
of a considerable increase in leukaemia, she says that there seems to be
an upward trend in reported cases. Of the 540 000 children living in Kiev,
the annual rate of acute leukaemia has grown from 20 cases in 1986 to 30
in 1989.

Doctors working in the children’s cancer ward at the Kiev Oncological
Research Institute are alarmed at the trends they are witnessing among their
patients. Sergei Gololobov, head of the ward, says the age of children brought
to the institute for examination has fallen while the number has climbed
from 2500 in 1986 to 6713 in 1989. For the first 10 months of 1990 the number
stood at 5021. The number of children with advanced cancers has increased
significantly since 1986. The incidence of lymphosarcoma and liver cancer
among them has also risen. Gololobov admits that his records are not an
accurate statistical sample of the incidence of cancer among Kiev’s child
population. He sees his records more as indicators of a trend that needs
to be substantiated.

There has been a general worsening of children’s health, not only in
the controlled zones, but as far away as Kiev, says Hrodzinsky: ‘This has
to do with the considerable weakening of their immune system after all the
radiation since 1986 . . . Children here in Kiev are getting very sick with
bronchitis and inflammation of the upper respiratory tract. They cough all
the time, they are poorly and weak.’ This phenomenon is known in the Soviet
Union as ‘Chernobyl AIDS’. Kiev’s background radiation is between two and
six times as high as the level that existed before the disaster. Food brought
into the capital from farming communities to the north introduces more contamination
still, adds Hrodzinsky. Striking confirmation of this fact is to be found
in the sewage plant outside Kiev, whose waste ponds are so radioactive that
the treated effluent is no longer used as farm fertiliser.

The medical system in Ukraine, as in Byelorussia and Russia, is unable
to cope with the growing demands being placed upon it by the Chernobyl disaster.
Doctors are still cut off from their colleagues abroad. The mounting economic
crisis has thoroughly depleted the material resources of hospitals and clinics.
The secrecy and denial of the grave impact of the Chernobyl accident of
April 1986 now leaves doctors unprepared for what is still to come. An international
effort is urgently needed to limit this disaster.

Marko Bojcun is a freelance journalist on Soviet current affairs and
a researcher for the Yorkshire Television documentary The Children of Chernobyl,
due to be broadcast on Sunday 21 April at 7pm on Channel 4. With Viktor
Haynes, he wrote The Chernobyl Disaster, published by The Hogarth Press,
London (1988).

Further Reading The Truth about Chernobyl by Grigori Medvedev, with
an introduction by Andrei Sakharov. Published by I. B. Tauris, London (1991),
price £14.95