“When the plant was operating the (Elba) river was much warmer,” Witt lamented on a recent afternoon. “It was like 10 degrees warmer!”

That’s because the Brunsbüttel plant discharged hot water from its cooling system back to its source, the Elba. For years, Brunsbüttel enjoyed spa-like conditions along the banks of what is normally a chilly waterway.

Witt’s words struck me as flippant. So I repeated the question: Is it a good idea to shut down the reactors? Her answer was the same: No. The river. No more swimming.

I made a mental note to dismiss Witt’s commentary, then continued my stroll around Brunsbüttel. I was expecting to find what all the German polls were suggesting, that nearly four out of five Germans wanted nuclear power abolished immediately. Soon I started to wonder if Brunsbüttel was in Germany at all.

“This is crap,” Christian Heider, a former machinist at the nuclear facility, to me at the bar of a corner cafe said to me. “Where are we going to get our power from now? The Russians?”

“Our plant was safe,” said his brother and former co-worker, Pierre. “I seriously doubt that a plane was going to crash into the reactor, or that an earthquake or a flood would have damaged it.”

The plant was safe, he was telling me. But the plant had been closed not for political reasons but because it had suffered a major fire. No radioactive material had escaped, but clearly somebody somewhere felt that the facility was no longer secure.

I left Brunsbüttel that day without anyone telling me they favored closing the nukes. How was it, I wondered, that the people living literally right next to a reactor – those generators of dangerous waste, those alleged accidents waiting to happen – could be so fearless?

Over at Greenpeace in Hamburg, economist Kristoph von Lieven offered the most obvious answer.

“In the towns where the reactors are, the people are getting a lot of money. Not directly but via jobs and through taxes paid to the local government,” he said.

He was right, of course. Who in town was going to cheer the plant’s closure? Who’s ever seen a workers union chanting the slogan, “No More Jobs!?”

Von Lieven’s second answer was more intriguing. Basically, he said, so far in Germany there has yet to be a major nuclear accident. And so the psychological assumption for those who live and work at or near nuclear plants is that there won’t be one.

That, combined with actually seeing the object of such fear day in and day out, makes the fear go away. It all becomes ordinary, routine. The far-away protestors appear more and more absurd for their impassioned opposition.

But what of the attitudes of people who’ve already suffered a major nuclear accident? It’s too early to know the long-term psychological effects of Fukushima on locals, but in Ukraine a lot of studies have been done. In 2006 I visited the tiny woodland villages near Chernobyl, on the eve of that disaster’s 20th anniversary.

By contrast to the Germans living in Brunsbüttel, the Ukranians I met were in fact afraid. They knew what a meltdown meant. But they had lived for so long with their fear that they’d internalized it, grown complacent, fatalistic.

I was walking around one scrubby little hamlet in the spring cold when a couple of young women beckoned to me from the porch of a wooden house. I joined them.

They were sitting around in bathrobes, smoking cigarettes, drinking homemade vodka. They served me a shot, then another, in a chipped and stained coffee mug. They watched me expectantly each time I drank. One of them had a little daughter, barely old enough to walk, walking around the frosty yard without shoes, socks or even pants.

“We don’t look for work. We don’t do anything. Theirs is nothing anyone can do for us,” the women told me. “We are poisoned beyond saving.”

The people in this region were lied to during the disaster by the Soviet authorities and for years afterwards by their own. They trusted no one, because no one had cared enough about them, their families, their livestock, their crops, their newborn children, their toddlers, and their teens, to get them to safety when the meltdown was underway or afterward. They were afraid of dying but resigned to it, and sure of the plant’s role in it no matter what anyone might say.

The German and Ukraine scenarios are different and tough to compare – one plant sustained life, the other destroyed it – but the people I met in both places shared something in common. They had come to terms – uneasy or no – with living so close to their now shuttered plants.

This week, on the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl, we had Gronlund on the show to talk about her findings. She explained that the order of magnitude difference between her estimate and that of the UN study ultimately came down to how far afield they each looked.

“The official numbers have been lower, but it’s because they’ve only looked at a smaller number of people,” Gronlund said. “They looked at the people who were in the most highly contaminated areas. And what my number includes is people who would get cancer not just in Europe, but beyond Europe. Because the contamination from Chernobyl was quite widespread.”

A listener took Gronlund to task for her methodology. “Bill_Woods” commented on our website,

“As I expected, this study relies on the ‘Linear No-Threshold’ assumption; the idea that a given amount of radiation will produce the same number of fatalities, whether it’s concentrated on a few people or spread over billions. Which at very low levels is unsupported by evidence and pretty dubious in theory. No other poison works that way…”

Well, if the Linear No-Threshold model is dubious, it seems that most of the world’s scientific establishment has been duped into accepting it. It’s the scientific standard used by, among others, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US National Academies, the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A little background here.

Establishing the effects of very low radiation exposures with a high degree of certainty has been a vexing challenge since studies of the first radiation victims — survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs — began more than 60 years ago. That’s because it’s extremely difficult to tease out any impact of low doses from what likely would’ve happened anyway. Roughly 40 people in 100 will develop cancer at some point in their lives, and roughly half of them will die of it.

Meanwhile, according to a 2005 US National Academies report, a single radiation dose of 100 milisieverts will cause only one additional cancer among these same 100 people. That’s already a very small percentage, and most people exposed to man-made radioactivity receive many times less than 100 mSv, making any cancers from that exposure exceedingly difficult to identify.

That’s where the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model comes in. In essence, it asserts two principles:

• that there is no safe dose, or exposure level, of radiation;

• that the likely number of cancers in a given exposed population can be extrapolated from the known impact of a known radiation exposure (e.g. 1 cancer per 100 people exposed to 100 mSv).

Here’s what the US Environmental Protection Agency says about the first of those, the “no safe level” assertion:

“Based on current scientific evidence, any exposure to radiation can be harmful (e.g., can increase the risk of cancer)…”

And here’s what the US National Academies says about the second, extrapolation from the known impacts of known exposures:

“A comprehensive review of available biological and biophysical data led the committee to conclude that the risk would continue in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.”

Like The World listener “Bill_Woods,” some scientists — and nuclear industry interest groups — take issue with this model. The American Nuclear Society, for instance, says “there is insufficient scientific evidence to support the use of the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis (LNTH) in the projection of the health effects of low-level radiation.”

Even some of the scientific institutes and regulatory agencies that use the model hedge their acceptance of it. Here’s what the International Atomic Energy Agency has to say:

“… at low doses of radiation, there is still considerable uncertainty about the overall effects. It is presumed that exposure to radiation, even at the levels of natural background, may involve some additional risk of cancer. However, this has yet to be established.”

So yes, there are questions and even doubts about the LNT model, and efforts to establish more certainty are ongoing, although given the complexity of the challenge, it may never be possible to establish much more certainty. In the meantime, in the absence of absolute certainty, policy decisions have to be made, so scientists and policy makers go with what they judge to be the best information available. And despite its limitations, the LNT model has been adopted as the best available by leading scientific and regulatory bodies.

Which brings us back to our interview with Gronlund.

As a journalist who is not a scientist, I have to try to establish the level of uncertainty surrounding any given scientific claim or model, and then make judgments about whether and how to report that in any given story. For me, its use by the above bodies indicates a pretty high standard of scientific acceptance for the Linear No-Threshold model. Yes, there are uncertainties, but it’s my judgment that they’re not significant enough to challenge Gronlund’s use of the model in a radio interview of less than four minutes. Especially since it was the same model used by the UN report that she was critiquing.

••••

Another listener comment on our website seems to dismiss our interview with Gronlund by suggesting we presented the figures of Chernobyl — related cancers out of context — without mentioning that whatever the actual number, they will be dwarfed by the overall cancer numbers in the same population.

Here’s what “FMCoNH” wrote:

”Interesingly and surprisingly Gronlund’s comments are generally logical and factual – atypical for the the UCS. However I find one very key point missing from both Gronlund and Lisa Mullins questions. That is regardless of the size of the population over which the radiation attributed cancer analysis is performed, the resulting number of radiation induced cancers is a very small fraction of the normal cancer mortality rate for the population analyzed. If it’s 4000 “excess cancers” as calculated by the World Health Organization or 27,000 cancers calculated by Gronlund, the important point is that those numbers are minute fractions of normal expectations. That’s why radiation epidemiologists say that any excess cancers (other than childhood thyroid) will be indistinguishable from the normal incidence in the affected populations.

“Any radiation cancer impacts are minor…”

Again, a four-minute interview didn’t allow time to get into this level of detail, but Gronlund does in her study.

But more to the point, how much does this “context” really affect the story of the harm caused by Chernobyl? Sure, statistically, “any radiation cancer impacts are minor.” But people aren’t statistics. Every one of the additional cancers caused by the disaster — whether it’s 4,000 as figured by the UN, 57,000 as figured by Gronlund or more as figured by Greenpeace — will affect real living, breathing people. And roughly half of these people will die sooner, and likely in a more agonizing way, than they would have otherwise. To suggest that these illnesses are somehow unimportant because they “will be indistinguishable from the normal incidence in the affected populations” reduces lives, illness and death to an abstraction. That’s not context, that’s callousness.

It’s true—statistically, the overall additional health and mortality risk from Chernobyl and from nuclear power accidents in general is very small. Listeners and readers can decide for themselves whether or not this added risk is an acceptable trade-off for the benefits they might get from nuclear power. But Gronlund’s point — which I agree with — is that we can’t really make that judgment without as accurate as possible an understanding of what the risk is.

• Remembering Chernobyl after 25 years
• How Many Cancers Did Chernobyl Really Cause?
• Fukushima likely not as bad as Chernobyl, but what does that mean?
• Fukushima vs. Chernobyl–Comparison less useful than ever
• Chernobyl: the true scale of the accident
• The Chernobyl Body Count Controversy
• Greenpeace: The Chernobyl Catastrophe: Consequences on Human Health

Read the Transcript
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Lisa Mullins:  People in Ukraine and neighboring countries are commemorating a grim anniversary  today.  It was on this date, 25 years ago, that a botched safety experiment at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine went terribly wrong.

Sound byte:  The Soviet Government reports an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, resulting in damage to one of the plant’s nuclear reactors …

Mullins:  An explosion had blown the roof off the Chernobyl Plant.  The whole world knows what happened next.  Huge amounts of radiation spewed into the air.  It spread across the western edge of The Soviet Union, farther afield into Europe, and beyond.  At least 28 emergency workers died of radiation sickness, and millions more people were exposed to elevated levels of radiation.  And yet, 25 years later, nobody can say for sure how many people may ultimately die as a result of Chernobyl.  A widely quoted figure from a United Nations study put the number at roughly 4,000, but others have said that that is way too low.  Now a physicist with the watchdog group, the Union of Concerned Scientists has taken a fresh look at the question, and come up with what, she hopes, will be a more reliable figure.

Lisbeth Gronlund:  My best estimate of the number of cancers that have, or will occur, is 53,000.  And the number of those that will result in death are 27,000.

Mullins:  Lisbeth Gronlund says that’s more than six times the U.N.’s estimate.

Gronlund:  The official numbers have been lower, but it’s because they’ve only looked at a smaller number of people.  They looked at the people who were in the most highly contaminated areas.  And what my number includes is, people who would get cancer not just in Europe, but beyond Europe.  Because the contamination from Chernobyl was quite widespread.

Mullins:  Okay, so when you say 27,000 deaths from cancer, how can you determine this?  Because we’re at least a generation beyond the accident now.

Gronlund:  Right.  So people have reconstructed the contamination as it spread, and they’ve looked at how people might be affected by that contamination.  And I have taken that data–sort of found it piecemeal, here and there–and then calculated the number of cancers and cancer deaths that would be attributable to that kind of a dose rate.  I really hope that this number that I have come up with is something that will become, sort of, the more standard number that is quoted in the media, because the 4,000 number is misleading.  And especially, it’s misleading if that caveat of, this number only applies to the people in the most contaminated areas, is not included.  And it tends to be dropped, and then the number that is out there is, “Oh, it’s only, you know, only a total of 4,000 deaths.”

Mullins:  With what certainty can you say that?  Because this seems as if it has been so difficult to decipher, and so hard to get firm numbers.

Gronlund:  That’s a very good question, and in fact, it is an uncertain number.  This is a best estimate.  And in some sense, really what you can say is that the number of cancers and cancer deaths are going to be in the tens of thousands.  Not the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands, but in the tens of thousands.

Mullins:  The figures that you’ve come by from Chernobyl, do they give any instruction as to what could be predicted in the outcome of Fukushima?

Gronlund:  Not really, because we don’t … The Fukushima crisis is still ongoing.  The radiation will continue to be emitted.  And after the fact, people will be able to reconstruct the dose that people in those areas will have received.  And then you can, from that, estimate the number of additional cancer deaths.  But it’s really too soon to say.

Mullins:  So, if we can’t draw a lesson right now from Chernobyl to Fukushima, who knows what we’ll be able to learn from Chernobyl in the future?  But right now, for you, what does it come down to in terms of why we need precise figures on this?

Gronlund:  Well, I don’t think we’re ever going to have precise figures, but I think getting as good an estimate as is feasible is important.  In part, it let’s us know what one of the downsides of nuclear power has been.  I mean, there are benefits to nuclear power, and there risks, and people need to assess both of them to understand and make decisions about whether it is something we want as part of our energy mix.  And knowing how many–roughly, how many–people died in Chernobyl is an indication of what the risks have been.  Because accidents will happen.  It won’t be exactly the same as in Fukushima.  It won’t be exactly the same as in Chernobyl.  But it’s very unlikely that Fukushima is the last nuclear power accident that we will see.

Mullins:  That’s Lisbeth Gronlund, who’s a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.  She has done a new assessment of the likely death toll from Chernobyl.  There’s a link to her report at theworld.org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Fukushima nuclear power plant following the March 11 earthquake & tsunami. (Photo: daveeza/Flickr)

Nowhere near Chernobyl. Except sort of. But really, much, much less bad. Or… maybe worse.

If your head’s hurting right now trying to keep track of official evaluations of the scale of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, well, get in line for the aspirin. If not yet the iodine pills.

For weeks we’ve been told that the still out-of-control nuclear mess at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant would ultimately come nowhere near the scale of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. (I wrote about this comparison—and its shortcomings—last week.) The Japanese government, for instance, had rated the accident at level 5 on the IAES’s International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale—an “accident with wider consequences,” roughly on par with the scary but ultimately fairly limited Three Mile Island event in 1979.

Then, Tuesday, we here in the US awoke to news that Japan has re-evaluated the amount of radiation released so far, and has recalibrated the disaster as a 7—top of the IAEA’s scale, a “major accident,” and a level previously reached only by… Chernobyl.

The announcement was widely reported in leads and top graphs in ways that strongly suggested Fukushima is, in fact, comparable to Chernobyl. (See NYTimes, NPR, Kyodo News, NHK.)

Yikes.

But hold on, they told those of us who weren’t too stunned to listen or read further, Fukushima still has released only about a tenth of the total radiation released at Chernobyl. So even if it’s on the same level as Chernobyl it’s still “totally different from Chernobyl,” according to an official of Japan’s nuclear agency.

OK, so it’s the same, but actually not at all the same.

Turns out the confusion partly results from an imprecise measurement system that doesn’t distinguish between events on the top end of the scale. And there IS a very important distinction here—between a Chernobyl reactor without a containment vessel that exploded and burned for two days, spewing high levels of radiation over thousands of square miles, and the four reactors at Fukushima that have so far suffered much less damage and the impact of which has been much more localized.

Except… on the heels of the government’s announcement that Fukushima is not on par with Chernobyl came this, from an executive of the Plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power:

“Our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.”

Huh?

Aside from that single quote from TEPCO’s Junichi Matsumoto, I haven’t been able to unearth any more details about this statement, certainly nothing about the level of probability behind it. And the same Japanese nuclear official who said Fukushima is totally different from Chernobyl, despite the top-level crisis rating, told the New York Times, “I cannot understand their position.”

So for the time being we’re again left in the dark. Which has been one of the biggest problems of this whole crisis—a dearth of detailed and reliable information, or context for the information we do have.

Some of this may be impossible to get for years, if ever—many instruments are broken or unreliable after the quake and tsunami, and the reactor cores are still too hot to for anyone to be able to assess them directly. It’s also impossible to measure radiation in every possible place it could have ended up. But some information may also have been withheld or massaged by TEPCO or the Japanese government, which has been wrestling with the challenge of how to manage the situation without causing panic among its people.

As I said, we do know that the dynamics of the Chernobyl incident were very different from those at Fukushima. We also know that Fukushima has been managed far better than the Soviets handled Chernobyl (not well, perhaps, but still far better). That means many fewer people have so far received acute doses of radiation this time, and that the fallout from the airborne releases seem to be much less and far more localized. And the Japanese government says that a month now into the crisis, the chances of another large burst of radiation are “significantly smaller.”

But we also know that along with the airborne releases, large amounts of radioactivity have seeped into the ground and been released into the sea, much of which, it seems, is as yet uncounted. And of course the disaster is still far from over. Radiation may continue to escape for weeks or months to come.

And amid the mixed signals, here’s one more: even as the risk of significant new releases seems to be diminishing, the Japanese government this week expanded the evacuation zone around the plant to include new areas where residents are likely to receive long-term elevated radiation exposure. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that some of these areas will be uninhabitable for at least several decades to come.

So—Fukushima like Chernobyl? Fukushima NOT like Chernobyl? I still believe the comparison is inappropriate no matter how the numbers do or don’t stack up (Are we comparing the nature of the accident? Total radiation released? Area affected? Total impact on human health?) But it’s clearer than ever this week that that’s a losing rhetorical battle, even as it’s also clear that the comparisons are more meaningless than ever.

But I sure do hope that at the very least, the IAEA will change its scale before the next nuclear disaster—this is becoming harder than ever to characterize for a general audience.

If they don’t, we’ll know that they really are in cahoots—not with the nuclear industry, as many allege, but with the aspirin manufacturers.

Fukushima nuclear power plant

**Update April 26, 2011: UCS has released an updated version of their report estimating total cancers and cancer deaths attributable to Chernobyl, which revises their estimates slightly downward from their original posing of April 7—from 70,000/35,000 to 53,000/27,000.**

April 8, 2011

For four weeks now, the world has watched with a surreal combination of horror and helplessness as the Japanese have struggled to regain control of their crippled nuclear reactors in Fukushima, staunch the flow of radioactivity, and evaluate the long-term impact of the disaster on human health, the environment, and communities near and far. Perhaps the only thing that anyone can be sure of nearly a month into this crisis is that we still can’t be sure of anything, and won’t be able to be for weeks, months, or maybe even years.

But there’s one thing of which most experts have been assuring us: in the end, Fukushima likely won’t be as bad as Chernobyl.

Problem is, that comparison falls short for a number of reasons. To start with, no one knows how “bad” Chernobyl really was.

We do know that the 1986 explosion and fire blanketed large parts of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia with high levels of radioactivity, including a roughly 30-kilometer hot zone around the plant that will be off limits to most people for centuries. We also know that much smaller amounts of radioactive fallout spread across Europe and around the world, and worked their way into ecosystems and food chains thousands of miles away.

But estimates of the human health effects are still all over the map.

In the years after the accident, critics of nuclear power warned of hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl-related cancers.  A few people today still hew to  those estimates, but in 2005, a multi-agency UN study provided a much less alarming figure and the closest thing yet to an official estimate of total projected cancer deaths—somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000.

That’s still a lot, but nowhere near the level feared.

Of course the UN report was hardly the last word, either. A year later, Greenpeace countered with a report of its own estimating the total number of likely Chernobyl-related deaths at roughly 90,000 — more than 20 times the UN estimate. That report in turn was criticized for relying on bad science.

Fast-forward to 2011, and a new analysis just this week from the highly-credible nuclear watchdog group, the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS physicist Lisbeth Gronlund re-crunched the UN’s data from the 2005 report and others, and came up with her own estimate of total Chernobyl-related cancer deaths: 35,000.

That’s less than half Greenpeace’s estimate, but roughly 10 times the UN’s “official” figure.

And of course that doesn’t begin to account for non-cancer health effects, ecological impacts, and the immeasurable psychological effects of fear and uncertainty.

This debate over Chernobyl’s deadly legacy likely will go on as long as people remember its name, largely because any assessment necessarily involves estimates, extrapolations, huge uncertainties and controversial dose-response models. And however many there are, most of the deaths and non-fatal cancers caused by Chernobyl will be hidden as virtually undetectable blips in a vast sea of cancers. Roughly 40 percent of humans will get cancer in their lifetimes, and roughly 20 percent will die of it, so even 70,000 more cancers cases throughout the affected populations may barely be noticed.

Unless you’re unlucky enough to be one of them. The fact is, whether it’s 4,000, 35,000 or 90,000, every single one of Chernobyl’s victims represents a human tragedy that will reverberate widely through each person’s family and community.

As will be the case with Fukushima. No one yet knows what the ultimate impact of this unfolding disaster will be on human health, communities and the environment. But even in the likely case that it doesn’t turn out to be as “bad” as Chernobyl—even if there end up being fewer than 4,000 deaths, and a ghost zone of perhaps only hundreds of square kilometers instead of thousands—have we really dodged a bullet?

Ultimately, we don’t need to know how “bad” Chernobyl was to know that it should be no one’s benchmark of relief.

I’m not using this disaster to make an argument against nuclear power. For the time being, until the world gets much more serious about developing cleaner alternatives, we face a phalanx of bad choices. All of our other current major sources of energy—oil, coal and even natural gas and hydropower—have huge environmental impacts, some arguably worse than any price we’ve paid so far for nuclear power.

What I am arguing against is using abstractions, phantoms, to imply that Fukushima or any other disaster is somehow less bad than it could have been. What’s happening in Fukushima is terrible in its own right, no comparison needed, thanks. It should evoke horror in all of us, along with compassion, and a serious reckoning about how we’ve organized our economies and feed our insatiable appetite for energy.

• WHO Media Center: Chernobyl: the true scale of the accident
• Greenpeace: The Chernobyl Catastrophe: Consequences on Human Health
• Greenpeace vs. the United Nations: The Chernobyl Body Count Controversy
  

• UCS: All Things Nuclear: How Many Cancers Did Chernobyl Really Cause?

I spend the bulk of my time for the radio program, The Big Show, chasing my tail trying to bring you “all the latest news.” What’s great about the podcast is that it affords me, and therefore you, the chance to step back and get some historical context and perspective on the news. That’s what I’m doing this week with the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima in Japan. Here you see a picture of the reactor at Chernobyl, encased in its concrete “sarcophagus.” That’s one of the places we will revisit, along with Three Mile Island in the United States, and the Tokaimura plant in Japan.

Yes, I’ll admit that WTP 324 will not be the most uplifting episode we’ve done. But it’s a fascinating glimpse into the past, and will hopefully arm you with some much-needed perspective amidst the daily deluge of breaking news.

To make up for the darkness, we will also feature a Tokyo blogger who is helping translate tweets from Japan during these difficult times.

(Photo: Elena Filatova)

Remembering Chernobyl after 25 years
Abd El-Krim: A Moroccan hero who never was
Nations Look So Pretty from Afar
100 Years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By Brigid McCarthy

As Japan struggles to contain a nuclear crisis, it’s prompted memories of Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear accident. On April 26, 1986, an explosion at one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine sent radioactive clouds over the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Byelorussia, which then blew across northern and western Europe.

Unlike the situation in Japan, Chernobyl was caused by operator error and a flawed reactor design. But the scale of the disaster was magnified by Soviet secrecy and a lack of preparedness.

Oleg Zhuk was a witness to that. He was a conscript in the Soviet army back in l986. He had just two days left in his military service when he and 10 other men from his unit were sent to Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. It was April 26th, the day of the accident.

They drove from Kiev about an hour north to Chernobyl.

“We were told that a small accident has happened, that just there was some kind of fire, and that the radiation was not very high,” Zhuk said.

They stopped at a Soviet military base near the nuclear power plant and picked up dosimeters to measure radiation levels nearby.

They quickly realized this wasn’t a small accident.

“It wasn’t true. We had special equipment and we saw that the level of radiation was very high,” Zhuk said.

Then they walked over to Prypyat, a town of about 50,000 people just a mile and a half from Chernobyl.

“There a lot of people just walking around. I saw children,” he said, and lots of young couples pushing baby strollers.
“It was Saturday and the weather was very good, and people were just calmly going around. They saw this smoke and were standing nearby and watching it. Nobody warned them that it’s dangerous for them to stand there,” Zhuk said.

In fact, Soviet authorities said nothing for days. They tried to keep the accident a secret. They only began evacuating people 36 hours after the explosion. And they didn’t tell them why.

But here’s what happened: Shortly after midnight on April 26th, operators at the power plant conducted a safety experiment. They cut the electricity to test whether the water pumps that cooled the reactor would keep working until the plant’s back up generators kicked in. But when they switched the electricity back on, it caused a massive power surge. Pressure built up inside the reactor and it exploded.

“This is a real conventional explosion, but in which it essentially threw a lot of radioactive material up into the sky,” said David Hoffman, who wrote about Chernobyl in his book, “The Dead Hand,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction last year. “It blew the roof off of the place,” Hoffman said, “but the thing is that the reactor caught fire, and it burned for 10 days.”

It continued to spew radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Hoffman looked through documents in the Soviet archives to piece together what happened next.

“I found a piece of paper that was a report by a fellow named Vladimir Gubarev, saying that there was nothing but chaos and confusion,” Hoffman said.

Gubarev was the science editor of Pravda, the official communist party newspaper. He arrived on the scene eight days after the accident, and was shocked by what he saw. He wrote that there were no emergency measures; no one knew what to do. “Soldiers were sent into the danger zone without any protective gear,” Hoffman said. “The sluggishness of local authorities is striking. They were waiting for instructions from Moscow.”

But Soviet leaders in Moscow were relying on reports from local authorities, who assured them that everything was fine; they’d put out the fire, and there was no need to evacuate the population.

But in fact, the fire was raging out of control.

At first they sent local firemen from Prypyat to the roof of the burning building to douse the flames with hoses. Most died almost immediately from acute radiation poisoning. Then they sent in helicopters, according to Oleg Zhuk. He said that most of the pilots were hurling parachutes filled with sand and boric acid into the burning reactor. They were forced to work until they fainted.

One pilot later recalled,”it was like flying on top of a frying pan.”

Oleg Zhuk with his daughter

“And I took my special equipment to see the level of radiation, and just about 100 meters from those helicopters and parachutes the level of radiation went up dramatically,” said Zhuk. “So my officer said that his soldiers won’t go there.”
Oleg Zhuk was allowed to leave Chernobyl after 10 days. Over the next several years, Soviet authorities sent in 600,000 rescue workers, mostly military conscripts like Zhuk, to decontaminate the surrounding area and seal off the damaged reactor.

Today, Chernobyl is ringed by an 18-mile uninhabitable zone.

A 2006 report prepared by several U.N. agencies and the three most affected countries found that roughly 50 people had died as a direct result of Chernobyl. But the report also stated that “it’s impossible to assess reliably…numbers of fatal cancers” due to the accident. And there’s still huge debate over the long term health effects. David Hoffman said that one estimate is that an additional 4,000 cancers may have resulted among the 600,000 people exposed to higher levels of radiation.

That’s actually much lower than health officials had predicted.

But many Ukrainians, including Oleg Zhuk, are convinced the real numbers are much higher. And there almost certainly have been other, non-cancer health impacts.

Oleg Zhuk is in his 40s now. When asked whether he’s suffered any health affects from Chernobyl, he said, “I don’t know. I’m ill from time to time.”

But he pointed out that his commanding officer tried to protect his team at Chernobyl.

“Our officer really cared about us. Probably, he saved our health; maybe our life.”

Related Links

• Commemoration of the
  Chernobyl Disaster:The Human Experience Twenty Years Later
• The lessons of Chernobyl
• International Atomic Energy Agency: Frequently Asked Chernobyl Questions
• World Health Organization: Chernobyl: The true scale of the accident
• The Chernobyl Forum: Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts
• Greenpeace: The Chernobyl Catastrophe–Consequences on Human Health
• Spiegel Online: Greenpeace vs. the United Nations: The Chernobyl Body Count Controversy
• New Scientist: Why Fukushima Daiichi won’t be another Chernobyl
• Union of Concerned Scientists: Nuclear Reactor Crisis in Japan FAQs

Coffee shop in the Ukraine

What exactly does it mean to be Ukrainian? A thousand years ago, Ukraine was the heart of the Slavs’ first great civilization, one of the largest kingdoms in Europe. Since the 13th century, parts of Ukraine have been over-run and ruled by Mongols, Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Austrians, Ottoman Turks, Russians, and Soviets. Ukraine finally achieved true independence in 1991. But Ukrainians are just starting to figure out what it means to be Ukrainian. The World’s Jason Margolis spent 10 days in Ukraine and reports on the quest for Ukrainian identity, exploring the nation’s music, politics, history, and humor.

Ukrainian humor
September 15th, 2008

Odessa Fish Market

The brand of humor that made Seinfeld such a hit is often described as New York Jewish humor. It’s a little off-the-wall, neurotic, and self-deprecating. Perhaps bitter and pessimistic. And very funny. The roots of modern Jewish humor come from Eastern Europe. More specifically, it’s said if you want to go to where funny was born, go to Odessa, the city on the Black Sea.

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Family roots
August 4th, 2008

Vladimirets, Ukraine

66 years ago this summer, the Nazis swept through the Ukrainian countryside. It’s estimated that they killed between 600,000 and 900,000 Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust.The family of The World’s Jason Margolis is originally from Ukraine. He recently traveled to the place where his grandmother grew up.

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Vladimirets audio slideshow

Famous battle
August 19th, 2008

"Famous Battle"

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Economy draws Ukrainians home
July 28th, 2008

Shopping in downtown Kiev

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Ukrainians left their country to find better jobs in the West. Now, some Ukrainians are reversing the pattern. They’re heading home because of new economic opportunities in Ukraine.

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Okean Elzy
July 15th, 2008

Ukraine’s most popular rocker is now serving in that country’s Parliament.

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Chernobyl tourism
July 24th, 2008

Jason Margolis in front nuclear reactor in Chernobyl

Chernobyl is the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident. When a reactor exploded there in 1986, it sent plumes of radioactive material across Europe. Chernobyl’s still largely off-limits. But the Ukrainian disaster zone has been turning into something of a tourist destination. Jason Margolis took the tour.

Listen:

Chernobyl audio slideshow

Viktor Yushchenko
June 26, 2008

Four years ago, something terrible happened to Viktor Yushchenko while he was running for president of Ukraine. His face became horribly disfigured. Doctors determined he was poisoned by dioxin. At lot’s happened since then. Ukraine went through the ‘Orange Revolution’ and Yushchenko went on to become president. These days he face looks less damaged. Now it’s his political health that’s suffering. Jason Margolis has an update on the Ukrainian leader’s physical — and political — health. Listen:

BBC video: the strange tale of Viktor Yushchenko’s face
Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko

Thoughts on Ukraine
July 14th, 2008

Jason found beautiful architecture, clean streets, and a certain bluntness in Ukraine. Read his journal