City of the Apocalypse: The Abandoned City of Chernobyl, Ukraine
World Remembers Chernobyl, Haunted by Nuclear Fears
April 25, 2011AFP – The world on Tuesday marks a quarter century since the world's worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine, haunted by fears over the safety of atomic energy after the Japan earthquake.
In the early hours of April 26, 1986, workers at the Chernobyl atomic power station were carrying out a test on reactor four when operating errors and design flaws sparked successive explosions.
The radioactive debris landed around the reactor, creating an apocalyptic scene in the surrounding area, while material also blew into the neighbouring Soviet republics of Belarus and Russia and further into western Europe.
Two workers were killed by the explosion and 28 other rescuers and staff died of radiation exposure in the next months. Tens of thousands needed to be evacuated and fears remain of the scale of damage to people's health.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced he will make a landmark visit to Chernobyl on Tuesday to take part in the memorial ceremonies, where he is expected to be joined by his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yanukovych.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill will hold a service in the Kiev region in the early hours of Tuesday, striking a bell at 1:23 am local time (2223 GMT) -- the time when the explosion went off -- to formally mark the start of remembrance ceremonies. He will then head to the affected zone to hold an Easter service at a chapel in the settlement of Chernobyl and then a service by a memorial next to the disused power station itself.
But the anniversary has gained an eerily contemporary resonance after the earthquake in Japan which damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant and prompted leaks of radiation.
Japan has placed the disaster on the maximum seven on an international scale of atomic crises, the same level as Chernobyl, and the troubles at Fukushima have prompted many questions about whether atomic power is too great a risk.
The operator of Fukushima, Tokyo Electrical Power Co. (TEPCO), has also come under fire over its information policy, an echo of the disastrous reluctance of the Soviet authorities to admit the truth over Chernobyl in 1986.
Moscow stayed silent on the Chernobyl disaster for three days, with the official news agency TASS only reporting an accident at Chernobyl on April 28 after the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden reported unusually high radiation.
In 1986 and 1987, the Soviet government sent over half a million rescue workers (liquidators), to clear up the power station and decontaminate the surrounding area, many not fully aware of the scale of the calamity.
"I think that our modern states must see the main lesson of what happened at Chernobyl and the most recent Japanese tragedy as the necessity to tell people the truth," Medvedev told a meeting of liquidators in the Kremlin.
"The world is so fragile and we are so connected that any attempts to hide the truth, to gloss over a situation, to make it more optimistic, will end with tragedy and cost the lives of people."
But despite the notoriety of Chernobyl, controversy has raged for years even between the UN's own agencies over the number of deaths directly caused by the disaster, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to dozens.
Some experts have said the worst health legacy of Chernobyl is mental rather than physical, with those affected traumatised by the memory of April 1986, forced relocation and the sense that they are victims of nuclear catastrophe.
In 2005, several UN agencies including the World Health Organisation, said in a report a total of 4,000 people could eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure.
But the UN Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) says other than the 30 confirmed deaths in the immediate aftermath only 19 ARS (Acute Radiation Syndrome) survivors had died by 2006 for various reasons.
Other than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer -- a usually treatable condition -- from contaminated milk there was "no persuasive evidence" of any other effect on the general population from radiation, it said in a report in February.
But environmental campaign group Greenpeace in 2006 accused the UN agencies of grossly underestimating the toll, saying there would be an estimated 93,000 fatal cancer cases caused by Chernobyl.
After the disaster, the Soviet authorities put up a supposedly temporary concrete shelter to protect the destroyed reactor but there have long been worries about its durability.
A new sarcophagus is being built nearby and is scheduled to be erected over the reactor in the next years.
But astonishingly, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which is running the project, has yet to win full funding for its completion. The conference last week secured 550 million euros ($785 million) in new pledges, short of the 740 million euros still needed.
Chernobyl continued producing energy until well after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reactor number two shut after a fire in 1991, reactor number one closed in 1997 but reactor number three continued working right up until December 2000.
Chernobyl, 25 Years Later: It’s Not Over Yet (Excerpt)
April 22, 2011
Climate Central - ...As for Chernobyl's environmental toll, there's not a lot of good information there either. James Morris, a biologist from the University of South Carolina, has been to the area five or six times to study the uptake of radioactive carbon released when the graphite burned.
"One pine forest within sight of the reactor was known as the 'red forest,'" Morris says, because radiation killed all the trees and turned their needles red. The timber was bulldozed and left to rot. Now a new forest has sprung up again, and, he says, "all the trees are clearly mutated." They’ve lost the internal signals that make a Christmas tree taper toward the top. Instead, he says, "they don’t seem to know which way is up."
But that sort of aberration isn’t seen everywhere. In fact, Perkins says some forms of wildlife, including wolves, bears and white-tailed eagles have returned to the forests where they haven’t been seen since being exterminated by hunters decades ago.
"One interpretation," he says, "is that humans are more dangerous than radiation."
Biologists documented plenty of mutated animals in the years shortly after the disaster, but these have diminished in later generations. Biodiversity, however -- the variety of species -- has also declined.
As for the Exclusion Zone, also known as the Zone of Alienation, an approximately Rhode Island-sized area surrounding the plant, Perkins has ventured inside four times with students from Evergreen State.
"You have to get special permission," he says, "but once you’re inside you can drive around freely, although you have to have a guide and be out by sundown. You can see the abandoned city -- lots of reinforced concrete, slowly crumbling. You see abandoned villages, with the forest overtaking them."
Or not quite abandoned, perhaps. Because they probably won’t live long enough to develop cancer from any exposure they get at this point in their lives, says Morris, the old people who lived in villages within the Exclusion Zone have been allowed -- unofficially -- to return.
"They're interesting places," he says, "full mostly of women, because they tend to outlive men by quite a lot. Whole villages full of old, old women."
You need special permission to enter the sarcophagus, the ominously named concrete shell that’s been built around the remains of Reactor no. 4, but anyone who’s been allowed into the Exclusion Zone can tour the visitor center about 300 yards away.
"I heard a presentation from some Ukrainian physicists who were somewhat dismayed," says Perkins.The sarcophagus isn’t watertight, they told him, and there’s some fear that the molten fuel remaining inside may include some water-soluble material that could leak out. The poorly built sarcophagus is starting to crumble in any case, which is why a huge, hangar-like concrete structure known at the "New Safe Confinement" is now being built to keep the worst of the remaining radioactive material under wraps.
But the Ukrainian scientists Perkins met with aren’t convinced it will work. The shelter won’t be watertight either, they told him, and, like the sarcophagus within, it will itself eventually become irradiated and dangerous.
"Their sense," he says, "is that this won’t last forever. It’s just kicking the can down the road, creating a problem for future generations."
That’s a lesson Japanese officials will surely keep in mind as they continue to grapple with their own nuclear mishap at Fukushima. The accident itself hasn’t been as disastrous as Chernobyl (at least so far), and Japan in 2011 is way ahead of the USSR in 1986 in terms of resources, technical expertise, and transparency.
Even so, experts have suggested that the cleanup there could take as much as a century, and that Fukushima may have to be encased in its own version of a sarcophagus, at the center of its own Zone of Alienation, for at least that long. Until engineers can get a look at the 1,000 metric tons of fuel deep inside the reactors, however -- something that might not be possible for years -- there’s no real way of knowing.
Half a world away, in now-independent Ukraine, there’s undoubtedly plenty of sympathy for what the Japanese are going through. But the Ukrainians are still dealing with their own disaster. Chernobyl is not only still unfolding: it will continue to unfold for many decades to come. Along with Fukushima and Three Mile Island, whose 32nd anniversary was noted at the end of last month, it’s a reminder that while nuclear power could help limit the carbon emissions that are already altering the climate, it’s hardly without potential dangers of its own.
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| This weather-beaten 16-story block of flats with the USSR coat of arms on the top looks like it hasn't been inhabited in decades (source) |
Chernobyl Villagers Live a Shadow of Their Former Lives
April 25, 2011
Deutsche Presse-Agentur - Poliske, Ukraine people living in the swamplands and pine forests of Polesia, a territory now bisected by the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, have long been poor and neglected.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986 made things worse.
This has always been one of Europe's very poorest territories,' said Voldymyr Tarasov, a former resident of Poliske, once a village of some 4,000 people in the heart of Polesia. The soil is bad, the growing season is short, and the roads were always few.'
Chernobyl ruined this place 25 years ago,' he added. And the people still living near the reactor, next to the radiation, they have absolutely nothing; they are destitute.'
In the wake of the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet government banned human settlement in a radius of 30 kilometres from the plants stricken reactor. Radiation made more than two dozen villages and towns uninhabitable, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.
Tarasov, a young man at the time of the disaster, was one of them, transported by government buses and trains away from his home never to return.
Poleske is now a ghost town. The drab, Soviet-era high-rises are gutted, and the collective farms have been abandoned. All of them are overgrown by a young forest that encroaches even on the highway.
The thing is, I am one of the lucky ones. We got out. My family managed to start a new life,' Tarasov said. But there are thousands who haven't been so lucky.'
The 30-kilometre no-mans land surrounding the power plant is known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The Ukrainian government calls the adjacent territory prichernobylski,' meaning these areas are now safe enough for habitation. But the boundaries are not as clear as the names would suggest.
Even where you think its safe, sometimes it isn't,' said Ivan Kovalchiuk, a border police captain who commands a unit that monitors the Exclusion Zone. You can have perfectly normal radiation levels, and then you take a step somewhere ~ and your Geiger counter is reading 100 times the safe level.'
There are varying official estimates of the number of people living near Chernobyl. Between two and four dozen people, almost all older retirees, are believed to have a residence inside the Zone itself.
There are very few of them, and they just want to live out the rest of their lives quietly in their homes,' Kovalchiuk said.
A far greater number of people live in districts on the edges of the Zone as many 200,000, according to combined Ukrainian and Belarusian estimates.
Forestry, dairy production and the raising of livestock are unsafe here, officials say.
That means, that the only thing we can do to support ourselves is to raise our own food and eat it ourselves. It's illegal to sell it,' said Vera Afanasievna, a resident of Sokolki. We know it probably isn't healthy, but we have no money.'
A half-dozen villages on the edge of the Chernobyl Zone are rudimentary. Although homes had electricity, the buildings appeared not to have changed since the days of the Russian empire. One exception is the town of Slavutych, built shortly after the Chernobyl disaster to accommodate plant workers and clean-up crews. Here the buildings are new. The average salary is about 1,000 dollars a month -- more than triple the typical monthly pay in Ukraine.
Over the years, the country has received more than a billion dollars in aid to deal with the disaster and its aftermath. But little of that money appears to have been made available to provide for the health and livelihood of those affected.
'Slavutych, where the Chernobyl specialists are, they live well. The world helps them,' Tarasov said. 'But the people on the lands around Chernobyl, all they ever got was radiation.'
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