ROGIN, Belarus — On the night of April 26,
1986, one of the crews on duty at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
received special instructions from Moscow to conduct an experiment.
They had to check whether the turbines could provide enough power
to keep the cooling system running in case of a power cut. Before
the experiment was started, all safety systems were switched off.
The chain reaction that followed could not be controlled. Yuri Korneev’s shift had started at
midnight. As usual, he worked at reactor block No. 4: “There
was a very loud bang,” Korneev remembers. “We
didn’t realize what had happened.” The explosion was so
powerful, it
blew the 1,000-ton roof off the building. Large quantities of
radioactive elements were launched high into the atmosphere and
spread across the entire Northern Hemisphere. Soldier Vasily Tychomirov didn’t know
what to expect when he was sent over to Chernobyl. He had been told
that the reactors could not be destroyed, “not even if an
airplane would crash into the nuclear plant.” During the
night of the disaster, Tychomirov first passed block No. 3:
“It was raining ashes and debris.” He recalls the
terrifying beauty of reactor No. 4: “I was only 22 years old, but
I will never forget it. The roof was like an open book, and there was a
magnificent light, a beautiful blue fire.” Korneev stood transfixed, hypnotized by the
same amazing light: “It was a beautiful fire, incredibly
brilliant.” The fire damaged his eyes, but at first he
didn’t notice and continued his work as if he was on
automatic pilot to be able to cope with the crisis: “We had
to get rid of the helium in the building, and the oil was not to
catch fire.” His report is modest, but colleagues explain how
Korneev avoided an even bigger disaster by putting out the flames
as the supply pipes, leading to 38 tons of fuel, were already on
fire. It didn’t last long: “I could hardly see and then
I started feeling very weak.” He ended up in a chaotic
medical unit: “There were people throwing up everywhere. They
went on until they had nothing left in their stomachs.” These
were the symptoms of acute radiation disease caused by an overdose
of gamma radiation. Ambulances were racing back and forth. In
Chernobyl, Korneev waited patiently until it was his turn to be
transported to the hospital. The organization for the veteran
workers of Chernobyl says that Korneev is the only one alive today of the
group that was on duty in block No. 4 when it exploded. In a quiet
voice, Korneev succinctly recounts the events of that catastrophic
night: “There was a doctor. I got an injection. I was taken to
bed and I slept.” Only after radiation measurements in Sweden and
Finland demonstrated that a disaster had occurred in the Soviet
Union did the then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev publicly
acknowledge that an accident had happened in Chernobyl. Even though
Gorbachev treated the issue lightly, the situation was not under
control and there was a lot to worry about. Tychomirov, one of
those who worked on the night of the explosion, was awarded a Red
Star for bravery. In 2000 he was treated for thyroid cancer.
Korneev’s vision deteriorated, and the plant worker had new
lenses implanted. The dose of radiation he took is considered too
high for him to ever again set foot on the premises of a nuclear
plant, he says: “It can be acutely fatal.” He has tried
to find work, but whenever his medical files are put on the table,
the interview is swiftly ended. Korneev is no longer strong enough
to do physical work, so he will just carry on waiting and wondering
whether the time bomb set inside him will go off: “I go to my
farmhouse, grow my own vegetables, and eat some honey.”
During the summer, the landscape that surrounds
Chernobyl consists of empty, smoothed-out spaces where villages
were destroyed and buried; its inhabitants have left, either by
force or voluntarily. A farmer mows the fields in long regular
loops to stop the weeds and stubborn birch shoots from taking over
the land. Behind him, a flock of storks spreads out across the
land. Maneuvering in slow motion, they patrol the field, cutting
off exits in search of panicking field mice. Not all villages have been destroyed, and not
every officially contaminated area is entirely empty. The village
teacher in Staroye Sharno, whom everyone calls Baba Hala, has never
left. She has her garden and her animals — a cow, the cats,
and, especially, the birds: “I talk to them: ‘Tchoo,
tchoo, tchoo! Twee, twee, twee!’ ” The first year after
the accident, she didn’t hear any birds, but then they
gradually came back. Baba Hala lives amid the unkempt houses
abandoned by her former neighbors. “They did offer me a flat
in Zhytomir,” she says, “but what should I do
there?” Grigory and Maria Smeyan, ages 71 and 77,
respectively, did not have a choice in the matter and found
themselves uprooted after the accident. They were living 27
kilometers from Chernobyl. Their village was evacuated in June
1986, says Grigory: “There was a truck for every two or three
families. We were allowed to take one bed, a bag of potatoes, and
food for three days. They gave us tinned meat, oranges, and 1,500
rubles per person.” Maria cannot be bothered to go back now,
but Grigory remains nostalgic. “If I could, I would go there
today even,” he says. “Over there the nightingales were
singing, and here are only crows.” In Ukraine more than 100,000 people were
evacuated in the weeks after the disaster, but a huge area of
agricultural lands and forest is still affected. Many of the
inhabitants of the area carry on eating fruits and vegetables from
their own gardens, and they also continue fishing and gathering
mushrooms and berries. This is what they are used to, even if it
means they have an intake of radioactive elements two to five times
higher than the standard. According to the Ukrainian government,
this is the case for 3.5 million people.
Just ahead of the holiday season, the
hospital’s corridors and consulting rooms are full. Surgeon
Igor Komisarenko, head of the Komisarenko Institute for
Endocrinology and Metabolism in Kiev, has been operating all morning. “Four
years after the explosion we were confronted with a surge of cases
of children with thyroid cancer,” says Komisarenko. The
cancers were caused by radioactive iodine that was released during
the disaster. Now, most of his patients are women.
Nineteen-year-old Elena Gurok blames herself for her illness.
Thyroid cancer was first diagnosed in 2002, and she has just had
her second operation: “It is my own fault. I should have
taken the medication regularly,” she says. Nila Bandarenko is another of
Komisarenko’s patients. She just had her third operation and
cannot yet speak, says the surgeon: “After the second one,
microscopic particles got into her vessels and started growing
there.” Bandarenko is also suffering from kidney cancer, and
her prospects are unclear. Like many of the women here, she is from
an area close to the nuclear plant. “The closer to Chernobyl,
the bigger the chances are of getting thyroid cancer,” says
Komisarenko. The United Nations even expects another
50,000 cases of thyroid cancer as a result of Chernobyl, says Carel
de Rooy, UNICEF representative to the Russian Federation and
Belarus: “The greatest danger from radioiodine is to the tiny
thyroid glands of children. Researchers have found that in certain
parts of Belarus, for example, 36.4 percent of children who were
under the age of 4 at the time of the accident can expect to
develop thyroid cancer.” UNICEF and other U.N. offices have
campaigned for years now to encourage a policy of universal salt
iodization that would make thyroid glands much less vulnerable to
radioactive iodine as they become saturated with the iodized salt.
So far Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia have not been willing to adapt
their regulations. If another nuclear disaster were to take place,
people would still not be protected from damage caused by
radioactive iodine and other elements. Says Komisarenko:
“After the Chernobyl disaster, iodine was distributed too
late, but radiation can affect all parts of the human body. It can
affect the stomach, the respiratory tract, and the gynecological
organs.” In his hospital he has also noticed an increase in
the incidence of serious kidney diseases. After the accident 19 regions in Russia, with
2.7 million people living in the area, were affected, and in
Belarus a quarter of the nation’s territory got hit with
two-thirds of the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. At the time,
2.2 million people were living there, a number that has since
dwindled to 1.5 million. The second-biggest city around, Gomel, was
particularly badly affected. During the summer of 1986 the
Pastuchenkos, like many thousands of families with small children,
took their son and two girls out of the area. Marina, the
family’s mother recalls: “We went as far away as
possible. We went to Russia and even to Dagestan.” But in
1998, Irina, who is now 19 years old, was found to have a brain
tumor. Three months later, her sister Yelena, now 24, was taken to
a hospital, where she learned that she, too, had a brain tumor.
“Irina had her first operation in May and half a year later
she had a second operation and radiation therapy,” says her
mother. Irina’s left arm is still partly paralyzed, and Irina
has a poor memory as a result of surgery. Still, Irina made it into
arts college and even her elder sister has finished law school
successfully, despite the hospital appointments and having to
recover from invasive surgery. Both Irina and Yelena went to
Germany for plastic cranial surgery, and both girls have thyroid
problems; Irina may soon need yet another operation. “We
didn’t eat mushrooms. We didn’t swim in the river, but
we should never have returned to this terrible place,” said
Marina.
Along the Kiev roads, sign boards
encourage the public: “Make love! There are 48 million people
in Ukraine, and we need to have 52 million!” It is unlikely
that the request will be fulfilled anytime soon. Nowhere in Europe
has the population aged more dramatically than in the areas
surrounding Chernobyl. After a shock wave of medical abortions
after the disaster, the birthrate in Ukraine is only half of what
it was in the mid-’70s. From 800,000 newborns a year, it has
plummeted to fewer than 400,000. In Belarus the trend is similar. Dr. Vachslav
Izhakovsky is director of the children’s hospital in Gomel.
He says that only one in every four children is born healthy. The
intensive-care unit has children with different congenital
malformations: cleft palate, no ears, no nose, serious
hydrocephaly. “In 1985 we had 200 children with congenital
malformations; now we have 800,” says Izhakovsky. The total
number of births registered by the hospital went down from 30,000
to 15,000. “The birth rate goes down, like everywhere in
Europe,” says Izhakovsky, “but an important factor is
that people realize the dangers of having children here.”
According to Izhakovsky, poverty is also
affecting the birthrate: “The average salary is $150 [U.S.].
Especially in the villages, life is hard. People are forced to eat
whatever they grow, and radioactive contamination is high.”
Research in the contaminated area has shown that children have
illnesses of the respiratory organs, the bones and connective
tissues, or the digestive tract. There are also more cases of
kidney disorders, cataracts, and heart and vascular diseases.
Autopsies on children who died suddenly have found these children
to have higher levels of the radioactive element cesium 137.
Izhakovsky says: “We think cesium 137 replaces another
element in the heart muscle, and, by doing so, it is causing
damage.” The overall condition of many children is weak,
according to the hospital’s director, and the
children’s immune systems are underperforming. The independent Belrad Institute in the
capital, Minsk, has done research all over Belarus. Director Alexei
Nesterenko says that in large parts of the country, people still
ingest radioactive elements through the food chain:
“Half-a-million children in Belarus have concentrations that
are too high.” Since the mid-’80s, children have been
sent on holidays to so-called pioneer camps and to other
“clean” areas. Many children still go abroad to stay
with foster families. Clean food and exercise can help the body
getting rid of part of the contamination. The Belrad Institute has
developed a supplement of vitamins, minerals, and pectin that can
do this as well; several courses a year can make the contamination
levels go down by 60 percent, says Nesterenko, “but we
don’t get enough money to supply half-a-million children. We
have only enough for 25,000.” Almost 20 years after the
Chernobyl accident, children are thus put at risk and are left more
vulnerable to many diseases. In the social and economical isolation
of Belarus, many parents are not capable of looking after their
children and are forced to hand them over to state institutions. The worst-hit countries have all seen a clear
rise in cases of congenital diseases. Identical twins Michael and
Vladimir Iariga were born five minutes apart. Michael, the older,
is seriously affected by hydrocephalus; his brother Vladimir was
born deaf. Their mother is from Bragin, one of the most
contaminated towns, and their father worked as a driver in the
contaminated zone, evacuating people and transporting cattle around
the area. He also worked in the fields hit by radioactive fallout,
and doctors who examined his blood found his DNA to be badly
damaged. “But we don’t get any help,” says the
boys’ mother, Nadezhda, “because the boys were born
more than three years after Chernobyl and we now live in Minsk,
which is not a contaminated area.” The growing numbers of birth defects are
especially disturbing because the trend is also noticed in less
contaminated areas. Anna Gorchakova has started examining the
effects with the use of European funding. In Minsk she is running a
hospice program that assists children who are terminally ill, as
well as their families. Gorchakova says that she has noted an
increase in congenital disease in areas that were not so heavily
exposed. As at the children’s hospital in Gomel, she has seen
children with multiple defects: “I find it very worrying.
Some of these children are real monsters. I am sorry; I don’t
know how else to put it.” Pediatrician Valentina Smolnikova has seen the
consequences in Buda Kashelova, in the south of Belarus. She has
been working there since 1979 and has seen dramatic changes since
the nuclear disaster: “Before that, we hardly had any
oncological problem with children. Now there are many cases of
brain tumors, cancer of the eyes, kidneys and other organs.”
The first increase she noticed after the disaster was in cases of
bone and skin cancer, “and there were also disorders of the
nervous system with stress, depressions and abnormal
behavior.” After some years the pattern changed and
Smolnikova then started getting patients with thyroid cancer and
leukemia. “Now there are many children with
congenital heart and kidney diseases,” she says. According to
Smolnikova, in her area only 10 percent of the children are born
really healthy: “Many children have chronic diseases or they
have very low immunity. Very young children have been here 30 or 50
times. They are here every single month of their life.”
Copyright © Antoinette de
Jong/TCS/ZUMA Press
All rights reserved.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2006.
