Truth was anearly casualty

By ALEXANDER R. SICH

Soviet andRussianauthoritieshave never toldthe full storyof the criticalfirst ten days.

A t a May 1986 press conference in Mos-cow— held just 11 days after the acci-dent at the Chernobyl Nuclear PowerStation—the cult of high technology

was unabashedly preached to an auditoriumfull of shocked news correspondents and invit-ed guests. When questioned as to the numberof fatalities the accident had caused and theimpact of the accident on Soviet society andthe Soviet nuclear industry, A.M. Petrosyants(then chairman ofthe Soviet State Committeeon the Utilization of Atomic Energy) respond-ed: "Science requires victims."

The Soviet system numbered its victims inthe millions. In a sense, the Chernobyl acci-dent was just one of the many misfortunesmisrepresented by the Soviet governmentover the decades in its continuing effort toshape public perceptions of domestic disasters,natural and manmade. And yet, the interna-tional character of the Chemobyl accident, thefact that radioactive fallout knows no nationalboundaries, made it a watershed event.

The accident exposed glaring weaknessesin the Soviet system: its backward technolo-gy, its sloppy safety standards, its inabilityto admit failure. And it brought to the sur-face many of the injustices, inefficiencies,

and secrets that the So-viet government had triedto keep hidden. With theworld's spotlight focusedon Chernobyl, General

Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was left with lit-tle choice other than to prove to the West hisdedication to reform by more fully implement-ing his recently announced policy ofglasnostor "openness."

In turn, gla.^'nost was a major factor that ledto the demise ofthe Soviet Union, which em-boilied a system that was fundamentally at

odds with freedom of expression an(l accessi-ble information.

Unfortunately, oUt habits die hard. Tenyears aftei- the accident, many nuclear bu-reaucrats in the former Soviet Union, particu-larly in Russia, are still too secretive and toomuch given to obfuscation.

Heroic but ineffectiveKy the time ofthe Chernobyl accident, Sovietcitizens had become masters at avoiding ac-countability for mistakes and failures. Perhapsno other statement quite captures the essenceof this lack of responsibility as one allegedlymade by a NIKIET specialist, whose organi-zation (the Moscow-based Scientific ResearchInstitute of Power Engineering) designed theRBMK reactor series. When asked to aid inclean-up and mitigation efforts, hv was widelyquoted as saying: "This is no longer a nuclearreactor. Our expertise i-s in nuclear reactors .. .so let others clean it up."

Alexander R. Sich is a nuclear engineer unththe Nuclear Safety Account ofthe EuropeanBank for Reconstruction and Development(EBRD) in London. For research that led to adoctorafp in nuclear engineering fro)n MIT,he was the first Western scientist to live andwork with members of tlie Chemobyl ComplexE.rpedition, the small gronp of Russian andUkrainian .'icientists studying the r('uiai>is ofUnit Jf. Sich, who is fluent in Ukrainian andRu.'i.sian, also holds an M.A. degree in. Sovietstudies from. Harvard University. He lived in.Ukraine from July 1990 to April 199ii, whileco7iducting his doctoral re.'^earch. The opin-ions expre.Hsed in this article are those oftheauthor, and tJm/ do not necessarily reflect anyviews held by the EBRD.

32 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

And so began an accident containment andmitigation effort portrayed by Moscow as oneof the most difficult and heroic engineeringtasks ever undertaken. In reality, the periodto the end of November 198(), during whichthe sarcophagu.s was constructed, was marredby an inept and recklesw attempt to concealthe extent of the accident—despite the factthat unwitting "volunteers" (including formerSoviet dissidents and political prisoners)risked their lives in several ineffective acci-dent-management actions.

The Governmental Chernobyl Commission(headed by Deputy Chairman of the SovietCouncil of Ministers Boris Shcherbina) wasformed during the morning of April 26, 1986,and in a manner- that resembled a cry to arms,rallied major Soviet organizations and peopleto mitigate the consequences of the accident.It was clear from the start that no concreteemergency plans had been previously formu-lated—no one was prepared to respond to anaccident of this magnitude.

In 1998, Sergei Shirokov, who headed theNuclear Energy Division of the UkrainianMinistry of Energy and Electnfication in 1986,told me that it was not until midday on Sun-day April 27 that anyone in Moscow had any

official idea what had happened. People fromthe station had surveyed the remains of thereactor building in the early morning hours ofthe 26th, but they were either afraid to reportwhat they thought had happened, or theywere simply not believed.

Through most of the first day, Gennady Sha-shainn. a key Soviet energy official, thoughtthe core was being effectively cooled by water.Based on this and other incomplete informa-tion, the central authorities in Moscow did notimmediately sense the urgency of the situationand delayed, for example, the evacuation ofresidents from what later became the 80-kilo-meter Exclusion Zone. They didn't want tocreate panic.

After local firefighters had contained or ex-tinguished more than 30 small fires burning inthe area of Unit A, efforts were directed atstopping the release of radionuclides from theburning core. Siege-mentality rhetoric wasemployed to rally workers to smother theprincipal fire—the infamous "red glow"thought to be the reactor core^within thereactor building.

In later years, the most startling revelationmade by Chernobyl researchers—and to thisday not fully accepted by the International

The scale of theChernobyl accidentwas greater thanSoviet officials hadever believed possi-ble, and they had nocontingency plans fordealing with it. Mostmitigation efforts weredevised on the fly.

May/June 1996 33

After the explosion,burning graphite in thereactor core meltedthe remaining uraniumfuel. The fuel (whichincreasingly becamecontaminated withother substances) atethrough the reactor'sLower BiologicalShield, flowed into thelower regions of thereactor building, andsolidified. Chemobylresearchers who enterthe building to obtainbore samples and totake photos areexposed to high levelsof radioactivity. Theywork quickly.

Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—is that the5,020 metric tons of material dumped from he-licopters to smother the smoldering core ofthereactor never entered the reactor core shaft.The red glow—ground zero for the helicoptercrews—was not the burning core. Rather, itwas probably a fragment of the core that hadbeen thrown up and out during the initial ex-plosion. (See "The Denial Syndrome," page 38.)Further, an attempt to quench the fire by dis-placing" oxygen in the core region with nitro-gen gas most likely occurred after the activephase ofthe Chernobyl acci<ient had ended.

That these attempts failed suggests that ap-proximately 71 percent ofthe fuel (about 135metnc tons) burned virtually in the open fornine days until it melted through the lowerpart of the core region, flowed downwardalong piping ofthe pressure suppression sys-tem, and quickly cooled and solidified intolava-like substances. (See diagram, page 39.)

AU of which means that significantly moreradioactivity was released into the atmos-phere than Soviet authorities were willing toadmit at the first major Chernobyl conference,the IAEA's Experts Meeting in Vienna, inAugust 1986.

This does not imply that during the activephase ofthe accident Soviet officials knew thatthe helicopter campaign had not covered thecore. They almost surely believed that the he-licopter crews had been successful. But by thetime ofthe August meeting, the officials hadhad ample time to examine the remains ofUnit 4 and to conclude, as is ob\'ious from pho-tos, that the core had not been covered.

The scientific finding that the core had not

been smothered after all under-mines one ofthe central tenets ofthe official Soviet version of theChemobyl clean-up campaign: thecult of the brave Chernobyl heli-copter crews who took actionsmeant to put out the fire, andwhose youthful deaths are hon-nred by a special museum in Kiev.Clearly, these "liquidators" werelirave and selfless. They were also,Linfortunately, used by Soviet au-thorities to create an imjiression inthe coming months and years thatsomething had been successfullydone to contain the accident.

In August 1986, when Academi-cian Valery Legasov, head of theSoviet delegation to Vienna, wasfaced with the fact that releases ofradioactivity began to increase onApril 30th and May 1st, and thatmitigation efforts apparently hadbeen unsuccessful in stemmingthese releases, he reportedly ex-

claimed: "The people woukl not understand.We have to be seen doing something!" Laterthat year, Legasov told the Soviet Academy ofSciences: "I did not lie at Vienna, but I did nottell the whole truth." Legasov committed sui-cide by hanging himself at home on April 26,1988, two years to the day after the accident.

There seemed to be an overriding desire bythe government to convince the people oftheSoviet Union and of the world that thingswere under control, and that the heavily dam-aged reactor building was isolated and secure.As it was being constructed—and to this day—the most visible and attention-drawing symbolof triumph over the accident, the sarcophagus,was consistently portrayed as a tremendousconcrete-and-steel engineering achievementthat tightly retained radioactive debris. Fur-ther, the government claimed there was acomplete accounting ofthe initial inventory offuel and fission products.

In May 1991, Richard Wilson, Mallinckrodtprofessor of physics at Harvard, spoke at thefirst Internationai Sakharov Conference onPeace, Progress, and Human Rights in Mos-cow. Based largely on extensive private con-versations he had with Russian scientists, hesummarized several ways in which the Sovietgovernment had attempted to control or cen-sor information about the consequences of theaccident:

• On Legasov's instinictions, about six pagesconcerning radioactivity released in Belaruswere removed from the official report justprior to the August 1986 IAEA meeting andwere not discussed.

• Several pages detailing the lai'ge quanti-

34 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

ties of radionuclides deposited 100 kilometersand more northeast of Chernobyl in theBryansk oblast of Russia were removed fromthe report following dii'ectives from the Sovi-et Central Committee.

• Dosimeters in the possession of physiciansand private individuals who had worked in themitigation efforts following the accident werelocked up by the KGB.

• Publication of "unauthorized" measure-ments of radioactivity were forbidden—evenas late as 1990.

• Physicians in Ukraine and Belarus wereforbidden to mention radiation in their medicaldiagnoses.

• Ap])eals by private individuals in Belarusthat children not be allowed to drink milk inthe first weeks of May 1986 were stopped forfear such warnings might caused panic.

• Health records of the "liquidators" (sol-diers and others who constiiicted the sarcoph-agus and did cleanup work in the zone) disap-peared after their work was completed. (Sincethe collapse of the Soviet Union, these datahave slowly begun to surface.)

The range of Soviet deception regardingChemobyl seemed endless. Consider the sar-cophagus, which one Soviet document called a"concrete cube." The amount of concreteclaimed to have been used to construct thesarcophagus ranges from 300,000 to 410,000cubic meters. However, if one simply takesthe cube root of this range of values, the di-mensions of a pure block of concrete withthese volumes would be in the range of (>7 to74 meters on a side. This is larger (and cer-tainly taller) than the actual sarcophagus,which is mostly empty space.

According to the structural drawings of thesarcophagus, the amount of concrete actuallyused in constructing the sarcophagus wasabout 161,000 cubic meters, which is still a lotof concrete. But a great deal of it leakedthrough holes in the reactor building onto thegrounds of the station, or was used to coverthe ground to shield workers.

The net effect of the government's propa-gandistic claims was to draw attention awayfrom the affected people and the extensivecontamination of the environment, includinggreat tracts of agricultural land, and focus iton the sarcophagus, which represented "vic-tory" over the accident. The Soviet leadersthemselves wanted more than anyone else tobelieve that most of the contamination wascontained within the sarcophagus, and so thestage was set for the creation of a myth thatwould remain unquestioned for several years.

"They should have given a little thought tothe problem before acting so haphazardly," isthe restrained assessment outside expertsoften make of the Governmental Commission's

methods. Rather than carefully thinkingthrough mitigation efforts, the GovernmentalCommission's intentions were dictated by thepassion to remain in control. For example, onemust question the wisdom of constructing an8.4-kilometer perimeter wall, which was sunkinto the ground to a depth of 30 meters. Theproject, known as Casa Grande, was aban-doned when only partially complete. It wassupposed to surround the station and stop thespread of radionuclides to nearby bodies ofwater.

The project was undertaken almost immedi-ately, ignoring the warnings of chemists andhydrogeologists. Apparently little forethoughtwas given to the fact that radionuclides bindchemically in the topsoil. Thus, the contami-nants would migrate only very slowly throughthe clay and sand sublayers into the groundwater, which was located approximately 15meters below the surface at the time of theaccident.

The project was abandoned because by thetime the workers were ready to extend thewall through the "Red Forest" (so named be-cause the trees turned reddish before dying),the army had not gotten around to decontam-inating the area. One bureaucratic tie-up ledto another, and the project was eventually"forgotten."

Meanwhile, the paitially constincted sectionofthe underground wall between the stationand the Pripyat River acts as a dam. The re-sult: the level of the gi'ound water had risen towithin 4.5 meters ofthe surface by 1992, ac-cording to Aleksandr Borovoi, head ofthe De-partment of Radiation Research at the Kur-chatov Research Institute in Moscow. That is,the ground water level, which seems to havereached equilibrium, is much closer to the con-taminants now than in 1986.

Another line of defense that was as ineffec-tive as Casa Grande was the valiant attemptby miners and engineers to construct a heatexchanger below the core by tunneling be-neath the foundation of Unit 4. The reasoning:In the event of a much-feared "China Syn-drome," there would be one more barrier be-tween the ground water and the molten core.The project was undertaken well after the ac-tive phase ofthe accident, and when it becameclear there was no danger of a melt-through, itwas abandoned. Workers in the area now callit the "Moonshine Still," because of its com-plex array of cooling pipes.

How much fuel?No one actually knew how much nuclear fuelwas left inside Unit 4 after the accident, nordid anyone know its condition well enough to

(continued on page 38)

FOR THE LOWDOWN

ON THE SHUTDOWN

turn the page

May/June 1996 35

The denial syndrome

The Intemational Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)still clings to the myth—first promulgated by the So-viets—that the 5,020 metric tons of sand, clay,dolomite, boron carbide, and lead dumped from heli-copters in the first few days after the Chernobyl acci-dent found their mark and succeeded in smotheringthe "burning" Unit 4 core.

But it is now clear that the helicopter pilots did notcover the core. Rather, with pinpoint bombing accura-cy performed under extremely hazardous conditions,these brave pilots managed to smother the infamous"red glow," which was thought to be the burning core.Unfortunately, the red glow is now viidely assumed tohave been only a minor portion ofthe core, thrown upand away from the reactor in the devastating steamexplosion. The location ofthe red glow was 12 to 15meters from the reactor core shaft, on the floor oftheCentral Hall, which was left roofless by the explosion.

About 71 percent ofthe fuel in the core (.roughly 1H5metric tons) remained uncovered in the reactor shaftafter the explosion. Eventually the fuel meltedthrough the reactor's lower lid and flowed into thelower regions of the reactor building, whei'e it cooledand hardened into lava-like substances. About 25 per-cent of the core was scattered in and around the re-mains ofthe reactor building, and almost 4 percentdissipated into the environment—producing radiationcontamination that was detectable over the entirenorthern hemisphere.

The bottom line: most ofthe core remained in theUnit 4 building, as the Soviets later said. But insteadof being smothered, the core remained exposed to theenvironment, releasing radioactivity into the atmo-sphere for nearly 10 days, at which point the rem-nants cooled down on their own.

Even today, the IAEA's official position, first ex-pressed in INSAG-1—the International Nuclear Safe-ty Advisory Group's review of the Soviet report pre-sented in Vienna in August 198(i—supports the Sovietversion of events. It concludes that "accident manage-ment actions taken at Chernobyl were, generally,quite successful." Dumping the materials into the re-actor shaft, the review added, "stabilized the situationat an early stage."

The IAEA's defense of this position, based primari-

ly on information provided by the Soviet government,seems particularly awkward today, because data andanalyses indicating that the core had not been smoth-ered became available in the West as early as 1989.Even more embarrassing, however, is that the IAEAitself sponsored a 1990 rejwrt by Aleksandr Borovoi.one ofthe key scientists investigating the Chernobylaccident. His data clearly indicated that the core wasnot covered by the materials, and that approximatelythree times more cesium 187 was released into the at-mosphere than the Soviets had admitted. The IAEAapparently ignored Borovoi's work.

My research at Chernobyl, which partially drew onthe courageous work of Borovoi and his Russian andUkrainian colleagues, eventually led to a broad reaj)-praisal ofthe accident and its consequences. The mainintent was to recreate the sequence of events duringthe nine days following the explosion, when the de-stroyed reactor was actively releasing I'adionuclidesinto the environment.

After my findings became known in early 1994,Morris Rosen, deputy director ofthe IAEA, notedthat he had flown over the reactor in May 1!)8(J, and hecould vouch for the fact that "the material ceilainlygot into the core region." My work, an IAEAspokesperson told a newspaper reporter in 1994, was"flawed and not worthy of serious attention."

Indeed, it is aerial observations ofthe destroyed re-actor that were more likely to be flawed. For onething, the 2,0(H)-metric-ton Upper Biological Shield—the reactor's "lid"—was perched, at a cockeyed angle,above the reactor well, blocking the view into the re-actor core. (The accompanying diagram makes thatclear.) Meanwhile, over the years, the scientists whohave actually entered Unit 4, at great personal risk,have taken about 200 bore sami)les and have madeenough visual and robotic observations to conclusivelyprove that virtually none ofthe material from thehelicopters entered the core shaft. If it had, signifi-cant amounts of it would have been found in the lava-like remnants of the core. In fact, only traces werefound.

In retrospect, the IAEA's approach to Chernobylshould sui-prise no one. After all. the IAEA is in thebusiness of" promoting nuclear energy, not discourag-

(continued from page 35)predict its future behavior. Preliminary analy-ses of hot particles in Sweden and Germanyindicated that approximately 3 to 6 percent ofthe mass ofthe core, or about 6.7 metric tons,had been released beyond the bounds of thestation. Based on these early results, the Gov-ernmental Commission hastily decided that96.5 percent of the initial 190.2-ton fuel loadwas still located within the core region. Thisofficial estimate became the ultimate arbiter.

the criterion to support the notion that thefuel had been accounted for and was tightlyheld within the sarcophagus. It was the keybit of data by which to convince the West thateverything was under control.

The Soviet leaders themselves, it seems,wanted to believe this, even if based on ques-tionable evidence. F'or example, one of my col-leagues recalls an incident at the KurchatovInstitute in which measurements by the IglaSystem (a wand-like probe suspen(led from a

38 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

BIRD'S-EYE VIEW

Materials dumped byhelicopters

CROSS-SECTION

^.. ^.-.yS'",

Lo*ef BiologicalShield

L^va-like deposits on fourteveJs beneath the reactor.

Soviet helicopter crews "bombed" the "red glow," believ-ing it was the reactor core. The author and many othernuclear engineers are convinced that the glow (upperschematic) was a fragment of the core that had beenthrown up and away from the reactor shaft. Much of theremaining fuel melted, mixed with other materials, andfiowed downward into the reactor building.

ing it. For ten years, the agency has attempted todownplay the consequences of the accident. In 1987,for example, well before information began to filterout of the Soviet Union on the ti"ue extent of the acci-dent, an IAEA report reassuringly said, "If anything,there will be a modification downward of earlycalculations of risks and predictions of healthconsequences."

And, too, the IAEA has been markedly unaggres-sive in questioning official Soviet and Russian Cher-nobyl data and analyses because the Soviet Union(and now, Russia) plays a significant role in the gover-nance of the IAEA.

For several years after the accident, the IAEAseemingly ignored specialists from republics otherthan Russia, which dominated the Soviet central gov-ernment. But Russian <lata were controlled and oftensuspect: Russia had 11 Chernobyl-ty})e reactors es-sential to power production, and thus it had a clearpolitical need to minimize the consequences of theaccident.

Dealing almost exclusively with the Russians, how-ever, not only restricted IAEA access to information,it alienated the IAEA from the people of Uki-aine andBelai'us, the republics most affecteti by the accident.The IAEA didn't help matters by derisively labelingas "radiophobes" those who were genuinely attempt-ing to draw attention to the accident's health effects.(In fairness to the IAEA, though, some environmentalorganizations. East and West, have worked overtimeto exaggerate the extent of the accident by morbi{ilyfocusing on unsubstantiated body counts numberingin the tens of thousands.)

Chernobyl has served both sides of the nuclear de-bate. One need not exaggerate the effects of radiationto know that tremendous damage has been done. Ar-guing over the definition of a nuclear v. non-nuclearexplosion doesn't help decontaminate tens of thou-sands of s(iuare kilometers of farm land. To battleover the body count misses the point: Is not one vic-tim enough to condemn a reactor design long knownto be deficient?

And surely we should expect more from the IAEAthan Deputy Director Rosen's careless statement atthe Vienna conference in August 1986: "Chernobylshows us that even in a catastrophic accident, we arenot talking about unreasonable numbers of deaths."

— A R. S.

helicopter) were presented and interpi-eted. Inanalyzing the Igla data, it was concluded thatthe largest amount of fuel was contained with-in the reactor core area. Following this, an in-ternal document was prepared detailing thelocations and quantities of fuel within the re-actor building.

The document seems to have been used toprovide information to the IAEA's ExpertsMeeting in August 1986. Unfortunately, notonly is there almost no fuel in the reactor core

area (the core shaft is virtually empty), but afew years later, when researchers entered thearea of the Central Hall to examine moreclosely the remains of the reactor, the Igla de-tector wand was found to be jutting partiallyout of the southern spent-fuel pool, approx-imately 12 meters from the reactor shaft, andit remains thei'e to this day.

How much radioactivity was released intothe environment? That is still a contentiousquestion. In 1986, the Soviets estimated 50

May/June 19% 39

Ten yearslater,bureaucraticinertiastillhampersscientists.

million curies. That compares to the l!)7n acci-dent at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nu-clear power plant, where virtually all of the ra-dionuchdes were kept within the containmentstructure.

In my study, I concluded that the release ofvolatile radionuclides at Chernobyl was actu-ally two to three times the Soviet figures.That was in line with earlier Westei'n suspi-cions regarding the releases, and the esti-mates are compatible with early satelliteimaging investigations by Edward Warman, avice president at Stone and Webstei', an engi-neering firm that has done a lot of nuclearpower work.

In fact, a recent publication by the Organi-zation for European Cooperation an(i Devel-opment presents the findings of Swedish in-vestigator Lennart Devell, which suggest aneven greater total release of about 200 millioncuries, if one adds the contributions of thevolatile isotopes, iodine 133, cesium 136, andtellurium 129.

Sadly, these higher release estimates sup-port conclusions drawn by medical experts ina recent study by the Workl Health Organiza-tion, which directly links the marked increaseof childhood thyroid cancers and other mal-adies occurring in Belarus and Ukraine to re-leases of radioiodine fi'om the accident.

An invincible bureaucracyTen years after the accident, Chei*nobyl isplagued by the legacy of the former regime,whose bureaucratic inertia continues to ham-per cleanup efforts and the work of scientistsat the site. It is not always clear who is incharge of what in the zone. Every organizationassociated with Chernobyl or the zone at-tempts to aggrandize its role. Organizationswith curious acronyms such as DerzhKom-Atom, MinChernobyl, MinEcoBezpeka, ISTC-Shelter, and NVO-Pripyat all claim at leastsome jurisdiction.

Much of the paternalism that characterizedthe Soviet system has been preserved regard-ing Chernobyl. Many entei-})rise directors andregional administrators still believe them-selves to be socially responsible for the preser-vation of jobs, and thus they demand controlof their fiefdoms. This is especially ti-ue for theChernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which seesits mission—apart from generating much-needed electricity with its two remaining op-erable reactors—as supporting the entire in-frastructure of the city of Slavutich, where28,000 people live, including most of the sta-tion's workers.

The sarcophagus, which some experts be-lieve cannot reliably withstand the high windloads or earthquakes that may be encountered

in the region, is also under the authority ofChernobyl station, and that leads to tensionsbetween the plant and the Ukrainian Acade-my of Science's Inter-Branch Scientific andTechnical Centre "Shelter" (ISTC-Shelter),the organization that sponsors the small gi'oupof scientists who m(tnitor and study the still-dangerous ruins of Unit 4.

The station controls access to the sarcopha-gus, and it is not eager to permit scientists toconduct research if their findings might helptip the scale toward eventual closure of thestation. Scientists from IST(%Sheltt;r, as wellas scientists with the Alliance, a Europeanconsortium, and AEA Technology, a Britishfirm, have repeatedly met bureaucratic roadblocks, which have slowed their efforts. It isno wonder that people in Ukraine often de-scribe the zone and the work there as bar-dak—a Russian word that literally means"whorehouse," but collo(]uially im))lies com-plete confusion and disordei-.

A word must be said about the conditionsunder which the ISTC-Shelter researcherswork at Chernobyl and the problems againstwhich they struggle daily:

I ai'rived in October 1991, a graduate stu-dent from MIT, a Macintosh computer in hand.I soon realized that my computer had morepower than the few older model IRM PCsbelonging to the researchers. Imagine my po-sition—a graduate student going to a foreigncountry to conduct research, and being be-sieged with inquiries by scientists there onhow to get their materials published in theWest so that information could get out.

As a consequence of the Three Mile Islandaccident in the United States, one of the mostcomprehensive antl costly research effortsever undertaken has produced valuable designimprovements that have been im])lemented inWestern reactors, while spurring researchinto the design of the next generation of "in-herently safe" power reactors. At Chernobyl,because of bureaucratic tangles and a lack offunds or general interest, not even all of themelted fuel has been positively located.

A persistent myth in the West is that mostscientists studying Chernobyl are poor physi-cists and unrepentant communists, whose onlyconcern is the exploitation of nuclear energyfor the gloiy of the state. In reality, as in manyparts of the world, political agendas, ratherthan actual or demonstrated energy needs andsafety concerns, dictate nuclear energy policy.The scientists I have worked with havo eitherbeen used by politicians as pawns in a powergame, or they and their work have been large-ly ignored.

Nevertheless, based upon what the formerSoviet Union was, it is easy to believe themyth because, until the dissolution of the So-

40 The Rulletin of the Atomic ReientiPts

viet Union, the West was carefully spoon-feddisinformation about most aspects of Sovietlife—not the least of which was the Chernobylaccident. So-called scientists and medical ex-perts, sueh as Yuri Izrael (then chairman ofthe Soviet Union's Institute of Hydrometeor-ology and Environmental Control) and Ana-toly Romanenko (the Ukrainian minister ofhealth), constantly downplayed the extent ofthe accident—even when faced with con-tradictions in their argnments. Yet these peo-ple spent little if any time at Chemobyl study-ing the situation firsthand. Meanwhile, the fewcompetent scientists at the site have been—and still are—largely ignored, partially be-cause their work contradicts official assess-ments ofthe extent ofthe accident.

Although it is a mistake to question thecompetence of scientists and technicians an-alyzing the Chernobyl accident, it is anotherthing to question whether or not the properspecialists are there to tackle the specificproblems Chernobyl poses. In fact, there are,as far as I can tell, no nuclear engineers study-ing the accident at Chernobyl. None ofthe sci-entists and technicians on the scene has anyextensive training in nuclear reactor systemsor in accident analysis. Most of them, however,have adequate training in nuclear physics andare eager to learn more.

For example, Aleksandr Borovoi, the Km*cha-tov Institute scientist {who also directs ISTC-Shelter's Division of Radiation and NuclearSafety), was trained as a neutrino physicist.He and his colleagues are excellent physicists,and they have learned a great deal in their ex-ploration of the remains of Unit 4. Neverthe-less, they had little previous expertise in reac-tor safety problems and accident management.

The conditions under which scientists workat Chernobyl can only be described as tragic.There is a core group of about 30 of themstruggling with, in the words of one of my col-leagues, an "invincible" bureaucracy thatserves only to impede their work. Until my ai'-rival in the fall of 1991, no Western nuclear en-gineer {or any Western scientist, for that mat-ter) had been permitted to conduct researchon the accident at Chernobyl, or to work di-rectly with these scientists. However, a num-ber of specialists in ecology, radiobiology, andhydrogeology from South Korea, Norway,Japan, and other states have been involved inshort-term research "visits" on envh'onmentalcontamination and migi'ation of radionuclidesin the water and soil.

Some of these research efforts are sanc-tioned under the auspices of NVO-Pripyat—the Pripyat Scientific and Industrial Associa-tion—which was created in 1987 to conduct(Jecontamination work and provide supportservices within the zone. {Formerlv, NVO-

Pripyat was called "Kombinat," a division ofthe former Soviet Ministry of Medium Ma-chine Building, the designers of, among othei'sthings, Soviet nuclear weapons.)

NVO'Pripyat's main concern seems to bepromoting the idea that something is going onwhile obtaining hard currency. Often I sawdelegations from Japan, the United States,Canada, and various other countries whowould visit the zone for the day to discuss var-ious proposals for research. However, as far asI could tell, no formal long-term research i>ro-jects were being conducted by Westerners inthe zone.

Meanwhile, little decontamination work hasbeen done in the zone since the accident, al-though NVO-Pripyat managed, while I wasthere, to organize many sightseeing excur-sions to the sarcophagus for Westerners eagerto pay $100 or more a day per person. It alsoindirectly interfered in the work of ISTC-Shelter scientists trying to conduct researchat the sarcophagus. In addition, NVO-Pripyat,through its Intemational Contacts Division,portrays itself to unsuspecting Western re-searchers as a legitimate scientific researchorganization that has the authority to sponsorscientific research within the zone—again, forexorbitant fees.

I witnessed one of N V{)-Pripyat's clumsyyet effective attempts at "spin control" inNovember 1991. Academician Ihor Yukh-novsky, then a Ukrainian presidential candi-date, aiTived in the city of Chemobyl on a pre-election fact-finding tri]). After a somewhatpointless discussion, Yukhnovsky, along witha television crew that had come with him,were to be driven by car to the sarcophagus toask some pointed questions.

The NVO-Pripyat people organized threecars: one for Yukhnovsky and his aides, onefor specialists from Kiev, and one for thetelevision crew. Yukhnovsky and the secondcar departed first, because the camera crew'scar had not yet arrived. In fact, the third car

Aleksandr Borovoi,a pivotal Chernobylscientist (secondfrom right), poses withother researchers andvisitors near Unit 4.

May/June 1996 41

Scientistswho risktheir livesto studythe reactorcan scarcelyaffordgasoline fortheir cars.

never arrived, and the camera crew was laterasked to leave the zone. Meanwhile, Yukh-novsky's car conveniently ran out of gas on thew'ay to the power station.

If it had not been for a passing driver whosiphoned some gasoline from his own truck,they never would have arrived. Although theygot there half an hour late, they were the firstto arrive, because the second cai* had gone bya "different route." And, of course, no televi-sion inten'iew was conducted, because the TVcrew never got there. NVO-Pripyat was obvi-ously not interested in Yukhnovsky asking the"right" questions on television.

Today, a brief tour of the zone will showanyone that little work has been done to prop-erly (lispose of now-radioactive equipmentused during construction ofthe sarcophagus.Located just to the west of Unit 4 is an entirefield of contaminated, uncovered, and l-ustingmachinery and supplies.

Moreover, approximately 25 kilometerssouthwest of the station near the small villageof Rasokha are two "machine graveyards"—shopping-center-sized areas full of fire trucks,military vehicles, and helicopters used in 1986during construction of the sarcophagus anddecontamination of the surroundings. All ofthese are contaminated and standing in theopen, surrounded by a double barbed-wirefence—with holes. Astonishingly, workers inthe zone, including some ofthe scientists andtechnicians, frequently cannibalize this ra-dioactive equipment for spare pai"ts.

The dollar curtainOne of the terrible ironies of Chemobyl is thatthe world's worst nuclear-power accident hasbeen so thinly investigated. If an accident simi-lar to Chemobyl had occuiTed in France, for ex-ample, the entii'e nuclear-energy world wouldhave engaged its experts in studying the acci-dent, limiting its consequences, and leai-ning itslessons. In contrast, at Chemobyl, only 30 or sodedicated scientists struggle to find enoughgasoline to rlrive to the reactor where they risktheir lives to make theii" measurements.

Over the past decade, the lack of contactwith Western colleagues for these scientistshas also taken its toll. While the Iron Curtainis long gone, it has been replaced by a "dollarcurtain." Once, the controlling regime dis-couraged and controlled scientific inter-changes between Soviet scientists and West-ern scientists: today, with the economies ofthe newly emerged republics struggling tofulfill basic needs, financial realities limit sci-entific exchanges.

The small research team at Chernobyl can-not afford to buy Western scientific journalsand scientific and engineering handbooks, let

alone obtain the proper computers and themoney to pay for the dangerous work of core-sample drilling within the sarcophagus. This,of course, greatly limits the researchers' abili-ty to compare their assumptions and hypothe-ses against the experience of others. The re-sult is that several researchers at Chernobylcling to erroneous models of the accident withan oftentimes irrational mania, and they staketheir careers on proving their version of theaccident as the only correct one. In turn, thisbreeds personal conflicts and even the sabo-tage of contamination monitoring work.

Researchers who take a more rational ap-proach are despondent. Conversations withthem have a subtext that is typically Soviet inits degree of cynicism and shame about ordi-nary life—the latter reflected in the om-nipresent see-how-we-Iive expressions of re-gret. Many of the researchers I got to knowoften used the adjective "civilized" whenspeaking about the West, thus implying thattheir lives were somehow less civilized.

Ten daysThe number of individual victims claimed bythe Chemobyl accident is uncertain, and per-haps cannot ever be fully quantified. But onevictim, for whom no one should mourn, is cer-tain: the Soviet Union. In his book Ten Daysthat Shook the World, the American journalistand communist activist, John Reed, depictedthe Russian i-evolution as marking the begin-ning of a workers' paradise and of a just andequal -society.

But in one of those strange twists that sooften punctuate human history, the traumaticten days of intense radionuclide release fromChernobyl's Unit 4 arguably marked the be-ginning of the end of this "paradise"—and ofthe Russian/Soviet Empire.

Ukrainians, as w'ell as other peoples oftheformer Soviet Union, used the accident and itsconcealed consequences as a springboard fromwhich to launch a gi'eater i)ush for perestroikaand eventually for complete independence. InThe Truth About Chernobyl, published in1990, Grigori Medvedev, a Russian nuclear en-gineer, said the accident "signaled the deaththroes of an entire historical period." Med-vedev w rites:

"An abscess, long hidden within our society,had just bui-st: the abscess of complacency andself-flattery, of corruption and protectionism,of narrow-mindedness and self-serving privi-lege. Now, as it rotted, the coi*pse of a bygoneage—the age of lies and spiritual decay—filledthe ail" with the stench of radiation."

Medvedev is a man given to purple proseand exalted pronouncements. But, at the core,he got it right. •

42 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists