The Legacy of Chernobyl Remains in Ukraine

Cherembyl, Ukraine— Chernobyl's pine woods and unkempt fields are haunted by history's greatest nuclear tragedy.

Dzens of evacuated communities are paralyzed in fright, home doors open. Wide fields are cemeteries for rows of radioactive vehicles, tanks, and helicopters employed in the terrible cleanup 10 years ago.

In plain view of the massive concrete-and-steel sarcophagus that encases Chernobyl, a once-thriving Soviet “model city” of 40,000 people—Pripyat—is vacant.

Wind bangs doors open and closed. Recently abandoned amusement-park rides squeak. Wolf, boar, and fox footprints line snowy boulevards outside decrepit apartment buildings.

Officer Nikolai Rey adds, “It’s really scary at night,” at a checkpoint outside this nuclear no-man’s land. The animals arrive, and any sound echoes across the city.

Knowing an unseen murderer stalks numerous people is scarier. Radiation illness and cancer have killed many. Chernobyl's brutal human and environmental cost is still unknown after 10 years.

“In places like Bosnia and Chechnya, the deaths of people are evident,” said Chernobyl Union executive director Liza Aulina. “But Chernobyl can kill a person slowly, and you don't know where or when.”

The future is also haunted by another Chernobyl calamity. Western powers encourage energy-starved Ukraine to shut it down, but the government wants a huge assistance package.

The V.I. Lenin power station, still named, was to have been the world's biggest nuclear reactor and another Soviet scientific and industrial feat. In 1984, the controversial fourth reactor was hurried into service, earning construction commanders bonuses and honors.

What occurred two years later, early on April 26, 1986, was inconceivable.

Engineers dropped reactor No. 4's power to 25% while testing emergency systems, unaware that Chernobyl-style graphite-core reactors are unstable at low power. It caused a reactor core explosion, fire, and partial meltdown.

Deadly nuclear fuel contaminated 10,000 square kilometers of Western Europe. Approximately 5 million individuals in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were impacted, according to WHO.

Soviet leaders from President Mikhail Gorbachev on down first covered up the calamity, then downplayed it, a massive falsehood that many believe helped overthrow a dying system. They even deployed marching bands to reassure the 130,000 residents evacuated within 18 miles of ground zero that it was just for a few days.

The rubble-strewn flats of Pripyat contain the bones of cats and dogs stuck inside, waiting for their owners.

“People were in a terrible state--shocked, crying,” recounts Vladimir Afonichkin, 56, a retired engineer from Kiev, the capital, and one of over 600,000 “liquidators,” or cleaning workers. “They didn’t know what was happening, but they suspected they lost everything.”

Kiev locals, 65 miles southeast, recall the birds' silence.

Dr. Viktor Klimenko arrived to Chernobyl from Kiev within hours after the incident and discovered individuals unsuccessfully washing their hair to remove radioactivity.

Some Pripyat residents naively observed the big fire from roofs, absorbing significant radiation doses.

Children have radioactivity in their hair and skin. “Everybody was dirty with radiation,” he continues, choking. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Also, breathing was difficult for days. “It was as if you had pepper on your tonsils,” explains Afonichkin.

It was stated that 31 individuals perished immediately after the disaster. The death toll is unknown due to sporadic victim tracking.

Chernobyl Union says 150,000 Ukrainians are dead and 55,000 are invalid from Chernobyl-related ailments. Others believe the figure is inflated to garner Western help and that fatalities are in the hundreds.

Cleanup workers are among the worst hit. As treatment demand rises, these workers' hospital beds fill the halls at the Center for Radiology Medicine near Kiev.

In 1993, former army pilot Col. Viktor Zhelayev, 58, was stricken with leukemia after flying hundreds of flights over the destroyed reactor to detect radiation. The majority of his flying colleagues are dead, and he can hardly move.

Propped up on his hospital bed, he explains, “I felt a moral obligation to do it.” “But I feel bad about the children and 30–35-year-olds.”

Pale boys and girls from the polluted zone lay listlessly undergoing intravenous therapy at the Children's Radiology Center across town.

Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia have seen a hundredfold rise in childhood thyroid cancer after the disaster.

The top radiation disease expert Klimenko adds, “It's really awful for me as a doctor to see what's going on with people's health, because it's so much worse than in an average region.” “And we don’t know how bad it will get.”

A few hundred individuals, largely retirees, have returned to the barbed-wire-enclosed Rhode Island-sized "dead zone" despite the risk.

The ghost hamlet of Szheganka's infrequent visitors make 53-year-old Irina Yashchenko cry with delight amid a peaceful woodland. They are the sole occupants of the previous 600-person hamlet since 1989, when she and her common-law husband, Ivan Khomenko, returned to his two-room brick house

Only two dogs, a cat, power, and each other. They sometimes go to Chernobyl, where nuclear plant servicing personnel stay, for supplies.

Khomenko, 58, a former woodcutter, shrugs, “This is our home.” “We don’t have enough health to worry about radiation.”

Money is the issue for the 5,000 personnel bused in everyday to operate at Chernobyl's two reactors, one of which was destroyed by fire.

Reactor No. 1 control room personnel earn $500 a month monitoring a massive bank of computers and green-screened monitors. They get 10 times the average Ukrainian salary in coveted U.S. cash.

“There’s a little risk working here,” says shift foreman Valery Zakharov, 50, a Chernobyl worker since 1977. “But how could I not work here for that money?”

The catastrophe transformed nuclear power, leading numerous governments to shut, cancel, or convert nuclear power facilities.

Cash-strapped Ukrainians choose money above safety in keeping a power plant operating. They have spent billions on Chernobyl and cannot afford to encapsulate the dangerously broken, 24-story-high sarcophagus, which they quietly concede might collapse at any moment, releasing a large radioactive cloud.

They are demanding $4 billion in help, more than the West wants, in political brinkmanship that worries nuclear safety experts. Even if foreign contributors help, Chernobyl's health and environmental effects will last for years.

"Closing Chernobyl is a long and complex process," Environment Minister Yuri Kostenko stated. “You can’t just say, ‘Close it,’ and turn off the switch tomorrow.”

References

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-14-mn-58398-story.html