By Donald L. Hughes

On April 26, 1986, alarm bells rang inside Unit #4 of the nuclear power station in Chernobyl, Ukraine, which was then part of the USSR. There was confusion; workers at first did not know what was happening. Soon it became clear that they had a runaway nuclear reaction underway, and a meltdown was imminent.

The Soviets had constructed the reactor with only partial containment to save money, and a steam explosion blew the roof off the building. Outside oxygen fueled a graphite fire in the reactor, and a plume of radioactive material flowed into the atmosphere.

There was a nuclear reactor meltdown and a radiation-releasing fire at Chernobyl, not a nuclear explosion. Nevertheless, it was later estimated that 10 times more radiation was released at Chernobyl than was released when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Panic among workers

Workers at the power station did not recognize the magnitude of the catastrophe that they had on their hands. Apparently in denial about the condition of the reactor, they tried for hours to pump water into it. They were not wearing any protective gear, nor were the firefighters who responded later, and they all died of radiation poisoning within a few months.
 

U.S. Government imaging shows the coverage of the radioactive plume in the first 80 hours following the accident.

Officials did not tell residents of the danger; they told them they would be returning soon, so they did not need to pack anything. Within a month, 120,000 people had been permanently evacuated from the Zone. Ultimately, 300,000 people were displaced because of the meltdown.

The clean-up
 
While these people were being removed from the Zone, officials brought in thousands of soldiers and other workers, called "Liquidators," to secure the power plant and build a concrete sarcophagus around the reactor to prevent further radiation leakage.

These workers also decontaminated the area. Cars, trucks, and helicopters that were contaminated were scrubbed.  Sixty thousand buildings were washed with special chemicals and a solution was sprayed on streets.  A pine forest that covered one square mile, and which had absorbed high doses of radiation, was cut down and buried in concrete pits.

The clean-up was a monumental task, and it took hundreds of thousands of workers over five years to complete.

A tour of the area
 
Recently, Eastern European Outreach, a California-based child sponsorship ministry sent me on assignment to see Chernobyl for myself, and to interview families that are still suffering as a result of the nuclear fallout.
 
You must pass through armed guards on the road to the power plant. You receive stern warnings about staying on the pavement because straying onto the soil exposes you to high doses of radiation. About 4,000 people work in the Zone today, including people like my tour guide, and they all wear badges to monitor the radiation. 
 

Arrow shows the reactor where radioactive material escaped into the environment. It was hastily encased in a concrete

Photographs of the facility were once banned, now there is a specially decontaminated area outside the visitor center where you can stand and have your picture taken with the stack of Reactor #4 in the background.

It is not until you walk the streets of Prypiat that you get a sense of the human desolation that the meltdown caused. Tall apartment buildings stand as decaying sentinels to a once lively city. The tour guide allows you to enter one of the buildings, a former kindergarten, and you view a jumble of children’s toys and gas masks, residue of the hasty departure by residents, and items left by the clean up crews that were trying to wash away the radiation.

Perhaps the saddest icon of the dead city is the fun park which still stands. In an area where families once thronged, the abandoned rusting Ferris wheel creaks in the wind.

The human toll

There is a debate about how many will die as a result of the catastrophe. There were immediate deaths, but lingering deaths due to radioactive contamination are expected. The United Nations, places it very low, about 4,000 people. Greenpeace, at the other extreme, estimates that fatalities will reach over 90,000 people.

But the real human toll is seen in the lives of the survivors. For the most part, people in the Zone were hard-working people, most of them engaged in agriculture. But the radioactive plume put

Donald L. Hughes stands in front of Chernobyl Reactor #4. The protective sarcophagus is undergoing temporary repairs to keep radiation from escaping again.

Yuri and Tamara Golovchak, a couple I interviewed for Eastern European Outreach, lived through the nightmare, one that continues for them to this day. Yuri was an electrician at the power plant and lived with his wife in Prypiat. I spoke with them in their cramped Kiev apartment, where they have lived since the decontamination work ended.

Tamara said, “Big buses came and took us away. They said we would be coming back soon, so we left things that were dear to us, like personal photographs. They took us to a place to take showers and get new clothes, and then I went with my son, Mikhail, to live with my mother in Kiev.”

As an electrician, Yuri had special knowledge of the reactor building, so he stayed on as one of the Liquidators.  He said, “There were 1600 in my work group closing down the station and 70 – 80% of them have since died according to my knowledge.”

When I asked if the family was getting help from the government, Yuri said, “They care about us less than they should. As time goes by, we get less help.”

The most tragic consequence for the family is the health of their sons.  Mikhail was six at the time of the meltdown, and he has had health problems all his life. When I visited the family he was in the hospital for ongoing treatment. Nikolai, who was born two years after the meltdown, has a rare blood disease. Doctors did not expect him to live more than three years, but today, at 15, he is a Christian who believes God has a plan for his life.

Even though the fallout has already reached into the lives of his children, Yuri remains proud of his work as a Liquidator. When I asked him why he worked so long in the Zone, knowing it was contaminated, he said, “if everyone said no, who would save our country?"

The next nuclear disaster

It has been said that the next nuclear disaster of the magnitude of Chernobyl will be at Chernobyl. This is because the sarcophagus built around the reactor was expected to last only 20 years, and time has now run out. If the sarcophagus collapses, it is estimated that four tons of radioactive material inside could be released into the atmosphere.

In 1997 a “Shelter Implementation Plan” was created by the U.S., European Union and Ukraine to build a more permanent structure to house the damaged reactor. Work has not yet started, and it is estimated that it will cost $800 million to construct an enclosure that will last for 100 years. It is expected that the reactor will be a deadly threat for 100,000 years, however.

In the meantime, the children in the villages on the outskirts of the Zone suffer from health problems, economic hardship, family breakdowns and the stigma of coming from a part of Ukraine that most would like to forget.

A lot of aid went into the region when the tragedy first struck, but now, after 20 years, much of it comes only from U.N. agencies, and from the tenacious mission groups who deal with the reality of the situation in Ukraine on a daily basis.

Preventing another nuclear tragedy at Chernobyl is not very high on the U.S. list of priorities these days. While the House of Representatives expressed sympathy for conditions there in an April 4, 2006 resolution to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, it was a nonbinding resolution. It will probably take another monumentual tragedy to awaken the world to the continuing threat of Chernobyl.