Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl by Piers Paul Read
Alongside the estimated lifetime limit of thirty-five rems that had been established by the government as the level for obligatory resettlement, a ground-contamination level had been set at forty curies per square kilometre. Now the proposals of the republican parliaments were that the first should be reduced to seven rems and the second to fifteen curies; indeed, some said that no one should be obliged to live where there was any contamination whatsoever. But to apply the lower levels would cost many million rubles. In a state that was virtually bankrupt, these demands had to be measured against other equally pressing, even urgent, calls upon its resources – for medicine, for example, and even for food.
Quite apart from the question of the cost of rehousing possibly a million more people from affected areas, the government knew that the stress caused by evacuation was more injurious than the effects of radiation. All attempts to convey this, however, were presented by RUKH and the Greens as an excuse to save money for the state, symptomatic of the Communists’ callous indifference to the welfare of the people.
In desperation, the Soviet leaders asked for help from the international community. In October 1989, the government asked the International Atomic Agency in Vienna to carry out ‘an international experts’ assessment of the concept that the USSR has evolved to enable the population to live safely in areas affected by radioactive contamination following the Chernobyl accident, and an evaluation of the effectiveness of the steps taken in these areas to safeguard the health of the population.’
It was not the first time that the International Atomic Energy Agency had been brought in to reinforce the credibility of the Soviet state. Only a fortnight after the accident, its Swedish director general, Hans Blix, and the head of its department of nuclear safety, Morris Rosen, had flown over the damaged reactor and subsequently reported their findings to a press conference in Moscow. Blix had said that he was ‘satisfied with the volume and nature of information’ given him by his Soviet colleagues; Rosen had felt that the contaminated zone ‘will be inhabitable again’.
Blix had also attended the conference on the medical aspects of the accident held in Kiev in May 1988, and in addition a team of experts from the World Health Organization had gone to the area in 1989. Their report had rebuked ‘scientists who are not well versed in radiation effects’ who ‘attributed various biological and health effects to radiation exposure … These changes cannot be attributed to radiation exposure, especially when the normal incidence is unknown, and are much more likely to be due to psychological factors and to stress.’
However, the Western media, like the democrats in the republics, paid more attention to the claims made by scientists like Dmitri Grodzinski or Vladimir Chernousenko, a physicist from Kiev, who had been the scientific director of the task force set up by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences to rectify the consequences of the accident. His claims that between seven thousand and ten thousand of the liquidators had already died as a result of the effects of radiation were given extensive coverage and were widely believed.
In response to the plea for help from the Soviet government, the International Atomic Energy Agency formed the International Chernobyl Project to assess the radiological situation in the affected areas. It called for help from different international organizations – the European Community, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Labour Office, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization – and formed an International Advisory Committee of leading radiation experts from all over the world under the director of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation from Hiroshima, I. Shigematsu.
To discover the precise nature of the anxieties of those still living in the contaminated zone, a team of ten Western scientists went on a fact-finding mission to the republics between 25 and 30 March 1990. At crowded meetings in town halls, they were asked questions that revealed the profound mistrust of the Soviet experts. ‘Is it safe to live here?’ was the first question put by an inhabitant of Polesskoe. Then: ‘Why are we meeting in a small room when there is a larger one available in the town?’ In Ovruc: ‘Is mother’s milk being investigated at all, and could it potentially cause harm to an infant?’ In the village of Novozybkov, in Russia, an old lady asked whether they should trust the Soviet or the Belorussian experts, who gave diametrically opposed advice. People wanted to know whether such disparate ailments as headaches, nosebleeds, weak legs, rotten teeth and gynaecological infections could be ascribed to radiation. ‘Can we really live here any longer?’
2
Upon its return to Vienna, the International Advisory Committee drew up a work plan for a multidisciplinary team of international experts. Their brief was to examine critically the extensive information already available concerning the accident, the subsequent contamination by radiation, the effect this had on the inhabitants of the affected regions and the measures taken by the authorities to protect them. Excluded from the remit was the health of the 600,000 liquidators now scattered throughout the Soviet Union.
Time was of the essence: the team had to report back within a year. It was therefore impossible to check all the information available to them or embark upon a new and comprehensive assessment of all the consequences of the accident. In any case, there could be no independent evaluation of the radiological situation immediately after the accident because of the decay of the short-lived radioisotopes.
Between May 1990 and January 1991, 220 scientists, mostly from the United States and Western Europe, went to the affected regions of Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine, and then returned to their own laboratories in the West to check the measurements they had taken. A year later, the report was ready. Acknowledging that it was difficult to be precise about ‘how much radiation dose has already been received or will be received’, the project experts nevertheless made their own estimates which were two or three times lower than those made by Ilyn’s Institute of Biophysics in Moscow. The contamination of food and drinking water was in most cases found to be significantly below the guideline levels established for international trade ‘and in many cases were below the limit of detection.’
Comparing the health of the inhabitants of villages in the contaminated and nearby uncontaminated zones, the international team found that both were equally bad. Between 10 per cent and 15 per cent were in need of medical treatment of one kind or another, but none of their ailments could be ascribed directly to radiation. Children were found with low haemoglobin levels and low red-cell counts, but there were no ‘statistically significant differences between values for any age group of those examined in surveyed contaminated and surveyed control zones.’ The same was true when leukocytes and platelets were examined: there was no difference between children in the different zones, and ‘no significant variation from the data of other countries … The immune systems of those examined … do not appear to have been significantly affected by the accident.’
It was the same when it came to toxic elements such as lead and mercury. It had been feared that the lead dropped on the reactor might have been carried up into the atmosphere and subsequently inhaled by the inhabitants of the contaminated zones, but the levels of lead and mercury were much the same as those in the United States: the level of cadmium was considerably less; and all three were considerably less than those found in Italy, for example, or the Sudan.
There was no evidence of radiation-induced cataracts, and project results for thyroid sizes and size distribution and thyroid nodules in those examined were similar to those reported for populations in other countries. Nor did the dietary restrictions imposed in the wake of the accident appear to have affected the growth rate of children, which was well within published USSR and international norms. Adults, on the other hand, were generally overweight.
The report found high rates of infant mortality, but these had existed before the accident and had declined since. No statistically significant eviden
3
Although it was humiliating for loyal Leninists like Ilyn and Guskova to have the deficiencies of Soviet health care exposed to the world, they were at least acquitted by the report of the charge of genocide. The charge of the Western experts was rather that they had done harm by overestimating the doses. ‘The cautious approach adopted … had two important negative consequences: firstly, the radiological consequences of continuing to live in contaminated areas were overrated and this contributed to additional and unnecessary fear and anxiety in the population; secondly, and more importantly, people will be relocated needlessly.’
Moreover, the Soviet methodology had been wrong. Resettlement should not be based upon an estimated lifetime dose but rather on the additional dose likely to be averted. There was no precise figure above which radiation was dangerous and below which it was safe. To change the criteria from forty curies per square kilometre to fifteen reduced the likely lifetime dose by up to a mere eight rems. The consequent reduction in the risk of eventually contracting cancer was minute, yet the cost of resettlement was enormous and ‘seemed disproportionate to the effective radiological protection achieved by relocation.’ The ‘adverse health consequences of relocation should be considered,’ said the experts, ‘before any further relocation takes place.’
When the findings of the report became known in the now disintegrating Soviet Union, they provoked outrage among the radical nationalists and environmentalists of RUKH and Green World. They were considered invalid because the project had not included the 600,000 liquidators. The experts had discounted the dangers of ‘hot particles’ and removed ‘hot spots’ from their calculations of average contamination. They had also chosen to examine the health of the affected population in the autumn when it was at its best, rather than at the end of the long months of winter.
More generally, the report was dismissed as a whitewash by the atomic-energy ‘mafia’, who had a vested interest in allaying anxieties about nuclear power. To Lubov Kovalevskaya, they were afraid that Chernobyl would turn out to be the spark that lit a blaze against the entire industry; to her friend Dr Lupandin, the report was a false, unprofessional piece of work. It was said that the international scientists had been bribed with free board and lodging at hotels in towns like Gomel and Minsk. In the debate in the Supreme Soviet on the Chernobyl Law in early May, Ilyn heard it said that to pay for the project, the Soviet government had expropriated one and a half million dollars from the Chernobyl charities.
Between 21 and 24 May 1991, more than five hundred scientists from all over the world gathered in Vienna to discuss the findings of the Chernobyl project. It came under fire from both the old Soviet scientific establishment and from the scientific champions of the new republics. Ilyn felt aggrieved that his intervention levels had been considered too cautious. ‘Let us look back and imagine the position of Soviet scientists who were responsible for the problems of standardization and the establishment of intervention levels at the time of the accident. If you put yourselves in this position, then you will understand that we didn’t have any alternatives and that we were bound to be conservative in the philosophy we adopted for the introduction of the various parameters in the calculations which we made.’
The principle which had guided them, he said, was the need to provide the maximum protection for the affected population, and to exclude all possible underestimates in their calculations. When it came to the dose to the thyroid, it had proved impossible to make accurate measurements. His colleagues in the Ukraine had done their best, but the teams of civil defence workers had proved incapable of making such measurements. ‘This was no fault of the scientists, but rather the fault of our system.’
Professor Ramzayev, the persecuted scientist from the Leningrad Institute of Radiation Hygiene, was offended by the suggestion of an American, B. W. Wachholz, from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, that the Soviets had withheld data on the dose of iodine 131. ‘I can tell you,’ said Ramzayev, ‘that we were not asked for the information which you say was not presented: In particular, none of us was asked for data on iodine. They in fact exist. I want to clarify this so that the impression is not given to those present and to the world at large that the USSR did not present something that should have been presented. At least this was not the case in the Russian Federation.’
Another American, L. R. Anspaugh from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, tried to calm him. ‘We certainly did not mean to imply that any data were deliberately kept from us, but only that we did not have the basic measurements that went into the thyroid calculations in the sense of the very raw data on the thyroid measurements … Our only comment was that, perhaps only because we did not ask for them directly enough at the time, we did not have the raw data on the actual exposure measurements of the thyroid itself that were made in the USSR.’
Ilyn, however, pressed the international experts to estimate what proportion of the overall dose came from the short-lived radionuclides like iodine 131. ‘The question is important to us for the simple reason that a number of people in the USSR, including people who claim to be scientists, are attempting to undermine the reliability of our dose commitment evaluations by maintaining that we did not take these doses into account … Therefore, I would like it to be stated more clearly, particularly since scientific representatives of our republics are also here today.’ He was answered by a member of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation. ‘From available data, UNSCEAR has estimated the total transfer factor to be … approximately six per cent of the total dose.’
By and large, however, the Soviet scientists felt vindicated by the findings of the project. ‘We are happy,’ said Guskova, ‘to find out that the people we have been so worried about have not suffered any notable damage over these first five years, and that the doses are lower than we could have supposed.’ But one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and the project’s findings were vehemently rejected by scientists from the republics Belorussia and Ukraine.
At the very start of the conference, Professor Konoplia from Minsk produced new data to show that the atmospheric contamination was greater than the project scientists supposed. They had made their measurements at the wrong time of year. In spring and autumn, the months of agricultural activity, radioactive dust was transported outside the contaminated zones; and unforeseen events, like forest fires, increased the atmospheric content of radionuclides in the locality many times over.
Konoplia would not even discuss whether or not there had been an increase in illness in the affected zones: ‘Most people admit that there has been a rise.’ The vice president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, V. G. Baryakhtar, told the conference of the various ailments that had affected the liquidators who had been left out of the project’s terms of reference. He also insisted that ‘we have definite evidence of chromosome aberrations in children’ and so ‘we should be a little more cautious about our conclusions.’ The director of the Kiev Institute of Endocrinology reported a rise in the number of thyroid cancers: twenty had been operated on in Kiev in 1990 as against one or two in the years 1985–89.
A Polish specialist, Professor Nauman, supported his colleagues from the republics that bordered his country: he thought the project’s statement that ‘no health disorders could be attributed to radiation exposure’ was unsound. It was impossible to be certain about the stochastic effects of radiation before 1995. He also clashed with the American expert, Professor F. Mettler, a tall, gangling scientist from the Department of Radiology at the University of New Mexico, on the question of genetic abnormalities and ‘the conclusio
Mettler agreed.
‘If you did not find any changes related to the radiation,’ Nauman persisted, ‘you cannot in fact make any conclusions at this moment.’
‘Are we talking about malformations now?’
‘I am talking about malformations, about genetic changes, and about the cytogenetic study. In fact, for malformations you had no control group from previous USSR studies from 1987 which would show any difference because, as you said, there are no data.’
‘For malformation rates in some areas there are previous data, and they are not statistically different.’
‘Yes, but you told us that intelligence quotient and the head size are most important and that you did not have data on them.’
‘That’s right. I agree with you completely that intelligence quotient is interesting and that there are no background data.’