Chornobyl: a Look from the 21st Century

We are approaching the 20th anniversary of Chornobyl, one of the most horrible disasters in the history of Ukraine and all mankind. The Day is also making a humanitarian contribution by publishing the reflections of Yuriy Shcherbak, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine, who was a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the international conference “Wounded Humanity: 20 Years after Chornobyl” held last month in Italy.

There is a bitter paradox: the explosion at the fourth reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station (ChAES) caused a totally unplanned and shocking disaster. Its unexpectedly grave consequences finally stemmed the never-ending optimistic lies and guarantees of scientists and technologists (since the 1950s) about the trouble- and conflict-free development of nuclear energy in the world. Like the Russian Empire, which predictably fell victim to the Bolsheviks in 1917 as the weakest link of the historical chain, the Chornobyl power station, with its explosive reactor, became the most vulnerable link in the worldwide nuclear chain. Perhaps the Chornobyl disaster helped avert other terrible calamities, but this is cold comfort for us, Ukrainians.

By all accounts, Chornobyl became a strict reminder to humankind that one should apply democratic practices not only in politics but also in academic and other fields: the monopolist-authoritarian principle of decision making by a narrow circle of scientists and Communist Party functionaries without opposing opinions and transparent international expert procedures caused the imperfect and unstable RBMK (“channel-type large-power reactor” — Ed.) reactors to be put into serial production.

The Chornobyl disaster has an air of strange anonymity. It is of a non-projected and spontaneous nature, and was not an act of sabotage or deliberate terrorism. Yet what begot this catastrophe was not just pure chance but an ominous pattern. Technological super-systems (TSSs), which are becoming more and more sophisticated and vulnerable, often spinning out of human control, are becoming increasingly dangerous to mankind. Recall the large-scale power outages in the USA, frequent malfunctions of computerized information networks, transport disasters resulting from the overloading of traffic control services, etc.

This is why Chornobyl is no ordinary accident, like a fire at a factory. It is an alarm from the future, a warning about likely future disasters at complicated and vulnerable TSSs, which may take a heavy human toll, cause enormous material losses, and harm the environment.

The Chornobyl station was the unviable brain-child of the Soviet military-nuclear complex conceived at the Kurchatov Institite in Moscow, Obninsk, Chelyabinsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and other restricted zones.

RMBK reactors are genetically derived from plutonium-producing military reactors, and VVER (“pressurized water reactor” — Ed.) reactors, from those installed on nuclear-powered missile submarines.

The veil of total secrecy over the Soviet nuclear complex prompted both designers and operators to hush up and repeat their errors: the warnings that sounded before the blast at reactor no. 4 did not have the slightest chance of being heard and considered by an inflexible administrative command system.

The brilliantly documented book Chernobyl: mest’ mirnogo atoma (Chernobyl: The Revenge of the Peaceful Atom) by veteran Chornobyl researcher, engineer, and physicist Nikolai Karpan mentions the top-secret minutes of the CPSU Politburo meeting on July 3, 1986, which was presided over by Mikhail Gorbachev and devoted to uncovering the causes of the Chornobyl disaster. While the entire country and the outside world were undecided about the causes of this disaster, our “wise” leadership knew perfectly well what had happened, and why. Boris Shcherbina, Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and head of the government’s investigative commission, said:

1) The RMBK is a potentially dangerous reactor;

2) The accident occurred because of flagrant violations of maintenance procedures by the operating personnel and serious flaws in the reactor’s design.

One can well imagine how this must have terrified the leaders of the communist superpower, when they pictured what the world would think of the explosive Soviet “peaceful atom,” which could go out of control at any moment. Acknowledging the fact that the 14 RBMK reactors installed in the European part of the USSR (at the Leningrad, Kursk, Smolensk, Ignalina, and Chornobyl nuclear power stations) could blow up at any time would have been tantamount to proclaiming the total bankruptcy of a system that was supposedly creating a “radiant future for all mankind.”

It was decided to prolong the agony for another five years, while the official report on the Politburo session placed the blame on the operators. The political system preferred to accuse them of inefficiency rather than question the mad project.

However, secrecy — for considerations of national security and “prestige” or for the sake of guarding commercial and technological secrets — is typical of the nuclear sector even in democracies, such as the US, Britain, Japan, and France. For example, in 2005 two independent physicists published a report in France, declaring that the governmental radiation protection service had concealed the fact that the Chornobyl disaster caused a high level of contamination in Corsica and southeastern France, which led to an increased incidence of thyroid cancer. “This is a deliberate campaign of lies aimed at saving the image of the French nuclear industry,” said a spokesman for the organization Down with Nuclear Energy!

What about countries that are not exactly showpieces of democratic development, such as North Korea, Iran, etc.? It is easy to imagine that some countries may be concealing tragic events (an epidemic of some unknown disease, a TSS disaster), which leads to other serious consequences.

Strict international control, unbiased assessments of nuclear reactor safety, and maximum transparency in such a sensitive sector as nuclear power stations (or other TSSs) would promote the safe operation of these facilities in the 21st century. It is high time the UN established an international agency to monitor technological security.

Preparedness for major manmade disasters is also an important question. If the experience of mopping up the consequences of an accident that took a heavy toll of those who “burned up in a blaze of radiation” is lost, this will mean that humanity is unable to learn any lessons from this tragedy. It is crucial to set up an accident response infrastructure, including regional crisis- and disaster-management centers capable of rapid reaction in the event of large-scale manmade calamities.

The lack of preparedness for the devastating tsunami in South-East Asia, which claimed 300,000 human lives, merely underscores the urgency of this problem in the 21st century.

To quote Yegor Gaidar, the world is once again in “a global transitional period.” The fault lines of 21st-century tensions and conflicts have been clearly drawn: the depletion of energy resources will exacerbate the world energy crisis and hence lead to desperate attempts to lessen dependence on resource monopolists.

Russia’s aspiration to build an energy empire is bound to trigger an increasing number of both large and small gas and oil disputes (the “gas war” between Russia and Ukraine was just the beginning) and force a number of countries to revise their energy strategies. It is the intensive development of nuclear energy in various countries, including the Third World, which will determine the energy paradigm of the 21st century. For example, the G8 countries, which are now preparing for a summit that will be dominated by energy questions, are pinning great hopes on a “large-scale revival of nuclear power production.”

Whereas after the Chornobyl disaster there was a lull in the construction of new nuclear power stations, this process can now be expected to gather speed, which will mean:

* decommissioning old reactors owing to the end of service life;

* building hundreds of new-generation reactors.

Since there are 441 reactors functioning in the world today, with about 30 new ones under construction (in Russia, China, India, Iran, and Japan), it is easy to foresee that the number of new reactors will rise steeply in the next 20 to 30 years, which will essentially increase the risk of nuclear accidents and the theoretical probability of Chornobyl-type non-projected disasters.

In order to make a qualitative leap in the development of nuclear energy, the nuclear lobby, consisting of businessmen, scientists and technologists, politicians and energy strategists, should overcome “the Chornobyl complex,” the fear of God that shook the world in 1986. Yet erasing the memory of Chornobyl and the hazards of the contamination zone will have grave consequences. “Technological chauvinism,” unbounded faith in the reliability of super-powerful systems only because they are new and cutting-edge (although they will be outdated within a decade) is another utopia, but not a religious or political one. It is common knowledge how utopias end.

When I was working on the documentary story Chornobyl in 1986-1988, the discovery that most shocked me was the lack of imagination, and such an important creative quality as fantasy among most of the power station operators, who faced the disaster on the night of April 26, 1986. They could not believe their eyes that the reactor had exploded. They reminded me of zombies because they were stupidly convinced that a disaster was impossible in principle.

“This cannot happen because it is impossible” was their logic, shaped and nurtured by an entire system of authoritarian and alternative-free teaching in schools and universities; the fear of questioning the orders of designers and ministers; obedience, servility, and the rigid hierarchism that blossomed in the bowels of the Ministry of Middle-Size Machine Building, a hermetically sealed nuclear state within a state.

It was once assumed that the greatest freethinkers in the USSR were physicists and poets, whereas skepticism, imagination, fantasy, and a spirit of criticism and sound disbelief are the hallmark of inner freedom. The reality was different. Most Soviet physicists (there were certain exceptions, like Andrei Sakharov) were ordinary cogs in the military nuclear machine, and they were unable to imagine what could happen to a huge reactor loaded with 180 tons of uranium dioxide and 200 (!) local critical masses inside, an inferior system of energy transfer control, and poorly designed safety rods that could not guarantee shutting down the reactor in case of emergency (See Karpan, pp. 276-77).

Today, perhaps only Hollywood with its famous guild of screenwriters can be called “fantasy valley” (like California’s Silicon Valley). Several hundred people with a highly developed, refined, wild, and depraved imagination are scaring humanity with all kinds of horrors and assaulting our consciousness by fantasizing about the catastrophes that the world may encounter in the future. The film The China Syndrome was a warning about the dangerous features of nuclear power production. Hollywoodian apocalyptic visions, regardless of their artistic value, are prompting us to think about future dangers and are stirring our drowsy imaginations.

In the 21st century humankind will need to switch to a new system of education and special upbringing aimed at reinforcing creative traits in prospective politicians, designers, architects, doctors, builders, researchers, and engineers — all those who will be building a new world. Renouncing the snobbish belief in the perfection of Soviet (or American, Chinese, French, Russian) equipment should become a rule based on the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster. The science of predicting (and hence averting) disasters should occupy an honored place among our top priorities.

High on the agenda of the 21st century is the pressing, Chornobyl-related problem of the stability of a state that possesses nuclear power stations and its ability to protect these facilities from terrorist attack. Physicist Lev Feoktistov states the reason behind the vulnerability of reactors in his book The Weapon that Has Exhausted Itself (1999). He says that internal pressure of 157 to 200 atmospheres is the Achilles’ heel of modern reactors. If the control systems’ fixtures on a reactor’s lid are damaged, the pressure will send the safety rods flying out of the active zone, and the reactor will blow up like a bomb (See Karpan, p. 219). Do I have to explain what a coveted target a nuclear power station is for terrorists?

It is easy to imagine to what kind of dangers countries ravaged by civil wars and armed conflicts, such as Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chechnya, Iraq, and Somali, would have been exposed. Meanwhile, the expansion of the nuclear power station network in various geographic areas of the world in the 21st century, as well as mounting geostrategic instability during a period of transition from a unipolar, US-dominated world order to an unknown one, poses new challenges and dangers for the world community, which has no right to forget the lessons of Chornobyl.

In these conditions, it is obvious that UN peacekeeping forces must intervene in conflicts fraught with the destruction of nuclear power stations.

As a number of international terrorist organizations are attempting to make a “dirty” atomic bomb packed with conventional explosive and highly radioactive nuclear wastes, it is crucially important to establish international control over storage and burial places for solid and liquid radioactive wastes and spent nuclear fuel.

A grave danger looms from practically inevitable attempts to break the nuclear non-proliferation regime already bursting at the seams in so-called threshold states: the aggressive, ambitious, and cruel dictators of those countries are ready to reduce their people to beggary in the hopes of acquiring nuclear weapons as an instrument for intimidating their neighbors and blackmailing the world community. The construction of a sieve-like nuclear shield by technologically backward countries may be accompanied by new Chornobyls. If a Chornobyl-type disaster occurs in a politically unstable country, the latter may sink into chaos and forfeit its sovereignty.

Chornobyl exposed another urgent problem of the 21st century: the problem profound mistrust of the authorities, and governmental and international institutions on the part of individuals and civil societies. The Soviet communist regime’s unprecedented attempt to suppress information on the situation at the Chornobyl power station and adjacent areas, coupled with a propagandistic campaign based on half-truths and disinformation, resulted in the complete loss of public trust in the Soviet communist system, and thus became one of the fundamental factors that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A civil society was born in Ukraine long before the Orange Revolution — it emerged immediately after the Chornobyl disaster, when people rallied together to demand that the state tell the truth. I was the head of the Ukrainian environmental organization Green World in the post-Chornobyl years and remember how effective our antinuclear actions were because we had the support of millions of people.

I remember our meetings with the IAEA delegation led by the staunch nuclear advocate Hans Blix: the Ukrainian Greens accused the Vienna-based bureaucrats of capitulating to Soviet propaganda and demonstrating a prejudiced attitude to the disaster risk assessment. It was the Ukrainian Greens who organized the first Chornobyl Tribunal.

The tribunal condemned such criminal offenses of the authorities as the celebrations of May Day in 1986, pageants involving children, and especially the fact that the residents of nearby villages were left to their own devices, while those in Prypyat, mostly nuclear power station workers, received adequate assistance (preventive treatment with iodine, rapid evacuation, etc.). We are now reaping the unhappy harvest of thyroid cancer among the villagers, mostly children, who were exposed to large doses of radioactive iodine. Bolshevism showed its repressive, anti-peasant nature even here by leaving the Polissia countryside high and dry.

In the new century there is deep residual mistrust of some international institutions, evidenced by the sharply negative attitude of Ukrainian public opinion to the resolution of the notorious Chornobyl Legacy Forum that was held in Vienna last year under the IAEA’s aegis.

The conclusions of the forum were interpreted as an attempt to downplay the real consequences of the disaster and sparked vigorous protests by Ukrainian NGOs and international ecological organizations.

Angelika Claussen, president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, accused the World Health Organization of making a secret deal with the IAEA (read: nuclear lobby) and deliberately spreading falsely optimistic information on the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster.

Civic organizations suspect that with many new nuclear power stations in the pipeline, the IAEA and WHO are trying to erase the memory of Chornobyl and thwart the efforts of NGOs to determine the truth about the disaster.

The most controversial point is the number of people who died as a result of the disaster:

* The experts of the UN Chornobyl forum believe that about 4,000 persons may have already died and may die in the future from exposure to the disaster-induced radiation.

* In Ukraine alone, over 17,000 families are eligible for government subsidies because of the Chornobyl-related death of their breadwinner;

* According to NGOs, the nuclear disaster claimed a total of 30,000-40,000 human lives in Ukraine.

Another factor that raises questions concerning the “reliability” of the UN Forum’s data is the fact that the forum’s expert team is headed by one Dr. Fred Mettler, a retired professor of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, who was seriously discredited in 1992 when he stubbornly denied any increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer in Chornobyl children. I will note, for reference purposes, that 3,270 people in Ukraine were operated for thyroid cancer in 1986-2004 — ten times as many as in the same period before the Chornobyl disaster.

The growing role of civil society in the 21st century raises the question of trust and cooperation between non-governmental, governmental, and international organizations. Only impartiality on both sides, an honest search for the truth, and the ability to hear one another can bring about the desired mutual understanding.

The day after the Chornobyl conference, we left Marostica for the neighboring town of Caldogno. By “we” I mean the Ukrainian delegation consisting of Yuriy Shapoval, professor of history; Natalia Baranivska, research associate at the Institute of History; and this writer. With us was Oxana Pachlowska, a professor at Rome University, who is a brilliant representative of Ukraine in Italy and one of the main organizers of the conferences on the Holodomor and Chornobyl.

Our hosts took us to Villa Caldogno, built by the renowned Italian architect Angelo Caldogno in 1565. We entered the grounds and froze in sorrowful amazement as we spotted 14 rows of crosses, like the 14 Stations of the Cross marking Jesus’s way to Golgotha. The crosses, which were swathed in white gauze, like rushnyky, bore the names of permanently depopulated Chornobyl villages. A few steps away stands a lone tree festooned with towels and photos of families evacuated from the centuries-old Polissian land.

In the middle of the villa grounds, against the background of huge, radiant Italian Renaissance frescoes, are ceiling-high photographs of Polissian peasants. Shining through the black faces of these 20th-century photographs are the joyful figures of the 16th century. These images, seemingly incongruent in terms of time and place, merge into one, indivisible, and undivided humanity in which the tragic and the joyous, and the past, present, and future are united in our imagination into an alarming metaphor of being.

At the end of the hall stands an altar decorated with icons. Inside there is a terrible, dead-looking monster dressed in a green chemical-warfare protective suit and gas mask with goggles. You can hear the quiet melody of a Ukrainian song in this Italian villa. The author of these surrealistic installations is the celebrated Ukrainian artist Anatoliy Haidamaka, and it is a pity that he will rarely get the chance to re-create his visions in Ukraine.

Next to this, in the cold and damp concrete bunkers of a former World War II German bomb shelter, is a photography exhibit by the no less renowned Ukrainian artist Ihor Kostin, the creator of a Chornobyl epic: every bunker has one or two photographs. All this seems to be a warning to humanity not to forget about Chornobyl, for if the land of the people perishes, we will have to stay in underground bunkers.

Displayed at the exit of the bomb shelter is the Italian translation of a couple of lines from a poem by Lina Kostenko:

“Oh, buried Chornobyl woods!
Do not forget our voices.”

This is the way the world is beginning to mark the anniversary of Chornobyl — by synthesizing rational thoughts, emotionless figures, and scientific facts, and displaying many heartrending feelings that only true art can arouse. Chornobyl will continue to be analyzed — in 2026, 2056, and 2086 — unless a new global mega-disaster cancels out Chornobyl and puts an end to our very existence.

P. S. On behalf of the Ukrainian delegation, I would like to express sincere gratitude to Francesca Lomastro, president of the Italian-Ukrainian association Il Ponte-Mist, Giorgio Cracco, secretary-general of the Institute of Social and Religious History Research (Vicenza), and to all the organizers of the conference “Twenty Years after Chornobyl” for their solidarity with the Chornobyl victims and interest in Ukraine. Ukrainian history is thus becoming part of Italian and common European history.