It appears that the countries that have nuclear power have learnt nothing from the accident at Chernobyl. In reality, we cannot guarantee the safety of people living within 200–300 km of a nuclear power station. Take the example of Olmany in the Brest region, more than 200 km from the power station. The level of contamination in food products there is so high that it constitutes a real danger to the health of the inhabitants. The children there are seriously ill. I’ve been to England, France, Germany and the United States… I’ve visited nuclear power stations there and they all say that everything is fine and that our problems are due to design faults in our nuclear power stations. Their protective measures are aimed only at the population living within a 20–30 km radius of the power stations. It reminds me of Professor Alexandrov, the scientific director at Chernobyl, who said one day: “This power station is so safe, you could put it in Red Square in Moscow”. Thank goodness they didn’t… Whatever safety measures you have, there is no guarantee against human error. Someone could always block the automatic security system, neutralise it as they did at Chernobyl, and the catastrophe would happen again in spite of everything. You can understand the position of governments who have invested a lot in the development of nuclear energy and want to see some return on their investment. There are also enormous financial interests at stake in the construction of nuclear power stations. It’s a lobby. You can’t expect objectivity from the IAEA because it owes its existence to the contributions made by countries that have nuclear power stations. What I can’t understand is the position of doctors, whether at the WHO or at the ICRP (International Commission on Radiological Protection).
4. A HEALTH CATASTROPHE
THYROID CANCER, BREAST CANCER, DIABETES, NUCLEAR AIDS
V. Nesterenko.—I have worked for forty years in the nuclear industry and since 1990 I have worked full time with doctors in radioprotection. Today, the whole world recognises it: ten to fifteen years before Chernobyl, we would come across only 2 or 3 cases of thyroid cancer among children in Belarus, but today, in 1998, we have already operated on 920 children. In other words, there are more children suffering from thyroid cancer in Belarus today than anywhere else in the world. This phenomenon appeared very early on. Every year we come across 80 to 100 new cases of childhood thyroid cancer in Belarus and the numbers are not dropping. In twelve years, the children have grown up, and in that group of adults, the number of cases of the illness is also increasing. Today in 1998—I know these figures—more than 3000 adults have been operated on for thyroid cancer. In second place is breast cancer in women. This phenomenon had already been observed following the accident at Cheliabinsk, and now we are seeing it here, in Belarus. Childhood diabetes is becoming much more common, particularly in the Gomel region. It is very important to emphasise that radioactivity affects the whole immune system. And it isn’t only the short-lived isotopes that appeared in the first few days; above all it has to do with the fact that for all these years, the inhabitants have been eating food contaminated with long-lived radionuclides. The organism becomes incapable of fighting off infection. It’s a kind of nuclear AIDS.
EYES
For example, let’s take the village of Svetilovichi, about 80 km from Gomel. It is about 180 km from the Chernobyl power station. The children in the village have, on average, an accumulation of 150–200 Bq per kilogram of body weight. But some have more than 2000 Bq/kg. These children have been examined by doctors: 23% of the children in the village have a cataract or impaired vision caused by radiation. An examination of the eyesight of 661 children in the Vetka region revealed that 48% of them had a cataract and need specialist treatment.
HEART
When radioactive caesium enters the organism in food products, it acts as a substitute for potassium and lodges in the cardiac muscle and other areas. The electrical conductivity of the myocardium is altered. In the same village of Svetilovichi, more than 84% of the children suffer heart arrhythmia. Unfortunately, they are not only candidates for heart attack but will have heart problems from now on.
BLOOD PRESSURE
Almost half of the children suffer major alterations in their cardiovascular system caused by the constant accumulation of radionuclides in their bodies. In general their blood pressure is too high. Where else would you come across children of 13–15 years old with blood pressure of 18–19 cm/Hg? That is what we are seeing, unfortunately.
DIGESTIVE SYSTEM, DIGESTIVE ENZYMES
Doctors examined children’s gastrointestinal tract using gastroscopy to see what was going on in the oesophagus, stomach, and duodenum. They found that 80% of the children had gastritis or even a stomach ulcer. They found that the mucus lining of the stomach, even in children 12–15 years old, was atrophying rapidly and looked like the stomach of a 70 year old. Radiation has a wasting effect on the body. These children are already suffering today and will become very ill in later life.
—You have this problem too, don’t you?
—Yes, it is the case with most of the liquidators. Studies like those conducted by Professor Burlakova in Moscow, for example, have shown significant increases in cancers of the digestive system as well as a loss of digestive enzymes. It is a characteristic of the liquidators. I lack all these digestive enzymes as well, to such an extent that I no longer know what an apple is, or a cucumber or a tomato….I can count on the fingers of one hand the items I’m allowed to eat. I’ve lived like that since 1986, I’ve got used to it.
LEUKAEMIA
Those people who were at the scene of the accident and received very high exposures to radiation began to develop leukaemia from that moment. That was to be expected. But we must expect other cases of leukaemia for another reason. It wasn’t only caesium that was dispersed across the area. There was a lot of strontium in the fallout. When strontium enters the body—it is the chemical equivalent of calcium—it concentrates in the bone and penetrates the bone marrow, the seat of our hematopoietic system. Unfortunately there are already cases of leukaemia in Belarus. Now is the time that it will begin to develop.
FERTILITY, THE PLACENTA
Another fact that has been verified by doctors. I listened to the gynaecologists’ report at the annual conference of Professor Bandazhevsky’s Institute of Medicine at Gomel in December 1997. We know that the placenta of a pregnant woman protects the child from heavy metals: it captures them. It also captures caesium, of course, but nature had not foreseen that this captured metal would emit gamma rays. This is how the foetus is irradiated, the pregnancy retarded, that problems arise during birth, and what is particularly serious, the child will experience problems throughout its development. This is what doctors have verified in experiments at Gomel. The doctors examined about 250 young girls from the town of Gomel, aged between 18 and 23 years old. The permanent accumulation of radioactive elements in the body through the ingestion of contaminated food causes damage to their genital organs; 20% of these young women will never be able to have children.
BRAIN
Over a period of about ten years, Professor Kondrashenko monitored the psychological development of children living in the areas contaminated by Chernobyl. This is what he established. 42% of the children in this area had delayed psychological development of between 3 and 4 years, leading to mental retardation; 6000 children were born mentally retarded. It is their brains that have been affected. The newspaper Izvestia reported recently that 600 people have already presented themselves at the psychiatric hospital in Kiev: “Help us. We can’t read any more. We can’t count money any more”. Later I talked about this with the doctors at the psychiatric institute, and they explained the phenomenon by the following mechanism: when the radionuclides enter the brain tissues, the immune system reacts to these tissues as foreign bodies and it starts to attack them. In fact they simply devour them. Professor Kondrashenko believes that if nothing is done, if clean food is not provided and the children are not protected from this radiation, there will b
e no longer be anyone capable of completing higher education in three or four generations in Belarus. This is what he has published.
Chapter II
THE LIQUIDATORS SACRIFICED
The liquidators have been sacrificed and betrayed, at least four times by those they saved: 1. They did not receive adequate information or protection. 2. The price they have paid, and continue to pay, in terms of their lives and their health, has not been recognised. 3. They receive no medical care. 4. They have been forgotten by the world and cast onto the scrap heap of History.
The graphite and uranium scattered all over the roof of the nuclear power station after the accident was giving off up to 20,000 roentgens per hour. Held in the hand, a piece of graphite would give off the equivalent of a lifetime’s accumulated dose from natural background radiation, in just a second and a half. According to the most recent estimates, between 800,000 and a million young men, known as the “liquidators”, were mobilised from all over the USSR to deal with the exploded reactor, to put out the fire that burned for ten days, to enclose it in an improvised “sarcophagus”, in conditions of terrifying radioactivity, where the remains of 200 tons of melted nuclear fuel had solidified like lava through a surreal labyrinthine ruin of concrete and twisted steel, and to “clean” the contaminated territories—that is to say the fields, the roads, the houses in the villages—all the areas on which the radioactivity had rained.
They battled with the radionuclides with their bare hands, using spades and water cannon. The barrel of the Danaides, an absurdity, a saturnine moment from ancient mythology. These victims of torture, exposed to enormous levels of radioactivity, given no official recognition, are ill. Tens of thousands have already died, and more are in the process of dying.
People often wonder why such an enormous number of people, a veritable army, were employed to deal with an accident at a power station. Surely this sort of accident, which is statistically predictable, is an inherent risk factor in the functioning of the industry? The absence of any protective measures that could deal with the scale and the duration of the radiological event that had taken place at Chernobyl demanded military logic: unable to offer effective protection against such high levels of radioactivity, the Soviet authorities chose to spread exposure over as large a number of people as possible, over a time period that, depending on the risk, might be counted in minutes, or even seconds. Many received doses of radiation that exceeded the scale measured by the Geiger counters. This calculation was a mental abstraction, without any forethought or preparation, to which has to be added improvisation on the part of panic stricken officials, with a disdain for human life and the practically unlimited freedom of totalitarian power to mobilise the masses to serve their cause. A series of propitious circumstances for those in power. The “conscripts”, denied protection and information, were used to close, with their bodies, the breach, that had opened up in the presumptions of modern technology. It was, historically, the last luxury the Soviet system could afford to pay itself, and us, for our protection. We have to ask ourselves how the “free world” will manage things in the event of a major accident in the West, that the IAEA itself estimates as (statistically) probable.46
46 The IAEA conference entitled “A decade after Chernobyl” held between 8th and 12th April 1996 in Vienna, discussed among other things “…the measures to be taken in a future accident, which is an inevitability, with the explicit aim of reducing costs for the industry responsible”. Michel Fernex, who was present at the conference, reported this in “La catastrophe de Tchernobyl et la santé”, (The Chernobyl Catastrophe and Health. See page 564) “Mechanisms of Injury”, “Radiation Dosimetry”, “Epidemiological Approaches” and “Future Accidents” were the four themes of the conference entitled “Biological Effects of Radiation Injury” organised in 1996 in Minsk under the auspices of the European Commission and the USA Department of Energy.
Twenty years have passed. The IAEA, UNSCEAR and the WHO have, incomprehensibly, excluded the liquidators from their statistics, and still claim that only 32 people have died, maybe 40, as a result of the accident at Chernobyl. There has been no monitoring, no epidemiological research among this cohort of 800,000 men exposed to enormous levels of radioactivity. Covered by the silence of the scientific establishment, the nuclear states, and the “international community”, look the other way, and are simply waiting for the liquidators to disappear without making waves. You cannot even say they have been “forgotten”, because to forget someone you have to recognise that he existed in the first place. No, these anonymous individuals, dispersed over the eleven time zones of the former Soviet Union, are excluded from the human community. They do not exist, these people who saved us and who were simply asking “to be treated like human beings”.
Here is the testimony of six liquidators that we interviewed during our first meeting, in 1990.
1990
1. MOBILISATION
Piotr Shashkov.—It was 5th June. I was working the third night shift with my team. At 2 in the morning, they came to get me: “Shashkov, the service chief wants to see you in his office”. “What’s it about?” “I don’t know”. I got there and found a colonel, a major and a captain. They said to me “Comrade Major Adjutant, you have been called up for service”. “Straight away?” “Yes, straight away. Get changed. The coach is waiting for you”. I knew there had been an accident. I asked “Where am I going?” Answer: “Liquidation work” “What’s the point of changing? I’ll go in my work clothes. They’ll be thrown out afterwards anyway”. I left in my work clothes. I couldn’t refuse. The summons I had received was marked red…..I was under military orders. After the accident, the Ministry of Defence declared a “state of war” and general mobilisation. The summons was underlined in red. If I had refused, I would have faced a military tribunal.
M. Boikov.—In our country, all the men are reservists and can be called up at any moment. The system made great use of this, to use them as an army to undertake agricultural work, construction work, repair work…It’s free labour. Instead of paying people, you conscript them and send them anywhere there is a need for man power.
Defence of the country is the sacred duty of every Soviet citizen. It is written into the constitution. Refusing to comply is the equivalent of desertion. You have no choice.
Alexander Grudino.—To begin with, I had no idea I was being taken to the nuclear power station. We were all brought together; I thought we were going into the fields to harvest the wheat. When we arrived at Bragin, I understood everything. We weren’t coming back. We’re talking about the Soviet Union. You receive the call, you go and fight. Like in Afghanistan, or Grozny… Dying for your country. I wasn’t at all frightened but I was aware of what I was doing. We were going to war, really. Only it was a war without bombs or shells… We had no idea what sort of war it was, in fact.
2. THE WORK
P. Shashkov.—We had to get onto a coach and were taken to the base. There we were given bulldozers. Because I was familiar with all military engines—I had been a tank driver—they gave us armoured infantry tanks adapted specially for the occasion: a digger at the front and a tip truck behind on caterpillar tracks. I had to dig up a layer of earth 20 cm deep, make a big pile and load it onto a lorry that took it away immediately. Then my place was taken by another lad. It took about forty minutes in all. That was a lot, the level of radioactivity was very high. But they said, “The armoured sides will protect you”.
I also worked on the roof of the power station for four days. The first day I was told to cut through the side of a concrete slab to allow water through. With a pick axe and a sledge hammer, it took about three minutes. The second day, seven of us lifted up a concrete slab and dropped it down. The third day we had to dismantle a ventilation pipe. And on the fourth day it was a piece of graphite. There was no shovel. I had to pick it up in my hands and throw it down. I knew pretty well what dose I’d got, but they marked it low
er. I protested. They told me: “Get out of here and don’t say a word”. I also worked in the clothing depot, where the radiation level was very high. The special overalls that I gave to the “comrades” were all contaminated.
For all our good work on the roof of the power station, we were entitled to a diploma that the colonel gave us when we got back. While we were there, we were told to “run like a dog then flee like a hare” because you absolutely could not stay there for longer than three minutes. In three minutes, the dosimeter registered 30 roentgens. But they never marked down more than 5–7 R in our records. The first day, my dosimeter registered 34 and they marked it 9. The second day, about 30 and again they marked it 5. The third day, it registered nearly 40 and they marked it down as 2! What they wrote in the records was about ten times less than what we received. I pointed it out to the colonel: “We know better than you what’s got to be done. Get out!” I myself was an adjutant-major. I said to him: “You’ve got no right! Write down what I received!” “Get out of here and don’t let me see you again!” Full stop. That’s it.
Victor Kulikovsky.—Me too. I tried to find out what was really going on. I felt the effects of the radiation straight away: nausea, dizziness, feeling ill, sudden weakness. And I really wanted to know how many rem I had absorbed. But at the radiometry office, they took the dosimeter from me as soon as possible, and took it away behind the door, then came and told me: “Your average dose is 11.92 rem”. I said: “That’s not true. I’m going to see your superior”. “Go ahead”. I found him; he sat there in his armchair, sneering: “Ha Ha! You should be happy with what they’ve written down. If you make a fuss, they’ll mark down even less”.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 14