3. THE DOSIMETRIST AT WORK
There remains the problem of the ash. The ash is incredibly radioactive. According to the regulations, this ash should be buried. It is considered as radioactive waste. The people throw their ash on the vegetable garden and then the radioactivity is transmitted to the vegetables they grow.
Q.—But everyone knows that the ash should not be used on their vegetable gardens. But they still do it?
Pasha.—So where should they put it?
—Underground, but not on the vegetable garden.
—That’s right, people have been told, but not everyone does it. Take me for example, I collect the ash in plastic bags and when they’re full, I get rid of them. Outside the village there is a waste dump. We brought this question up once and representatives from the Ministry came from Minsk. They looked at our “grave” as we called it, and they said it was not appropriate, and that the ash needed to be taken to proper “burial grounds”, like the ones they have in the Gomel region. They left saying that they would ask their superiors to sort it out. It was a question of organising the collection of the ash in large containers and of taking it away but so far nothing has been decided.
—When was this?
—This year, about a month ago. Our rubbish tip is not equipped for that. It needs special treatment so that the contamination does not spread, either into the soil or into the surrounding area. If it rains, or if there is a flood, it must not be allowed to leak away. We don’t have the appropriate rubbish tip.
—Is it close to the village?
—About 4 kilometres away.
—And is the contamination level there very high? Is the ash very radioactive ?
—It’s terrible, terrible. I have tested it myself. Once I measured the level in my ash and sent the result to Nesterenko’s institute. They told me that such a high level was not possible. Their instruments could not register it.
—How many becquerels?
—It was 116,000 Bq/kg. But their reply did not reassure me. I wanted to know the truth. When we were called there again on a training course, I said to myself. “I really want a clear understanding. Did I measure it correctly or did I make a mistake? Who is right?” I took the ash with me to Minsk. I brought it with me to the training course and they measured it during their work. Again, the level was too high to register on their machines: they weren’t capable of measuring such high levels. They mixed the ash up and finally got a measurement. It was 200,000 Bq/kg.
—Where does your wood come from?
—Around the village, from the forest…The forest can’t be changed and we’re not going to bring wood from Minsk. It’s not realistic.
—Do many people use the ash as a fertiliser?
—Lots. You can go and ask in the village. Not everyone follows the recommendations, not everyone buries the ash. They throw it behind their vegetable gardens, in abandoned fields. It spreads from there, the grass grows and animals graze there. They need to bring a gas supply to the village and instal central heating. That would be the only way to get rid of the ash. But that’s not going to happen any time soon. They’ve said that we’ll get a gas supply around 2005 maybe. So, we just carry on, living, stewing in our own juice.
Pasha’s gestures are precise and professional. She puts on an immaculately clean white coat, and her blonde hair is tied back in a chignon on the top of her head with a piece of wool. On a table there are several bags of vegetables and hay, and half-litre bottles of milk waiting to be measured with the Belrad RUG-92 radiometer that is standing in a corner of the room. An elderly peasant woman gets out her vegetables. Pasha washes them in the sink, cuts them up into pieces before placing them in the radiometer container and closing it hermetically.
The peasant woman.—(She is addressing us). Oh, you should come and see where I live and take measurements inside my house. I’m going to live in Japan, it’s clean there. A lot cleaner than here anyway. (To Pasha) Do you think the carrots are clean?
Pasha.—They’re clean.
Q.—And how much do you measure yourself?
The peasant woman.—632 Bq.
Pasha takes the carrots off the radiometer, puts on the potatoes and returns to her table opposite the window to record the results. The machine gives out a beep, the result comes up.
Pasha.—Look, the potatoes are showing only zero. Let’s try once more… zero again. The vegetables are clean.
Q.—Where does the 632 Bq come from then?
Nesterenko.—From the milk. I wanted to have a milk separator installed in one family where it could be used by several households. Pasha, who was it that agreed to organise a group? You said it was one of your colleagues, didn’t you?
Pasha.—Lena.
Nesterenko.—Do they live far from each other?
Pasha.—You live on the other side of the village, don’t you? It’s quite far.
The peasant woman.—Yes, we are at the far end, through there.
Nesterenko.—It’s absolutely crucial that you measure the milk. Using the milk separator, you will end up with the cream which you then dilute with boiled water and you will have the same milk, but far less contaminated.
The peasant woman.—What milk am I going to separate. I barely get 3 litres from the cow!
Nesterenko.—You’ll have 3 litres of clean milk.
Peasant woman.—Where should I bring it? Here?
Nesterenko.—No, no, we want to give a milk separator to one family that can be used by several families.
Q.—But she lives at the other end: the village needs two milk separators.
Nesterenko.—It’s impossible for the moment.
A boy of about ten years old, who we previously saw splitting logs as skilfully as any adult, brings some hay to Pasha. She gives the peasant woman her produce back, but the peasant woman does not leave. She is listening to us, curious to know more about the hay.
Nesterenko.—The way he splits wood is incredible! I’ve never seen anyone do it so well. It’s a real art. I’m serious. His axe is almost bigger than him. He lifts it up and down it goes, effortlessly, one log after another.
Q.—Vassili Borissovich, can you explain why the acceptable limit for hay is 1300 Bq/kg?
Nesterenko.—We know the coefficients for the passage of the contamination from the hay to the animal. If the government has fixed the limit in milk at 100 Bq/l, it means that the limit for the hay can be 1300 Bq/kg. Unfortunately, 100 Bq/l is too high. In Russia the norm is 50, half of that amount. It’s the same in Ukraine. So, really, if the hay measured 600–700 Bq/kg, the milk would not be so dangerous, it would be less than 50.
Q.—On Paraskovia Pavlovna’s register, the hay can measure up to 5,000.
Nesterenko.—I can see quite clearly here that the milk brought in by this woman measures 174 Bq/l, so her hay will measure more than 2,000 Bq/kg. I asked her where her cattle graze. There are some very marshy areas here. They put boots on and go and cut the hay. Normally this hay would be withdrawn, and, because the government is short of money, it would be fed to beef cattle, not to dairy cattle.
Of course, it would still have an effect on their health, it would slow their growth. But before being sent to the abattoir, they just need to be fed on clean grass for three months. They would purify themselves quite naturally down to acceptable levels. Three years ago, when we arrived, we organised some political action, and wrote to the president of the regional soviet to put pressure on them to bring in hay from uncontaminated areas. They took the contaminated hay from the peasant farmers and exchanged it for clean hay; that’s how the system worked here. Unfortunately, they don’t do that anymore. Last year, it was very difficult. To give you some idea, 15 to 20% of the districts in the North had to slaughter their cattle, because there was nothing to feed them on. It was the worst year since the war.
The peasant.woman.—(she is angry)�
�Yes, they brought us hay from the clean areas, to replace ours, which was radioactive. I went to the president of the collective farm and he said he would bring us some. They brought some to us and it was mouldy. The cow wouldn’t eat it; it could only be used for bedding. That was the hay they brought us so that the milk would not be contaminated! It was so mouldy that the cow wouldn’t even sniff it, let alone eat it!
4. FORCE OF HABIT
We leave Pasha’s laboratory and take a walk around the village. For Romano, who comes from a peasant family in the Po valley (Italy), filming the villages in these areas is a joy. There are no pretensions towards any abstract architectural beauty. These wooden buildings are human, functional and blend in with the natural environment. The form of the houses, the fences and other objects, weathered and worn with the passing of time and constant usage, have an inexhaustible beauty.
In the courtyard of a khata (an isba) smoke comes from the door of a small building. Two women, the grandmother and mother of a little girl that Nesterenko has measured, are at work at a strange sort of brick stove built around a cauldron, suspended in the centre. They are preparing food for the pigs, a sort of stew made from beetroot, potatoes, rye and bran. Under the cauldron, the wood crackles and flames releasing smoke from a bed of radioactive ashes.
The mother.—We have five pigs. Our two cows give us a lot of milk. We keep some of it for us, and the rest is given to the collective farm, which pays us in cash. My children drink very little milk. I took it to Pasha to be measured, and it was 60–70 Bq. That’s a lot for the children. But what can we do? They said we should buy milk or use a milk separator. If we had a milk separator in the house, I would use it. There are milk separators at the market, but you have to buy them. People from the local council came to measure the radioactivity here and they brought milk separators. We take our milk to the school canteen and put it through the milk separator. They said they would bring several milk separators, that they would be kept at the clinic and that Pasha would deal with it. Nothing more came of it.
Q.—They didn’t do it?
The mother.—They didn’t do it. They never brought the milk separators. Just one, to show us how to do it. They separated the milk, diluted it with water, and got clean milk. That’s all.
Q.—If they had kept their promise, would you have gone?
The grandmother.—Of course!
The mother.—We would have done it for the children.
Q.—You need to acquire new habits.
The mother.—It’s true, but you know, Ivan finds it hard to change his habits. Some French people came, the organisation ETHOS. They made some measurements and they said: “You need to put the ash in bags and take it away!” It’s true. Other people would have done it. But we’re used to putting it on the vegetable garden, and that’s what we’re still doing. Tell us or don’t tell us, it will end up the same. I do it for a month and then I forget, we’re always so busy. If I spent all the time in the house, if that was all I had to do and if I had any money, OK, I would use gas for cooking; I would buy clean food from the shop. But I haven’t got any money. I get up at 5 in the morning, I need to milk the cow, do the housework… In summer, we have blueberries. We go into the forest to collect them and then we sell them. The wholesaler comes to the shop and buys them.
Q.—And you eat them too?
The mother.—We eat them (she laughs and looks a bit ashamed) We eat them, because we think of them as our own produce. The same way that we eat our cherries and our apples. When we bring blueberries from the forest, we try, in general, not to give them to the children, but it’s the same thing; when we’re not looking, they eat them. Or else, we make jam… (She stops, looking a little guilty). We do that sometimes.
Q.—But that’s how the becquerels accumulate.
The mother.—Yes, the becquerels accumulate. They accumulate inside the body.
Q.—You need to take it more seriously.
The mother.—I know…
Q.—For the sake of your health.
The mother.—I should. But if we don’t eat the food we’ve grown… which is radioactive, then we would simply go hungry. It’s too expensive at the shop.
Q.—Yes OK, but you could be a bit less Russian and eat less of them. (They laugh) Be a bit more sensible.
The mother.—Yes, “Russian”… That’s what we’re used to.
We measure the ash from the oven in the house. Very carefully, so it does not get blown about, the grandmother uses a dustpan to remove it from the oven and pours it into the bucket. I lower the sensor of the Geiger counter into the ash. The ash measures 2.2 μSv/h. Two microsieverts per hour, that is twenty times higher than natural radioactivity.
The grandmother.—Yes, radiation. That’s how we live.
Q.—You need to bury it. Do you put it on the vegetable garden?
The mother.—We throw it under the fence in the vegetable garden.
The grandmother.—We use it as fertiliser. We grow cucumbers under glass. You need peat, soil and ash… a mixture of all three.
When the grandmother empties the bucket under the fence in the vegetable garden, a cloud of ash rises, blown about by a current of air coming across the neighbouring field that has just been ploughed. We go to see the greenhouse where these beautiful cucumbers that they are so proud of are grown. There is nothing growing there at the moment.
The mother.—We cover it with plastic sheets. There, you can see the peat. We are going to plant our cucumber seedlings here, which have been grown in little bags. We make little holes and sprinkle the ash on top because it kills all the microbes and insects. Then we plant our cucumbers.
Q.—With this ash?
The mother.—With this ash ... with radioactive ash.
5. NO-ONE TAKES ANY NOTICE
At another khata. The little boy who was splitting wood with such skill is hurrying across the courtyard. In one hand he holds a plastic bag of hay and in the other the piece of paper Pasha gave him. His father waits for him by a pile of wood that needs cutting. The man looks at the paper in silence for some moments.
Q.—Were you expecting this result?
The father.—No… no.
—It’s very high.
—Aha! (Among Russian peasants this means yes)
—The time before, did you have the hay measured?
—They measured it. There may have been some radioactivity, but no-one takes any notice.
—But you yourself, have you ever had your hay measured before today?
—No.
—This is the first time?
—Yes.
—Do you know what the acceptable level is?
—They said it was… (He looks at his son) How much is it, the norm?
—About 1,500, 1,300.
—It’s 1,300.
—But this measures10,000!
—There you are…It seems the radioactivity is very high, but no-one takes any notice.
We film the two men working together, splitting the silver birch logs that are piled up in the yard.
The smoke and the ash from these logs are a permanent source of radioactivity in the households of the village, inhaled by the inhabitants. We will be reminded of them later at the WHO conference in Kiev, in June 2001, when we will hear Professor Mikhail Savkin, vice-principal of the scientific centre of the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow and member of the International Commission for Radiological Protection, the ICRP, that sets the “norms”, asking conference members to stop spinning yarns about radioactive wood.
6. NOBODY TELLS US THESE THINGS
Standing on the beaten earth of the street, a peasant is looking over a fence at two villagers in the yard who are cutting up a pig that they have just killed.
Q.—You know that food products are tested for radioactivity at the clinic?
The peasant.—There’s a l
aboratory at Stolin, where they test the food.
—No, here… at Olmany.
—They don’t come here to measure.
—No, it’s you who has to take a kilo of meat to the clinic and they will measure it for you there, to find out if it is clean or not.
—They don’t bring it here?
—It’s you that takes it there. You need to take it to Pasha.
—Alright, I see. But what difference will it make?
—You can then treat the meat to eliminate the radioactivity. In salt water.
—We haven’t got the equipment to kill the radiation. We can’t afford it.
—I understand that, but you can decontaminate the meat, to a certain extent.
—When the shop gets it, then yes, it is clean. But otherwise…
—You can put it in salt water. It reduces the amount of radioactivity.
—In salt water?
—Salt water eliminates the radioactivity.
—Really? Nobody told us that. Who knows… Maybe it’s true. We don’t take those precautions here… Maybe it will kill them , but… We don’t take these precautions.
—No, it’s you that needs to prepare the food so that it is less contaminated, and it will be better for you… and better for the children too.
A woman calls him.
The peasant.—Huh?
The wife.—Come to the house!
The peasant.—I’ll be right there.
Q.—Is that your wife?
The peasant.—My niece. We need to plant the potatoes.
Q.—Is she calling you to come home?
The peasant.—Aha! (means yes) We need to plant the potatoes. Can I go?
Q.—Of course, off you go. Keep well.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 46