“And if you haven’t done it by then, we’ll relieve you of your Party card!”
“Esteemed Yegor Kuzmich,” the general replied, “if that is the situation, you needn’t wait seven months to take my Party card. You can have it now.”
* * *
On their return to Moscow, the Politburo Operations Group had confronted a new problem: finding a way to permanently isolate what remained of Reactor Number Four from the environment. Now that the graphite fire was finally going out, and the specter of the China Syndrome had receded, it was imperative to prevent further radioactive releases into the atmosphere around the plant—and also to restart Chernobyl’s three remaining reactors as soon as possible. The electricity they generated may not have been crucial to the Soviet economy, but restoring them to operation would once more demonstrate the might of the Socialist state and reassure the people of its commitment to nuclear energy. And they could be safely brought back online only once the ruins of Unit Four had been sealed. Responsibility for this fell first to the Ministry of Energy, but its construction teams were soon overwhelmed by the magnitude of the tasks before them. On May 12 they simply gave up in despair.
But General Secretary Gorbachev was determined to smother the fiasco as quickly as possible. The USSR had been the first in the world to construct a nuclear power station, he told the Politburo. Now it must be the first to build a coffin for one. It was time to call in the experts who had written the rules of Soviet nuclear construction in blood: the specialists of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Sredmash chief Efim Slavsky arrived the next day with a team of ten men, flying into Kiev aboard his personal Tupolev Tu-104 jet and then circling the ruins of the plant by helicopter.
“What a mess,” he said as he surveyed the wreckage from the air. His staff was aghast at the scene, which was far worse than the official reports had suggested. Smoke still drifted from the crater of the reactor, which now resembled a dormant volcano, threatening to roar to life at any moment. It was clear that whoever undertook the job of walling in the remains of Unit Four would be working in one of the most hostile environments mankind had ever encountered. The task promised levels of radiation almost beyond imagining, a construction site too dangerous to survey, and an impossible deadline: Gorbachev told Slavsky he wanted the reactor sealed up by the end of the year. Deaths were almost inevitable. The octogenarian nuclear minister turned to his men.
“Lads, you’ll have to take the risk,” he said.
The following afternoon, in an interview broadcast on Soviet Central Television, the head of the government commission, Ivan Silayev, outlined plans for the reactor’s final resting place: a tomb in which the ruins of Unit Four would be interred forever. It would be “a huge container,” he explained, “which will enable us to secure the burial of everything that remains . . . of this entire accident.” The resulting structure would be monumental, built on a scale to last a hundred years or more, and, before the cameras, Silayev gave it a name resonant with history and ritual: sarkofag.
Sarcophagus.
* * *
In public, the Soviet government continued to assure its people that the catastrophe was under control and that the radiation already released posed no long-term threat. But in its secret sessions within the Kremlin, the Politburo Operations Group heard that the direct effect of the disaster on the population of the USSR was already reaching alarming heights. On Saturday, May 10, Ryzhkov learned that a total of almost 9,500 people had already been hospitalized in connection with the accident, at least 4,000 of them in the previous forty-eight hours alone. More than half of that number were children, 26 of whom had been diagnosed with radiation sickness. The levels of contamination in four of Russia’s western regions had begun a rise that had yet to be explained, and the Soviet Hydrometeorology Department had decided to fly weather control missions over Kiev, using aircraft to release more cloud-seeding materials into the atmosphere in the hope of preventing radioactive rain from falling on the city.
The Soviet prime minister issued new instructions to insulate Moscow from the spreading threat. Civil defense troops threw roadblocks across all major routes leading into Moscow and checked every vehicle for radiation. Traffic backed up for hours, as furious drivers boiled in the unseasonal heat. Travelers arriving in the capital from both Belarus and Ukraine were hospitalized and decontaminated. Now Ryzhkov also instructed the state’s agro-industrial enterprises to halt all deliveries of meat, dairy, fruit, and vegetable products from the affected areas until further notice.
Meanwhile, in Kiev, the Ukrainian government had formed its own task force to oversee the cleanup of the towns and villages inside the thirty-kilometer zone and introduced measures to protect people in neighboring areas from contamination. On May 12 it banned fishing and swimming as well as washing clothes, animals, or cars in the rivers and ponds of five districts up to 120 kilometers south of the station.
On every approach to Kiev, traffic police established washing and decontamination checkpoints to ensure that not a single car could enter the city without being checked for radiation. Municipal tanker trucks patrolled the streets, sluicing thousands of liters of water onto the roads and sidewalks, while troops sprayed down walls and trees to remove radioactive dust. But the Ukrainian leaders, wary of panic and of antagonizing their bosses in Moscow, had still made no decision about whether to evacuate the children of the city.
The Kremlin’s chief scientists on radiation medicine and meteorology—Leonid Ilyin and Yuri Izrael—refused to provide a definitive answer about the long-term effect of the spreading contamination. Summoned from Chernobyl to an urgent meeting with the Ukrainian government task force, the experts said that the reactor had been covered and radioactive emissions steeply reduced; soon they would cease altogether. They insisted that current radiation levels didn’t warrant an evacuation and recommended merely that the republic take further steps to keep the population informed of the ongoing measures to manage the crisis. But the Ukrainian leaders suspected that—whatever their true beliefs—Ilyin and Izrael also didn’t want to take responsibility for endorsing an evacuation. So, in a special late-night session of the Ukrainian Politburo, Vladimir Scherbitsky ordered the two scientists to draw up a written and signed statement of their opinion. He then locked the document in his office safe and disregarded their advice.
That night, Scherbitsky unilaterally ordered that every child in Kiev from preschool to seventh grade, and all those who had already been relocated from around Chernobyl and Pripyat, be evacuated from the city to safe areas in the East for at least two months. The following night, the Ukrainian health minister, Romanenko, appeared once more on TV to reassure viewers that radiation levels in the republic remained within international limits. But now he advised that children should be allowed to play outside only for short periods and forbidden from ball games that might kick up dust. Adults should shower and wash their hair every day. He added that the school year would be concluding two weeks early, “to improve the health of the children of Kiev city and oblast.”
The evacuation began five days later, sweeping up 363,000 children, as well as tens of thousands of nursing and expectant mothers, in an exodus of a half million people—the equivalent of a fifth of Kiev’s total population. It was a logistical task that dwarfed the initial effort to evacuate the thirty-kilometer zone and, from the outset, was overshadowed by the specter of panic. Thirty-three special trains ran on a shuttle schedule, departing every two hours from Kiev station; gaggles of grade school students clustered on the platforms, numbered paper labels pinned to their shirts, in case they got lost, and extra planes were provided for those who could not make the journey by rail. When the torrent of women and children overwhelmed the Pioneer camps and sanatoria of Ukraine, Soviet holidaymakers in resorts across the Caucasus were informed that their vacations were canceled, and evacuees found temporary homes from Odessa to Azerbaijan. Three days later, Kiev had become a city without children. No one could say when they m
ight return.
On May 22 Scherbitsky put his signature on a Party report describing the republic’s handling of the accident. Despite widespread failures and carelessness—particularly the belated provision of safe limits for the population’s radiation exposure—90,000 people had been evacuated successfully from the Ukrainian areas of the thirty-kilometer zone. All had been rehoused, and more than 90 percent were already back at work. They had been provided with compensation of 200 rubles per person, amounting to 10.3 million rubles in total. Of the more than 9,000 men, women, and children who had been hospitalized or quarantined across Ukraine in the days after the accident, 161 had been diagnosed with radiation sickness, including 5 children and 49 Interior Ministry troops. A total of 26,900 children had been sent to Pioneer camps in other parts of the Soviet Union, and breast-feeding women had been relocated to sanitaria within the Kiev region.
But for all this apparent care for its citizenry, the dark undertow of Soviet history was already tugging at the first victims of the accident. Just the day before, the Ukrainian health minister had received a telegram from his superior in Moscow. The message provided instructions on how to record diagnoses on patients exposed to radiation as a result of the accident. While those with severe radiation sickness and burns were to be described accordingly—“acute radiation sickness from cumulative radiation exposure”—the records of those with lower exposure and without severe symptoms were not to mention radioactivity at all. Instead, Moscow dictated that the hospital files of these patients were to state that they had been diagnosed with “vegetative-vascular dystonia.” This was a psychological complaint with physical manifestations—sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, and seizures—triggered by the nerves or “the environment,” unique to Soviet medicine but similar to the Western notion of neurasthenia. The memo decreed the same misleadingly vague diagnosis for liquidators who came for examination having received the maximum allowable dose of radiation for emergency workers.
* * *
Back inside the zone, the dogs and cats left behind by the fleeing population had themselves become a health hazard—the Soviet Agriculture Ministry feared the spread of rabies and plague. More immediately, starving and desperate, with their hopelessly irradiated fur, the abandoned pets were now toxic to anyone they encountered.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs turned to the republic’s Society of Hunters and Fishermen for help, calling for twenty teams of local men to spread out across the contaminated territory to begin liquidating all the abandoned pets they could find. Each group would be composed of ten to twelve hunters, accompanied by two hygiene inspectors, a policeman, and a dump truck; four mechanical excavators would dig pits for burying the dead animals. As the spring wore on, the silence of the deserted Polesian countryside was broken by the crack of rifle fire, as the men of the Society of Hunters and Fishermen stalked their domesticated quarry across the Exclusion Zone.
Although the industrious Ukrainian sportsmen would eventually manage to eliminate a total of twenty thousand agricultural and domestic animals inside the thirty-kilometer zone, it proved impossible to kill them all. Some dogs managed to escape beyond the perimeter and were fed and adopted by the liquidators they found camped there. The soldiers may have been heedless of the radiation the animals brought with them but nevertheless christened them with bitter new names, more appropriate to their changed environment: Doza or Rentgen, Gamma and Dozimetr.
* * *
The men of General Pikalov’s command who spread out across the zone in the summer of 1986 were participants in a vast and singular experiment. Soviet contingency plans for a nuclear power plant accident had envisaged a single, brief radioactive release from a damaged reactor—not one that continued for so long and, even as decontamination work began, had still not ceased entirely. The houses and buildings within the thirty-kilometer zone had all been contaminated in different ways, depending on their distance from the plant and the atmospheric conditions at the time the plume had reached them. There was no established methodology to follow. Radiation experts were summoned from Chelyabinsk-40, where their work on the enduring legacy of the Mayak disaster had made them uniquely qualified to clean up a radioactive landscape. But even they had never encountered anything like this.
At first, the chemical troops simply tried washing everything clean. Using a water cannon and fire hoses, they blasted farm buildings and houses with water and the decontamination solution SF-2U. But as the solution soaked into the ground, the fallout became concentrated, and the radioactive contamination of the soil beside the buildings more than doubled, so that the top layer had to be removed with bulldozers. Some materials proved more recalcitrant than others: tiled walls, in particular, were hard to clean, and reinforced concrete remained just as contaminated after washing as it was before, and the troops had to scrub it with brushes to remove even some of the radionuclides. In yards and gardens, the men stripped away the upper levels of earth and piled it into mounds, which they sealed beneath a layer of clay and seeded with fresh grass. The most heavily contaminated soil was trucked away and buried in specially excavated pits as nuclear waste. Many settlements were decontaminated twice, or three times, but homes that resisted the process for too long were simply demolished. Eventually whole villages would be bulldozed flat and buried, their locations marked with triangular metal signs bearing the universally recognized trefoil symbol indicating a radioactive hazard.
Soviet technicians tried whatever they could to strip radionuclides from buildings and the land around them: the troops boiled up polyvinyl alcohol solution in field kitchens to make a liquid that could be painted on walls to trap contaminants and dry into a film that could be peeled away. They sprayed the shoulders of the roads with bitumen to contain dust and laid kilometer after kilometer of fresh asphalt where highway surfaces proved impossible to clean; they fitted Mi-8 helicopters with massive barrels to carry glue that could be dispersed from the air to trap radioactive particles on the ground. Specialists from NIKIMT, the technical services division of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, scoured factories across the Union for anything that might be used to keep the dust at bay—so long as it was cheap and available in enormous quantities. As the summer wore on, everything from PVA glue to barda—a pulp made from beetroot and waste products from timber processing—was shipped into the rail yards on the perimeter of the zone and sprayed from beneath the helicopters in thick, dark showers.
Meanwhile, the threat posed by the radiation to the rivers, lakes, and reservoirs that covered Ukraine had tested the ingenuity of Soviet engineers and hydrologists to its limit. Summoned to the zone from Moscow and Kiev in the first few days after the explosion, they fought to keep fallout from being washed into the Pripyat and seeping into the groundwater, and to prevent contamination that had already swept into the river from penetrating downstream—toward Kiev and the huge reservoir that supplied the city with drinking water. Military construction brigades and men from the Soviet Water Ministry built 131 new dams and filters, sank 177 drainage wells, and began work on a subterranean wall of clay—five kilometers long, up to a meter thick, and thirty meters deep—intended to trap contaminated water before it could reach the river.
Close to Pripyat, the pine forest that filled the sanitary zone between the city and the plant also lay directly in the path of heavy fallout released from the reactor in the first few days after the explosion. Thickly dusted with beta-emitting radionuclides that exposed them to massive doses of radiation—in some places, up to 10,000 rads—almost forty square kilometers of woodland had been killed outright almost immediately. Within ten days, the dense stands of pine lining the main route between Pripyat and the station turned an unusual color, as their foliage changed gradually from deep green to coppery red. The soldiers and scientists who sped down this road had no need to peer from the observation ports of their armored personnel carriers to know they had entered the “Red Forest”; even shielded by armor plate and bulletproof glass, the n
eedles of their radiometers began to swing wildly amid the extraordinary levels of contamination. The forest posed such a threat that it, too, would soon be mown down by combat engineers and buried in concrete-lined tombs.
In the fields of the collective farms, agricultural scientists employed deep plowing to turn the topsoil and safely inter radionuclides out of harm’s way. They tested some two hundred different varieties of plants and crops to establish which absorbed the greatest levels of radiation, and sowed the fields with lime and other calcium powders to chemically bind strontium 90 in the soil and prevent it from traveling further into the food chain. The specialists’ optimistic forecast was that farming could begin inside the zone within the year.
But in a place where the leaves on the trees and the earth beneath their feet had become sources of ionizing radiation, the work was Sisyphean. Even the most gentle summer breeze recirculated dust carrying alpha- and beta-emitting particles into the air. Every rain shower washed radiation from the clouds and flushed more long-lived nuclear isotopes into the ponds and streams. The arrival of autumn would send radioactive leaves skittering across the ground. The Pripyat marshes—the largest swamp in Europe—had become a massive sponge for strontium and cesium, and the vast stretches of agricultural land proved too large to be scraped clean even by squadrons of earth-moving machines. Only ten square kilometers of the zone would ever be truly decontaminated. A total cleanup would have required nearly six hundred million tonnes of topsoil to have been removed and buried as nuclear waste. And, even with the seemingly unlimited manpower at the disposal of the Soviet Union, this was regarded as simply impossible.
Midnight in Chernobyl Page 30