Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  At the end of the summer of 2008, Natalia prepared herself for the worst. She believed that, by then, he had no more than five days to live, and—together with Kirill and Alexander’s brother, Vladimir—sat with him in shifts around the clock. Natalia made food for him at home, took it to the hospital, and fed him herself. They were stunned when, at the end of August, he pulled through and was suddenly back on his feet. The doctors allowed him to return home on weekends, where he was able to take walks, drive, and shop for fresh vegetables in the market. And even when Alexander returned to the hospital, he kept working from his bed. He insisted Natalia take a business trip to Paris she had planned for November. But, although he remained active and determined to carry on just as before, his condition continued to worsen. His face and body swelled so much that he no longer looked like himself.

  Early in October 2008, when they were quite certain of the prognosis, the doctors allowed Alexander to return home to spend two weeks with his family. He came to Natalia’s office every afternoon in his car to pick her up from work and drive her home. On October 25 he turned forty-seven. He drank champagne, and friends and colleagues, including many he hadn’t heard from in years, called from all over the world to congratulate him and wish him well.

  The following week, more than twenty-two years after he had first crossed the threshold of the brown brick building on Marshal Novikov Street, Alexander Yuvchenko returned to the hallways of the former Hospital Number Six for the last time. That same day, he called Natalia to say that he was being taken into intensive care for surgery and wouldn’t be able to phone again. By now, Kirill—twenty-five years old and a trainee surgeon—was working at the hospital himself and continued to see his father every day. But when a quarantine was declared on the ward, visitors were prohibited, and Kirill warned Natalia not to even try coming to the clinic. On Saturday the two men laughed and joked together, but on Monday, November 10, Alexander fell into a coma. Eight hours later, shortly before midnight, Kirill telephoned his mother.

  “Father is dead,” he said.

  * * *

  Almost twenty-five years after the explosion of Reactor Number Four, in February 2011, the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone surrounding the power station remained deeply contaminated. Levels of radiation everywhere varied wildly and unpredictably: an invisible patchwork of fallout leached deep into the landscape. The site of the Red Forest—where the poisoned trees had been cut down by Soviet engineering troops, buried in concrete-lined pits, covered with fresh soil and sand, and replanted with grass and new pines—had proved so radioactive that the road through it was abandoned. Instead, traffic to the plant was directed down a new route, laid several hundred meters to the east. On a sandy path that cut past stands of healthy-looking conifers toward the patches of spindly and deformed pines beyond, the electronic clicks of a Geiger counter rose from a light patter to a steady torrent, until a guide told me we should go no farther. Beyond this point lay a barren clearing carpeted with dead needles and broken branches, where almost nothing would grow and the Geiger counter would make a sound no one wanted to hear: the continuous squall of white noise indicating levels of radiation thousands of times higher than normal.

  In the decades since the pioneer troops of the Twenty-Fifth Motorized Rifle Division first staked out its boundaries with fence posts and barbed wire in the summer of 1986, the territory of the Exclusion Zone had expanded repeatedly, as the newly independent governments overseeing it revised the Soviet norms of what constituted dangerous levels of radiation downward to meet Western standards. In 1993 the main section of contaminated land in Belarus—designated as the Polesia State Radiological and Ecological Reserve—was enlarged to include an extra 850 square kilometers of territory. In 1989 Ukraine added another 500-square-kilometer stretch of polluted countryside to the western edge of its part of the zone, encompassing the newly evacuated areas of the Polesia and Narodichi regions, to create a single administrative entity named the Zone of Exclusion and the Zone of Unconditional (Mandatory) Resettlement. Together, by 2005, the contiguous parts of the Belarusian and Ukrainian zones made up a total area of more than 4,700 square kilometers of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus, all of it rendered officially uninhabitable by radiation.

  Beyond the borders of the evacuated land, the contamination of Europe with radionuclides from the explosion had proved widespread and long lasting: for years after the accident, meat, dairy products, and produce raised on farms from Minsk to Aberdeen and from France to Finland were found laced with strontium and cesium and had to be confiscated and destroyed. In Britain, restrictions on the sale of sheep grazed on the hill farms of North Wales would not be lifted until 2012. Subsequent studies found that three decades after the accident, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic were still too radioactive for human consumption.

  At the same time, a remarkable story had emerged from within the Exclusion Zone—a fairytale narrative of ecological rebirth and renewal. Far from enduring decades of inevitable sickness and death in an atomic wasteland, the plants and animals left behind in the evacuated area after the accident had apparently made an amazing recovery. The first evidence for the phenomenon came from three cows and a bull found wandering near the reactor after the explosion. Taken to an experimental farm near Pripyat, all four animals—named Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Uranium by researchers—had initially been rendered infertile by the acute doses of radiation received after the accident. But they slowly recovered, and the radioactive farm’s first calf was born in 1989. And when the experimental herd was expanded, to thirty or more cattle, including some raised on uncontaminated land outside the zone, the research team examined the blood work of the two groups of animals.

  They expected to find at least some evidence in the analysis of the two groups’ differing levels of radiation exposure; they found none.

  After the breakup of the USSR, as the economies of Ukraine and Belarus pitched into steep decline, the appetite for funding further Chernobyl research dried up. But one scientist—Sergei Gaschak, a former liquidator who in the summer of 1986 had spent twelve hours every day for six weeks washing the radioactive dust from cars and trucks close to the plant—stayed on in the zone. Venturing deep into the forests and swamps of the abandoned landscape, Gaschak began to spot creatures long since eliminated from the rest of Ukraine and Belarus by hunting and collective farming: wolves, elk, brown bears, and rare birds of prey. His observations helped foster a new notion of the zone, as appealing as it was counterintuitive: demonstrating that nature was apparently capable of healing itself in new and unpredictable ways. In the absence of man, plants and animals were thriving in a radioactive Eden.

  The idea of the miracle of the zone took hold through TV documentaries and books that told a story of how chronic exposure to the relatively low levels of radioactivity left in many areas was proving apparently harmless—or, in some cases, even beneficial—to animal populations. Yet scientific evidence for the thesis was thin, or contradictory. Gaschak himself lacked the funding to conduct large-scale studies of the wildlife population of the zone and based his theories on estimates. And a team of independent researchers, led by Timothy Mousseau from the United States and Anders Pape-Moller from Denmark, published dozens of papers that contradicted his results and instead showed patterns of early death and malformation among the plants and animals in the zone.

  What seemed clear from much of the research into low-level radiation conducted since 1986 was that different species and populations reacted to chronic exposure in varying ways. Pine trees coped with it less well than birch. Moller and Mousseau found that migrant barn swallows were apparently very radiosensitive; resident birds less so. Winter wheat seeds taken from the Exclusion Zone in the days after the disaster and then germinated in uncontaminated soil had produced thousands of different mutant strains, and every new generation remained genetically unstable, even twenty-five years after the accident. Yet a 2009 study of soybeans grown near
the reactor seemed to show that the plants changed at a molecular level to protect themselves against radiation.

  Meanwhile, the World Health Organization asserted confidently that no inherited or reproductive effects on nearby populations would result from the accident. This bore out decades of earlier research showing that, although mammalian fetuses exposed to radiation while in the womb might suffer from birth defects, the risk of it causing inheritable mutations in human beings was almost certainly too small to detect. But some researchers insisted that no one could be truly certain where mankind might fall on the continuum of DNA damage and long-term adaptation found in lower organisms, and finding the answer could take decades or even centuries. They argued that the genetic effects of chronic radiation exposure on each species studied had often been subtle, varied, and demonstrated conclusively only after many generations; the potential genetic changes in human beings—who, by 2011, had only recently produced their third generation, as the children of the liquidators themselves began to raise families—might take hundreds of years to fully unravel. “That’s what we want to know,” Moller explained. “Are we more like barn swallows or soybeans in terms of radiation-induced mutation?”

  * * *

  As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster approached in 2011, the government of Ukraine pressed ahead with plans to open the Exclusion Zone as a tourist attraction. “The Chernobyl zone is not as scary as the whole world thinks,” a spokeswoman told a British reporter. “We want to work with big tour operators and attract Western tourists, from whom there is great demand.” The authorities had already tolerated the surreptitious return of more than a thousand peasants to their ancestral homes inside the zone, where they chose to live out their old age in remote seclusion, “aborigines of the nuclear reservation,” subsisting on fruit and vegetables they grew themselves. Now the researchers working in the area feared that this new initiative was a prelude to reopening the area for full repopulation and were appalled—Sergei Gaschak, because he hoped the zone could become a permanent wildlife reserve where elk and lynx could live beyond the reach of hunters; Moller and Mousseau, because they feared for the long-term health of a human population exposed to the mutagens remaining in the environment.

  But after a quarter century, the collective memory of the world’s most devastating atomic accident had dimmed and softened. In the harsh light of climbing oil costs and global warming, governments were reconsidering the viability of nuclear power. The first contract to build a new nuclear power plant in the United States in more than thirty years was already under way. At the beginning of March 2011, Ukraine announced plans to begin construction of two new reactors not far from Chernobyl. The government in Kiev was still plotting the future of the forbidden zone when, on March 11, 2011, the news came in from the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan.

  The disaster involving the three General Electric–built reactors on the northeastern coast of Honshu followed a now familiar course, this time played out live on television: a loss of coolant led to reactor meltdown, a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas, and several catastrophic explosions. No one was killed or injured by the immediate release of radiation, but three hundred thousand people were evacuated from the surrounding area, which will remain contaminated for decades to come. During the early stages of the emergency cleanup, it became clear that robots were incapable of operating in the highly radioactive environment inside the containment buildings of the plant. Japanese soldiers were sent in to do the work, in another Pyrrhic victory of bio-robots over technology.

  Sweeping away the convenient fallacy that what had happened in Chernobyl had been a once-in-a-million-years fluke, the Fukushima accident stifled the nuclear renaissance in the cradle: the Japanese government immediately took all of its remaining forty-eight nuclear reactors off-line, and Germany shut down eight of its seventeen reactors, with the announced intention of closing the rest by 2022 as part of a move to renewable energy. Existing plans for all new reactors in the United States were suspended or canceled.

  Yet nuclear power endured. More than seven years after the Japanese disaster, the United States still had a hundred licensed and operational power reactors—including one at Three Mile Island. France continued to generate 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, and China had recently embarked on a reactor building spree, with twenty new units under construction and thirty-nine already in operation. Some environmentalists argued that humanity could not afford to turn its back on the promise and terrors of the peaceful atom. The global need for electricity was increasing exponentially: humanity was predicted to double the amount of energy it used by 2050. Despite the growing certainty that burning fossil fuels was the cause of devastating climate change—making the stabilization of carbon emissions imperative—coal remained the most widely used source of energy in the world. The fine particulates from fossil fuel plants in the United States killed more than thirteen thousand people a year; worldwide, three million people died annually as a result of air pollution released by coal- and oil-fueled power stations. Even to begin to head off climate change, all the extra power-generating capacity that the world would need to create over the coming thirty-five years would have to be clean, yet neither wind, solar, hydroelectric, nor geothermal power—nor any combination of them—had the potential to bridge the gap.

  Nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide and have been statistically safer than every competing energy industry, including wind turbines. And at last, more than seventy years after the technology’s inception, engineers were finally developing reactors with design priorities that lay not in making bombs but in generating electricity. In principle, these fourth-generation reactors would be cheaper, safer, smaller, more efficient, and less poisonous than their predecessors and could yet prove to be the technology that saves the world.

  Less than a month before the explosion of Reactor Number Four in 1986, a team of nuclear engineers at Argonne National Laboratory–West in Idaho had quietly succeeded in demonstrating that the first of these, the integral fast reactor, was safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island 2 and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), an even more advanced concept developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is fueled by thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years. Running at atmospheric pressure, and without ever reaching a criticality, the LFTR doesn’t require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground.

  In 2015 Microsoft founder Bill Gates had begun funding research projects similar to these fourth-generation reactors in a quest to create a carbon-neutral power source for the future. By then, the Chinese government had already set seven hundred scientists on a crash program to build the world’s first industrial thorium reactor as part of a war on pollution. “The problem of coal has become clear,” the engineering director of the project said. “Nuclear power provides the only solution.”

  * * *

  By the time the thirtieth anniversary of the accident approached, the Exclusion Zone had opened to regular sightseeing tours from Kiev, and it seemed that the international scientific community had reached a reassuring consensus on the long-term health effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe. With the Soviet medical record fragmented and compromised by secrecy and cover-up, the mantle of scientific authority on the disaster had been assumed by the numerous nongovernmental organizations operating under the umbrella of the United Nations. And with each successive five-year milestone after the catastrophe, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR),
and the IAEA all marched together toward the same conclusion: the public health effects of the Chernobyl accident “were not nearly as substantial as had at first been feared.”

  The Chernobyl Forum, a United Nations study group cooperating with the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, estimated that by 2005, about four thousand people who were children at the time of the accident had developed thyroid cancer caused by iodine 131 from the reactor, leading to nine deaths. Their estimates suggested that up to five thousand fatal cancers might occur in the most heavily contaminated regions of the former USSR as a result of radiation released by the accident, making up part of a projected twenty-five thousand additional cancers attributable to the disaster in Europe as a whole. In a population of more than five million people living in the affected areas, the UN scientists viewed these numbers as barely statistically significant. They instead attributed the majority of disease in the fallout zones to psychological factors—a “paralyzing fatalism”—the latest incarnation of Soviet “radiophobia.” In a follow-up report ten years later, the WHO noted that the recent discovery of a pattern of cataracts in liquidators had led to a downward revision of the safe-dose limits imposed on nuclear workers by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. They also noted an increase in cardiovascular disease among liquidators exposed to chronic low-dose radiation—but cautioned that this might also be the result of other factors, including poor diet, lack of physical activity, and stress.