by Craig Nelson
The graphite tamper, now enflamed at more than 1,200°C, began to burn through the reactor floor, mixing with concrete to meld into corium, a radioactive lava. Underneath the reactor itself were two floors of bubbler pools, reservoirs for the emergency cooling system, which could now at any minute boil away and explode into steam. Three men went into tunnels to open the pools’ sluice gates, but their sole lamp failed, and they had to find the valve by touching their way along a pipe, like three blind men. They returned to the control room and announced their success at finding and opening the drain. In time, all three would contract acute radiation sickness, and all three would die.
Though the possibility of a basement steam explosion had been circumvented, the corium lava could still burn its way into the water table below the reactor and contaminate even more territory than had already been poisoned by atmospheric fallout—a real-life China Syndrome. As physicist Shan Nair explained, “The water table will start leaching actinides and fission products from the melted glob of fuel into the environment. So you will end up with some radioactive contamination of water supplies and ultimately crops and other products. That’s a major problem because radioactive particles are much more dangerous when digested—they cause internal irradiation of organs with resulting increased cancer risks.”
To prevent this, a team began to daily inject fifty-five thousand pounds of liquid nitrogen to freeze the earth beneath the reactor to -100°C, stopping the lava flow and stabilizing the collapsing foundation. But eventually this proved unworkable, so the basement rooms were pumped full of concrete, with the liquid nitrogen used to quench the fire from beneath. Fifty-six miles of dams with polyethylene shields were then installed to keep rainwater from surging the contained waste into the water supply.
Six hundred thousand workers, called liquidators, arrived from across the empire to fight the crisis. Thirty-four hundred rushed in wearing protective suits to quiet the fire and excise the poisonous debris—for forty seconds at a time, absorbing a lifetime of dosage. They were called the bio-robots. Others removed miles of radioactive topsoil and then planted hundreds of thousands of trees to hold the earth and reduce the spread of toxic dust (their cars and trucks are still in the plant’s parking lot to this day, too radiant for human touch).
“It was a real war, an atomic war,” one liquidator said. “In those times the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We’ll never be Dutch or German. And we’ll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there’ll always be plenty of heroes.” The final tally: 206 days of cleanup, and three engineers getting ten-year prison sentences for criminal mismanagement. Of the 237 workers and firefighters who contracted ARS (acute radiation sickness), 31 died in the first three months.
Contaminated food and equipment was supposed to be buried, but much of it made its way to the black market and was sold, along with supplies sent in for the victims—oranges, coffee, buckwheat. Resident Anna Artyushenko: “There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. ‘Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.’ ”
On April 27 at 2:00 p.m., over 336,000 people were told they would need to evacuate their homes for three days, and a ten-mile-long convoy—1,216 yellow school buses and 300 supply trucks—arrived in Pripyat from Kiev. Instead of three days, though, the residents were permanently exiled. The Nazis destroyed 619 Belarusian villages in World War II; Chernobyl emptied another 485 villages, with 70 having to be buried beneath the earth. Liquidator Arkady Filin: “One collective farm chairman would bring a case of vodka to the radiation specialist so they’d cross his village off the list for evacuation; another would bring the same case so they’d put his village on the list—he’d already been promised a three-room apartment in Minsk.” Not everyone agreed to evacuate. Resident Zinaida Kovalenko: “The soldiers knocked. ‘Ma’am, have you packed up?’ And I said: ‘Are you going to tie my hands and feet?’ Old women were crawling on their knees in front of the houses, begging. The soldiers picked them up under their arms and into the car. But I told them whoever touched me was going to get it.” Anna Artyushenko: “The police were yelling. They’d come in cars, and we’d run into the forest. Like we did from the Germans.” Zinaida Kovalenko: “Everyone up and left, but they left their dogs and cats. The first few days I went around pouring milk for all the cats, and I’d give the dogs a piece of bread. They were standing in their yards waiting for their masters. They waited for them a long time. The hungry cats ate cucumbers. They ate tomatoes.” Arkady Filin: “Gangs of men were sent to kill the household pets to keep epidemics of disease from springing up. It was very easy at first, since the dogs weren’t afraid; they ran towards the human voices, thinking they were going to be taken home. Then afterwards, they grew wary and ran into the forests at the sounds of people coming. And the cats learned how to hide.” The atomic no-man’s-land covered eleven hundred square miles, with a name translated three ways: the Zone of Exclusion. The Zone of Estrangement. The Zone of Alienation.
By May 12, 10,198 people in the region had been hospitalized, and that autumn, when the chestnuts shed their leaves, three hundred thousand tons of them were bagged and buried. By November, five hundred thousand cubic yards of rebar concrete covered the reactor, and though it continued to burn, it could no longer infect anything but itself . . . but the containment turned it into an oven, and the nuclear fire rose to 4,500°F. By December 1986 a $768 million battleship-gray concrete sarcophagus was set in place to keep the melted-down two hundred tons of atomic fuel and corium lava from leaking out. Planned to last twenty years, it began disintegrating almost immediately, with cracks and holes letting in rain and snow. Most of the gaps have now been plugged, and the sarcophagus will supposedly be replaced in October 2015 by the New Safe Confinement (NSC), an $800 million steel arch that will be longer than a football field and taller than the Statue of Liberty and the largest movable structure ever made by human hands.
Still, a number of Belarusians and Ukrainians refuse to leave. Current resident Elena Shagovika: “They come around here and ask us why we never left. Where were we going to go? And what would we do there? When my old neighbors come back to see us, they just stand in the road and weep. We don’t belong anywhere else. We belong here.” Here means tilling your soil with potassium (to block the cesium-137 from infecting your crops) and lime (stopping the strontium-90). You can grow plenty if your soil is clay based (which soaks up most radionuclides), but only potatoes if it’s peat. Shagovika’s neighbor Anna Artyushenko: “If we kill a wild boar, we take it to the basement or bury it ourselves. Meat can last for three days underground. The vodka we make ourselves. I have two bags of salt. We’ll be all right without the government! Plenty of logs—there’s a whole forest around us. The house is warm. The lamp is burning. It’s nice! I have a goat, a kid, three pigs, fourteen chickens. Land—as much as I want; grass—as much as I want. There’s water in the well. And freedom! We’re happy.” Zinaida Kovalenko: “Sometimes it’s boring, and I cry. The whole village is empty. There’s all kinds of birds here. They fly around. And there’s elk here, all you want. [Starts crying.] . . . Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth. I worked hard and honestly my whole life. But I didn’t get any fairness. God was dividing things up somewhere, and by the time the line came to me there was nothing left.”
Chernobyl was merely the fourteenth most lethal nuclear accident in USSR history, with the other thirteen kept classified until the empire fell. A far worse incident, for one example, happened in the south Urals, on September 29, 1957, when cooling equipment for nuclear waste at the Mayak Plutonium Facility malfunctioned, the waste ignited in fire and exploded, irradiating 270,000 people and fourteen thousand square miles of land with re
markable vigor—2 million curies. As the plant’s employees had already spent the previous seven years disgorging 2.75 million curies of waste into the Techa River, today, a half century later, the territory remains one of the most radioactive regions in the world.
The United States has had its own trouble spot in Rocky Flats, Colorado, a fusion-bomb trigger plant that suffered a series of plutonium fires in 1957, 1965, and 1969, then was discovered to have been lackadaisical with leaky waste drums. Federal officials were forced to shut the plant down in 1989.
The Soviets have never released official mortality figures for the Lenin Station’s two-week atomic fire. Onetime foreign minister and Georgia president Eduard Shevardnadze famously said of the disaster that it “tore the blindfold from our eyes and persuaded us that politics and morals could not diverge.” It was a financial catastrophe—hundreds of thousands relocated, billions paid for liquidation, and Belarus and Ukraine still spending around 5 percent of their yearly federal budgets on Chernobyl victims. The cost is so high that the majority of Belarusians opposed the dissolution of the USSR and to this day want to reunite with Russia. Belarus Radiobiology Institute director Yevgeny Konoplya: “We are the great guinea pigs of modern times. We are getting to prove for the world what radiation can do to humans. We have suffered from the policies of a country that no longer even exists. We have suffered from lies. And we have suffered from other people’s belief in technology. We once had a beautiful country. What we have now is pain.”
From 1992 to 1995, Johan Havenaar, chief of emergency psychiatry at Utrecht University Hospital, oversaw a study comparing fifteen hundred residents of Gomel (previously Belarus’s most agriculturally productive region, but now with twenty of its twenty-one districts rendered infertile by Chernobyl), with fifteen hundred from nearby Tver, Russia, where no Ukrainian radioactivity has ever been found. The Belarusians said they were five times as sick as the Russians and argued that almost all of these illnesses were due to “the station”—Chernobyl. Forest administrator Volodya Ronashev, forty-eight years old: “My teeth are falling out, and I can’t see too well anymore. I used to be healthy. What else could it be but the station?”
The Dutch then gave the two groups of residents extended medical exams and found that their health was, physically speaking, nearly identical. Psychologically, though, the difference between the two groups was astounding. The Gomelites described themselves as weak and helpless victims with a predetermined, disastrous future. They tried to repair this by either being extremely careful and dramatically exaggerating any health worries, or freely eating the fruits, mushrooms, and animals from the state-warned contaminated zones while screwing, drinking, shooting up, and smoking like it’s 1999.
Chernobyl Forum radiologist Fred Mettler found that after twenty years “the population remains largely unsure of what the effects of radiation actually are and retain a sense of foreboding. A number of adolescents and young adults who have been exposed to modest or small amounts of radiation feel that they are somehow fatally flawed and there is no downside to using illicit drugs or having unprotected sex.” The pregnant of Gomel are so afraid that their children will be born defected that even today they have three abortions for every live birth—more than twice the rate of the rest of Belarus. Johan Havenaar: “These people are sick. It’s just not the type of illness they think. We have to realize that the psychological damage here runs very deep. And we need to treat that every bit as vigorously as we need to treat cancer.” Harvard physicist Richard Wilson: “It’s not too much to say that Chernobyl helped destroy the Soviet Union and end the Cold War. What it did to Belarus is hard to describe. But the worst disease here is not radiation sickness. Except for children, the physical effects are not easy to measure. The truth is that the fear of Chernobyl [radiophobia] has done much more damage than Chernobyl itself.”
The evacuated, meanwhile, seem just as miserable as anyone remaining behind in Gomel. The town of Slavutych was built solely to replace Pripyat; the major form of litter on the roads outside its housing projects are empty vodka buckets; its central square is a black-marble memorial to the station’s victims, where surviving relatives regularly gather to lay wreaths and light candles as a boys choir sings Gospodi, Gospodi, Gospodi—“my God, my God, my God.” Tamara Lusenko was one of those forced to move from her family farm to what she says is a prison: “If I knew it would be this bad, I would have chained myself to the gates back home. Is the danger really so bad there now? Isn’t it time we all went home?”
Despite everything, Ukraine continued running the other Lenin Station reactors for the next fourteen years. Eight times, the government decided to shut down the plant, and each time it reversed the decision, as it would destroy five thousand jobs in an economically cratered nation. Most of the remaining V. I. Lenin power plant employees have developed a special form of Slavic bravado. “Radiation is good for you,” one said. “I work here so when I come home glowing, my wife will think I’m a god.” Another shrugged, saying, “Life itself is dangerous, my friend.” On December 15, 2000, before a coal-black statue of Prometheus (the Titan who stole fire from the gods and had an eagle eternally chewing his liver in punishment), Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma placed a wreath in honor of the dead and announced that the last Chernobyl reactor, Unit 3, would finally be shut down. Workers in jumpsuits protested with black armbands and unfurled banners, but forty-two hundred were laid off, leaving four hundred to maintain the site.
The government is now trying to revive the area economically by turning the Zone of Alienation into a tourist attraction—visit the end of the world, circa 1986, for a mere $150 a day. The ghost city Pripyat includes Soviet apartment towers listing in torpor, peregrine falcons nesting in high-rise balconies, schools sprouting stalagmites of mold, the ruins of an amusement park in faded kindergarten colors, black storks perching in the great oaks of the cemeteries, and in the harbor a graveyard of river ships—something like an atomic Detroit. While the town of Chernobyl has replaced its post office’s time and temperature display with a dosimeter monitoring radiation levels in different sectors of the Zone, VIPs can visit the control room of Reactor #4, with missing ceiling tiles, exposed wires and cables, and its walls covered in decontaminant, which has dried to the color of human blood. With sidewalks, roads, and building foundations sprouting in flora, every town in the Zone, like a clock of civilization running backward, is reverting to forest, becoming Soviet ruins like Cambodia’s Angkor Wat or Guatemala’s Tikal. But KEEP OFF THE GRASS has a whole new meaning here; after the massive decontamination effort of the liquidators, “it’s safe where we are,” Sergei Saversky, deputy chief of zone management, explained to a recent group of tourists. “Just don’t walk where you’re not supposed to.”
With the wilderness, comes the wild creatures. Contrary to expectations of nuclear winter and atomic desert, after the evacuation of ever-hungry people with their eternal agricultural war against predators, the Zone of Alienation’s 1,660 square miles became a wildlife sanctuary teeming with cormorants, cranes, herons, and sixty-six different species of mammals—bears, wild boar, wolves, red deer, roe deer, beavers, river otter, foxes, lynx, thousands of elk, and a surfeit of barsuk, the badger of central Europe. “Northern Ukraine is the cleanest part of the nation,” an Academy of Sciences official explained. “It has only radiation.” When the waterways were overrun with thousands of beaver, their woodworking dammed the canals that drained the fields, returning them to marshland, and becoming once again a home for otters, fish, moose, badgers, bear, boar, and waterbirds. Since so much of the Zone is forbidden to human trespass, two endangered species, bison and wild horses, were reintroduced here, and because no one remains to fish and eat them, catfish living in the station’s canals now grow to ten feet in length, their giant whiskers twitching in the air for the bread tossed by tourists.
It is a perfect illustration of the world without us.
The Zone’s other major business is science, with teams of radioecolo
gists turning the region into an alfresco laboratory, studying the effects of radiation. Yes, the plants and animals are thriving, but what is going on inside their cells, and what about their DNA? The findings are wildly mixed. University of Georgia geneticist Ron Chesser studies chubby, mouselike voles: “Chernobyl represents a huge mystery, and scientists love mystery. . . . The mutation rate in these animals is hundreds and probably thousands of times greater than normal. . . . You wouldn’t want to keep one of those voles in your pocket for any length of time.” But except for enlarged spleens, the scientists have yet to find anything biologically wrong with their charming voles. Immediately after the disaster, an entire four-square-kilometer forest turned from pine green to deep red. When its birch and pine seedlings were grown elsewhere, they became bushes instead of trees, with giant needles and a feathery mien. A local population of dormice—the exquisite hamster and historic Roman empire delicacy—has been studied for fifteen years, and though 4–6 percent have genetic abnormalities, the population in general is healthy. Moose-bone leftovers from a wolf meal revealed fifty times the normal amount of radiation as late as 2010, yet studies comparing wolf populations in irradiated versus non-station-infected territories found no significant overall differences.