Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  Finally Ukraine scored on a dubious penalty kick. The remaining minutes ticked away, and the game ended 1-0. Ukraine would be advancing to the next round. Nikolai pounded on the table in celebration while Dennis poured out another round. He looked me in the eye, our glasses raised.

  “To victory,” he said.

  Afterward, Dennis and I went for a walk, clutching liters of beer we had bought at the corner store. It was a beautiful Friday evening, still warm with lingering sunlight, and the town was quiet. I suppose the place is always quiet. The only other person in sight was Lenin, standing alone on a low concrete platform, his hand in his pocket, looking like he was waiting for the bus.

  A car passed in the distance, and we hid our beer bottles inside our coats. “We are not supposed to have beer outdoors in the town,” Dennis said. “If it is police, they can get angry.” For a moment, I felt like a bored teenager in a too-small town, with nothing to do on a Friday night but wander the streets and get drunk. Maybe there’s a reason the Exclusion Zone is also called the Zone of Alienation.

  Across the street from Lenin, next to the church, was the recreation center. Dennis told me there was a Ping-Pong table inside, but that the place was closed for the weekend. First no canoeing or mushroom gathering, and now no Ping-Pong? These people had a thing or two to learn about hospitality.

  “Come, I can show you the nice spots in town,” Dennis said. We strolled to the edge of town and then down an overgrown dirt road toward the water. Now off the clock, Dennis had dropped the forced, semi-military formality of his guide persona and was enjoying himself. He pointed at the thick overgrowth spilling into the road. “There could be wild boar here,” he said. “They like to hide in bushes like these. Sometimes the mother boars leap out of the bushes and charge. If this happens, you must climb something very tall, like this—“ He pointed at one of the tall, concrete utility poles that lined the road.

  I looked at it doubtfully. “I don’t think I could climb that.”

  Dennis took a swig of his beer and smiled. “If the wild boar is charging, you learn fast.”

  At the riverbank, we stopped and stared out at the sunset, the surface of the water glassy and still. I wondered idly if the giant mosquitoes swirling around us were mutants, or if we might see a three-eyed fish. A few mutants would add such panache to the zone. But the closest you’ll come are the deformed, runty trees of the Red Forest and some unspectacular abnormalities in bird coloring, in the litter size of the wild boar, in who knows what else. The point is there are no two-headed dogs.

  The world thinks of Chernobyl as a place where humankind had overwhelmed and destroyed nature. The phrase “dead zone” still gets tossed around. But this was nowhere more obviously untrue than here, watching the sunset, my entire horizon a quiet rhapsody of water, sun, and trees. Paradoxically, perversely, the accident may actually have been good for this environment. The radiation—while not exactly healthy for any organism—has been so effective at keeping humans away that Chernobyl has gone back to nature, a great, unplanned experiment in conservation by way of pollution. For decades, wildness has been reclaiming the place, growing in where civilization would have pushed it back, reoccupying the space once reserved for people.

  If the zone had become a giant, radioactive national park, then Dennis was the Boy Scout in love with it. As we walked back to town, birdsong filling the air, he told me about the scientists and researchers who came to the zone to study the wildlife. His pride was obvious. Species of birds not seen in the region for decades had been popping up there, he said. Ecologists had even chosen it as a place to reintroduce an endangered species of wild horse. And everywhere I had gone, except for the reactor complex itself, I had seen nature running riot. Despite the radiation—indeed because of it—Chernobyl had effectively become the largest wildlife preserve in Ukraine, perhaps in all of Europe.

  It is a turn of events that highlights a certain human arrogance about our destructive powers. It is only hubris to imagine that we can destroy nature, or the world. It is the mirror image of the industrialist’s egotistical desire to exploit and control it. And it is true that we can kill off continents of forest and destroy species by the thousands, and even wreak climate change. But once we’re gone, the rest of nature will rush on, as it has after so many other cataclysms, growing over and through and out of us. The apocalypse we can create is for ourselves and for our cousins, but not for life on Earth.

  We headed back by a different route, cutting through the town’s World War II memorial, an arcade of pillars tucked into the woods. The centerpiece of the memorial was a white column, perhaps thirty feet tall, with a large bronze star perched on top. Fresh flowers had been placed at its base.

  Layers of catastrophe had been overlaid on this landscape. During World War II—long before any nuclear reactors came along—the area around Chernobyl had been the scene of brutal fighting. As local partisans resisted the German occupation, the people suffered murderous Nazi reprisals, only to endure a horrific famine once the war was over.

  In that context, it’s hard to say that the accident in 1986 was even the worst thing offered up to Chernobyl by the twentieth century. Indeed, although the human dislocation caused by the accident was immense, its legacy in terms of illness and death is deeply ambiguous.

  In the public consciousness, Chernobyl stands for cancer, deformity, and death. Even now, a quarter century later, there is no shortage of charities dedicated to the care of “Chernobyl children”—recently born kids suffering from cancer or birth defects attributed to the accident’s aftereffects. But the Chernobyl Forum (a consortium including several branches of the UN and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) has argued that, after an epidemic of thyroid cancer among children living in the area during the accident, no measurable increase has yet been demonstrated in the region’s cancer rates. The Forum’s projection of excess cancer deaths in the future is surprisingly low, at about five thousand. Meanwhile, its estimate of the number of people killed by the accident’s immediate effects stands at fewer than a hundred. Such estimates drive organizations like Greenpeace crazy, and they have produced their own numbers—of nearly a hundred thousand projected cancer fatalities, and sixty thousand already dead. Who knows, maybe the UN is the nuclear power industry’s stooge.

  More fundamentally, it’s just hard to accept how little is known with any confidence about the disaster’s effects, whether on people or animals. And it’s hard to accept that the Chernobyl children may be the children of regular misfortune, not of nuclear fallout. That the accident’s most traumatic effects may have been social and psychiatric, rather than radiological. That Chernobyl—and humankind’s wretchedness—may not quite have lived up to our expectations.

  Early the next morning, in the zone’s only hotel, I awoke to the symptoms of acute radiation poisoning.

  Inflammation and tenderness of exposed skin. Nausea and dehydration. Exhaustion and disorientation. Headache. Did I mention the nausea? I was still in my clothes, sprawled on top of a ruffled pink bedspread. The ceiling listed sideways in a sickening spiral.

  I lay motionless, hoping for death, and stared upside down through the window above my head. Beyond the gauzy curtains, a massive Ukrainian dawn burst downward into the sky. It made me want to burst, too.

  It wasn’t radiation sickness. What I had was a bad hangover and a bit of sunburn. But I didn’t see much difference.

  I had found the nightlife in Chernobyl. Coming back from the war memorial, we had visited the outdoor “vehicle museum,” a tidy grass parking lot with a fleet of military trucks and personnel carriers left over from the cleanup. Already slightly tipsy, we amused ourselves for a moment by dipping our radiation meters into the wheel well of an armored personnel carrier and listening to them scream, and then headed back to find the party.

  The party was across the road from headquarters, in front of the hotel, and consisted of Dennis, Nikolai, and me, sitting on a bench in the parking lot. The hotel—
it was more like a nice dormitory, really—was otherwise deserted. I’m sure you can still get good rates. I went up to my room and brought down some gifts: a Mets cap for Dennis, a pair of New York shot glasses for Nikolai, and a bottle of vodka for everybody.

  We followed the strict custom that a bottle opened is a bottle that must be emptied—even though Nikolai wasn’t drinking tonight and Dennis was too polite to outpace me. Toast upon toast seemed to improve my Ukrainian, and Nikolai’s English, and the fluidity of Dennis’s translation, and soon it was unclear to me which of us was speaking what. By this time it was completely dark, and my elbows had what I was certain were beta-radiation burns from leaning on the hood of the car, and we had somehow ended up in a bar.

  There is a bar in Chernobyl, I thought. There is a bar in Chernobyl.

  How we got there, or exactly where it is, was quickly lost in the fumes of my mind. I was deeply drunk. A lifetime lived in moderation had left me unprepared for this work. But if this was the price, I would pay it. I had found Chernobyl’s only nightclub—even if it was little more than a bare, cinder block room with half a dozen people quietly slugging vodka and cognac out of tiny plastic cups.

  “So, Dennis!” I shouted. “Is the zone a good place to meet girls?”

  He nodded sagely. “There are many girls here,” he said. “And they are all over fifty.”

  It’s beyond cliché to suggest that drinking is the way to befriend Slavs, but it’s also true. We left the bar at full stumble, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, only partly because I couldn’t walk. Nikolai, still sober, was proclaiming his enthusiasm for the project of pollution tourism. Most people came to Chernobyl just to get their two photographs, he said. They treat the staff like servants and leave. They never bother to find out what a nice place the zone can be.

  I raised a nonexistent glass, and we came weaving into the parking lot, singing in Ukrainian at the top of our voices, exchanging a series of cavorting high-fives. I said goodnight to my brothers, and then somehow, in a single, fluid motion, fell up the stairs, down the corridor, through a locked door, and into bed. Which is where I found myself the next morning, feeling like a fishbowl brimming with bile.

  At headquarters, breakfast was a reprise of the previous night’s antipasto. I introduced a piece of cheese to my mouth, wet it with a teaspoon of water, and left it at that. Outside, I found Dennis and Nikolai. One look at my expression, and they both burst out laughing. Dennis shook my hand and smiled. “Next time, give me some more notice that you’re coming,” he said. “I’ll show you the really good stuff. Maybe we can go in a helicopter.”

  The jerk. Surely I could stay on? Wasn’t there still time for helicopters and canoes? But it was not possible. These things needed to be booked in advance. The permissions. An escort. And Dennis already had a group of Ukrainian journalists out in the parking lot waiting to begin their visit. The nascent business of zone tourism carried on.

  So learn from my mistakes. Plan on two nights.

  In the car, I leaned gingerly against the seat, trying to disappear. Nikolai laughed again. There was still entertainment value in my hangover. He stamped on the gas, and we started for Kiev. It was another beautiful day for a drive. More glorious countryside, more checkpoints. Guards waving their excellently bulky Geiger counters over the car to test it for contamination. And detectors like phone booths, for us to hug, to test ourselves. And the road back to Kiev, through roadside villages, past pairs of men swinging scythes in the fields, and onto the highway, already swelling with the first weekend traffic streaming out of the city.

  I wasn’t done with the Exclusion Zone. In the back of my mind, a scheme was beginning to form. A scheme for a picnic near Strakholissya, the town I’d seen on the map. A scheme that would require Olena to help me borrow a rowboat. Maybe on Sunday?

  But for the moment, the world was still half-spinning, and I couldn’t look. I rolled the window down and felt relief stream in with the wind. Nikolai hugged the edge of the road as we picked up speed, and I leaned my head against the frame of the car and listened to the rising drone of the engine, eyes closed, mouth hanging open, gulping in the sweet, sunny air of the Exclusion Zone.

  TWO

  THE GREAT BLACK NORTH

  On April 28, 2008, a group of some sixteen hundred ducks landed on a lake near Fort McMurray, Canada. It was a warm day for early spring in northern Alberta, the temperature reaching into the mid-sixties. The ice on the water was still melting after the long winter. The ducks were heading for nesting grounds in the green expanse of Canada’s boreal forest—a vast band of coniferous trees and wetlands that stretches clear across Canada and that provides a summer home for half the birds in all North America.

  Around these parts, though, a duck can’t safely assume that a lake is in fact a lake. This lake, for instance, was actually a huge tailings pond owned by the Syncrude corporation—“tailings pond” being a term of art in the mining industry for “waste reservoir.” As the birds touched down, they became coated with oily bitumen residue. Most of them sank. Others languished on the surface, waiting to be saved by human beings or videotaped by journalists. Of the sixteen hundred birds, fewer than half a dozen survived. Ducks of the world, beware of Alberta.

  Syncrude had presumably hoped to keep its little duck holocaust private, but an anonymous tipster reported the incident and, before the day was out, the company had a full-blown public relations disaster on its hands. “Hundreds of Ducks Dead or Dying after Landing on Syncrude Tailings Pond,” reported the Western Star, while the Spectator ran the cheeky “Tar Pond Dooms Ducks to Death.” Within days, the scandal grew from mere corporate misfortune—“Syncrude in Hot Water over Duck Disaster” (Windsor Star)—to provincial government headache—“Duck Disaster Sinks Alberta Government’s Credibility” (Calgary Herald)—to a matter of national import that demanded the prime minister’s attention—“Harper Promises to Investigate Dead Ducks in Northern Alberta” (CBC).

  This, then, is Canada—perhaps the only country where ducks have national, even geopolitical, significance.

  But this isn’t because the Canadian character is somehow uniquely sensitive to the welfare of its waterfowl. It’s because the sixteen hundred—long may their memory live—had, with their deaths, scratched a festering sore on the Canadian national psyche. They had landed—and died—in something larger than a lake. Larger than a tailings pond. They had hit a grim bull’s-eye in the world’s largest and most controversial energy project, in the Middle East of the Great White North, in the cauldron of our energy future. They had landed in oil sands country.

  Canada lives in the imagination of the United States as a benign, continent-size footnote, the brunt of conservative jokes about invasion and annexation, and the object of liberal daydreams about socialized medicine and sensible bank regulation. If there is an overarching consensus among Americans about their cousins to the north, it is that they are like Americans but nicer, probably smarter, and more loving of hockey.

  Less well known is that Canada is a towering, earth-shaking, CO2-belching petroleum giant. Let us keep our stereotype that Canadians are mild-mannered, but in terms of oil there is nothing moderate about them. They have it. With something like 175 billion barrels’ worth hidden under the ground up there, the country is second in the world only to Saudi Arabia in proven petroleum reserves. The United States’ number-one single provider of foreign oil isn’t someplace in the Middle East. It’s Canada.

  A secret joy must surge through the heart of the US economy at this fact. Here on our very doorstep is a Persian Gulf without the Persians. A Saudi Arabia without the Saudis—or the Arabians. And Canada literally advertises this fact. In 2010, the Alberta government bought time on the huge screens of Manhattan’s Times Square. “A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar,” one ad read. “A great neighbour supplies you with 1.4 million barrels of oil per day.” It’s enough to make modest, climate-change-fearing Democrats want to build pipelines.

  Those
175 million barrels, though, come with a 170-billion catch. Most of Canada’s oil—half of what it produces today and 97 percent of what it expects to produce in the future—isn’t in the form of liquid petroleum, ready to be pumped out. It’s oil sand, a thick, grimy sludge buried underground. And it takes more than sticking a straw in the ground to drink this particular kind of milkshake. It takes the world’s largest shovels, digging vast canyons out of what was once Alberta’s primeval forest; and the world’s largest trucks, delivering huge quantities of the sticky, black sand into massive separators that need insane amounts of heat and water to boil the sand until the oil floats out of it, leaving behind—not incidentally, if you’re a duck—unfathomable quantities of poisonous wastewater, which are then stored in tailings ponds of unusual size.

  Got it? Environmentalists call it dirty oil, as if the stuff that comes out of the ground in Kuwait were somehow clean. But oil sands oil isn’t dirty just because it requires strip-mining on a terrifying scale, or because it generates entire lakes of waste. It’s also energy-intensive: you have to spend a lot of energy to separate and process the oil, much more than if you were simply pumping petroleum out of a well. So if you’re passionate about carbon dioxide emissions and climate change—passionate about avoiding them, that is—oil from oil sands should give you the creeps. When you burn it, you’re also burning all the energy that was used to produce it. The technical term is double whammy.

  Engineers in the audience may argue that in terms of CO2 emissions, oil sands are at worst a 1.25 whammy, depending on how you run the numbers. Nevertheless, a movement has coalesced around the goal of stopping oil sands development, with environmentalists determined to make Canada stop digging new Grand Canyons in its backyard. Leave the sticky stuff in the ground, they say, reasoning that, with the world already suffering for our overuse of fossil fuels, this is no time to be developing a new source.