Ghost of Chernobyl Continues to Haunt Ukraine

Mariya Shylan, a gregarious pensioner living alone in the wooden farmhouse where she grew up, is the robust picture of the simple pastoral life.

She extols the virtues of the vegetables she grows, the local fish she gets from her neighbors, the wild animals that roam freely all around her home.

“I live in beautiful countryside,” she says.

Doubts creep into her voice, however, when she talks about her younger son, who died last month of liver disease. The doctors said it had nothing to do with the accident nearly two decades ago. But she will never know for sure.

Shylan lives 14 miles from the Chernobyl plant, which became a synonym for nuclear disaster when one of its reactors exploded and burned April 26, 1986, spewing radioactive waste over a large swath of Europe.

She is increasingly alone. This already depopulated village is slowly disappearing, waiting to join a necklace of ghost towns in the radiation-affected “exclusion zone” that speak of the disaster with the eloquence of silence.

At the site of the destroyed reactor, the epic saga of the world’s worst nuclear accident also is far from over. In a sense, it has barely begun -- the effort to contain and clean up radioactive materials will go on for centuries.

“Today the problems are under control, but it’s not environmentally safe from a long-term perspective,” said Valeriy Kulishenko, the top engineer for protective measures at the site.

Twenty-eight donor countries, including the United States, have contributed $618 million to the cleanup effort. But a plan to create a new “sarcophagus” to entomb the doomed reactor will cost hundreds of millions more.

With the inauguration last month of President Viktor Yushchenko, a pro-Western former opposition leader, new authorities have taken power in Ukraine who enjoy enormous American and European goodwill. That appears to ensure a continuation of outside help to deal with the problem.

“European governments and the major donors ... will certainly be sympathetic to the new government,” said Vince Novak, director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s nuclear safety department. “So at least there won’t be any political obstacles there.”

Today, radiation levels in the exclusion zone -- a radius of nearly 20 miles from the plant -- vary wildly, depending on where radioactive debris fell in 1986. Some places register only natural background radiation, but driving in a car with a dosimeter, one passes through places where the reading zooms up to 100 times normal.

Once home to 135,000 people, the zone now has 358 residents like Shylan, according to official statistics. The returnees were originally considered squatters. But restrictions were eased about a decade ago, putting them into a limbo where their presence was no longer banned but they still could not have their legal residence recorded.

About 5,000 people live in the zone during work shifts of 15 straight days a month or four successive days a week, but spend the rest of their time elsewhere. And 4,500 people commute into the zone for jobs such as decommissioning other Chernobyl reactors, the last of which was shut down at the end of 2000 under pressure from Western nations.

The greatest worry today is that the original sarcophagus, hastily built in 1986 to contain the radioactive debris of Chernobyl’s No. 4 reactor, could collapse in a fresh cloud of radioactive dust should a moderate earthquake strike, Kulishenko said. Urgent work is underway to reinforce this leaky and unstable concrete-and-steel structure, parts of which rest on the damaged walls of the original power plant, he said.

Plans are moving forward to add a second shelter around the old one. The “Shelter 2” is a huge 19,800-ton steel arch designed to be assembled nearby, then slid into place on rails to minimize workers’ radiation exposure. The sarcophagus is designed to last at least 100 years, providing improved conditions for further stabilization work and eventual cleanup of radioactive debris isolated inside.

The combined stabilization and construction effort carries a $1-billion price tag, before any major cleanup. Removal of approximately 200 tons of uranium-based fuel still trapped inside is likely to be postponed for many decades, for a variety of technical and practical reasons, including there being nowhere to put it.

“Some of it looks like lava,” said Novak, whose bank is coordinating funding for the project. “This is the material you don’t want to remove until you have facilities to store it in a depository.”

Shylan is bitter about the whole idea of nuclear power, despite her insistence on living in the exclusion zone. “It’s a typical example of how to rob the people,” she declared. “People in the neighborhood of the nuclear power plants get sick.”

She noted that Soviet founder Vladimir I. Lenin never endorsed nuclear energy. When a visitor pointed out that he was too early for that, she turned the phrase around and replied firmly, “Well, now it’s too late.”

Nearby Pripyat, about two miles from the plant, was the largest town to be emptied by the disaster. Today, its central square stands eerily quiet, overgrown with weeds and overlooked by a vacant lot. The tree-lined street leading to the square is surrounded by crumbling apartment blocks, closed storefronts and rusting playgrounds. Eight-foot-tall trees grow out of the sidewalks in a town once home to nearly 50,000 people.

A sign next to a padlocked door warns in Ukrainian and English: “Attention! Entry to the exclusion zone without permission of exclusion zone administration is prohibited.”

The disaster struck at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, during preparation for a planned test involving one of the plant’s turbine-generators, according to a Soviet report released that August. Operators of the reactor, which differed radically in design from most nuclear power plants in the West, made a series of errors that caused the nuclear chain reaction to speed up in an effect similar to pressing a car’s gas pedal to the floor.

As the fission accelerated, the reactor’s heat output rose 330 million watts within three seconds, according to the report. This triggered explosions of steam and hydrogen gas in the core that destroyed the reactor, blew the roof off the building and started a graphite fire in the core that hurled radioactive waste into the atmosphere for 11 days.

At first, the Kremlin failed to report the accident, delaying an announcement for nearly 72 hours while radioactive fallout spread over Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.

The total amount of radioactive materials unleashed into the environment was roughly 30 to 40 times that released by the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Soviet and Japanese scientists said at the time.

Despite the massive radiation leak, there was no immediate evacuation of Pripyat, where most of the plant workers lived. Life there went on quite normally the day of the disaster, with weddings and a soccer game.

Among the most worrisome contaminants is radioactive cesium-137, a long-lived component of fission wastes that enters the food chain through the soil. Concern about cesium-137 was a primary reason for the permanent depopulation of much of the exclusion zone and a ban on hunting.

In the days after the accident, the government evacuated more than 135,000 people from the area around the plant. By August 1986, 31 people had died as a direct result of the disaster. Two men were reported killed in the blast, but most fatalities were among emergency workers who succumbed to radiation sickness. More than 200 were diagnosed with acute radiation sickness, but death statistics after that summer are not clear.

Experts have estimated that the accident may have caused 6,000 to 10,000 deaths from cancer and other effects of radiation exposure.

Shylan’s son, Viktor, a Chernobyl forest ranger who died at 46, was a crane operator at the time of the accident who helped remove radioactive debris from Pripyat, she said. Soviet officials reported that 600,000 soldiers and volunteers took part in the cleanup. Viktor had no real choice, Shylan said.

“It was forbidden to leave your working place,” she said. “It was Communist times.”

When she first returned in autumn of 1987, “the militiamen said, ‘It’s forbidden to live here, it’s dangerous to live here,’ ” Shylan recalled. “People with children didn’t come back.... Then people from the ecological center took soil samples and said it’s not so dangerous.”

In the early 1990s “they stopped driving around and telling people to leave,” said Shylan, who gets a $55-a-month pension but lives mostly on the chickens in her yard and the vegetables she grows.

“The only thing that changes is the numbers,” she said. “One hundred and fifty people came back here in 1987. There were 40 people here 10 years ago. Now there are 18. They get older, year by year. And the young people who left this area will never come back.”