Soviets Apparently Contain Plant Fire : Radiation Still Emitted, U.S. Indicates; ‘Accident Not Yet Over,’ Russian Says

The fire that had been burning out of control at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union appeared Thursday to have been contained, but the dangerous blaze is believed to still be emitting radiation, smoke and vapor, Reagan Administration officials said.

At the same time, in a statement appearing to corroborate the Administration’s assessment, a Soviet Embassy official said: “The accident obviously is not yet over with. We are still trying to manage the situation.”

Although new assessments indicate that a second reactor is not in any danger, as had been earlier thought, an Administration official said the Soviet Union is believed to be closing other nuclear plants similar to the Chernobyl facility, at least temporarily.

U.S. officials, relying heavily on photographs from spy satellites for information about the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power complex, said that firefighting equipment was observed near the plant. And, despite the likelihood that radiation has contaminated the vicinity, the Soviets have dispatched helicopters flying at low levels to drop sand or chemicals on the smoldering reactor, the U.S. officials said.

However, three days after knowledge of the accident became public, confusion persisted about the conditions at the plant, the extent of the damage, the effect the accident will have on the 2.4 million residents of the city of Kiev, 60 miles away, and the impact that a nuclear cloud, still swirling into the atmosphere, will have on the rest of the world.

The Soviet government, which has said very little to its own citizens about the accident, took the highly unusual step of accepting an invitation to send a representative to testify at a hearing by a House subcommittee on conditions at the Chernobyl facility.

“The situation in Kiev is normal. There is no real reason for concern,” said Vitaly Churkin, a second secretary at the Soviet Embassy here. “Everything is fine with the water, with the air.”

Brushing aside speculation about massive casualties, he told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy conservation and power: “I can state categorically there are two people dead.”

He said another 18 were in serious condition. The Soviet Union had announced that 197 were injured in the accident.

Churkin, however, refused to answer direct questions about radiation levels and the fire in the reactor core, saying he had no technical information.

In addition, there were these developments Thursday:

--The U.S. government said that it had found no increase in radioactivity in this country and that the radioactive air mass given off by the reactor was widely dispersed throughout Northern Europe and the Arctic. A task force said portions of radioactivity located Wednesday morning off the northwestern coast of Norway “should continue to disperse with possible movement toward the east in the next several days,” while other radioactivity “may move eastward through the Soviet Union and through the polar regions over the coming week.”

No Significant Effects

--Harold Denton, director of nuclear reactor regulation at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ordered a review of the threat of a fire at the Fort St. Vrain nuclear power plant in Colorado, the only U.S. commercial nuclear power facility with a reactor core made of graphite, the material that was burning at the Chernobyl complex.

But Denton said the Soviet plant, which was built without a containment vessel to block the release of radiation, differed so greatly from U.S. models that it would make no sense to shut American power plants for fear of a similar accident. Eight Energy Department reactors, built in isolated areas, lack such protective devices.

--Administration officials--including those in Washington and those accompanying President Reagan at a meeting of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations in Bali, Indonesia--expressed growing irritation with the Soviet Union’s failure to make public details about the accident. The data could be used to calculate the possible radiological health hazards to Americans.

“We still do not know if the plume might reach the United States, but based on data that we do have at this time, we do not expect any significant health effects if, indeed, it does reach the United States,” White House spokesman Larry Speakes said in Bali.

The Soviet Union has refused to allow outside experts to view the area and has shared no scientific data. It also rejected U.S. offers of assistance, Administration spokesmen said.

Relying on satellite photographs, radiation levels monitored on the Soviet border and other sources of information, Administration officials have pieced together a variety of possible scenarios of the accident, which is believed to be the worst in the history of nuclear power.

While not providing an instant alert to the Chernobyl accident, the U.S. surveillance satellites are now providing considerable detail about a sequence of events Moscow has labored to conceal.

California Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the disaster began Friday when a power failure interrupted the cooling supply of water at the fourth of four reactors in the power plant complex, and a back-up generator failed.

As a result of the cooling system failure, the core--the fuel elements within the reactor pressure vessel--overheated and then ruptured, igniting a 1,000-ton block of graphite. The graphite is used to “moderate,” or slow, the movement of neutrons and promote a controlled nuclear reaction.

By Brown’s account, based on a briefing by the CIA, attempts to extinguish the 3,000-4,000-degree Centigrade fire with water caused an intense chemical reaction, producing carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas. The gas exploded, spewing a plume of intensely radioactive elements into an area 30 to 50 miles around the plant.

The explosion destroyed one building and may have led to problems in an adjacent reactor, Unit No. 3.

Officials were uncertain Thursday about the status of this other reactor, backing away from an earlier assessment that a meltdown may have occurred there in addition to the meltdown believed to have taken place in Unit No. 4. In a meltdown, heat melts the fuel rods, producing an uncontrolled release of radiation.

These officials assumed that the No. 3 reactor could not have escaped some problems as a result of the intense fire at the adjacent unit. But one government source said: “It looks like Reactor 3 is not in any kind of danger. It looks like it’s been successfully shut down. And there is some evidence the fire (in Unit No. 4) has been contained.”

A congressional source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that an office building apparently situated near the plant was damaged. However, he said there were no indications as to whether the building was occupied at the time of the disaster.

The Soviet Union has claimed that two people died as a result of the accident. Secretary of State George P. Shultz said the casualties exceeded that figure “by a good measure.” But Administration officials said they have received no indications about the extent of deaths and injuries, and the Soviets have apparently refrained from any discussions of such matters over communications channels that could be intercepted.

Officials with access to intelligence photographs said they have seen no sign of widespread evacuation of the area around Chernobyl, which is north of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, although Speakes said the Soviets reported that the release of radiation required “the partial evacuation of the populations in regions immediately adjacent to the accident.”

Officials were baffled about the way the Soviets were handling what in this nation would be considered an emergency of unprecedented proportions.

One source said the photographs showed two soccer games being played--one near the plant and another, before a crowd of spectators, at a military base only 15 miles to the west--after the accident occurred.

Dangerous Flights

The use of the helicopters to fight the fire, apparently by dropping material to smother it, led one official to remark dryly: “I wouldn’t imagine it’s very healthy for them.”

Stanley Auerbach, director of environmental sciences at the Oak Ridge, Tenn., National Laboratory, said that if “they’ve got fire trucks in there, based on our theories, they’re pretty brave men.”

Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet emigre in Palo Alto, said in an interview that friends had spoken with relatives in Kiev and that the residents of that city have been given no instructions about coping with radiation, although some have been hospitalized with signs of radiation sickness.

Bukovsky said he was told that the water supply was cut off at one point and that the city was cordoned off, prohibiting a free flow of traffic.

He said milk, not always available in Kiev, was distributed in recent days. In Poland, such distribution was restricted out of concern that radiation that settled on grass could enter the food chain and, through cows’ milk, reach humans.

“There are lots of indications that the Soviets know there may be a medium- and long-term threat to the health of the citizens of Kiev. They’ve chosen to ignore that threat, because there’s no way to inform those citizens without Westerners knowing,” one government source said.

According to the State Department, 470 Americans live in the Soviet Union and as many as 600 tourists were visiting there at the time of the accident. Spokesman Charles Redman said the department believes that most Americans in the Kiev area wishing to do so have left.

The United States has advised Americans against traveling to Kiev, and Britain has issued a wider advisory, recommending against visits to Moscow, the entire Western Soviet Union, northeastern Poland and Warsaw.

In addition, the United States is taking steps to measure radiation levels at its embassy in Moscow and the consulate in Leningrad.

In Bali, Speakes displayed his pique with the Soviets, comparing the fallout from the accident to that of an atomic bomb exploded in the atmosphere and saying that “an earlier announcement would have been helpful to everyone on a worldwide basis.” The Administration has said it did not learn of the accident until it was disclosed in a brief announcement Monday by Tass, the Soviet press agency.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Robert C. Toth, Michael Wines and Paul Houston in Washington and Eleanor Clift in Bali.