Worst May Be Yet To Come for Soviets : Delayed Radiation Effects Peril Health of Residents Near Reactor

Unlike the neighboring old Ukrainian villages that have stubbornly weathered famine, revolution, and the vicissitudes of Soviet government, Pripyat is a stark, new, planned community designed and created by experts in Moscow. Soviet high tech.

It is different from all the villages around it. Many of its people are engineers and technicians, many of them Russians, unlike the Ukrainian peasants whose lives are paced by the rhythms of the rye and mushroom and potato crops and the farrowing of piglets in the spring.

As many as 25,000 people lived in the town when disaster struck Reactor No. 4 last weekend.

It is possible that, for them, the worst is yet to come.

Pripyat was built, relatively speaking, overnight, its population moved into dormitories and Spartan apartments hard beside the construction site where the Soviet Union in the 1970s built one of the world’s biggest nuclear power complexes.

There was no need for workers to live in Chernobyl, the established town several miles away. Pripyat was built so close to the huge project that the carpenters and plumbers could walk to their jobs in the morning and back home in the evening, even in the bone-chilling winters and sweltering summers.

When the giant nuclear reactors and the metal buildings around them were completed, the construction crews moved on and operating engineers moved into Pripyat to man the control rooms for four 1,000-megawatt reactors.

Since the Soviet government has released only the sketchiest of details on what is apparently history’s worst nuclear accident, it is still not known how well or how poorly the people of Pripyat have fared.

At first, reports reached the West that as many as 2,000 might have died almost instantly, with tens of thousands more injured. Moscow indignantly denied such reports, acknowledging only two killed and 197 injured. While skepticism remains about the Soviet figures, many U.S. specialists now believe the estimates of massive early casualties were exaggerated.

Ominous Caveat

There is, however, an ominous caveat attached to that verdict:

“There may be delayed evidence of injury,” according to Dr. Niel Wald, chairman of the Department of Radiation Health at the University of Pittsburg’s Graduate School of Public Health. “The injuries may not yet be lethal, so one would have to be careful about feeling that the worst is over.”

Except in the cases of massive exposure where death comes within hours, radiation sickness is marked by a latent period. This was first observed in the wake of the United States’ use of the atomic bomb against Japan in World War II.

“There was a whole wave of early casualties and then the dust settled and people buried their dead,” said Wald. “And then there was a whole new wave of people at the hospital door at about the second or third week, and a lot more casualties occurred then than at the very beginning.”

What is known for certain now is that Pripyat and three other villages closest to the nuclear complex were evacuated, that they are now contaminated by lethal radiation. And, meanwhile, the caldron opened by the explosion and fire has sent radioactive iodine, cesium, strontium, and more than a dozen other isotopes spreading hundreds of miles across Europe.

Meltdown Probable

Although Soviet officials have not acknowledged that there was a meltdown of the reactor’s uranium core, radiation specialists interviewed by The Times said there is no doubt that some, if not all, of the fuel melted, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.

The evidence is the presence of man-made elements, including Neptunium, in the fallout measured in Sweden.

Further proof that the radiation release was indeed enormous is the appearance of radioactive iodine-134 in the fallout over Sweden, said Dr. Richard Gardiner, professor of diagnostic radiology at the Rush Medical School in Chicago. This particular isotope has a half life of 52 minutes, meaning that half of it decays every 52 minutes. Yet enough was released into the atmosphere at Chernobyl that it was still present in the fallout over Sweden five days after the reactor was hit by the chemical explosion and fire.

Dr. Herbert L. Abrams, professor of radiation at Stanford University and others interviewed in recent days, made “rough guesses” that persons a full 10 miles from the accident site may have been subjected to a radiation dose of about 150 rads, enough to produce nausea, changes in blood count and increased susceptibility to infection.

By some estimates 10% to 20% of those exposed to a dose of 100 to 200 rads will succumb to infections and die.

‘Worrisome’ Radius

If levels reached 150 rads at a distance of 10 miles, conditions would have been far higher at Pripyat. “A radius of five miles,” Abrams said, “is a very worrisome one.” At this distance, scientists now believe, radiation levels were sufficient to cause severe illness.

Half of those exposed to a radiation dose of 350 to 450 rads will die within 60 days, and at higher levels, death follows sooner. Those who receive doses of more than 500 rads would face nearly certain death unless there is “heroic” medical intervention, including getting victims into sterile environments and conducting bone marrow transplants.

At a level of 700 to 2,000 rads, radiation sickness marked by acute nausea and intractable diarrhea would produce death within three to 10 days. Exposures to more than 2,000 rads causes death within hours through destruction of the central nervous system.

Claim Ridiculed

Almost from the moment the accident became known, casualty figures have been a subject of fierce dispute. The Soviet claim of only two fatalities was ridiculed by Kenneth L. Adelman, the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and some news reports put the number as high as 2,000. The Soviets reported 197 persons hospitalized, with 49 released after examination. On Thursday, the Soviet news agency Tass said 18 of those still in hospitals were in serious condition.

While there remains strong skepticism about the Soviet figures, they are now conceded to be plausible.

In the first place, it is not known how many workers were at the reactor site at the time of the accident. And, while a Soviet official said Saturday that about 49,000 persons had been evacuated from the Chernobyl area, it is not known when the evacuation began.

For 2,000 fatalities to have occurred immediately, Gardiner said, it would have probably required a nuclear explosion.

Graphite Explosion Seen

He and others, including Harold Finger, a former official of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, suggested that the persons killed immediately were victims of the graphite explosion, which ruptured the reactor and started the long-burning fire.

“For 2,000 deaths to have occurred over a period of two or three days, as suggested in the news reports, they would have had to receive a tremendous radiation exposure, 1,500 to 2,000 rads, Dr. Roger Linneman of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School said. “If there had been a nuclear explosion or that kind of release, the readings in Sweden would be much higher.”

Thus Pripyat’s victims of radiation sickness are probably yet to come. And the Soviet Union--like most other nations-- may be ill-equipped to deal with large numbers of radiation patients.

Even though the Ukrainian capital of Kiev is only about 60 miles south of the Chernobyl complex, American experts doubt that Soviet medical facilities are equipped to treat large numbers of serious radiation exposure cases adequately.

Facilities Limited

In all of the United States, Abrams said there are only about 1,350 hospital beds equipped to handle serious burns or acute radiation syndrome.

“If Kiev had 10 real burn beds,” he said, “it is fortunate.”

There were reports soon after the accident that victims from the Ukraine were being flown to Moscow for treatment, and Dr. Robert P. Gale, who chairs the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry, flew to the Soviet capital from Los Angeles last Thursday.

On Saturday, a day after his arrival in Moscow, the UCLA physician said he had seen cases of what he called “rare” radiation poisoning. “Their condition is rare, but not unknown,” he said, but he would not elaborate. He planned to go on, as early as today, to see accident victims in the Ukraine.

In an interview with West German television network ARD, which broadcast excerpts Friday night, Moscow Communist Party chief Boris N. Yeltsin said, “We have several serious cases of this sickness and this top specialist is now in a position to operate on several, and he will probably do that.”

Bone marrow transplants, the only effective treatment for some severe cases, ordinarily have to be done within one week to 10 days of exposure in order to be lifesaving.

Improved Procedures

Despite the severity of acute radiation sickness, victims today can have a far better chance of survival than they did a decade or more ago. In addition to the ability to transplant bone marrow, physicians have improved diagnostic procedures for determining the amount of radiation a nuclear accident victim has actually received.

But Dr. Lyle S. Brenner of the Johns Hopkins University Medical School said there has been little improvement over the last 40 years in the ability to handle cases caused by the ingestion of radioactive isotopes.

After the Windscale reactor accident in Britain in 1957--a fire in a reactor a fraction of the size of the huge Soviet plant--an area of 200 square miles was contaminated and placed off limits for 25 days.

While the Soviets’ kept the magnitude of acute radiation sickness a mystery, the radioactivity borne across Europe by the winds stirred waves of concern over the long term effects of low doses of radiation from Chernobyl.

Iodine Administered

While no figures were available, government officials in the Polish town of Mikolajki told Western reporters that two days after the explosion in the reactor in the Ukraine, radiation measured 500 times the normal background level and six times more than the accepted safety standard. Cows were ordered kept in barns, the sale of milk from grazing cows was banned, and children were administered an iodine solution to protect their thyroid glands.

The reported radiation levels and the precautions ordered in Poland, and later in Romania and Yugoslavia, caused experts in the United States to speculate that a huge area across the western Ukraine and eastern Poland had been seriously contaminated.

Fortunately for the Soviets, the wind apparently carried the radioactivity away from the metropolis of Kiev. Unlike nuclear weapons explosions, whose mushroom clouds carry radiation up into the jet stream and around the world, most of the foul cloud from the damaged Soviet reactor was apparently dissipated by lower level air currents.

Dangerous Elements

Of the radioactive elements being spread across Europe, those causing greatest concern are iodine, cesium, and strontium: iodine because it quickly finds its way into the food chain, causes thyroid damage, and poses a particular hazard for the young; cesium because its half-life of 37 years makes it a long-term contaminant; and strontium because it finds its way into the bones, causing bone cancer.

Thus far, European governments have sought to assure their constituents that the Soviet accident poses no long-term threat to health.

But it has stirred anew a long-standing scientific debate over the danger of low level radiation exposure.

A committee established by the National Research Council to tackle the issue concluded that it may never be possible to estimate the absolute risk of radiation exposures slightly above background levels of about 100 millirem per year.

It went on to estimate, however, that 10 rem of additional radiation over a period of one year would produce approximately 75 to 2,300 additional cancer deaths for every million persons exposed.

If, for example, the Soviet accident exposed half of Europe’s population of 700 million to an exposure of 10 rem for a single day, it would eventually produce an estimated 85 additional deaths from cancer--an increase of .0005 percent.

A Furious Debate

Dr. John Gofman , emeritus professor of medical physics at UC Berkeley, was a driving force in a furious debate during the 1960s over the effects of low level radiation--arguing that the risk was as much as 10,000 times that calculated by the Atomic Energy Commission.

Although he basically lost his debate with the nuclear establishment and the medical community, he still contends that the effect is 20 times greater than that estimated by the National Research Council’s Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation.

Dr. Edward Radford of the University of Pittsburg, who chaired the panel, does not go as far as Gofman, but he has argued that the risk might be three times greater than the committee estimated.

Such scientific differences, as much as public fear, are generating increasing pressure upon the Soviet Union to release more information about the radiation dispersed by the accident.

New Pressure Urged

American scientists and institutions such as the Johns Hopkins Center for the Advancement of Radiation Education and Research last week began urging the International Atomic Energy Agency to bring pressure upon the Soviet Union to share what it knows about the radiation release.

In some quarters, U.S. actions, such as Adelman’s ridicule of Soviet casualty figures, were viewed as damaging to chances of getting some Soviet cooperation.

“What we are doing is saying to them, ‘You are either lying or you are stupid,’ ” said the University of Pennsylvania’s Roger Linneman. “That made them clam up. It was not conducive to our being invited to learn what has happened.”

Times reporters Maura Dolan and Robert Steinbrook in Washington and Harry Nelson and Thomas Maugh II in Los Angeles contributed to this story.