One Year Later : A Legacy of Ruin: Inside Chernobyl

On the train to Kiev, the bearded and mirthful Soviet oceanographer Lev Khitrov bursts into his American companions’ sleeping compartment laden with a fresh supply of cabbage rolls, salami, his wife’s lemon cakes and a jar of vodka which, he says, with a twinkle of the eye, is the best way to ward off radiation.

Richard Wilson, Harvard physicist and internationally recognized nuclear power expert, accepts the vodka but denies its medicinal effects. He does, however, claim that the cigarette Khitrov is puffing poses a greater health risk than the radiation likely to be encountered the next day on a rare tour of the site of the world’s greatest nuclear power disaster.

Chernobyl’s story is yet unfolding, and as Sergei Komarov, the plant’s new chief engineer, would put it the next day: “There are still more questions than answers.”

Life Far From Normal

Almost a year has passed since the blast on the morning of April 26, and, as the first American journalist to enter the plant discovered, life in the area is far from normal. Although two of the Chernobyl power station’s reactors continue to generate electricity, a third is being decontaminated and the fourth is permanently sealed in a concrete tomb.

The work force must be bused in from safe sites nearby, and although some of the 135,000 local residents who were evacuated have been permitted to return, the whole area has the feel of a military crisis center.

The two-hour car ride from the Kiev train station to the Chernobyl power station required high-level approval from authorities in Moscow and a local police escort to pass through the various checkpoints that begin just outside the Ukrainian capital’s city limits. The purpose of the security, Soviet officials say, is to keep the roads free for vehicles involved in repair of the plant and to stop people from returning to this pastoral land to fish, hunt, farm or just picnic.

Contamination Remains

A rabbit or fish taken in the region could be contaminated by the radioactive cesium that is the explosion’s enduring legacy. It’s still there, buried in the ground, stuck in the tar roofs and roads and nestled on the river bottoms.

Cesium-137 has a radioactive half-life of 30 years, and the barbed wire surrounding the remaining hot spots is much in evidence. It is still not possible to inhabit the town of Pripyat, once home to about 45,000 people. And while some life has returned to the countryside, the most common sights are abandoned homes and barns, their open doors swinging in the wind because nobody is left to shut them.

As spring strips the surrounding land of its snow, the radioactive cesium will be exposed. It is only then that the delicate cleanup can be resumed in earnest and decisions made about the safety of farmers turning the soil and returning to the homes they have abandoned.

Wilson, who gives the Soviets high marks for their recovery effort and increased safety measures, agrees with most experts here that the situation is under control and that life can eventually return to normal, even in Pripyat. Cesium can be washed off the walls of houses and tar stripped off the roofs and roads.

Farming is a trickier matter, since no one knows how deeply the cesium has embedded itself in the soil. If it remains near the surface, rich topsoil will have to be replaced.

Even the most optimistic projections provide for closure of some particularly dangerous hot spots for three or four decades.

The spring runoff will pose further risks to the area’s water supply. At the moment, much of the cesium that was carried into the rivers that crisscross this rather pretty rural landscape has settled into the bottom sediment. But swirling spring currents may disturb the river bottoms with alarming consequences.

For that reason, Khitrov the oceanographer is now Khitrov the river expert, and he makes frequent trips to inspect the waterways near the damaged reactor.

Optimistic, For Now

One can imagine this Dostoevskian character bounding through the pine and birch trees to check his radiation monitoring devices in the rivers and streams, his whimsical smile and quizzical expression a shield against a life that seems unnecessarily irrational. If the numbers are wrong, the water supply of millions, including those living downstream in Kiev, will be threatened.

For the moment Khitrov is optimistic: The sediment should stay put and, some day soon, fishing and swimming will be permitted in what was once a much-loved recreational area for the millions who live in this part of the Ukraine.

But just in case it doesn’t, wells have been dug for Kiev and surrounding villages, and an alternative reservoir water supply has been connected to the city’s pipes.

Khitrov, like the other scientists and officials encountered in Chernobyl, pulled few punches about the problem, self-consciously reflecting the Gorbachev era’s new spirit of glasnost , or openness.

Although that spirit was decidedly lacking in the first weeks after the explosion, Soviet officials have since been very forthcoming with data, as Wilson’s traveling library of documents attests. He also has been permitted long, candid interviews with all of the major Soviet officials dealing with nuclear power and is “impressed with the speed and efficiency with which they have moved to improve the situation in all of the nuclear plants.”

For Wilson, this was his first visit to the reactor site, but he seemed as knowledgeable as his Soviet hosts on the details, thanks to U.S. satellite photography and public Soviet data.

In fact, during the car ride from Kiev to Chernobyl, the Harvard physicist, a consultant to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, astonished his hosts with an accurately detailed description of the terrain ahead.

Back in Moscow, a day before, Wilson had compared notes with his old friend and fellow nuclear power advocate, Andrei D. Sakharov. Veterans of the nuclear adventure’s first exciting days of promise, they both still believe that nuclear power can work, though they agree it must be made safer. For his part, Wilson is forever making calculations on the backs of envelopes, proving one thing or another about the relative safety of nuclear power compared to coal or kerosene.

Others are less sanguine. At the Kiev station the two scientists and an accompanying journalist are met by local dignitaries from the Ukrainian Academy of Science who make no secret of their anger at the screw-ups that caused last April’s explosion. “It was insane,” says one, “human error. They just disconnected three automatic shutdown systems in order to do a minor experiment.”

Wilson agrees that it was a matter of human error but says that the machines should have been better, as they are in the new Soviet nuclear plants. He runs through the technical modifications, some of which have already been incorporated in the older plants; others were being implemented during this visit.

Meanwhile, jostling along in the Soviet version of a Toyota mini-van, Wilson keeps adjusting his flopping Russian fur hat as he nonchalantly reads his Geiger counter, ticking off ever-higher yields--400, 600, 700 microrads per hour--to the reporter’s alarm. No problem, says Wilson: The level of radioactivity is less than that of a chest X-ray.

Inside the Turbine Room

But it does look a bit scary on the other side of the 700-kilometer barbed-wire fence that runs along the side of the road. Behind it is the land that was directly beneath the deadly plume of radiation that passed over in the first minutes of the blast.

Unfortunately, one of the Soviet scientists observed, the rabbits and other animals that frequent this area can’t read the warning signs posted along the wire. Officials can only hope that the animals will not move off the radioactive reservation to be shot and eaten by hunters. People even have been known to sneak in and hunt and fish within the forbidden zone. Peasant habits die hard.

By now, the radiation inside the visitors’ van has hit a steady 700 microrads, which Wilson once again shrugs off by recounting tales of spills in his Harvard lab that produced higher yields. Perhaps we should call it a day and go back, the reporter suggests.

“Are you kidding?” Wilson exclaims. “We’re going into the turbine room”--adjoining the turbines for plant No. 4, the site of the explosion. “I’ve been dying to see those turbines,” Wilson explains as if discussing some local monument.

At the Chernobyl plant itself, the visiting party dons white smocks, hats and plastic shoes, while Wilson checks his state-of-the-art Geiger counter to make sure that the battery is still working.

Safety Stressed

Inside the Chernobyl plant, it is as if the accident never happened. Various wall gauges report the steady output of electricity, display temperatures and monitor radiation. Technicians in white smocks bustle purposefully about on the catwalks crisscrossing the high-ceilinged room that houses the turbines.

It was this tranquil scene that disintegrated on the morning of the disaster as other technicians lost their bearings and their lives.

But much has changed. The current staff has been retrained in the basics of nuclear safety, and their friendly demeanor can quickly give way to a dour acknowledgement of their responsibilities. They laugh while offering a visitor the plastic shoes, but if one resists putting them on, a stern lecture on the dangers of radiation will quickly follow.

The shoes are put on, and the tour goes off without a hitch. The biggest challenge is to make a respectable dent in the groaning table of food laid on by the chief engineer, a solid, no-nonsense guy imported from Siberia to make sure there are no more Chernobyls. His predecessor is about to stand trial for the human errors now universally blamed for the disaster. The new chief makes it clear by his crisp military bearing that human errors will no longer be tolerated.

Wilson is impressed with the cleanliness and compact order of the turbine room, which is about half the size of a football field. The continued operation of units No. 1 and 2 is attested to by the constant screech they emit and by the digital readout that reports 2,000 megawatts are being transmitted to various parts of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Down at the far end, there is a temporary floor-to-ceiling wall that will seal off unit No. 3 until it is fully decontaminated. Unit 3 was flooded by radiation as a result of the explosion in unit No. 4. That unit at the end of the room is encased in concrete, a mummy of the modern age in its nuclear coffin.

The control room is a control room. Full of switches and dials, it looks innocuous enough until one remembers that as a result of decisions in No. 4’s identical control center, 31 people lost their lives coping with a disaster they did not comprehend. The one among them most often mentioned here is the physician who took 500 rads--not the microrads the visitors had measured while riding in the van--as he attempted to save others’ lives. That was a million times the exposure the visitors endured riding from Kiev to Chernobyl.

The first soldiers sent into the area to contain the blast could work the hot spots for only 90 seconds before being replaced, according to Soviet physicist Yevgeny P. Velikhov, who flew into the area the day after the explosion and is widely credited with having brought order to the chaos that surrounded the scene.

Back in Moscow, during an interview that preceded the Chernobyl tour, Velikhov had played down the personal risks he endured directing the recovery. But in documentaries now being shown on Soviet television, he can be seen climbing through the wreckage when it was still hot and flying over the plant in a helicopter while the reactor’s top was open and belching radioactive material.

Wilson says he has learned from Soviet sources that Velikhov received a 25-to-30-rad dose when he climbed the side wall of the damaged reactor and peered down inside to survey the damage. That exposure is on the edge of permissible risk. According to Wilson, this was not an act of bravado but a heroic action that may have saved tens of thousands of lives.

“Someone had to go and see what to do next. It was Velikhov who made the correct judgment,” Wilson said. Helicopters had been dumping sand and graphite on the plant, but Velikhov’s visual inspection showed that while the fire was being smothered, other steps had to be taken to contain the radioactivity.

Velikhov is the widely respected and very personable 53-year-old physicist who often accompanies Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on his trips abroad. A member of the Soviet Union’s ruling Central Committee and deputy director of its prestigious Academy of Sciences, Velikhov is probably his country’s most influential scientist. He is also one of that obviously large group of Soviets profoundly alarmed by the implications of the Chernobyl explosion.

Carelessness of ‘Fools’

Velikhov concedes that the Soviets may have been too blase about the risks of nuclear power. He is the director of the Kurchatov Institute, which designed the country’s nuclear plants and wrote their safety manuals. Although he took over after that work was done and can point with pride to the newer generation of Soviet plants that incorporate many additional safety features, including containment domes, the example of Chernobyl remains worrisome.

“The next disaster will kill the nuclear industry globally,” Velikhov said. And while he believes it is possible to make nuclear power safe, he noted that the problem is the same throughout the world, that occasional carelessness is a part of an industrial situation.

“The problem is it is impossible to make anything foolproof for fools,” he noted.

The word fools might seem harsh, but it also fits Wilson’s assessment of what happened that night at Chernobyl: “The people who were in charge of the operation clearly did not understand the reason for the rules.”

According to Wilson, the accident occurred when the people in charge committed six separate serious errors while conducting a safety experiment, including deactivating three emergency shut-off systems. “They had very much a mind-set of wanting to finish this experiment in spite of the fact that the reactor was not in the right condition for doing it.

New Guidelines Issued

“It was a safety experiment, of all bizarre things. It was to see how long the generators would go on generating enough electricity to power the safety systems after the steam to the turbine had been cut off. And you can only do that once a year when the reactor has been turned off, and if they failed, they would have had to wait another year.”

The Soviets, largely at Velikhov’s direction, have completed a crash retraining program for all personnel in their nuclear power industry, along with introducing newly written guidelines on safety. But as Velikhov admits, “How can you guarantee that the workers there will follow the instructions, particularly after things have operated smoothly for a while and seem routine?

“It is completely impossible to imagine the consequences of all measures and mistakes,” Velikhov said, adding, “For this reactor we have solved the problems, but for the next situation. . . ?”

Echoing a point frequently made by high Soviet officials, Velikhov argued that Chernobyl demonstrated the futility of civil defense preparations for nuclear war: “With Chernobyl we were able to mobilize the resources of the entire country, but a nuclear war involves many more frightening incidents, including the more devastating effects of blast and heat. So what could you do? Nothing.”

‘Civil Defense Is Nonsense’

He stressed the difficulties that the Soviets encountered in their cleanup efforts even after the addition of Western European robot technology. “After two weeks of discussion with the army corps, I asked how you wish to survive a nuclear war if you have no possibility to clean this small piece of nuclear garbage?

“Here we had no panic, but in nuclear war you would have much. We had full access to support from all over the country, and only because of such access, we had tens of thousands of people working here. A soldier can only be used for 90 seconds in the hot place. After that, he was free for life from any (nuclear-related) duty, the same with pilots of (the) helicopters. It cost (the Soviet nuclear effort) thousands of people who are no longer able to work in this industry. We lost many experts out of this work who can’t work in the field anymore.

“Without this possibility to use the nation’s resources, it would have been impossible to save the 135,000 people who were relocated. It didn’t change my thinking about civil defense because I never believed in it. But it opened the eyes of all people that civil defense is nonsense.”

Specter of Nuclear War

In the case of nuclear weapons, Wilson reminded: “One is dealing with a technology designed to explode that is also under the control of human beings. One hundred such devices are in Leningrad harbor. What if you have management error over those? The consequences wouldn’t be very pleasant.”

So it was not surprising that the subject of nuclear war came up repeatedly on the long trip back to Moscow. Chernobyl has clearly taken its place alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of the fundamental thinking about nuclear war.

This was brought home as the caravan of visitors pulled out of the power plant parking area and onto the road to Kiev. Wilson’s words kept resounding in one observer’s mind as dusk’s ghostly silence enveloped the abandoned Chernobyl countryside.

Particularly disturbing was the sight of a collective farm complete with all the requirements of living: white farmhouses with blue trim, tractors and other farm implements, clothing hanging on a line and some children’s playthings. All the requirements except people.