Soviets Planning Destruction of Town of Chernobyl

Soviet authorities are planning to raze the 800-year-old town of Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda reported Saturday, but the move is encountering serious opposition.

The special governmental authority established by the Ministry of Nuclear Power to operate the Chernobyl atomic energy plant after the April 26, 1986, accident and to decontaminate the area around it has already begun razing homes in the town and reportedly sees no alternative to the complete destruction of Chernobyl, which had a population of more than 10,000.

“The radiation situation in Chernobyl is such (that) people cannot resume a full life for decades,” the authority’s chief engineer, V. I. Komarov, is quoted as saying. “And by the time normal life can return, all the houses will be fully dilapidated and living in them will be impossible. In other words, there will be scarcely anything to preserve at all!”

At least 31 people died as a result of the explosion in the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl plant, according to official Soviet figures, and 237 suffered serious radiation sickness.

More than 135,000 people were evacuated from 179 hamlets, villages and towns in a zone 18 miles around the plant immediately after the explosion. Many have returned, but perhaps half will be permanently resettled outside the area, according to Soviet officials.

The level of radiation differs considerably from area to area in the evacuation zone around the plant, according to Pravda. In some areas it has returned to normal, but “dirty pockets” of high radiation remained in other areas. The town of Chernobyl itself recorded measuring radiation of 0.1 milliroentgen an hour in June, equal to the natural radioactivity of nearby mountainous areas in the Soviet Union but twice that of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, 60 miles to the south.

Pravda reports, however, that another town, Gden, which like Chernobyl was about 11 miles from plant, has been successfully decontaminated and that most of the population moved back last year and seems to be prospering.

Alexander Levada, writing in Pravda, attacks both the decision of the special authority to demolish Chernobyl and the secrecy with which it was made. The plans should be reconsidered, he argues in a lengthy article that clearly has high-level political support.

The special authority “revealed its strategic plans only when the first attempts to destroy the houses in Chernobyl was made,” Levada said, accusing the officials of ignoring the wishes of local residents as well as local governments.

Contaminated House Destroyed

Officials began by burning down one contaminated house and then bulldozing two streets of homes in the center of Chernobyl.

The difference between Chernobyl, which now seems doomed, and Gden, which is recovering, Levada adds, appears to lie in the fact that Chernobyl lies in the Ukraine, while Gden is in Byelorussia, a neighbor Soviet republic, where local officials pressed for the decontamination and the step-by-step rehabilitation of the village.

“Unfortunately, there has not been a single example of a ‘Gden’ in the Ukraine,” Levada said, implying that local and provincial officials were interested in moving the peasants off this land permanently, though it has always been particularly fertile.

Five months ago, on the second anniversary of the Chernobyl explosion, Pravda alleged that the plant’s mismanagement had continued, although with some new officials. “The leadership has not learned a lesson from the past,” the paper said. “It is as if there had been no accident.”

Nearly 1,000 people, most of them elderly peasants, meanwhile, have found their way around police roadblocks and returned unofficially to their homes and are now living in many of the hamlets and villages around the plant that had been evacuated in 1986, according to Pravda.