More Byelorussia Land Affected by Radiation From ’86 Disaster

Radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is still spreading in Byelorussia almost three years after the accident and has contaminated one-fifth of the republic’s arable soil, Pravda said Saturday.

“We harvest hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated grain and do not know what to do with it,” the Communist Party newspaper quoted Mikhail V. Kovalev, premier of the Byelorussian Soviet Republic, as saying.

Although the Chernobyl plant’s No. 4 reactor, which exploded in April, 1986, in the world’s worst nuclear disaster, is in the Ukrainian Republic, the radioactive pollution released by the accident spread north to neighboring Byelorussia.

There has been little in the Soviet media about the consequences of the accident in Byelorussia, however, with most reports instead focusing on damage in the Ukraine.

“The influence of the Chernobyl accident and its consequences on the territory of Byelorussia is not diminishing,” Kovalev was quoted as saying. “The territory is contaminated more than we supposed. More than one-fifth of the republic’s agricultural land is contaminated.”

Kovalev said residents of the Byelorussian cities of Gomel, 100 miles north of Chernobyl, and Mogilyov, 200 miles from the plant, had to be given additional funds to defray the costs of finding uncontaminated food.

Shortly after the accident, authorities marked off a 19-mile forbidden zone around the nuclear plant, 60 miles north of the Ukraine’s capital of Kiev. They evacuated about 100,000 people from the area and began efforts to decontaminate the soil and buildings and halt radioactive fallout.

“(But) we did not manage to stop the spreading of the contamination in Byelorussia,” Kovalev said. “The roads have contaminated dust. The population uses contaminated peat and firewood.”

The cleanup in Byelorussia has cost about $1.4 billion so far, Kovalev said.