Chernobyl: The Catastrophe Isn’t Over Yet : THE LEGACY OF CHERNOBYL <i> by Zhores A. Medvedev (W.W. Norton: $22.95; 344 pp.; 0-393-02802-X) </i>

Time has been kind to the Medvedev brothers. Historian Roy, a former dissident turned member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, today is revered in the Soviet Union for his past work on the Stalin period. And Zhores, a scientist who has been exiled in Britain for almost 20 years, has continued to provide revelations about Soviet nuclear catastrophes. His 1979 book about a nuclear-waste-dump explosion in the Ural Mountains in the ‘50s was instrumental in forcing Soviet authorities to acknowledge that accident last year. Now he has turned his attention to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and once again has offered an incisive and often bitter account of its aftermath.

The book can be added to a number of “revisionist” works on the topic. Medvedev relies on his background knowledge of the Soviet nuclear industry gained from 10 years of experience (1963-73) to produce a book that is often highly critical of the handling of the accident and weighty in its documentation. It reveals how a traditionally secretive industry attempted to conceal the real effects of Chernobyl, particularly the levels of radioactive fallout, until the development of widespread sicknesses among the adjacent population made further concealment impossible.

He divides the book into two sections. The first focuses on the effects of Chernobyl on health, agriculture and the environment; the second deals with the Soviet nuclear industry and the future of nuclear energy. Yet the underlying theme of both sections is the dominant role of official secrecy. His conclusions, which may be unpalatable to some, particularly proponents of nuclear energy, should be viewed within the overall context of the Chernobyl controversy and the debates about the real effects of that accident.

While just more than four years have passed since the explosions that ripped apart the fourth Chernobyl reactor, what might be termed a “traditional” interpretation has, by and large, prevailed, including in the West. In 1986, when the Soviet delegation, led by academician Valery Legasov, presented its report on the accident to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, it was almost universally praised as a remarkably frank account.

Subsequently, the predictions by Soviet health authorities that future cancers among the population affected by radiation would be barely discernible from general cancer deaths were generally accepted by Western scientists. Indeed, Western experts sometimes have gone much further than their Soviet counterparts in their unbridled optimism. One Canadian observer thus has maintained that the total excess radiation absorbed by the average Soviet citizen from Chernobyl is the equivalent to moving a few centimeters up a hill.

Medvedev is quick to dismiss such simplistic notions, which base predictions on the total Soviet population rather than those people directly affected by radiation. He also discloses that while official prognoses in both the U.S.S.R. and the West are based on radiation releases from April 26 to May 6, 1986, the reactor continued to emit radioactive byproducts into the atmosphere for at least another four days.

Medvedev also notes that scientists have assumed that basic safety precautions, such as keeping children indoors, were followed from the first, but in fact no health warnings were given to the population of the neighboring city of Pripyat (50,000) for about 40 hours, and the general population in the Ukraine was warned only 10 days later. Thus the 1986 May Day parade was held in Kiev (population 2.5 million) one week after the disaster, at the very time that radiation levels in that city were beginning to rise alarmingly.

Medvedev takes a careful look at likely health consequences in the most penetrating chapter of his book. The key problem has been that no maps of radiation fallout were published in the Soviet Union before March, 1989. At that time, it was shown that radioiodine, radiocesium and radiostrontium had spread well beyond the borders of the designated evacuation zone

(See maps, Page 2).

For three years, local residents of southern Byelorussia, northern Ukraine and the Bryansk region of Russia had consumed so much radiation-tainted produce and liquid that today’s illnesses owe more to food and milk than to external radiation. The book also focuses on the police and cleanup workers, victims of what Medvedev believes was unnecessary exposure to potentially lethal radiation levels in the first days through lack of protective clothing and Geiger counters among emergency personnel.

Turning to the nuclear industry, Medvedev points out that the Soviet Union has an unenviable record of careless and shoddy construction, combined with an inherently faulty design of the graphite (RBMK) reactor. Knowing that public opposition to their industry would not be tolerated, nuclear authorities forged ahead with an ambitious expansion program centered in the Ukraine. A test of safety equipment on the night of April 25-26, 1986, should, in the author’s view, have been completed before the fourth reactor went into service. Further, at the end of the reactor cycle more radioactive products were in the reactor core: Thus the accident was far worse than it would have been had basic industrial rules been followed.

Chernobyl, then, is said to be the result of basic errors, technical deficiencies of the reactor, an adamant bureaucratic elite (especially the Ministries of Power and Medium Machine Building) and official secrecy. But even under early glasnost, such secrecy persists, and contributes to a narrow and incomplete official account of the accident’s consequences. This interpretation--and Medvedev cites several Western “experts” who have advanced the same or similar views--is only now being questioned.

“The Legacy of Chernobyl” is not without its defects. The technical data, especially on radiation fallout (and despite a glossary), are likely at times to overwhelm the general reader. Yurii Shcherbak, chairman of the Green World ecological association and chairman of the Soviet Parliament’s Committee on Ecology, is referred to twice as a “journalist” rather than a medical doctor (which clearly gives his comments on health effects more credibility). While Medvedev reports on the anti-nuclear protests that have halted reactor construction in the Soviet republics, not enough space is devoted to the basic question of whether nationalism and economic sovereignty in these republics will lead to a halt in the Moscow-based nuclear-power program.

None of the above, however, detract from the importance of this book. Having worked on this same topic for the past four years, and having visited the Chernobyl station and the Radiation Center last year, I have been struck by the reticence of both nuclear and health officials in and outside the Soviet Union to discuss the current health effects of the disaster. All too often, spokespersons resort to platitudes on “risk coefficients” and “long-term fallout statistics.”

Medvedev demonstrates the irrelevance of such generalization in the face of immediate and serious health problems. The situation in Byelorussia today is truly alarming. And of what consequence is it to the population of Narodichl (northern Ukraine) that in theory it is too early to trace significant health effects from the disaster when one out of every two schoolchildren is sick today with thyroid tumors, anemia and other ailments?

The author’s skepticism is justified. From Gorbachev down, officials have withheld the truth from their own public, with a resultant psychological tension one of the major medical consequences.

All medical records of those who suffered from the tragedy are classified material. When hospital patients--former cleanup workers or firemen, for example--have died, radiation sickness has been interdicted as an official cause of death. Such secrecy is not unique to the Soviet Union (as revelations from the 1957 accident in Windscale, U.K., demonstrate), but Chernobyl remains by far the world’s worst accident at a nuclear power station.

Our knowledge is enhanced significantly by this timely and bold study.

BOOK MARK: You can’t hide a “radioactive volcano”--Zhores Medvedev’s characterization of Chernobyl--but the Soviet Union has tried. For an excerpt from “The Legacy of Chernobyl,” see Opinion, Page 2.