Entering the Forbidden Zone

O n May 14, 1990, UC Irvine plant geneticist Franz J. Hoffmann became one of the first Western scientists to visit the infamous Chernobyl nuclear reactor complex, site of the worst nuclear accident in history.

Leaders of the Ukraine republic had invited scientists because they do not trust the official government pronouncements about the hazards, said Hoffmann.

The 45-year-old cell biologist found no evidence of genetic damage or horrific mutations in his three days in the so-called “forbidden zone” surrounding the damaged reactor. But there is abundant evidence of serious cell damage to plants, as well as extremely high radiation levels.

Yet it was the mute testimony of fallen bicycles, evacuated houses that had been ransacked for valuables, normal lives forever disrupted by an explosion in the night, that left him shocked and overwhelmed by the enormity of the Chernobyl disaster.

The landscape is so contaminated that it cannot be settled for at least the next 100 years. Containment efforts have been so inadequate that a concrete-and-lead shell encasing the damaged reactor is sinking of its own weight and another must be built.

“Visiting Chernobyl won’t make you an opponent of nuclear energy, necessarily,” he said. “But it makes you think about it more carefully than before.”

The formalities at the checkpoint are unexpectedly brief. No identification is necessary, not even our heads are counted.

We have entered the “forbidden” 30-kilometer zone (an area within about a 19-mile radius of the ill-fated Chernobyl nuclear reactor complex) and are now on evacuated and highly radioactively contaminated territory.

Our group consists of seven scientists from five Western countries and seven Russian colleagues. This is the first time that foreigners have been allowed to freely sample soil, water or plants in the forbidden zone, and take the material out of the country.

At the border of the inner zone, a still more contaminated area within a 10-kilometer radius of the reactor, we have to change to a “dirty” bus. It is a rundown vehicle that only operates within the inner boundaries. One day, it will end up as radioactive waste at the reactor site.

We are standing in front of reactor No. 4, which ran out of control at 1:24 a.m. on April 26, 1986, and is now enclosed in a sarcophagus of concrete and steel. The other three reactors (one is attached to the ruins, the others are a few yards away) are operating again.

Although the Russians still draw energy from Chernobyl, they at least have given up on ambitious plans to make it the world’s greatest concentration of nuclear power production. At the time of the accident, two more reactors already were under construction--the housing for one looks almost completed.

But the building lots are now deserted. Tools lie around, huge cranes tower into the air. The ruins, which look almost like a memorial, will also stand here until time has devastated them. The three operating reactor blocks are projected to be shut down forever--”as soon as possible,” presumably around the end of 1991. The power plant area, including the 10-kilometer zone, will remain closed to settlers for at least 100 years.

Most of the workers live in Slavutich, a city northeast of the plant and just outside the 30-kilometer zone. They get an increased salary combined with a cut in working time. Also, food supply and medical care are better here than elsewhere in the country. While people all over the Soviet Union suffer from increasingly short supplies, we experience abundance around the zone.

But will these employees one day regret their decision to work at the site? There are still too many unknowns to give a clear answer.

The Glade

We ride to the city of Pripyat, little more than a mile away from the nuclear plant.

Before the accident, almost 50,000 people lived here. Now, the houses built in the boring style of modern socialistic prefabrication architecture are deserted, their doors nailed shut.

This city, which might not have looked pleasant even when lively, is now totally depressing and strangely unreal. Nature has started to reclaim her territory. The buildings deteriorate while plants overgrow the sidewalks and sprout through the cracks of the street asphalt. Grass on the soccer field almost reaches the crossbar.

This vacated city is not a total ghost town, however. We stop in front of a building where we will have our lunch. We are greeted by a group of employees offering white towels and are welcomed by a battery of running water taps.

At the entrance to the dining hall is a radiation detector. One member of our group activates it and must wash his shoes again outside the building.

The room can hold about 250 guests. Floors and walls are covered with quarter-inch-thick plastic foil so they can be easily washed. Dining in this grotesque environment is not exactly fun, but the food is excellent and ample--almost wasteful, not only by current Soviet standards. The Interhotels in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev where I had stayed could not offer comparable quality and variety.

The suspicion that the opulent meals we are offered are just another Potemkin village put up for the foreign observer is credibly denied. This is the lifestyle of the forbidden zone.

Outside Pripyat, I step into a glade. The distance to the reactor is about 2 miles. Now, in the middle of May, it is especially beautiful. Birch trees carry a tender green. The forest ground is covered with wild pansies blooming in two forms, a common three-colored type and a rare two-colored variety without blue petals.

Otherwise I cannot find anything remarkable about them. I am searching for malformed weeds reported by some Western media as omnipresent, but I do not find a single one here or anywhere else. And birds, which have been reported absent, are frequently visible.

Overall, the vegetation seems, with few exceptions, healthy. Yet many oak trees seem to still fight for survival. Leaves that begin growing normally start rolling in certain areas of the leaf blade, creating irregular shapes--the so-called monstrosities. The nuclear accident has clearly caused cellular damage to plants, but there is no sign of lasting genetic mutation.

Then there are the even more publicized “red forests.” According to some magazines, woods in the vicinity of the power plant are now a glowing reddish-pink. These red forests are patches of pines that received a tremendous dose of radiation during the accident, then died. The “red forests” are dead forests and look like dried pines are supposed to look.

Still, these dead forests pose seemingly unsolvable problems to the authorities. They need to be cut down to prevent them from becoming breeding places for diseases, but where to put the heavily contaminated wood?

And, the Ukraine has been suffering for years from a severe drought. This spring was extremely dry. Someday, the dry forest could start burning, and then one can only hope the winds won’t carry radioactive material into populated areas.

The Little House

I notice a little house covered by young birch trees. It is surrounded by a low fence and several small sheds belonging to the settlement. The entrance door is wide open.

The total floor space is less than 250 square feet divided into three tiny rooms. One room is almost completely occupied by a huge whitewashed stone oven. The surroundings seem familiar. In Russian novels I have read descriptions of places like this, mostly in portrayals of poverty and misery. All the windows are broken. The floor is strewn with personal belongings and broken housewares. I find photographs, letters, toys.

In front of the house lies a child’s bicycle with trampled spokes.

The residents of this area--and I will see many more abandoned houses like this one--were evacuated by the army the day after the disaster. They left abruptly without having time or being allowed to take any of their belongings. At the time, they thought they would soon be able to return. They’ve never come back.

Later, somehow, the empty houses were looted. No one knows where all the stolen and often highly contaminated goods ended up.

Here, in this small deserted and vandalized cottage, the misery caused by the nuclear explosion seems imminent. One senses the terror of the evacuation, even more than in the city of Pripyat with its unreal Kafkaesque atmosphere.

Here it becomes clear how close “nuclear war” and “the peaceful utilization of nuclear energy” really are. In the whole trip to Chernobyl, it was the sight of these small devastated forest settlements that made the greatest impression on me.

In the garden, we find a tree stump covered with ants; there is almost no wood visible. In the center of the cut surface is a small hollow, perhaps 2 inches in diameter, where radioactive substances were washed by the rain and, thus, concentrated. The dosimeter (which registers levels of radiation absorption) measurements are extremely high .

The ants don’t seem to care. They are busy performing their stately duties. Malformations or other abnormalities are not visible. Of course, this observation is of limited value. We do not know when the ants colonized the tree stump, nor what ants would do to malformed and possibly disabled tribe members.

We decide not to stay too long--the radiation is too intense at this spot.

We leave the garden and continue our sampling and assessments. As a geneticist, I am able to restrict myself to sampling with the camera; others collect large amounts of contaminated specimens.

(The scientists are expected to deliver their conclusions by the end of the year to the International Union of Radioecologists. )

The safety measures taken by us are not uniform. We are all wearing a Russian standard labor suit (with Ukrainian colors on the sleeve, unthinkable before glasnost ) and a simple white surgeon’s hat. Some of us wear gloves; others collect with naked hands. Cameras and other carry-ons are covered with plastic bags or transported without protection.

In places where some of us wear respiration masks, others smoke. At least 10 of the participants are radioecologists, but among them there is no agreement on necessary precautionary measures. Some of our Ukrainian colleagues, who have been using the forbidden zone as an outdoor laboratory for years, are especially careless.

The City in Fear

Kiev, a city of 2.3 million inhabitants, situated about 75 miles south of Chernobyl, seems much cleaner than Moscow or Leningrad.

Following the reactor accident, the city was washed daily with water-spraying trucks. Since the heavy equipment remains and since, under communistic bureaucracy, it is difficult to stop what is already in motion, the daily rinses continue.

Kiev’s beautiful parks and chestnut trees are flowering everywhere at this time of year. The streets are crowded until late at night.

In Revolution Plaza, young people are on a hunger strike to demand a stronger stand by Moscow against the rulers of China. “For the dead of Tian An Men square” is written on their banners.

The newly formed Ukrainian parliament holds its first meeting, where a strong radical opposition clashes with the political establishment. Thousands of interested citizens listen to the proceedings in the streets.

The excitement is misleading, however. Many people are depressed. There is a severe shortage of food, and prospects for the future are dark. And again and again, there is Chernobyl.

Fear is everywhere. Almost everyone has a story to tell about the neighbor’s child who suddenly fell ill of leukemia and died. Everything that can be connected to the reactor accident is seen as a definite consequence of it, even if the circumstances speak against such an interpretation.

Official government statements regarding the incident are not believed by the citizens: “Nobody is telling us the truth? What will happen to our children? What if the dead forests start burning?”

The distrust of “those in Moscow” is deep among Ukrainians. Nuclear power plants are placed under the control of the nation’s central administration and out of the hands of the individual republics. That is why the accident was handled by the authorities in Moscow.

Mistakes were made. Situations were badly misjudged. False information was frequently distributed. But most important, in spite of the many heroic efforts and the tremendous amount of money spent, there was still not enough financial backing for the cleanup. There remains a permanent shortage of resources of all kinds. The administration is normally overburdened by lesser challenges; this one was many orders of magnitude too difficult for the ossified government apparatus.

At the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, I observe statistical data that seem to support the assertion that the reactor meltdown has had no detectable effect on the population’s health.

However, there is an obvious trend toward a general decrease of people’s health. This deleterious tendency, which was kept secret until recently, began eight to 10 years ago. Cited reasons are deficient medical care, insufficient nourishment and various environmental stresses.

Effects of the Chernobyl accident are not visible, not even in the case of children’s leukemia. The data does not prove the people’s view wrong--far more research is needed--but it does not at this stage support this contention. The infant death rate, which remains high, has actually decreased due to mandatory infant examinations ordered after the nuclear accident.

Does this mean the consequences of the accident were not all that bad after all?

By no means. The reactor meltdown has caused unthinkable misery and nobody knows how much more it will bring.

Predictions of the number of people who will die of Chernobyl-related cancer within the next 20 years are often ideologically tinted (on both extremes) and scientifically irresponsible. Too little is known about the health-damaging effects of irradiation, although there are scientific reasons to be more careful and to reduce the current exposure limits for people working with radioisotopes.

Postscript

Our visit to Chernobyl, although not always in accordance with Western press reports, surpassed the imagination.

A holocaust does not need exaggeration. Who can conceive the inferno of the evacuation in a city like Pripyat or in the forests surrounding the plant? Enormous resettlements, affecting more people than have been resettled to date, apparently are still necessary and indeed planned for the near future, especially in Byelorussia.

We left Kiev for Chernobyl on an early Monday morning and returned to the capital on Wednesday. During that time I was exposed to about 6 millirems. This is about six times the normal dose or a little less than I received on my flight from Los Angeles to Moscow.

That is, the journey to Chernobyl caused at least twice the exposure of the visit to the forbidden zone itself. But this doesn’t diminish the danger of visiting the accident site. That area contains numerous so-called hot spots, which could be relatively small entities, for example, dust particles that are highly radioactive. Such an invisible particle, if inhaled into the lungs, can have devastating consequences.

This danger is real, but it is impossible to assign a probability to it.

The air traveler, who is exposed to a higher average natural radiation at an altitude of 30,000 feet, does not have to worry about such malicious hot spots. These comparisons probably explain why people all over the world, especially in Western Europe, were so confused by the media about the impact of the explosion on their own lives.

But be assured that those who pursue this confusion game are not so sure themselves. If my next cold stays longer than usual, I may wonder if it has anything to do with my visit to Chernobyl.

CHERNOBYL DANGER AREAS

Like the rings on a target, two radiation zones now encircle the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The 30-kilometer “forbidden” zone, which extends to a radius about 19 miles from the reactor, surrounds a more contaminated 10-kilometer zone. There are several other small evacuated areas scattered nearby.