Environment : Chernobyl : The Full Impact of the Nuclear Nightmare in the Soviet Union Is Just Beginning to Emerge

Doors bang with the wind. Fences have fallen around the village’s stout houses. The post office, the school, the community center are all padlocked. And yellowed weeds, some shoulder high, wave in the fields where Bartalomeyevka’s farmers grew rye, potatoes and vegetables.

Bartalomeyevka is a modern ghost town--it was killed by radiation.

Home to more than 3,000 people just five years ago, it is one of the hundreds of villages in the western Soviet Union that were abandoned after clouds of radioactive particles from the explosion at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station passed overhead in 1986 and made them uninhabitable.

“The young have all gone--they understood that all this radiation would be a living death,” said Anatoly E. Popkov, 58, whose family is one of 17 still living in Bartalomeyevka, about 100 miles north of Chernobyl. “We should leave, too. There is still lots of radiation here, and it churns up your stomach and makes your bones ache and just eats away at you.

“But how can you leave a place that has been your whole life and the life of your parents and their parents and their parents before? Bartalomeyevka is where God put us--this is our place in the world. Where will we go?”

As destructive as the original explosion was, the full consequences of the Chernobyl disaster are only becoming clear five years later:

* Hundreds of thousands of farmers from Byelorussia, western Russia and the Ukraine have been resettled, or must still be, from land so poisoned that it cannot be farmed for a generation or more. Yet, the massive migration from villages that go back centuries threatens to destroy the very societies it is intended to save.

* Upward of 4 million people from the region are thought by doctors to be in high-risk groups susceptible not only to cancer but a range of severe illnesses, already on the rise, that include heart and lung diseases, nervous disorders and digestive tract ailments. For doctors, the sharp increase last year in cancer of the thyroid gland among children and adolescents is a portent of the human suffering still to come.

* The exploded reactor at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station in the northern Ukraine remains a serious threat. Although stabilized at tremendous cost in 1986 and encased in a concrete sarcophagus, the reactor is still highly radioactive and far from leakproof, and a fierce dispute is raging over what to do about it.

* And the cleanup, the resettlement and the health care that will be required now seem beyond the capability of the crisis-ridden Soviet Union and its Byelorussian, Ukrainian and Russian republics. At the same time, there is widespread distrust of all government, a feeling that it will abandon Chernobyl’s victims to their fate.

“A sense of doom is settling on our people that, if we accept it, could condemn our nation to extinction,” said Natalya P. Masherova, president of the Byelorussian Znich Union, which takes its name from the holy fire with which ancient Byelorussians sought to ward off evil spirits, and which was formed to aid Chernobyl victims. “People ask, ‘What have we done for God to punish us this way?’ And it does seem a punishment. Every fourth Byelorussian was killed in World War II, and now every fifth Byelorussian--2.2 million people--was in the Chernobyl radiation zone. It is a real question, ‘How will we survive?’ ”

In Bartalomeyevka, an instrument placed on the window sill of one of the houses to measure radiation screeches its warning of unsafe within seconds. The state farm that formerly was based here was dissolved last autumn; its fields have been poisoned with cesium, strontium, plutonium and other elements spewed forth by the reactor. And veterinarians are starting to find cancerous tumors and leukemia in the village livestock and household pets.

“ ‘Leave,’ they tell us, ‘leave,’ ” Alena N. Muzichenko, 60, one of Bartalomeyevka’s remaining 100 residents, said. “Three times, the authorities have ordered us out. But where do we go? I have lived my whole life here. I married here, had my children here and will probably die here. Look, we had just built a new house, 15 meters by 6 1/2, with 11 windows, and you don’t abandon a house like that, not one with 11 windows. . . .

“Besides, what is this radiation? It doesn’t stink, and it doesn’t bite. They talk about it, but we don’t see it. Oh, yes, sometimes we feel bad, but after we lie down and rest a bit, the feeling passes.”

Under the central government’s resettlement program, more than 163,000 people have been evacuated from territory where radioactivity measures more than 40 curies per square kilometer, and 73,000 more remain to be moved this year. But Byelorussia, Russia and the Ukraine, setting stricter limits than Moscow, want to resettle people living in areas that received 15 curies or more. Altogether, officials estimate that more than half a million people will eventually be moved.

“The scope and the degree of the radioactivity was seriously underestimated from the beginning,” Prof. Dmitri M. Grodzinsky, a biologist and member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, said. “It was thought the main danger was from cesium 137, that the strontium 90 fallout had been contained within 30 kilometers of the reactor, the plutonium within 10. But now we are turning up plutonium and strontium right here in Kiev (the Ukrainian capital, about 80 miles south of Chernobyl).

“This means that many more people than we believed were subjected to greater doses initially and to continued radiation. It means that they are at far greater health risk than we thought. It means that the cleanup will take more work and more time than we expected. It means, in short, that the long-term consequences of Chernobyl can only be assessed now.”

In Gomel, a Byelorussian city of half a million about 80 miles north of Chernobyl, the municipal council elected last spring made a full cleanup its first priority--but was astounded to find radiation levels far higher than the central government had disclosed.

“Our schools, our clinics, our factories, our stores, not to speak of our housing, are contaminated,” Alexander F. Zinchuk, deputy chairman of the Gomel council, said. “Of 172 kindergartens, 151 are contaminated, and that ratio holds true whatever we have looked at. . . . Byelorussia absorbed 70% of the fallout from Chernobyl, and that was many times what fell on Hiroshima.”

To drive through Gomel and the other districts north of Chernobyl is to encounter closed roads, fenced-off villages and signposts warning, “Danger--Radioactivity.”

“To live here is to live through a modern nightmare,” Alexander P. Baranov, a lawyer in Gomel and a member of its municipal council, said. “Except it is not a dream--it’s reality.”

While most Soviet nuclear power specialists mock this as “radiophobia” and a refusal to accept modern technology despite the problems it brings, Semen S. Voloschuk, chairman of the Russian Federation branch of the Committee for Eliminating the Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident, is sympathetic.

“The radioactivity is everywhere--in the food people are eating, the water they are drinking, the air they are breathing,” Voloschuk commented. “A person can’t see it, but he can’t stop thinking about it--and about what it is doing to him and his family. The anxiety is tremendous.”

And the radioactivity is spreading, according to scientists working with the environmentalist groups Green World and Chernobyl Union. Previously clean areas are being slowly contaminated by radioactivity carried by dust, water and weeds.

Soviet officials maintain that rigorous checks over the past two years have eliminated all but perhaps 5% of the radioactivity in human food and water supplies, but the very doctors, nurses and technicians assigned to the area are moving out by the hundreds, believing the region to be unsafe.

“Where is it safe to live--that is a highly contentious issue because scientists have not fully agreed on how much radiation can be absorbed,” Viktor Gubanov, chairman of the national Committee for Eliminating the Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident, said in an interview in Moscow. “There are places that are manifestly unsafe because the radiation is high and will remain high. There are other places where the original dose was significant and where there is now chronic radiation, low level but chronic, and people should be helped to move to clean areas. . . .

“But we face another problem, in that resettlement is so disruptive for these people that the stress brings on even greater health problems for many than the radiation would. These are people rooted in their villages, and moving them 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) is like putting them into space orbit. We try to resettle communities as a whole to maintain all the family and social ties, but we often fail.”

In some places, those evacuated are ostracized by local residents who believe that they, like lepers of the nuclear era, have brought the radiation with them.

For some the adjustment has been impossible, and they have moved back to their old homes, even within the 18-mile “exclusion zone” around the plant where deformed trees and plants suggest what radiation can do to the human body.

In Bartalomeyevka, where the recorded radiation level was above 50 curies a square kilometer in 1986, the remaining residents complain that even though they have been told to move--even though government services ranging from electricity to police protection have been halted to force them to leave--they have not been given new homes.

“Those who have left have scattered to the winds,” Atitia Ganeyeva, 38, said. “What our parents and grandparents and all the generations who came before built is being destroyed. This radiation is doing what no enemy, not even the German Nazis in the last war, could do--destroy Bartalomeyevka.”

Thyroid Cancer on the Rise

Lena Pobedinsky is a bright-eyed, giggly, quick-witted girl of 11, and yet her mother’s brow is wrinkled in worries, her eyes clouded with tears. Lena’s thyroid gland is enlarged, and it has changed in a way that suggests a tumor may be growing in her throat.

“We hope and we pray she will be all right, but we don’t know what will happen,” her mother said. “She tires so quickly now, her temperature goes up and down, she’s just not herself.”

A farm family, the Pobedinskys were living in southern Byelorussia in April, 1986, and Lena and her brother, Nikolai, who is now 12, were among the thousands of children hit when radioactive iodine 131 fell over the area.

Iodine accumulates naturally in the thyroid, a gland in the throat that regulates the body’s development and its metabolic rate, and the sudden appearance of so much iodine, radioactive though it was, in an area where there is chronic deficiency in the environment meant that it was all quickly absorbed.

Now, five years later, there is an upsurge in thyroid cancer--19 new cases in Byelorussia last year, 20 in the Ukraine, where in the past no more than three or four would have been expected between the two republics.

“Timely diagnosis is crucial,” said Dr. Valery A. Rzheutsky, director of the Diagnostic Center for Radiation Medicine in Minsk, the Byelorussian capital, where Lena was being examined. “If we detect this cancer even before it is developed, when there are only preconditions for it, we can monitor it closely and act in time. But with so many children, it is an enormous undertaking.”

In the Ukraine, medical teams checking the children from the fallout area have found about 15,000 with enlarged thyroids, according to Dr. Victor M. Ponomarenko, the republic’s deputy health minister, and 1,500 to 2,000 of those appeared to have changed significantly in the past year.

“Of the 2.2 million of our people who were in the fallout area, 400,000 were children--we are very, very concerned for them,” Dr. Arkady K. Tomashev, Byelorussia’s deputy health minister, said. “Of those children we have monitored, 14% suffered very heavy doses of radiation; overall, 40% to 45% of the children we are monitoring have enlarged thyroids now. Understand, we are talking about thousands and thousands of our children.”

Dmitri Grodzinsky of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences said that thyroid cancer is only the first of a range of tumors and leukemias likely to appear in the next three years. Laboratory tests, as well as Japan’s experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the United States attacked them with atomic bombs in World War II, indicate that almost all forms of cancer will increase markedly, probably peaking about the year 2000.

“What we expect but cannot predict is the debilitating impact of long-term radiation on the human immune system,” Grodzinsky added. “There could well be a very large upsurge in viral diseases, like those that come with AIDS but this time virtual epidemics, that will be harder to treat than cancer cases.”

Estimates of Chernobyl’s eventual number of victims vary widely; even now, Soviet officials continue to maintain that only 32 deaths can be attributed to the disaster, while environmentalists put the number as high as 10,000.

Scientists working for the Chernobyl Union, an activist group working to win medical treatment and benefits for victims of the accident as well as for increased safety in the nuclear industry, estimate that 1% of the likvidatory-- the 600,000 soldiers, firefighters and nuclear power specialists who struggled over three years to “liquidate” the disaster--have since died, that one-third of the rest run a serious risk of cancer and that about 5% are already invalids.

“We don’t know, for sure, but 7,000 to 10,000 deaths is a rational, even conservative estimate,” Vladimir F. Shovkoshytny, president of the Chernobyl Union and a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, commented.

The Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences’ Center for Radiation Medicine in Kiev is coordinating the monitoring and treatment of more than 1 million people in high-risk categories, including the 150,000 evacuated from the area around the plant, a further 280,000 living in highly contaminated areas and the likvidatory. The three republics in addition have their own monitoring and health-care programs, with Byelorussia committed to annual checkups for a fifth of its population.

“So far, we are seeing increases in cardiovascular diseases, respiratory ailments, digestive tract problems and nervous disorders, with stress being the main factor,” Prof. Vladimir G. Bebeshko, the center director, said. “We have precisely 145 cases of radiation sickness . . . and so far no cases of tumors or leukemias directly attributable to Chernobyl. There is an increase, to be sure, but against the broader increase in the incidence of cancer in society it is not statistically significant.”

Reflecting central government policy, Bebeshko’s position is strongly disputed, however, by others working with Chernobyl victims.

“When you have as many cases of thyroid gland tumors as we have had in the past 18 months, you know as a doctor that it was the radiation,” Rzheutsky said. “As a scientist, yes, I would like to establish a clear causal relationship, but as a doctor I know it’s there and I am pretty sure that we will soon start seeing other cancers increasing.”

A Dangerous ‘Tombstone’

Twenty stories tall and encased in gray concrete, Unit No. 4 at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station should stand, in the words of one Ukrainian environmentalist, as “a tombstone for nuclear power.” In fact, it is still very much a problem.

“The danger must not be underestimated--we could have another ‘Chernobyl,’ ” the Chernobyl Union’s Shovkoshytny, a former engineer at the plant and now the chairman of the public commission overseeing the exclusion zone around it, commented. “The reactor was stabilized, but that stability is very fragile, very tenuous.”

The problems are many, according to both officials and environmentalists. The sarcophagus contains more than 150 tons of radioactive materials and is not hermetically sealed; dust is always in danger of seeping out. Intense radiation and heat within the reactor and the building housing it are eating away at the concrete and steel supposed to contain them. The reactor’s huge cover, blown off by the explosion, remains suspended over it, but could cause the reactor to “go critical” if it fell. Moderate earth tremors could bring dangerous shifts within the reactor.

Gubanov of the Soviet Chernobyl Committee acknowledged that the present sarcophagus, decided upon in the panicky days after the explosion and built in six months, is not a long-term solution. “There’s a sharp clash of opinions,” he said. “Some want us to build another sarcophagus, probably exceeding the Great Cheops Pyramid in size; others want us to take everything away and restore Chernobyl to a green meadow.” A decision is to be made later this year, he added. Plans are also being made to shut down Chernobyl’s other three reactors in compliance with decisions of the Ukrainian Parliament.

“This is a very daunting engineering problem,” Grodzinsky said, “and it cannot be resolved simply. Man has built something that has become very dangerous and could destroy him if he cannot manage it.”

Can the Government Cope?

“Radiological disasters differ from other catastrophes in that you get the first blow and then you sit, slowly dying, as you get the second and the third and the fourth,” Voloschuk of the Russian Federation’s Chernobyl Committee said. “That is our position today. We were hit hard five years ago, but we know there is more to come.”

What is in question now, even more than five years ago, is the Soviet government’s ability to manage what for a number of decades will be a permanent crisis.

Gubanov tries to be reassuring. His committee is coordinating extensive programs for resettlement, for medical care and for a further cleanup, he said; plans are being drawn for the medium and long term. The central government is now appropriating the equivalent of $17 billion a year, at official exchange rates, to assist Chernobyl victims.

“Five years ago, mistakes were made, some of them quite serious, because the range of problems exceeded the ability of anyone to understand or cope with,” Gubanov said. “Even two years ago, we did not grasp what Chernobyl was and what it meant. Now, I believe, we do.”

However, with the country’s political future uncertain and the economy contracting in violent spasms, the Kremlin finds policy-making of any sort increasingly difficult, especially on an issue as contentious as Chernobyl. At the same time, the central government has lost the obedience it formerly commanded.

“Chernobyl demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet system,” Serhiy M. Fedorynchyk, an activist with the Ukrainian environmental group Green World, said, “and a new politics began with Chernobyl.

“The disaster, the initial attempts to hush it up, the bungled cleanup, the incompetence with dealing with the problems that have followed--all of it demonstrated to people that they were living on a very small planet and that it was too important to entrust to governments, especially like we had.”

A bitter anger toward the center on this issue reaches right to the top of each republican government. Send aid, Tomashev and Ponomarenko said, pleading the cases of Byelorussia and the Ukraine for hospital equipment, medicines and vitamins, but send it direct to them. “If a letter has a Moscow address, it will never get to Minsk,” Tomashev added.

Voloschuk, recruited from the government cleanup effort at Chernobyl to direct Russia’s program, said, “I can’t remove the radiation, but I can remove the other factors that shorten a person’s life or make it uncomfortable. Our economic crisis makes it difficult, but we have that obligation.”

People are nearly as cynical, however, about the republican governments, which have yet to find their feet after elections last year, and activist groups are trying to play an increasing role in shaping policy.

“People are utterly confused, and in this chaos they are losing hope,” Masherova of Znich said. “There is no realistic concept for resettlement, so many people remain where they are, poisoning themselves and their families. There are plans for medical monitoring and improved health care, but no equipment or drugs to carry them out. There are governmental commitments to do many things, but no resources for any of them.”

Znich is attempting to mobilize the republic’s intelligentsia to compile a strategic program for the fallout region as well as contact foreign donors who might help underwrite it. In the Ukraine, Chernobyl Union and Green World are engaged in similar efforts.

“To pin our hopes on the central government or on the republic government is pointless, for they will not help,” Gomel’s Zinchuk said. “We ourselves are going to have to do this if we want to survive. We can do it because no one wants to see his child or a neighbor’s dying, slowly and painfully. Where Moscow is ready to write us off as a nuisance, we can succeed because the alternative is our death as a nation.”

But rare is such optimism in this blighted land. The near-despair of Vladimir S. Lipsky, chairman of the Byelorussian Children’s Fund, is more typical. “This tragedy manifests itself increasingly with every day,” Lipsky said, “and with each day hope declines. When a man loses hope, it’s tragic, but when a child loses hope--and ours are--the grief is simply beyond words.”

Five Years Ago at Chernobyl

It’s been called the most frightening catastrophe of modern industrial history. A series of errors in connection with a planned shutdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s Reactor No. 4 caused a thermal explosion and fire at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986.

The accident released a radioactive cloud, left, and abnormal radioactive levels were soon detected. For months--even years--it was said that the main impact was within a 30-kilometer radius of Chernobyl, which was evacuated. In a 10-kilometer zone, no resettlement was anticipated for a century. A sign near Chernobyl, top, warns people to stay away.

Nobody really knows the full cost of the disaster. Yuri Koryakin, chief economist for the Soviet Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering, estimated that by the year 2000, the tab could reach 215 billion rubles--$358 billion at the official rate of exchange (chart above).

Projected Costs...:(in billions of rubles) Lost electricity production: $66.8 Agricultural losses: $94.5 Decontamination cleanup: $45 SOURCE: The Chernobyl Disaster, by Viktor Haynes and Marko Bojcur