A Day In The Life Of Mother Earth : Chernobyl’s Aftermath : ‘This radiation business is like when we were fighting the Nazis.’ Ivan I. Shanga, <i> relative of Ukraine resident</i>

The Problem--Nuclear Safety

* The U.N. View--”To protect human health and the environment, safe management and disposal of radioactive waste should be an integral part of worldwide nuclear safety efforts.”

* The Case Study: Sosnivka--The nightmare of the 1986 Chernobyl accident goes on for this tiny village and the 37 families that once called it home.

The enemy lurks outside Zonya Grishanovich’s log cabin, silent and invisible. Yet the tiny peasant woman’s eyes fill immediately with tears when she talks of leaving.

“I love the berries here, the mushrooms and the trees,” exclaims Grishanovich, who is so bent by her 63 years that she walks like a hunchback. “Everything in this place is dear to us, everything is ours.”

But what belongs to this woman in the threadbare sweater held together by safety pins can now harm or even kill her. Her wooden-floored home, the birdcherry tree out front, the courtyard where chickens scratch the dirt and the woods beyond have been dusted with a radioactive isotope, strontium 90, that is one of the most dangerous products of the Chernobyl disaster.

Only Zonya Grishanovich, her husband and one other family are left in Sosnivka, a hamlet in northern Ukraine that once boasted 37 households. Authorities began evacuating it in January, and the Grishanoviches should be gone by autumn.

For the confused woman, having to abandon her home for an uncertain future as a refugee because of something she can’t see is frighteningly unfair.

A visiting in-law, Ivan I. Shanga, has an analogy. “This radiation business is like when we were fighting the Nazis,” he declares. “I joined the partisans when I was 13. When we moved through the woods, we had to be silent and stealthy, since we didn’t know where the Germans were. Radiation is like that, I think.”

For hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Belarussians and Russians, the nightmare of Chernobyl did not end in May 1986, when the burning reactor at the nuclear power plant north of Kiev was finally doused. The accident’s legacy is still part of daily life.

“From the moment I begin work in the morning, absolutely everything I do is connected with Chernobyl,” says Ivan S. Okhrimchuk, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk’s representative in Ovruch, a region larger than Rhode Island.

Eighty thousand people live in this pine- and birch-forested area about 50 miles west of Chernobyl, a region of flat fields where peasants graze their cows and grow wheat and other crops.

Into that bucolic tableau, in Okhrimchuk’s words, Chernobyl thrust a “catastrophe” that seems to never end.

The accident’s true costs are still being debated by proponents and foes of nuclear energy everywhere. According to figures recently published in Kiev, 6,000 to 8,000 Ukrainians have already died from Chernobyl’s radiation, but the chaos that followed the Soviet breakup may make it impossible to fix the accident’s global consequences with any degree of scientific reliability.

But what is now occurring in Ovruch--ill children, a rising death rate, frighteningly deformed animals, a general climate of uncertainty and fear--gives a disturbing if admittedly partial glimpse of how horribly high the final bill could be.

On the grounds of Kindergarten No. 1 here, Alexei M. Kudrya, 53, a ruddy-faced man built like a football halfback, probes the earth with a two-foot-long aluminum pole hooked to a gamma ray detector.

At the base of the building, where rain drips from the eaves, Kudrya finds hot spots of radiation three times greater than what is considered safe for children.

Although the kindergarten was washed down long ago by soldiers, the topsoil will now have to be dug up and removed for the safety of its more than 200 pupils.

In the Ovruch area alone, 2,400 people still live in villages and neighborhoods so contaminated by fallout that theoretically they will be forced by law to leave them. In Ukraine as a whole, specialists say 1.8 million people, including 380,000 children, live in areas that received varying doses of particles from the blazing reactor.

However, this newly independent state, beset with a major economic crisis, is manifestly incapable of rehousing all but a fraction of these people.

This district needs about six railroad cars of imported milk a month to replace milk produced by local cows that have grazed on grass dusted by cesium, strontium and other isotopes. But Ukraine has too little gasoline to regularly deliver food to Ovruch’s 153 villages.

What’s more, the stubborn mentality of the self-sufficient, often barely literate, but proud peasantry may doom such an enterprise before it starts.

“If you lived in the village, you’d understand that you just don’t go out and buy milk if you have a cow,” says Okhrimchuk, who has one himself.

Providing people with pure food and water has become officials’ priority task, since at least 80% of radiation exposure comes not from external sources but from fallout that is inhaled or swallowed and continues to emit particles inside the body that kill or irrevocably alter healthy cells.

But a quick examination of the equipment used by the local Sanitary-Epidemiological Center to check radioactivity in food and drink shows how woefully inadequate the government effort is. Radiation probes sent for maintenance can be out of service for 10 months. Even when meters are available, there are often no batteries for them.

“It has gotten to the point that sometimes I wonder what I am going to work with tomorrow,” the center’s engineer, Nikolai S. Yakovenko, sighs.

The main test station in Ovruch, located in a shabby emporium where people can also get a haircut or have a button restitched, performs no more than 10 radiation checks a day.

The testing center has only enough gasoline to have sent a mobile checkpoint on a single trip to the district’s villages this year. If dangerously irradiated food is found, Yakovenko and his co-workers are not empowered to impound it, only to write up a report.

In the meantime, nothing prevents the peasant from trying to sell his crop elsewhere. Across the street from the statue of V. I. Lenin that dominates the center of the city of Ovruch, a group of elderly women hawk carrots, onions and glasses of sunflower seeds.

When asked if they have proof their wares are radiation-free, they hurriedly turn away.

Residents of irradiated districts get a 200-ruble aid payment per month to help them buy “clean” food. But as one Ovruch man says: “When three small herrings cost 160 rubles, just how much can you buy?” Without much real choice, the peasants basically eat what they grow.

Tragically, it is on children that Chernobyl’s legacy seems to have fallen the hardest.

Tamara Tsigankovka, principal of the Sholomki elementary school, says many of her 230 youngsters are sick so frequently they cannot keep up with the curriculum.

The children are given three snacks daily of food brought in from other areas of Ukraine and supplementary doses of vitamins in their tea. But a test akin to that for tuberculosis has revealed weakened immunity in as many as 40% of the pupils in some age groups.

“From a purely medical point of view, all children must be evacuated from the Ovruch region,” a local pediatrician, Dr. Viktor V. Kozmirchuk, says flatly.

Pulling a ragged carbon copy from his desk in the crowded Ovruch polyclinic, the 28-year-old physician starts reeling off a list of harrowing statistics showing how grievously the health of residents--and especially children--has suffered since the fateful year of Chernobyl.

Anemia cases increased by 114% in 1986-90. There has been a 4 1/2-fold rise in stomach and intestinal ailments.

Last year alone, there was a 54% increase in deaths caused by heart and circulatory system ailments as well as a 40% increase in fatal cancers.

Laryngitis, tracheobronchitis and other lung and respiratory diseases in children have increased five times since Chernobyl. The number of Ovruch youngsters classified as “very ill” is at least six times greater than in 1986, and each year, the group of children certified as fully fit has dropped.

But this may only be the leading edge of the wave. What obsesses Kozmirchuk is the possibility that the people of his region may have suffered permanent damage to their genetic makeup because of prolonged exposure to radiation.

They would thus pass on to yet unborn generations what he calls “Chernobyl AIDS”--a crippled immune system hampering the body’s ability to fight diseases--and a likelihood of impaired development of internal organs.

From a biologist in nearby Zhitomir comes supporting evidence for the disturbing thesis of genetic mutations caused by Chernobyl. Vyacheslav Konovalov has reported a doubling since 1986 of births of monstrously deformed farm animals.

Many in the nuclear power industry have steadfastly maintained that exposure to low levels of radiation has a zero effect on health. By such reasoning, areas that received a light powdering of Chernobyl fallout are at no risk.

“Look, that’s just not logical,” pediatrician Kozmirchuk counters. He draws an analogy with vodka drinking. Moderate doses now and again may be no problem, but daily consumption could lead to alcoholism.

What is incontestable is that authorities are in no position to handle a major health crisis. Ovruch, which is supposed to have 282 doctors, has only 142. Because of radiation risks, medical school graduates are no longer assigned here, and the breakdown of the centralized economy has caused chronic shortages of antibiotics, painkillers and anesthetics. There is no centralized facility to focus on radiation’s effects on health.

Lacking the means to change their place of residence, many people seem to take refuge in the stoicism that has been the Ukrainian peasant’s timeless hallmark. “Where can you go? They don’t accept us anywhere,” says Galya Savchuk, a cook whose teen-age daughter’s vision has deteriorated by 30% in recent years. “People I know have been waiting for two or three years to go to Kherson (in southern Ukraine), but there are no free apartments.”

Others are more combative and even accuse the Ukrainian leadership of continuing the cover-up campaign the Communists had mounted around Chernobyl, perhaps because the cost of relocating everyone in danger is unthinkably huge.

“The authorities make us live on poisoned territory,” says Anatoly L. Polshikov, a member of the government council in Ovruch and a militant in a private radiation watchdog organization.

By order of the Ukrainian government, the Chernobyl plant is to be shut down completely by next year. But its legacy will last virtually forever--24,000 years from now, half the particles of plutonium sprayed into the air in 1986 will still be emitting radiation.