COLUMN ONE : The Atom Sows Crop of Sadness : The Kremlin’s hubris in the nuclear field and its patent disregard for the health and environmental implications of its acts may rank among the 20th Century’s greatest crimes.

It was about three years ago in this ramshackle Siberian farming and mink-breeding town that the Yellow Children began to appear.

After hospital treatment, the jaundice that turns some newborns here a dull yellow eventually disappears. But it is not their only problem, for these infants also show signs of congenital defects in their nervous system and organs. They begin to walk later than other children, are oddly silent and have a vocabulary that remains infantile far too long, doctors say.

In one month, 42 of 59 boys and girls born in Talmenka turned yellow a day or two after birth. Towheaded Andrei Gushchin, 2 years and 10 months old, was one of the first. “He won’t be a Lomonosov,” doctors warned Andrei’s mother, Olga, referring to Russia’s great 18th-Century savant and poet, Mikhail V. Lomonosov.

Olga Gushchin now wonders whether her quiet, undersized son will even be able to handle kindergarten.

The outbreak of infant jaundice brought researchers from 40 institutes to Talmenka and other affected towns. They scrutinized air and water pollution, contamination of food by pesticides and other chemicals, parents’ occupations and other possible causes. All were eliminated as the chief underlying reason for the newborns’ problems, leaving scientists with a horrifying conclusion.

As one prominent Moscow researcher puts it, the hundreds of Yellow Children born to date can only be “nuclear mutants”--the most recent victims of the Soviet Union’s costly, often tragic relationship with the atom.

It is 250 miles from this settlement among the pines and birches of Siberia to the hilly steppe at Semipalatinsk. But the locales may forever be intertwined. For at the latter site, in Kazakhstan, on Aug. 29, 1949, scientists detonated the Soviet Union’s first atom bomb. There was a 25-m.p.h. wind that day, and it carried a tongue of hot radioactive dust from the explosion downwind to the Altai region of Russia and the town of Talmenka.

That was more than four decades ago. But on a scrap of paper, Yakov N. Shoikhet, professor at the Altai Medical Institute, sketches out for a visitor how people exposed to fallout from the 122 aboveground blasts at Semipalatinsk could transmit health problems in an unbroken line to their children, and to grandchildren now being born.

“There is evidence of chromosome change due to radiation exposure,” Shoikhet says. “Only God knows what we will see in the fourth generation.”

With a sort of terrible biblical justice, the people of Talmenka and of the former Soviet Union as a whole are now being made to pay for the atomic misdeeds of their ancestors. Long masked by censorship, disinformation and a conspiracy of professional silence, the problem is becoming known in its vastness and complexity only now:

- More than 100 nuclear bombs were detonated for “peaceful purposes” across the face of the former Soviet Union, from inhabited areas of the coal-mining Donbass region in Ukraine to the pristine Siberian permafrost.

- High-level radioactive waste was routinely dumped into lakes and rivers, even those used as sources of drinking water or for swimming and fishing. Entire nuclear reactors were heaved into the ocean.

- Urban areas including Moscow and St. Petersburg have been fouled with clandestine dump sites for atomic waste, or are menaced by shoddily built, aging atomic power plants.

- An estimated 20 million Soviets were exposed to radioactivity released at Chernobyl; unknown millions received doses from bomb tests at Semipalatinsk and at Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic--sometimes as intentional guinea pigs--and from a trio of disasters at the country’s first plutonium-producing center.

The Kremlin’s technological hubris in the nuclear field and its patent disregard for the health and environmental implications of its acts may rank among the 20th Century’s greatest crimes. And, as the Chernobyl accident in 1986 showed, the outside world may suffer the consequences too.

No Full Remedy Likely

“Of all the environmental problems of my country, the nuclear problem is No. 1,” said Alexei V. Yablokov, state counselor for ecology and health to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. Cleaning it up, he said, will cost “trillions of dollars.”

But speaking of remedies may, in many cases, be overly optimistic. For the irradiated mess that the Soviet military-industrial complex left on one-sixth of the Earth’s land mass will be eternal in places. Such nuclear pollution will be the most durable legacy of the defunct Communist regime.

“Big chunks of the republic are so poisoned they will not be suitable for human settlement for a very long time. We are talking decades,” Victor Danilov-Danilyan, Russia’s minister for the environment, has been quoted as saying.

Take one example. Near Chelyabinsk in the southern Urals, the once secret Mayak weapons-grade plutonium plant has accumulated so much radioactive waste--in an open lake, dumps and storage pools--that if spread evenly over the former Soviet Union, it would be enough to poison every square foot.

The amount of waste stockpiled there--1.2 billion curies--is 24 or so times the radiation spewed by Chernobyl, and about 240 times the long-lasting nuclear contamination unleashed by the Hiroshima bomb.

Mayak, where large-scale releases of radiation have already occurred, is linked to the outside world via the Ob River, which flows into the sea off northern Russia. Even now, Lake Karachai, transformed into an atomic cesspool, is seeping into the subterranean water table and tributaries of the Ob, according to Moscow physicist Lydia Popova.

“Radioactive contamination in my country is dangerous for all the world,” Yablokov warns.

The effects on human health of Soviet nuclear practices, though still debated, appear nothing short of tragic. Thyroid gland tumors have gone up by 22 times in the past five years in Belarus, while in one region of Ukraine that was also contaminated by Chernobyl fallout, stomach and kidney illnesses have increased 450%.

Few corners of what was the Soviet Union escaped the atomic taint. In Moscow itself, home to more than 9 million people, there are at least 600 secret waste dumps whose radiation levels are “dangerously high,” according to specialists.

Atomic Waste in Park

One of these atomic garbage piles is right in Izmailovsky Park, a leafy retreat where Muscovites and visitors to the city browse at a popular weekend art fair and parents take their children for a bit of wintertime sledding.

Only recently did it come to light that nuclear waste--mostly cesium 137, a dangerous gamma-ray emitter--had been tossed in a river connecting ponds where Peter the Great captained a miniature sailing ship as a youngster. For a generation or so, Russians ambled past the site, none the wiser.

Even when waste is kept away from the general population, storage often is inadequate. John Large, a nuclear engineer from Britain, recalls with disquiet a visit this year to the Sosnovy Bor nuclear power plant and waste site about 45 miles from the heart of St. Petersburg.

Waste storage unit No. 2, a shabbily constructed “big box” of prefabricated concrete, was leaking rainwater and melted snow through the roof, Large remembered. The Sosnovy Bor workers’ response couldn’t have been simpler--or more senseless, Large said. They went around the silo smashing holes about every 20 feet into the decaying 18-inch-thick walls with a sledgehammer.

Now the rainwater, heavily contaminated with nuclides, streams out onto open ground, Large said.

For the now independent states of Belarus and Ukraine, the single most important fact of life is nuclear-related: Chernobyl, and the economic and social costs of coping with the consequences of the worst accident in the history of nuclear power.

“We in Belarus lost one in four people during the Great Patriotic War (World War II), while as a result of Chernobyl, one in five citizens--approximately 2 million people, including 800,000 children--now suffer because they live in contaminated zones,” said Anatoly S. Zybovsky, deputy chairman of the Belarus State Committee on Chernobyl.

Eighty percent of Belarus was sprayed with radioactive isotopes when Chernobyl’s No. 4 reactor exploded on April 26, 1986. In Ukraine, farmland and woods about the size of West Virginia were contaminated, in many places with plutonium 239, which will emit deadly alpha radiation for more than 20,000 years.

The enthusiastic use of nuclear bombs by the Kremlin on the Soviet landscape had a still-to-be-determined impact on human health. But the practice betrays the same conquering attitude toward nature that led state planners to dream of reversing the flow of Siberia’s mighty rivers.

At least 115 “peaceful nuclear explosions,” as they are euphemistically called, were staged throughout the Soviet Union to refashion the landscape.

Bombs were detonated in salt deposits near the mouth of the Volga, European Russia’s most important river, to create huge, glassy-walled “bottles” underground for the storage of oil and gas. Bombs were used to extinguish a burning gas well, much the way a child’s puff blows out a birthday candle, and as atomic bulldozers to gouge a canal. In the Siberian wilderness region of Yakutia alone, a dozen nuclear devices were exploded.

Because of the Chernobyl accident, much is known about the potential for disaster of the hardware designed and built by the Soviet atomic Establishment, the yadershchiki, or “nuclear guys.” And in the opinion of the yadershchiki themselves, the risks remain great.

Asked in a recent poll to rate all models of Soviet-built reactors designed for generating electricity, more than 200 nuclear energy specialists and physicists gave the units only a “C” for sturdiness and reliability, and the Chernobyl-type RBMKs a “D.”

In Moscow itself, there are nine reactors, designed chiefly for research purposes, seven of which are housed at the I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Nuclear Energy in the city’s west. The Moscow City Council is now so mindful of the dangers of an accident that its Presidium has ordered all nine phased out by July, 1999.

Refueling Accident

The tragic trail of the atom literally spans the extent of what had been the Soviet Union. In August, 1985, at a refitting yard on Chazma Bay 35 miles east of Vladivostok on the shores of the Pacific, Soviet sailors set out to refuel the reactor on a Victor-class submarine, but something went awry.

A quench plate designed to prevent a runaway reaction dropped for some reason, perhaps when a wave made the sub roll. The reactor went out of control, overheated and belched hot steam and fire, blasting the uranium high into the air. Ten men in the reactor compartment were killed instantly, and the area was blanketed with high radioactivity.

Fallout reportedly spread in a band hundreds of yards wide toward Vladivostok. But naval officials told Western visitors recently that it didn’t reach the city of 700,000. The irradiated dead were buried in specially prepared pits and the accident hushed up, though Russian officials now admit the Soviet navy had suffered two similar mishaps earlier.

The hulk of the submarine is still in Chazma Bay. What to do with its sister ships that were once the backbone of the Soviet navy is a nettlesome environmental question that still awaits a solution.

Joshua Handler of the Greenpeace Nuclear Free Seas Campaign has written President Bush that about 80 Soviet submarines are probably awaiting disposal, with another 80 likely to be retired soon, meaning that about 300 reactors will have to be disposed of--somehow.

How the Kremlin took care of that chore in the past shocks even members of the Russian nuclear Establishment. In the Kara Sea off northern Russia, icebreakers, other ships from the Murmansk Shipping Co. and naval vessels dumped at least 15 used reactors, including six units from submarines still containing their uranium fuel, said Andrei A. Zolotkov, a radiation safety engineer with the shipping line.

In the case of the obsolete nuclear-powered icebreaker V. I. Lenin, Zolotkov said, the entire hull section encompassing the ship’s three reactors, less their uranium fuel, was cut out with blowtorches and the entire irradiated mass--measuring 65 by 65 by 35 feet, or as high as a five-story building--was dumped into the sea.

Seals Die of Cancer

“They must have realized this would ultimately cause ecological damage,” Zolotkov said.

The bill for such abuse of nature is now coming due, scientists say. According to officials at the Northern Polar Institute in Archangelsk, seals by the thousands are dying of cancers caused by radioactive pollution of the seabed and fallout from Soviet nuclear tests staged west of the Kara Sea on Novaya Zemlya, the archipelago where the seals spend most of the year.

And much remains to be discovered.

In the bogs northeast of the Siberian city of Tomsk, where plutonium and uranium cores for Soviet nuclear weapons are manufactured, military helicopters with crews clad in protective wet suits have been dumping unidentified drums into the ooze, then hurling explosive charges after them to warn people away, reports Albina Bychaninova, a local Ph. D. in medical sciences.

Traces of radiation are showing up in ducks and crayfish in the streams and lakes and in forest animals like elk. After eating game and fish tainted with cesium 137 in the Tomsk area in 1990, seven people were hospitalized.

In Kyshtym, near the now-idle reactors of the Mayak facility that poured their waste into Lake Karachai, townspeople talk fearfully of the smoking, unlabeled freight cars that are sometimes routed through the heart of their community on the way to Mayak, which also reprocesses used nuclear fuel. No one will tell them what is inside.

At Kyshtym, as in the Altai, there has been a wave of jaundiced newborns; a veteran midwife at the Kyshtym hospital told an American visitor she has witnessed a recent increase in birth defects and “strangely weak” infants.

At Mayak, between 25 and 30 tons of plutonium, an extremely toxic and fissionable metal, are in storage. Something like 130 additional tons of purer weapons-grade plutonium spread throughout the former Soviet strategic armaments network.

Such enormous quantities of the radiological poison arouse not only concerns about security and the potential for terrorism but health worries. Just 300 pounds of plutonium, if spread to the lungs of the world’s entire population, would be enough to cause cancer in each and every human, specialists say.

The exact effects of radiation on the body are still under dispute, so there is no unanimity about the impact on people of all of the “peaceful” Soviet atomic blasts, instances of pollution by nuclear waste and fallout from bomb tests.

The International Atomic Energy Agency performed its own extensive study of Chernobyl’s effects in 1990, sending 250 researchers into Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The U.N. agency summed up its findings this way in a glossy, colorful brochure: “No health effects were found that could be attributed directly to radiation exposure.”

Atom Agency Rapped

That conclusion outraged environmentalists, who see the IAEA as a shill for the worldwide nuclear power industry. “The IAEA report was a fraud,” Georgetown University professor Murray Feshbach charges. “They didn’t even know enough to ask for the (Soviet Health Ministry’s) Third Administration data, the data from the agency that kept all the secret health data.”

Feshbach, co-author of an indictment of Kremlin environmental practices entitled “Ecocide in the U.S.S.R.” and a respected authority on this country’s health trends, has his own alarming suppositions about radiation’s effects on the peoples of the former Soviet Union.

“It’s something I can’t prove, and I want to make sure that’s understood,” Feshbach said in a recent interview. “But I think the gene pool of this population overall, and (especially) in areas like Semipalatinsk, has been affected.”

His fear, and that of some specialists in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, is that genetic code carried by human chromosomes may have been altered by a “synergy” of simultaneous exposure to radiation, industrial and agricultural poisons, and the adulterated food and poor medical care that most Soviet citizens received.

One who doesn’t mince words is Dr. Vladimir M. Lupandin, a senior researcher of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The jaundiced children now being born in the Altai, the psychiatrist and environmental activist says, are “third-generation nuclear mutants.”

On a recent fact-finding mission this year to the western Siberian region, the Moscow-based researcher said he found that 10 of the Yellow Children had died, while survivors were displaying clear signs of birth defects of the brain, liver and circulatory system.

But since jaundice or other diseases don’t carry a label saying they are radiation-induced, it has been difficult for scientists like Lupandin to rigorously prove a cause-and-effect link with the Semipalatinsk tests.

One dissenting expert--a professor in biochemistry, biophysics and genetics from the University of Salzburg, Austria, who works for the IAEA--contends that by the 1950s, research had shown worries about genetic harm from radiation to be unfounded.

“The human body has incredible repair facilities,” Dr. Friedrich Steinhausler said in an interview at the IAEA’s Vienna headquarters. “In people who were children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in 1945) you don’t see chromosome damage, and yet they were subjected to one hell of a dose.”

Steinhausler acknowledges that the thyroid cancers now mushrooming in Belarus are probably radiation-induced, since the exploded reactor at the power plant in neighboring Ukraine belched radioactive iodine that would have been readily absorbed by human thyroid glands.

But on the whole, the IAEA scientist dismisses most health problems blamed on Chernobyl as almost certainly the byproduct of stress generated by a pathological fear of radiation, or the statistical result of much better record-keeping.

Meanwhile, to understand better the forces at work, specialists from all over Russia have flocked to the Altai to look into its strange health trends--such as unusually high rates of circulatory and urinary tract disorders.

Only time, however, will tell what will happen to the Yellow Children.

“As to what will become of these youngsters at, say, sexual maturity, it is too early to say, for this problem only began a few years ago,” explains Dr. Ivan F. Zaitsev, chief physician at the Territorial Children’s Clinical Hospital in Barnaul, the Altai’s capital.

The incidence of the infant jaundice is also an unsolved riddle. It comes and goes, with this summer seeing relatively few cases.

In her ground-floor apartment, Olga Gushchin, her face clouded with worry, bounced her shy, mute son on her knee one afternoon as she talked to a foreign visitor. She has a healthy teen-age daughter, so she knows something is wrong with Andrei. But exactly what?

“I feel his mind will lag behind; that’s certain,” she said. “But what will happen to us in the future, I don’t know.”

Moscow bureau reporter Sergei Loiko contributed to this report.

NEXT: How the Soviets created their nuclear mess

A Radioactive Landscape

All across what once was the Soviet Union, residents are discovering the lethal legacy of the Soviet love of the atom. The lingering havoc includes wretched reactors and widespread nuclear pollution even from exploded bombs. This map gives a sampling of some of the disasters and potential trouble spots:

A. Chernobyl: Radiation from 1986 explosion drifted over much of Europe in the world’s worst nuclear power accident.

B. Novaya Zemlya: Nuclear tests have contaminated the Kara Sea.

C. Chelyabinsk: An area of about 11,000 square miles has been contaminated by atomic waste dumping at weapons complex.

D. Semipalatinsk: 467 nuclear tests spread radioactivity over farmlands to the northeast.

*

Atomic blast for “peaceful purposes” such as mining

Concentrations of radioactive pollution

Nuclear dump under construction

Large-scale disposal of nuclear waste

Nuclear submarine accident

Older nuclear plant (including Chernobyl-type reactors)

Heightened radiation from local sources

Heavy contamination (1 to 40 curies per square kilometer*)

Moderate contamination (over 1 curie per square kilometer**)

* As of December, 1990

** As of March, 1992

Sources: Rima Vedeneyeva, director of the Yunona Cartographic Center for Social and Ecological Research in Moscow; Associated Press

The Invisible Killer

Radioactivity is measured by the number of disintegrations over time. One common unit is the curie. The Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 caused 14 curies of radiation to escape; the Chernobyl power plant explosion spewed 50 million curies into the air in 1986.

*

EFFECTS ON HUMANS

Doses can be calibrated in rems. Nuclear power plant workers in the West usually are limited to exposure of no more than 5 rems annually. For the civilian population, the maximum permissible dose is one-tenth of that, or 0.5 rem. In Ukraine, people are subject to mandatory evacuation from areas soiled by Chernobyl fallout if the absorbed dose tops 0.5 rem and have the right to optional relocation if the dose is 0.1 rem. Since radiation occurs in nature, everyone on Earth receives a certain dose. The average natural background radiation from cosmic radiation, radioactivity in the earth and food is 90-100 millirem.

*

RADIATION DANGERS VARY

* Alpha particles are more dangerous than other forms because they are as big as the nucleus of a helium atom--two protons and two neutrons--and travel at speeds of about 6,000 miles per second. Protection as flimsy as a sheet of paper stops them. But if absorbed into the body by breathing, ingestion or through an open wound, they can cause great damage to cells.

* Beta particles are much lighter than alpha but travel much faster, at speeds up to 186,000 miles per second. They can be halted by thin metal shields, or even 100 sheets of paper, and usually do not go much deeper than skin level. They typically cause skin cancers.

* Gamma radiation is an electromagnetic wave that travels as fast as the speed of light. It has no mass but is the most penetrating type of radiation and can be stopped only by thick lead or concrete.

Compiled by Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg and Moscow bureau researcher Cindy Scharf

Sources: Natural Resources Defense Council, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists