Chernobyl’s Ghost Haunts the Ukraine

The ghosts of history’s worst nuclear accident lurk everywhere in the pine forests and overgrown farmland that surround Chernobyl.

Dozens of evacuated villages lie frozen in panic, house doors flung open. Vast fields serve as open graves for endless rows of radioactive trucks, tanks and helicopters used in the deadly cleanup 10 years ago.

And within full view of the hulking concrete-and-steel sarcophagus that entombs the source of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a once-thriving Soviet “model city” of 40,000 people--Pripyat--sits starkly empty.

Doors bang open and shut in the wind. Hastily abandoned amusement-park rides creak noisily. Snowy boulevards are dotted with wolf, boar and fox tracks outside decaying apartment high-rises.

“It’s really scary at night,” says policeman Nikolai Rey at a checkpoint outside this nuclear no-man’s land. “The animals come, and any sound echoes all over the city.”

Eerier still is the knowledge that an invisible killer is still stalking many people. Thousands already are ill or dead from radiation sickness or cancer. Even after 10 years, Chernobyl’s terrible human and environmental toll still isn’t fully known.

“In places like Bosnia and Chechnya, the deaths of people are evident,” says Liza Aulina, executive director of the victims group Chernobyl Union. “But the Chernobyl tragedy can kill a person slowly, and you don’t know where it will catch you or when.”

The specter of another tragedy at the still-functioning, accident-plagued Chernobyl plant also darkens the future. Western leaders continue to pressure energy-starved Ukraine to shut it down, but the government is holding out for a big aid infusion.

The V.I. Lenin power station, which still bears that name, was to have been the world’s largest nuclear plant, another showpiece of Soviet scientific and industrial might. Its ill-fated fourth reactor was rushed into operation in 1984, winning bonuses and medals for the construction chiefs.

Two years later, in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, the unthinkable happened.

Never warned that Chernobyl-style, graphite-core reactors become dangerously unstable at low power, engineers cut power in reactor No. 4 below 25% while testing emergency systems. It ignited an explosion, fire and partial meltdown of the reactor core.

Deadly reactor fuel shot into the atmosphere, contaminating about 10,000 square miles and reaching as far as Western Europe. About 5 million people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were affected, the World Health Organization says.

In a big lie that many feel helped topple a dying regime, Soviet officials from President Mikhail Gorbachev on down first hushed up the disaster, then played down its severity. They even sent marching bands to soothe the 130,000 people evacuated from within 18 miles of ground zero, assuring them that it was only for a few days.

Evidence of the false promise can still be seen in the rubble-strewn apartments of Pripyat--skeletons of cats and dogs that were locked inside, awaiting their owners’ return.

“People were in a terrible state--shocked, crying,” recalls Vladimir Afonichkin, 56, a retired engineer from Kiev, the capital, who was one of more than 600,000 “liquidators,” or cleanup workers. “They didn’t know what was happening, but they suspected they had lost everything.”

In Kiev, 65 miles southeast, residents remember that the birds stopped singing.

Dr. Viktor Klimenko rushed to Chernobyl from Kiev within hours of the explosion and found people washing their hair in a futile effort to get the radiation out.

Some had foolishly watched the huge fire from rooftops in Pripyat, receiving massive doses of radiation.

“Children had radiation in their hair, their skin. Everybody was dirty with radiation,” he says, his voice catching. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Breathing was labored for days, too. “It was as if you had pepper on your tonsils,” Afonichkin says.

Thirty-one people were reported to have died in the immediate aftermath of the accident. The death toll, however, is a matter of speculation because of haphazard tracking of the victims.

Chernobyl Union claims 150,000 people in Ukraine alone are dead from Chernobyl-related diseases, and 55,000 are invalids. Others say that number is wildly overstated in an effort to attract Western aid and contend that deaths are only in the dozens.

The cleanup workers are among those who have suffered the most. Hospital beds for these workers spill into the corridors at the Center for Radiology Medicine outside Kiev because of the growing demand for treatment.

Col. Viktor Zhelayev, 58, a retired army pilot who flew dozens of flights over the exploded reactor to measure radioactivity levels, was diagnosed with leukemia in 1993. Most of the other pilots he worked with are dead, and he can barely walk.

“I felt a moral obligation to do it,” he says, propped up on his hospital bed. “But I feel bad about the children, and the people who are only 30 or 35.”

At the Children’s Radiology Center across town, pale boys and girls from the contaminated zone lie listlessly, receiving intravenous treatment.

Thyroid cancer among children, almost nonexistent before the accident, has increased a hundredfold in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.

“It’s really awful for me as a doctor to see what’s going on with people’s health, because it’s so much worse than in an average region,” says Klimenko, a leading authority on radiation illnesses. “And we don’t even know how bad it’s going to get.”

Defying the danger, a few hundred people, mostly pensioners, have returned to the off-limits “dead zone”--a Rhode Island-size area surrounded by barbed wire.

Deep in a silent forest, Irina Yashchenko, 53, weeps with joy at the arrival of rare visitors to the ghost town of Szheganka. She and her common-law husband, Ivan Khomenko, moved back to his two-room brick house in 1989 and remain the only residents of the former village of 600.

They have little but two dogs, a cat, electricity and each other. For provisions, they make occasional treks to the town of Chernobyl, which some service workers affiliated with the nuclear plant use as a temporary base.

“This is our home,” Khomenko, 58, a retired woodcutter, says with a shrug. “We don’t have enough health left to worry about radiation.”

For the 5,000 people who are bused in daily to work at Chernobyl’s two functioning reactors--another was closed after a fire--it’s a simple matter of money.

The workers in the control room of reactor No. 1, monitoring a huge bank of computers and green-screened monitors, make $500 a month. That’s 10 times the average Ukrainian income, and they are paid in coveted U.S. currency.

“There’s a little risk working here,” acknowledges shift foreman Valery Zakharov, 50, a Chernobyl worker since it began producing electricity in 1977. “But how could I not work here for that kind of money?”

The accident changed the face of nuclear power, prompting many nations to close, cancel or convert existing or planned nuclear power stations.

But money, not safety, is the overriding priority for cash-strapped Ukrainians in keeping open a plant they rely on heavily for power. They have already spent billions on Chernobyl and say they cannot afford to encase the badly cracked, 24-story-high sarcophagus, which they admit privately could cave in at any time, raising a giant cloud of radioactive particles.

In political brinkmanship that alarms nuclear safety experts, they are holding out for $4 billion in aid--more than the West wants to pay. Even if foreign donors come through, those living in the shadow of Chernobyl will be living with its deadly health and environmental legacy for years to come.

“Closing the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is a long and complex process,” Environment Minister Yuri Kostenko said. “You can’t just say, ‘Close it,’ and turn off the switch tomorrow.”