TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429202.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 130 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 64

Who Knows How Many Will Die?


In a stunning new book, a Soviet nuclear expert details
Chernobyl's causes and catastrophic toll

By JANICE CASTRO -- Reported by James Carney/Moscow and Jerome
Cramer/Washington


    The people of Pripyat had no way of knowing that their
small Ukrainian town was dying that morning as they gazed at the
ruddy glow over Chernobyl reactor No. 4 some 2 1/2 miles away.
It was a bright spring Saturday, April 26, 1986. A townsman
came in from sunning himself on a roof, exclaiming that he had
never seen anything like it, he had turned brown in no time at
all. He had what would later be known as a nuclear tan. A few
hours afterward, the man was taken away in an ambulance,
convulsed with uncontrollable vomiting. Soon many of his
neighbors were coughing, throwing up and complaining of
headaches and a metallic taste in their mouth.

    During the night, in the worst nuclear power disaster
ever, a catastrophic series of explosions had shattered the
reactor, blowing the roof off the containment chamber. Firemen
had extinguished the initial fire but could not quench the
combustion of the molten core that was now spewing 50 tons of
radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Despite the lush
beauty of the springtime scene, everything for miles around was
drenched with lethal radiation.

    The full story of the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath
may never be known. Soviet officials have managed to keep most
of the details secret. But in The Truth About Chernobyl,
nuclear physicist and former Chernobyl chief engineer Grigori
Medvedev gives a searing account of the accident. His book,
published in the Soviet Union two years ago, will be released
in English this week by Basic Books to coincide with the
disaster's fifth anniversary.

    Medvedev, who helped investigate the disaster, interviewed
dozens of plant officials and workers, many of whom later died
of radiation poisoning. One sobering conclusion: it could easily
happen again (the Soviet Union has 16 other reactors of the
Chernobyl design). And in the U.S.? Because America has no such
reactors, and because the accident resulted from a breathtaking
level of ineptitude, ignorance and criminal negligence,
Americans have little reason to fear a similar occurrence.

    Many key plant managers and technicians at Chernobyl knew
nothing about nuclear technology. Patronage held sway over
professionalism when it came to filling top jobs that carried
prestige and good pay. The accident, ironically, occurred during
a safety exercise, when incompetent managers exposed the core,
depriving it of vital cooling water.

    What Medvedev calls the "conspiracy of silence" that had
cloaked the Soviet nuclear power program in secrecy and lies for
35 years added to the human and environmental cost. In a
country where nuclear accidents had never been reported, the
pressure to cover up the monumental disaster at Chernobyl was
enormous. Plant managers misinformed government officials,
insisting that the reactor was intact. Even as the radioactive
cloud was spreading over thousands of square miles of Europe,
Soviet bureaucrats were still denying the accident. At the same
time, Moscow bosses quashed early requests by Chernobyl
officials to evacuate the area, dooming many compatriots.

    The scene Medvedev describes in the hours after the
explosions is straight out of Dante. While fire fighters,
engineers and others heroically exposed themselves to massive
doses of radiation as they tried to contain the damage,
Chernobyl's bosses moaned, wrung their hands and did little
else. Meanwhile, all night, as the reactor core blazed, local
residents calmly fished in the cooling pond just outside,
watching the spectacle, oblivious to the danger.

    No one had any way of estimating how much radiation
exposure the Chernobyl workers suffered, since all the measuring
instruments at the plant had gone off the scale. Nor did Pripyat
doctors know much about treating radiation sickness. The windows
at the clinic were left open as the fire roared a few miles
away. The fallout was wafting in like sunlight, settling over
everything. The doctors themselves were being poisoned: patients
were emanating radiation.

    The damage still grows. The Soviet government has compiled
a registry of 576,000 potential health victims who may contract
cancers and other diseases as a result of radiation exposure.
But some top officials think at least 4 million people will be
affected, most in the western U.S.S.R. but some as distant as
Germany and Sweden. Radiation levels remain extremely high in
parts of Belorussia, the Ukraine and the Russian republic.

    Former Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut, who won three gold
medals at the 1972 Munich Games, still lives in her Belorussian
hometown of Minsk, 180 miles from Chernobyl. Part of the region
is heavily contaminated with radiation, and she tells of how
children learn about nature at special exhibits. "This is a
bird," says the teacher, showing them plastic models. "This is
a tree." In an area long known for its wild mushrooms, berries,
flowers and the beauty of its forests, the children are no
longer allowed to go into the woods.


________________________________________________________________
    How likey is it that a nuclear power accident like Chernobyl
will occur in this country?

          Very likely             16%
          Somewhat likely         38%
          Somewhat unlikely       25%
          Very unlikely           17%


    [From a telephone poll of 1,000 American adults taken for
TIME/CNN on April 10-11 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling
error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.]