It was 25 years ago when a deadly explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet state of Ukraine led to what was then the worst nuclear disaster in history. It sent a cloud of radioactive fallout into Russia, Belarus and over a large portion of Europe. Fifty thousand people living in Chernobyl’s immediate surroundings had to be evacuated. A vast rural region became uninhabitable, and public authorities were forced to put restrictions on the sale and import of food to reduce the risk of radiation-induced cancer deaths among their populations.
Children born in the plant’s vicinity continue experiencing high levels of birth defects, especially severe brain damage. Chernobyl Heart, a 2003 documentary film by Maryann DeLeo. The film won the Best Documentary Short Subject Award at the 2004 Academy Awards.
Chernobyl is one of only two nuclear accidents to ever receive a Level 7 classification on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The other was, just recently, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power accident that occurred last month in Japan.
Jeff Patterson talking:
a month after the accident, which irradiated a huge area—and the radiation went worldwide—I was in Germany, East and West Germany, touring and lecturing. I was in Marburg, a university town much like Madison. After my lecture, the mayor of Marburg came up to me and said, “What should I tell people? I get different answers from my radiation specialists, from my medical doctors, from my engineers. I don’t know what to tell people.” And I think this is the situation today.
Two years after Chernobyl, I was in Chernobyl, and while we were touring around the plant, where they were still washing down the streets, there were men grading dirt up that was highly radioactive. They wore no respirators, no protection whatsoever. And I asked my guide, “How are you monitoring the radiation levels on these people?” And he said, “Oh, they all wear badges.” And I said, “Where’s your badge?” And he opened his coat and said, “I guess I left it at home today.” And this is exemplary of what was done after Chernobyl, where 600,000 to 800,000 workers came in and sacrificed some of their lives for the cleanup.
And the records on many of those workers are simply gone. They’ve disappeared. I spoke recently with a physicist who was involved with monitoring the radiation at the plant at that time, and he said these workers had no protection. They wore paper masks, that they often didn’t wear. And he said he’s tried to find the records in the Ukraine, and they’ve simply disappeared. And he himself did not know how much radiation he received at the time of that accident. So I think this is an example of the confusion, the difficulty in monitoring radiation, and the history of the nuclear industry, which has been one of secrecy, cover-up and minimization of the damage that occurs.
When we look at the Hiroshima data, this Hiroshima bomb was a one-time dose of radiation that occurred 65 years ago, and we’re still seeing new cancers and new deaths from that. And again, that was a one-time dose of radiation. This radiation goes on and on, because its nuclides that are put into the atmosphere are now in the ground and water and continue to expose people. So, we honestly don’t know the end of this experiment, and we’re going to have to watch it for literally hundreds of years to see what’s going to happen. I think that it’s safe to say that the results are far worse than certainly the conservative estimates.
And the other issue is, the Hiroshima data has cost billions of dollars to accumulate. And we’ve been looking at that for 65 years, and we still don’t have the end answer to that question. So, here we are with far more people exposed to continuing radiation. This is truly an experiment that we’re not going to see the end of, and that the results of which will be visited on our children and grandchildren for generations to come.
nuclear power, nuclear energy, has three poisonous Ps, and those are pollution—and we’re certainly seeing the example of that now at the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. That pollution occurs all along the fuel cycle, from the time we dig it out of the ground, the tailings that are left and expose people to radon, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to the production of fuel, and then we don’t know where to bury the waste or what to do with it. And now we’re seeing the catastrophic release of radiation once again, which happened at Kyshtym in Russia, happened in Chernobyl, and now is happening in Fukushima—and will happen again. And so, pollution is the first thing that is the poisonous P.
Second is price. And as Medvedev said—he claims that this is the cheapest form of energy. It’s by far and away the most expensive form of energy. When we figure in the results of these disasters and the cost to people’s health, the economic loss, the agricultural loss, the Ukraine, in the initial days of this, spent a sixth of their national budget on Chernobyl. And Belarus and the Ukraine are still spending five to seven percent of their national budgets every year to deal with the Chernobyl accident. If we figured all of that in to the cost of nuclear power, nuclear power becomes extremely expensive. As Dr. Sherman mentioned, the next sarcophagus that they’re proposing to build over the nuclear power plant, they’re estimating will cost $1.1 billion, and they’ve only raised $800 million for this now. It’s already three years behind time in terms of being built. And so, the question is, will this ever get done, because the cost of this is so much. The cost of building a new nuclear power plant is so expensive that, chances are, none will be built, because nobody wants to fund them.
And the third poisonous P is proliferation. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons go hand in hand. Medvedev talked about the peaceful atom that was designed by Eisenhower. Well, it’s out of the peaceful atom program that has come nuclear weapons for many countries. And we’re seeing the example of that in Iran today. So, these are deadly parts of the nuclear experiment that we are conducting today that, in my opinion, is a highly unethical experiment.
The mayor of South Miami, Florida, just wrote a letter, when, after the Fukushima accident, he was trying to find out what the evacuation plans are for South Miami, which is 16 miles from a nuclear power plant. And he, as mayor, can’t find out what will happen and feels that the plans are totally inadequate, including the plans to distribute potassium iodide. He tried to find out from the county how many tablets of potassium iodine were available, and they wouldn’t tell him.
So I think that the lesson in this is that wherever this happens in the world, it happens to us all—the radiation from Fukushima is here, we’re still experiencing radiation from Chernobyl that has gone worldwide, and so no one is isolated from these accidents—and that no matter where it occurs, whether we blame the technology in Russia, whether we blame the tsunami, that we are all totally inadequately prepared to deal with this. We are attempting to manage the unmanageable. And so, we need to rapidly move away from this and rapidly move away from nuclear weapons in the world.
Janette Sherman talking:
as a society, to say no to nuclear power, because there is no way to control it. And as Dr. Patterson points out, these catastrophes will continue, and we can’t—we, simply, as a world society, cannot deal with them. When a nuclear reactor explodes, the radiation goes around the entire hemisphere. It is not confined to where the people live—or where the accident occurred. The effects are ubiquitous across all species: that’s wild and domestic animals, birds, fish, bacteria, viruses, plants and humans. So the effects are extremely serious, and they last for generations. We’re terribly concerned about Belarus, where only 20 percent of the children are now considered healthy. So, what do you do with a society if 80 percent of your population is sick? Who are going to be the artists and the musicians and the scientists and the teachers, if your population is not well?
We need to stop the use of nuclear power. We have other sources: conservation and solar and wind and biofuels. We need the population to rise up and say, “No more nuclear.” It’s not going to work, and it will just be a matter of time before there’s yet another accident, such as occurred—is occurring at Fukushima Daiichi. We know now they still do not have this accident under control, and it’s still releasing massive quantities of isotopes. And it’s going to be a disaster for the Japanese population, but also it’s spreading around again the northern hemisphere.
in Chernobyl, the liquidators were largely recruits. They were generally healthy young men and women, generally between the ages of 18 and 39 or so. Already, by 2006, 15 percent had died, and now the data that is arriving to us is about 90 percent of the 800,000 recruits have bad health. And their children are particularly adversely affected.
Now, we don’t know if the cleanup workers in Japan are being protected or not. Certainly, the Tyvek suits are not going to protect them from external radiation. The biggest concern for the—is the inhalation and ingestion of radioisotopes, which are being released on a constant basis. We see that the cleanup workers in Japan are wearing respirators, but whether they are adequate or not, I have no idea. We’re also not being given information on the levels of radiation to which they’re exposed. Now, what they did in Chernobyl, they would send in some people to do some particularly dangerous work for maybe 15 minutes or half an hour and then take them out, because they had received a lifetime dosage. We don’t know what’s occurring in Japan, particularly, and whether the workers are being adequately protected.
It’s very, very, very important to keep adequate records on exposures and the effect of the workers and make them publicly available, certainly not by the name of the individual person, but certainly the data needs to be available and transparent so scientists can follow what is happening to these people. The problem within Chernobyl was that they released almost no data for three years, and it was very, very difficult to reconstruct what was happening. And as Dr. Patterson pointed out, many of these records have disappeared. And indeed, many records of nuclear workers in the United States have disappeared, and it has—workers have a very hard time finding what their exposures were, even when they knew what their job description was.
Chernobyl today
it’s an area 30 kilometers in circumference that is totally out of bounds to humans. And no crops are grown there. Some people have moved back in. Large areas of the earth has been scraped off, trees cut down. And all of that earth has been buried in trenches. And now, as they are attempting to build the new sarcophagus, they’re finding high levels of radiation in the ground with machinery that was buried immediately in the area. There are graveyards with tanks, buses, machines, that are highly radioactive, that are just sitting out in the open air. And interestingly enough, a recent report showed that the cesium levels around Chernobyl and in this zone and other zones have not diminished in the way that they predicted that they would. And so, they don’t know whether this is coming from cesium that’s coming up through the soil, whether it’s perhaps coming from new cesium that’s being blown into the area.
But clearly, the unknowns are far greater than the knowns in all of this. And this is an experiment that we’re carrying out with the unknowing and unconsenting irradiation of huge populations of people around the world. We’re now seeing, for example, in Japan, raising the bar, allowing children to be exposed to levels of radiation that previously were restricted for nuclear workers. And in my opinion, this is unconscionable. It’s like being in a ball game and in the seventh inning deciding that one team is losing, and so they say they’re going to change the rules in the middle of the game. These levels were set for a reason. And that’s because radiation is not good for you, and there is no safe level of radiation. And so, to now change the rules of the game, again, is another unconscionable part of this terrible, cruel, poisonous experiment that we won’t know the end result of for hundreds of years.
– from democracynow.org