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Thursday, December 14, 2000

Pulling the plug at Chernobyl

Fourteen years after one of its reactors exploded, the Chernobyl power plant is closing. The world may breathe a sigh of relief, writes Ian Traynor, but the locals are far from happy.

Six weeks after the explosion at Chernobyl spewed clouds of radioactive dust into the skies over Europe in April 1986, Sasha Novikov packed up his meagre belongings in what was then Leningrad and headed for a new life of danger and adventure on the nuclear frontline.

The nuclear physicist was 21 years old, just graduated and ambitious. He didn't think twice. "It was a war situation here at Chernobyl and we were the soldiers called to serve," he says. "Live work, dangerous work. So many people died. So many people got sick. But there's such a thing as patriotism and professional duty. And now? After all that effort, after all that suffering, after all the money that's been spent on making this place safe, they're closing it down. That's politics," he spits in disgust.

Environmentally, technologically and politically, Chernobyl's impact was, and continues to be, huge. The flat marshlands in Ukraine, north of Kiev, near the Belarus border, were chosen by the geriatric Soviet leadership in the '70s to be the site of the world's biggest nuclear power plant, a luminous symbol of communist progress and superiority.

But when a half-baked experiment at the station's fourth reactor backfired at 1.24am on April 26, 1986, the atomic explosion and the reactor meltdown not only instantly vaporised Valery Khodimchuk, the night-shift charge hand at reactor No4, but terrified Europe, shocked the world, corroded public confidence in nuclear power everywhere, and hammered several large nails into the coffin in which the Soviet Union would be buried a few years later.

Igor Oleynich was on the night shift next door at reactor No3 that night. "I was the only person in the reactor room. It filled with smoke instantly; within five seconds I was getting trapped. I ran outside and watched the explosion. It was awesome. We didn't know what a nuclear accident was. Some of us wanted to go in on kamikaze missions to get Khodimchuk's body out. No-one could have survived more than 15 seconds."

Almost 15 years on, with $US300 million ($550 million) spent on patching up the station, hundreds of millions more pledged to entomb the stricken reactor anew, and years of Western pressure on the Ukrainians, Chernobyl is finally to be closed for good tomorrow. (Indeed, only one of its four reactors is still operating. After the explosion at reactor No4 in 1986, two more reactors were closed in 1991 and 1996.)

The world will breathe a mighty sigh of relief. But for the 6,000 people who take a sealed commuter train through the 30-kilometre exclusion zone every day to put on their turquoise suits, pick up their personal radiation dosimeters and go to work at Chernobyl, the closure is a disaster equal to April 1986. They are frightened and furious - not at having to work in what is perhaps the most toxic environment in Europe, but at the prospect of losing their jobs.

If you think Chernobyl is bad, says Oleg Goloskokov, the plant's assistant general director, try elsewhere in the Russian nuclear industry. "I came here in 1989 from Siberia. I've got two kids and my wife and I took a conscious decision. There are definite risks and there are really dirty zones. But I worked at Tomsk and Chelyabinsk. There was a terrible accident there in 1957. It's very dangerous, very polluted. And we wanted to get away from the nine-month winters. It's much better, much safer here."

Ustina Rudnichenko is even more stoical. In the hamlet of Opachichi, a few kilometres from the station and well inside the exclusion zone, the 84-year-old peasant woman lives alone with her chickens, her plum-brandy still and her outhouse piled with home-grown potatoes, garlic, pumpkins and pears. More than 100,000 people were belatedly evacuated from the zone after the disaster. Rudnichenko is one of the 600 or so mainly elderly peasants who have since returned illegally to their native villages to see out their last years. "My husband's dead, my children refuse to visit me. I'm very lonely," she says. "But I belong here. I'm not moving. This is where I was born. What is there to be afraid of? Death?"

Her countryside is enchanting, thickly wooded and unspoilt, at least to the eye. You can't see or smell radioactive contamination. After nearly 15 years of lying untouched, the no-go zone has become a bizarre safe haven for wildlife, plants and grasses.

"The exclusion zone has become a giant laboratory for natural research," says Anatoly Nosovsky, a former Chernobyl engineer now running a US-funded regional research centre. "We don't understand the impact of radionuclides on nature, and, apart from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can try to find out here."

There is an experimental dairy farm where cows - named Uranium, Alpha, Beta and Gamma - are put through their paces. Their milk is fed to pigs to observe the effects of contaminated milk. Plant research includes observing the extent of genetic mutation in strains of wheat grown on irradiated soil.

Rudnichenko and her fellow villagers are oblivious to the dangers, eating perch from the rivers and collecting mushrooms - especially hazardous - in autumn. But at 84, she is lively, articulate and alert. "We get lots of promises, but we never get any help."

And despite the batteries of statistics and the endless research into the impact of Chernobyl, the human cost of the disaster is less than clear. In the days that followed the blast, 31 emergency workers died. The years since have seen an alarming rise in thyroid cancer among children in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus, with cases running at almost 100 times the normal rate. One worker who loads fuel rods into reactor No3, and who asks not to be named, says that he sent his 10-year-old daughter's medical data to the West for analysis and fears she will not live to be an adult. "I lost 12 of my friends and I've seen so much death and suffering," he says. "I don't think about my own health. I don't have the right. But I haven't told anyone here about my daughter."

Those who claim to have suffered from the disaster run into millions, but such figures are manipulated politically in Ukraine and Belarus. Three million people are categorised in Ukraine as "liquidators", the term for those who battled to contain the fallout to qualify for paltry government benefits. But Ukraine is broke, sunk in corruption. The past few months have seen strikes, demonstrations and hunger strikes in Ukraine, Moscow and Belarus in protest at the non-receipt of promised benefits. By contrast, Western engineers and consultants working at Chernobyl can earn monthly five-figure salaries and, health permitting, can look forward to an early, well-heeled retirement.

The West has pledged more than $US700 million to erect a new sarcophagus around reactor No4 by 2015, but the plant managers complain that most of the money will go to the big Western nuclear engineering firms contracted to do the work. The project is urgent and extremely perilous. The existing sarcophagus was improvised after the catastrophe when helicopters dropped sand and concrete onto the smouldering reactor and huge remote-controlled cranes smothered the lot in hundreds of tonnes of thick sheet steel. Beneath the hulking battleship-grey containment there now lurks 200 tonnes of radioactive lava, poison, dust and debris, with radiation levels four times higher than lethal. The vehicles, hoisting equipment and helicopters - 12,000 items in total, and all highly contaminated - are dumped in a large metal graveyard a few kilometres from the station. More tall cranes and the red walls for the prospective fifth and sixth reactors stand frozen in time, relics of when construction was abandoned in 1986.

"The sarcophagus beams are not stable, the supports are weak. There is damp, rain and corrosion," says Anatoly Gora, chief engineer of the entombment project, who has worked at Chernobyl since 1976, the year before the first of the four reactors was started up. "We still haven't decided on the new type of containment, but we've been preparing for 2 years. Nothing like this has ever been tried before. It's a one-off project."

The existing sarcophagus could not be welded or screwed down because the work was too dangerous, so there are gaps big enough to crawl through - and more than big enough for the radiation to seep through unseen.

"The situation is getting worse," says Oleg Goloskokov. "There were 200 tonnes of nuclear fuel in the reactor when it exploded. About 3 per cent of that was expelled in the blast. The rest is still inside, including 30 tonnes of radioactive dust. The sarcophagus is not sealed. A lot of snow and rain gets in - up to 3,000 cubic metres of water every year. There's a chance the roof could cave in. A highly radioactive solution of water, plutonium and uranium is constantly leaking out.

"It's a problem we have not solved, controlling the water and the dust. The nuclear fuel has to be extracted, controlled and buried. Otherwise there could be another accident. But that's a very difficult problem and it has never been attempted anywhere before."

Chain-smoking Kent cigarettes in his spacious office, Vitaly Tolstonogov, the Chernobyl director, glances up from working through a pile of papers with his expensive fountain pen and snorts: "The end? You think Chernobyl's closure is the end? It's only the beginning. A political decision has been taken to close us down. But that does not solve the problems here. We'll solve the problems eventually. It's just a question of how long it takes and how much money it costs."

But that is little comfort to Sasha Novikov. The nuclear physicist, who is married with two children, expects to be among the 3,000 people to lose their jobs tomorrow, along with his salary of $US250 a month: "We were heroes back then in the war. Now they've no use for us."

Novikov delivers a bitter and mischievous grin. "I suppose I can always go and work for Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein. They're always looking for people like me and the money's a lot better."

The Guardian

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-- Cave Man (caves@are.us), December 13, 2000

Answers

Subject: Pulling the plut at Chernobyl

What's a plut?

-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), December 13, 2000.

Whats a plut? hee hee...rofl.

ahh, leave cavey alone now, he has been doing some good posts re: gas and electricity.

Thanks Cavedude.

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), December 13, 2000.

Uncle Bob,

If you spell "plut" backwards you get "tulp". If you ad an "i" between the l and p, you get "tulip". Therefore they are pulling tulips out of a radioactive sarcophagus. Make sense?

-- Cave Man (caves@are.us), December 13, 2000.

sarcophagus um, what IS it? um, cavedude, can you tell me?

Um, thanks and passes cavey an alabama slammer, here ya go.

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), December 13, 2000.

"plut" = plutonium

-- Pu239 (U@Np.Pu), December 13, 2000.

Sumer,

Sarcophagus is a 35 cent word for concrete coffin.

sarcophagus:

stone coffin. The original term is of doubtful meaning; Pliny explains that the word denotes a coffin of limestone from the Troad (the region around Troy) which had the property of dissolving the body quickly (Greek sarx, "flesh"; phagein, "to eat"). This explanation is questionable; religious and folkloristic ideas may have been involved in calling a coffin a body eater. The word came into general use as the name for a large coffin in imperial Rome and is now used as an archaeological term.

-- Cave Man (caves@are.us), December 13, 2000.

Oh (perks up on barstool) ok.

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!

Passes the bong takes a long inhale and falls to the floor. :-0

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), December 13, 2000.

UB:

What does plut mean? Go to: expage.com/plut

Your answer is there.

Best Wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1x4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), December 13, 2000.