“Blind Chance Sweeps The World Along”

October 1st, 2006 midwifetoad Posted in News |

ON THE NIGHT of April 25-26, during the routine shutdown of one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (about 130 kilometers north of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital), the reactor’s power suddenly increased. Significant release of steam and the subsequent reaction created hydrogen gas, which exploded, and a fire. The reactor was damaged, and there was a radioactive leak, mostly of iodine-131. The accident occurred at 1:23A.M., and by 5:00 the fire was extinguished. Two people died at the moment of the accident: automatic systems adjuster Vladimir Shashenok and nuclear plant operator Valeri Khodemchuk. About 300 people were affected by radiation, and some of them died later.

Here is the story of the Chernobyl accident as told in the pages of Soviet Life magazine. The magazine was an official publication of the Soviet Union, and puts the best possible face on the tragedy. Nevertheless, the story is poignant and quite revealing.

‘Blind chance sweeps the world along.’ Of the 41 operational reactors in the Soviet Union, chance chose the newest, which went into service in 1983 (the USSR put the world’s first reactor into operation in 1954).

“Blind chance sweeps the world along.”

It was the 152nd accident recorded at the more than 370 nuclear reactors operating in the world today. “Blind chance sweeps the world along.” Of the 41 operational reactors in the Soviet Union, chance chose one of the newest, which went into service in 1983 (the USSR put the world’s first reactor into operation in 1954).

On the night of April 25-26, during the routine shutdown of one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (about 130 kilometers north of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital), the reactor’s power suddenly increased. Significant release of steam and the subsequent reaction created hydrogen gas, which exploded, and a fire. The reactor was damaged, and there was a radioactive leak, mostly of iodine-131. The accident occurred at 1:23A.M., and by 5:00 the fire was extinguished. Two people died at the moment of the accident: automatic systems adjuster Vladimir Shashenok and nuclear plant operator Valeri Khodemchuk. About 300 people were affected by radiation, and some of them died later. An earlier fire in a similar graphite reactor at Windscale in Great Britain had raged for 12 hours, and the radiation leak had caused about 260 cases of thyroid gland cancer, 13 of which resulted in death.

U.S. experts know from the experience of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant accident how difficult it is to ascertain the causes of such incidents. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) received information about the Three Mile Island accident almost two months later. The IAEA and the governments of other countries received information about what had happened at Chernobyl on April 28.

Immediately after the Chernobyl accident, sources abroad suggested that the breakdown had occurred as a result of inadequate reactor safety precautions. After analysis, however, U.S. experts declared (according to The New York Times, May 19, 1986) that the damaged reactor had enough of the latest safety systems, systems similar to those used at American reactors.

Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. who had studied the technical documents of the Chernobyl reactor, said that the results of such a comparison could score many points for U.S. reactors but that they could show the advantage of Soviet reactors, too.

Sources abroad also suggested that the crippled reactor had had no containment system. But Dr. Edwin Zebroski, chief nuclear scientist at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, attested that the Chernobyl reactor had been inside a massive dome 200 feet long, 70 feet high and 70 feet wide. Zebroski had visited Soviet reactors and analyzed the design drawings. Assessing the sturdiness of the protective structure, he said that it had steel walls 12 feet thick, reinforced with concrete walls 6-8 feet thick.

In the opinion of many Soviet and foreign authorities, the accident and the course it assumed were unlikely, almost impossible. And yet it did happen, and it developed as no one could have predicted.

Evacuation

In the morning, access to the contaminated zone (the plant and the area around it) was barred. All those who had received radiation injuries were sent to the best clinics in Kiev and in Moscow. A plan for evacuating people from a 30 kilometer zone around the plant was immediately drawn up. There was no direct threat to the life and health of the people in this zone: The maximum level of radiation in it on April 26 was 10-15 milliroentgens per hour. Yet the authorities decided to evacuate the people.

Fire trucks are en route to Chernobyl to carry out cleanup work.

Here the advantages of organizational centralism, which is quite often sharply criticized for insufficient flexibility, came through. Easily surmounting interdepartmental barriers, the orders of officials and party leaders helped to carry out many tasks most effectively, according to a U.S. correspondent. In a very short time 2,172 buses and 1,786 trucks were provided, nearly 4,000 drivers mobilized, the reception of the evacuees in new places organized and accommodations reserved in hotels and boarding houses.

As a result, the 40,000 inhabitants of Pripyat, a town near Chernobyl, were evacuated in about three hours. It took more time to evacuate the people from villages because the farmers did not want to leave at the height of their spring work. Nevertheless, 26,000 people were evacuated from the 50 villages that were in the zone of increased radiation. As the people arrived in the new places, they were provided with housing, three free meals a day and a 200-ruble allowance. Kitchen garden plots were allotted in the villages. Most of the evacuees in the very first days went to the jobs given them by the local authorities. No one paid a single kopeck out of his or her own pocket for the evacuation.

Cars leaving the 18-mile zone around the plant are checked for radiation.

Not all of the leaders coped with the emergency situation. The conclusions, like everything linked with the accident, were quick and drastic. Two executives of a transport association were removed from their post for failing to provide work in time, to pay wages and to issue clothing to the association’s 200 evacuated workers. One of them was expelled from the Communist Party, and the other received a strict party reprimand. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. But corrections were made immediately thanks to the central leadership, which directed the entire potential to solve a twofold task: first, to eliminate the effects of the accident and then to ensure the safety of the people and provide them with the essentials.

Schools ended their classes two weeks earlier than usual, and the children immediately went off to Young Pioneer summer camps, including the best ones on the Black Sea coast. Fifteen hundred children from the accident zone soon arrived there. Their parents’ trade unions paid for their stay in the camps and their transportation. Among the first children to arrive at Artek, the most famous Black Sea children’s camp, were the daughter and son of operator Valeri Khodemchuk, who died during the accident. To help the children get over what had happened, their mother, Natalya Khodemchuk, who had worked as a pumping station operator at the plant, was put on the staff of Artek.

Neutralizing the Crippled Reactor

Local firefighting units were the first to attack the flames engulfing reactor No. 4. Dozens of fire engines soon came to their aid from Kiev and from the region. In three and a half hours 50 fire crews prevented the next reactor from catching fire and extinguished the fire in the damaged reactor.

A group of specialists flew from Moscow to Chernobyl in the morning. They were followed by a government commission, which had to make decisions without having had any experience with such accidents. The first decision was to evacuate people from the danger zone. The second was to localize the spread of radioactivity. A considerable part of the work in eliminating the consequences of the accident fell on the armed forces.

After the accident, the plant’s environs resembled a war games area-helicopters (lined inside with lead slabs) in the sky and personnel carriers (whose armor lessens exposure to radiation) on the ground. A site for helicopters was set up 12 kilometers from the plant. Throughout the day helicopter pilots, flying 200 meters above the plant, bombarded reactor No. 4 with sacks of sand, marble chips, dolomite, lead and boron to seal it off.

About 5,000 tons of such materials were dropped on the reactor’s core. The lead melted and formed a film over the hot graphite. But the 5,000-ton seal created a new danger that the reactor might crash into the water-filled bubbling pond beneath it. The water had to be removed immediately. Hundreds of fire engines now participated in this operation. But the task was fully accomplished only after divers had opened the special gate valves in the pond.

The light YAK-40 makes regular trips to the Chernobyl zone (crew commander Fyodor Goruainov, right) to seed clouds with granulated carbonic acid and silver iodide to control rain. New machines and equipment continue to arrive in the accident zone. Technicians conduct regular checks of radiation within the 18-mile zone around Chernobyl.

After the graphite rods had been cooled, ending the danger of a chain reaction. workers began to lay a concrete foundation from below to prevent a meltdown of the reactor’s core through the ground if the uranium heated again. Preparations began for walling up the reactor with concrete from all sides, “burying” the source of radiation in a concrete “sepulcher.” Unlike the sepulchers of the Egyptian Pharaohs, this one will be under constant control, including automatic regulation of the processes taking place inside the reactor, for many years.

From the ground, on a deblocking machine, soldiers using a manipulator repeatedly extracted pieces of graphite from the reactor itself. But in general more use was made of remote-control equipment. The Chelyabinsk Tractor Works, for example, delivered a 19-ton bulldozer via an IL-76 plane The bulldozer was fitted out with radioelectronic equipment in Kiev and brought to Chernobyl, where it helped rake up radioactive debris.

Before the reactor’s burial it was carefully examined by IAEA Director General Hans Blix and the IAEA Nuclear Safety Department head, Maurice Rosen. Both were invited to the USSR by the Soviet Government. From Moscow they flew to Kiev, and from there to Chernobyl. where they flew by helicopter to the reactor and examined it through the destroyed roof from a distance of 800 meters.

Using a personal dosimeter, Blix established that during his trip to the USSR he had received a dose of radiation roughly equivalent to that of a dental X-ray. Rosen compared the magnitude of his radiation-10 milliroentgens-with the dose of radioactivity an airline passenger receives during two flights from Europe to America.

Workers are checked for radiation before leaving the plant area.

Doctors

For doctors the accident and its aftermath were both torture and an education. They had previously known about radiation sickness only from lectures and textbooks. It was torture because after the accident they saw for the first time severe cases of radiation sickness, some of which they could not help. It was an education because when they faced the real and imagined consequences of the accident, they had to quickly mobilize all resources and reorganize all work.

Special departments were set up at hospitals where victims of the accident and its aftermath were brought, and the hospitals themselves were promptly supplied with special equipment. Their personnel was reinforced, mainly by experts in laboratory analysis. Nearly 230 additional four-person medical teams were formed in the Ukraine, and almost 1,900 doctors and paramedical personnel worked in neighboring Byelorussia.

Streets of towns and villages near Chernobyl are regularly sprayed with water.

The Ministry of Health of the USSR decided to check for radiation everyone who complained about their health. During the first three weeks after the accident. nearly 220.000 people were checked for radiation in the Ukraine. Only workers at the nuclear power plant and people who participated in eliminating the aftermath of the accident required hospitalization.

While a great number of people were being given medical checkups. doctors in clinics fought to save the lives of the patients with acute radiation sickness. American doctors Robert Gale and Paul Tarasaki gave them a lot of help. By the time they arrived in Moscow. Soviet doctors had performed six bone marrow transplants. Altogether 19 transplants have been made.

Angelina Guskova, head of a department at Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. where the first and most severe cases of radiation sickness were brought, said that no country in the world could cope with this situation single-handedly. There isn’t a country that has enough experience to do so.

Banks of the Pripyat River were built up to prevent contamination of the water.

Doctors and other specialists developed procedures to check foodstuffs. Milk was tested three times-on the farm, at the dairy and before delivery to shops. Nearly 100 food products were tested every day. Special attention was paid to the markets, even in cites situated far from the affected zone. Most markets sell products not only processed on nearby farms and grown in nearby fields, but also brought from other regions of the country. Every vender, no matter from where, was checked. Because it was spring, market trade was growing fast. so the controllers were busy day and night.

A total of 2.827 checks were made in Moscow’s markets on May 11. All products were clean. On the next day 3,501 checks were made. and only two batches of contaminated merchandise were discovered. On May 13 inspectors made 4,621 checks and banned only one batch. On May 14, 2,726 checks were made and seven batches banned. On May 15, 3,123 checks were made and six batches banned. On May 16. 2,920 checks were made and three batches banned. On May 17, 3,071 checks were made and one batch banned. On May 18, 3,001 checks were made and not a single batch was banned. On May 19, 3,017 checks were made and nothing was banned On May 20, 3,008 checks were made and one batch was banned.

Food products and equipment, such as delivery trucks, are checked for possible contamination.

Meanwhile, a large-scale decontamination operation was conducted in the 30-kilometer zone around the plant. The zone was divided into three sectors. Radiation levels on the surface and in the air were monitored several times a day. Every day they fell by five per cent. Decontamination teams comprised leading experts. most of them volunteers. Early in June residents of some villages in the 30-kilometer zone were allowed to return home.

Will the accident affect this years harvest in the Ukraine and Byelorussia? Oleg Shchepin, First Deputy Minister of Health, responded to that question. Iodine-131, the main radioactive substance released from the crippled reactor, has a half-life of eight days. As plants grow. they absorb about one-tenth of one per cent of radioactivity. This amount is so small that it presents no health hazard. By the time the new crop is harvested, it will be absolutely safe.

In Minsk, capital of Byelorussia, Gina Zhuk checks strawberries with a dosimeter.

As regards radioactive dust, which cows might ingest with grass, experts believe that there will be no radioactivity if their milk is processed into butter or cheese. So the accident will have little effect on the harvest in the Ukraine.

While cleanup work was in full swing in the 30 kilometer zone, farmwork usual for that time of the year went on outside it. Experts played safe, however. More than 800 laboratories monitored the condition of soil throughout the republic. They also constantly monitored radiation levels in the air. This job was done by 188 fixed and 38 mobile monitoring stations and specially equipped planes.

Conditions remain normal in Kiev, along the main street, Kreshchatik.

To prevent radioactive fallout from being washed down into the Pripyat and the Dnieper rivers, their banks were shored up. The aircraft monitoring the situation in the air prevented rainfall over the affected zone. Light planes using silver iodide induced rain far from the area, while heavy aircraft using granulated carbonic acid dispersed clouds moving toward Chernobyl. In spite Of heavy cloudiness in the Ukraine in May. there was practically no rain in Chernobyl in the first month after the accident.

Water in rivers and in open reservoirs was examined every hour, and three times a day the Ukrainian Ministry of Health issued bulletins on the quality of the water. Radiation in the water never exceeded normal levels. Radiation levels in the air in Kiev, with its population of nearly 2.5 million, were always normal, too.

Facts and Rumors

Late in May a group of foreign ambassadors arrived in Kiev on a trip organized by the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs to acquaint there will, the progress trade in eliminating the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. Alexander Lyashko, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukraine, told the ambassadors that the radiation level in Kiev was 0.18 milliroentgens pet hour. American Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Prize winner, said that passengers flying from Europe to America received a larger dose of radiation that the residents of Kiev and its environs.

“Everything we saw and heard from witnesses reassured us, and I am going to report to my government that the situation in Kiev has stabilized and that there is no danger to people’s life,” said Federico S. Bravo, Argentina’s ambassador, a doctor by training.

A worker in protective clothing sprays buildings near the plant with a decontaminant.

Not everyone was reassured, however. Three days later the government newspaper Izvestia published a letter by Jörg Kastl, Ambassador to the USSR from the Federal Republic of Germany, Kastl wrote that the Soviet Government could not evaluate the scale of the accident or control the disaster in Chernobyl, and that the FRG and other countries were concerned about the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident. In a comment following the ambassadors letter. Izvestia quoted an official of the FRG chancellery as saying that the accident at Chernobyl created no threat to the life and health of the population of the Federal Republic.

Neither Izvestia nor Kastl knew at the time that an accident leading to the release of radioactivity had occurred at a nuclear power plant at Hamm, the FRG. and that it was followed by an accident at the nuclear research center at Karlsruhe, as a result of which radiation levels in the area increased by 20 times. Later Italian Civil Defense Minister Giuseppe Zamberletti admitted that the increase in radiation levels near Milan. earlier thought to be the result of the Chernobyl accident, might be the result of the accident at Hamm.

While Kastl was writing a letter to Izvestia, Theo Sommer, publisher of the newspaper Die Zeit, interviewed Hans Blix upon his return from the USSR.

Conditions remain normal in Kiev, at the Bessarabia Market.

“Did you get the impression that after the initial confusion the Russians expertly rectified the situation? Did they do everything right? Were they fast enough?” Sommer asked.

“My answer is yes, Blix replied. We had the impression that the people who fought the accident and its aftermath have a lot of control and authority, and they could do everything they considered necessary.”

“Most of the preventive measures taker in Western Europe were unnecessary,” Blix said.

Two days earlier, when asked about the consequences of the Chernobyl accident for other countries. Morris Rosen told Der Spiegel magazine that the dose of radioactivity received by the population of neighboring countries would have no serious consequences.

Panic continued to grow in the West, however. Rumors circulated that tens of thousands of people may eventually die as a result of the Chernobyl accident. No wonder Dr. Gale wrote in the Los Angeles Times late in May that one should exercise caution in determining the medical consequences of the Chernobyl accident. The flood of contradictory views and speculation about the accident proved that Dr. Gale was right when he said that one would not gain much but could lose a great deal by making rash judgments and spreading rumors.

“There Is No Alien Woe”

In the early 1970s Konstantin Simonov, a leading Soviet poet, wrote a poem with this title. The phrase is now a proverb. And proverbs express a nation’s spirit as truthfully as one’s eyes express one’s soul. The newspapers paraphrased this proverb for their mail concerning the accident at Chernobyl.

The number of letters snowballed from day to day. On May 18 Pravda had to report that applications to go to Chernobyl should be addressed not to its offices.. but to Soyuzatomenergo, 7 Kitaisky Proyezd, Moscow. Izvestia had to remind its readers where to send donations for the victims fund.

Individuals and collectives alike offered their help. The offers came from all over the country, even from places that could in no way be affected by the accident.

“I’m ready to do anything I can to help eliminate the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant,” wrote K. Arustamov, a mechanical engineer for gas turbines, pumps and compressors from Moscow.

“I am a physicist, aged 30, healthy and fit for any job. During my vacations I want to work without pay at Chernobyl to wipe out the effects of the accident. I am ready to go at once.”Paskushov. from Grozny.

“Do they need a diesel locomotive driver at Chernobyl?”—Mutchayev, from Kandalaksha.

From the town of Alagir, a team of bulldozer and excavator operators asked to be sent to Chernobyl.

Evacuees from the danger zone were resettled according to plan. But even if there had been no such plan, they would not have been left without a roof over their head, judging from the letters to the newspapers. ”Prepared to put up any family. Waiting for reply,” the Nuzhdovs from Alma-Ata wrote to Izvestia. In Uzbekistan, Markhamat Aminova, head of a department at the republic’s university, told the district party committee that she, her brothers and their father were ready to accommodate up to 25 children of school age.

Donations were another way of expressing sympathy with Chernobyl victims. The State Bank opened a special account, No. 904, and deposited the contributions that poured in, from a few rubles to several thousand. Teams and other work collectives sent bonuses they had received. Sometimes there were receipts for work done on Sundays. In May the popular actor Mikhail Ulyanov, pop singer Alla Pugachova and others gave a concert in the Olympic Sports Complex attended by 30,000 spectators. All the proceeds went to Account No. 904. The next day Moscow Radio announced that the well-known poets Rimma Kazakova, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky were arranging a reading at the Literary Club. with receipts to be donated to the Chernobyl Relief Fund. At the same time Literaturnaya gazeta carried a letter in which Archimandrite losif Pustoutov and Chairman of the Executive of the Trinity Church of Moscow Region M. Rogachev said that, on behalf of their congregation and executive, they were donating 5,000 rubles to help eliminate the consequences of the Chernobyl accident.

Three days after Izvestia’s report about Account No. 904, it had grown from 6.5 million rubles to 38.4 million.

Certainly those who contributed money or offered hospitality to evacuees—whether they are members of the Communist Party or not. whether they are workers or writers. atheists or believers—they were all perfectly well aware that their money or housing weren’t essential. They knew that the state would provide everything necessary and would not leave the victims in the lurch. But knowing that, they still wanted to help. It is probably not for nothing that the expression “there is no alien woe” has become a proverb in the Soviet Union.

So what about nuclear power now? This was the question that the accident posed for the public, scientists and the country’s leadership. The public reaction was mixed. Some of the letters written to Pravda were against nuclear power. The newspaper therefore approached Academician Valeri Legasov, deputy director of the Institute of Atomic Energy, and asked him to comment on this controversial issue. He was one of the scientists who immediately flew to Chernobyl to deal with the accident.

Legasov is convinced that nuclear power plants are the crowning achievement of power engineering and that the future of our civilization is inconceivable without nuclear power. That is not the professional narcissism of an atomic scientist. A witness of the April 26 drama, he is not inclined to minimize the problems raised by the accident. “We must draw all the lessons from it, technical, organizational and psychological. People died in the accident, and tremendous material and moral damage was done, but I believe that this tribulation will make nuclear engineering more dependable.”

Perhaps these words “more dependable” may seem out of place after what happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. But they make scientific and statistical sense. According to scientists, the probability of accidents at large industrial systems, nuclear power plants included, is less than in simple systems, although if anything does happen, the consequences are graver and take longer to eliminate. Besides, statistics show, as Hans Blix said, that we have the experience of 4,000 nuclear power years. Nuclear power has to develop. Soviet scientists believe, and nothing will stop its advance. True, additional measures should be taken to guarantee greater safety and to prevent accidental breakdowns, scientists said at a press conference on Chernobyl.

Conditions remain normal in Kiev, along the main street, Kreshchatik.

The Soviet leadership believes that future world economics is hard to imagine without nuclear power development. The indisputable lesson of Chernobyl, said Mikhail Gorbachev, is that the reliability and safety of nuclear equipment have assumed paramount importance.

Safety is being enhanced now at all nuclear power plants in the Soviet Union, whether operational or under construction. The Soviet Union believes that leading nuclear power countries should cooperate within the IAEA to develop an economically viable and at the same time more foolproof reactor of a new generation. In short, reliability and safety in nuclear engineering today have top priority.

Gorbachev also proposed that international conditions favoring the safe development of nuclear power be created, based on close cooperation of the countries concerned. He further suggested that the United Nations and its specialized agencies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), be more closely involved in the safe development of peaceful nuclear activities. On behalf of the IAEA. Maurice Rosen described this proposal as one that merits the closest examination.

The support expressed for this Soviet proposal by a number of IAEA countries raises hopes that countries of different social systems might join their forces and make nuclear power safer, with no accidents at nuclear power plants troubling the world. The outlook would be more optimistic if the other Soviet proposal, on ending nuclear tests (none have been conducted in the USSR for a year), were supported by all countries possessing nuclear weaponry. That would offer real hope for preventing the absolute accident—a global nuclear disaster.