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Life and death in Chernobyl's giant shadow

DPA, CHERNOBYL
Tuesday, Apr 25, 2006, Page 9

A Geiger counter crackles beneath the sign to the Lenin atomic power station at Chernobyl. Two decades after the reactor explosion the grassy spot emits 500 times the normal urban radiation level.

While visitors are alarmed, veterans working here shrug off the rays as an inconvenience as they maintain one of the world's most infamous objects.

"Radiation is a serious matter, but for me its effects are like water of a duck's back," says Russian scientist Eduard Pazukhin, deputy head of the radiation safety department of the Ukrittya center which monitors the devastated site for the Ukrainian government.

The 70-year-old insists he is in good health despite half a century of tackling Soviet nuclear disasters, including 20 years in Chernobyl where he works mainly on the destroyed fourth reactor, which he says he knows "as well as my own apartment."

But on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the disaster tomorrow, he and others with experience of this landmark event in history are far from blase about claims by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency that the damage has been exaggerated.

"This is an outrageous point of view. The Chernobyl accident was a huge tragedy for human life and for civilization as a whole," Pazukhin adds, his ready smile vanishing over what many see as a bid to downplay Chernobyl's legacy as global demand for nuclear power grows.

LIFE AMID DEATH

The UN forecasts 4,000 eventual deaths from the accident compared with independent estimates of up to 200,000 deaths in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia between 1990 and 2004.

Many people are thought to have died prematurely because of the accident, from cancers but also many illnesses related to reduced immunity and damage to internal organs and bodily systems.

While the row continues it is business as usual inside the 30km-wide dead zone around the now decommissioned plant, which paradoxically hums with activity. Today some 7,000 people work here, many engaged in the key task of maintaining the concrete sarcophagus on the shattered reactor.

Spending only half of each month in the zone to reduce health risks, almost half are based in Chornobyl, the Ukrainian name for the town located 13km away from the station.

But its shops, neatly tended flower beds and swept roads can't hide rows of crumbling houses abandoned during the evacuation of the 12,000 inhabitants nine days after the explosion.

More than 2 million people were displaced in total -- 200,000 of them permanently -- as the Soviet government acknowledged the extent of the disaster. Many were given only a few hours to pack their things.

Lost and often unwelcome in the towns they were moved to, a few thousand mainly elderly people later returned to their villages in the second zone outside the inner, 10km-wide, total exclusion zone. Around 320 remain today.

RETURNEES

"I was born here, where else could I go?" said Maria Shulan, a sprightly 76-year-old from the village of Parishiv, located 17km southeast of the plant.

She is one of 18 people left from the original 1,000 and lives on home-grown produce. Convinced the accident was divine punishment for blighting the land with the station, she dismisses health concerns.

Here the Geiger counter shows the radiation level to be slightly above normal, reflecting the checkered nature of the contamination.

In some places people are strongly advised to stay off the grass, which absorbs radioactivity, elsewhere it is clear because changing winds spared the area 20 years ago.

Other returnees include Father Nikolai, the Orthodox priest in Chornobyl who ministers to the locals and the workers.

"During a visit here five years ago he made a snap decision to come back and restore the church," his wife Lyubov Yakushina said.

The priest also conducts funerals for former residents of the zone whose remains are brought here for burial.

A short drive northeast reveals the chimneys of the plant on the horizon. After another police checkpoint, visitors pass the fifth and six reactor blocks that were left uncompleted in 1986.

At the fourth block, workers in protective suits hang on ropes and trestles on the 59m-high sarcophagus wall. They perform maintenance that Pazukhin says could safely extend the shroud's life for at least 10 years, ample time for the construction of a planned replacement around 2010.

CONSTANT MONITORING

Technicians constantly monitor the state of the sarcophagus, a giant construction of girders and concrete that was built in six months after the accident. They use remote-control robots to gauge conditions inside and to probe the main mystery, the location of 18.1 tonnes missing from the reactor's original 181.4 tonnes of fuel.

Most set hard in a glassy mass beneath the reactor and the rest flowed deeper into its foundations or was emitted into the atmosphere. But Pazukhin's team believes no more than 4 percent of the fuel was spewed from the exploding block and vehemently reject claims that all 181.4 tonnes were lost.

Such disputes mean little for the town of Pripyat, located 3km from the plant, once home to 46,000 workers and their families before it was evacuated for ever on day two of the crisis.

It is now a ghost town, looted and decayed, still carrying a giant hammer and sickle on a central building and painted Communist slogans on house walls promising a bright future under the party of Lenin.
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