Feature
Chernobyl’s ghosts
by Bruce Gabites
As New Zealand weighs up its future power-generation options, the fallout from the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986 is a grim reminder of what can go wrong.
The armed guard glares over the paperwork and asks something in rapid-fire Russian that I don’t understand. Our driver nervously lights a cigarette and shuffles off to the far side of the road. There are problems with our permits.
Like something out of a Cold War movie, this checkpoint seals off the 2600 square-kilometre “exclusion zone” surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986.
Twenty years of silent radioactive decay have now made the area safe for short visits. But you still risk your life visiting Chernobyl today. Not from the fallout, which will be releasing radioactivity for hundreds of years, but from our Ukrainian driver. Before we reached the checkpoint, we had been speeding down the middle of the road and just avoided a collision with oncoming traffic by a last-second swerve. There are no seatbelts and the van door has an alarming habit of flying open without warning.
As you drive into the town of Chernobyl, the apartment blocks have the haunted post-apocalyptic look that you’d expect in this supposed nuclear wasteland. But then I spot washing hanging on one of the balconies and there’s a man weed-eating a grass verge. Yuri, our guide, explains that about three and a half thousand workers now live in the town – 20 kilometres from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Most of them are involved in decontamination work. “The pay isn’t even particularly good,” he says, “but most of them can’t find work anywhere else.”
In more contaminated areas, entire villages were bulldozed and buried to ensure that their residents never returned. “If people moved back, next thing they’d be growing and eating their produce. With the amount of radioactivity in the soil, this is just not possible,” says Yuri.
From 150m away, Chernobyl reactor number four captures your gaze for a long time. It’s one of the most famous yet least visited buildings in the world. For 10 days after the accident, this reactor burnt out of control, spewing several hundred Hiroshima bombs’ worth of radioactivity into the air. The fallout drifted over much of Europe and eventually spread throughout the northern hemisphere.
An enormous concrete structure – “the Sarcophagus” – surrounds the reactor, sealing it off. It took 90,000 workers and $US6 billion to construct. To limit exposure to the extreme levels of radioactivity, workers’ shifts were short. Some were as brief as 90 seconds, which was just enough time to run in and hurl a chunk of radioactive debris back into the reactor core.
In the days after April 26, there was a real risk that the core would reach critical mass, turning it into a nuclear bomb. The fire had to be put out and the reactor sealed, but there was no way to do this without immense personal risk to those involved. Helicopter pilots flew into the radioactive plume above the reactor, dumping sand and chemicals onto the fire, until they were too weak or nauseous from radiation sickness to hold the controls.
The first fire-fighters on the scene, who survived for only a few days, were buried in lead-lined coffins, their bodies effectively toxic nuclear waste. Their hospital beds absorbed so much radiation that later patients increased their radioactive exposure after lying in the beds.
The buses used to transport workers to the site absorbed dangerous levels of radioactivity and were eventually dumped in what’s known as the “Vehicle Graveyard” – a field about a kilometre square, where along with thousands of other “hot” vehicles they now lie rusting in rows among the long grass. Surrounded by barbed wire and warning signs, this vast graveyard gives some sense of scale to the massive disaster: there must be several billion dollars’ worth of vehicles here.
Three kilometres from the Chernobyl reactor is the ghost town of Pripyat. A rusting hammer-and-sickle sign hangs outside the town’s former Communist Party headquarters, which, as with the other buildings here, has the appearance of being hit by a bomb.
A day and a half after the meltdown, Pripyat’s entire population of 50,000 was evacuated in a fleet of 1200 buses. It took just four hours. “They were told to take money and clothes for three days. They never returned,” says Yuri.
Four-metre trees grow from cracks in the road. In Pripyat, you can imagine what life would be like after a nuclear war. Silent. The only sound is the steady tick tick from Yuri’s radiation dosimeter.
“That spring, it was very hot,” he says, “and there was a terrible smell over the town as the food in refrigerators and freezers and the bodies of abandoned pets decomposed.” But maybe these were the lucky pets. At Kiev’s Chernobyl Museum the previous day, I’d seen a newborn animal preserved in a jar. It may have been a cat. But with its two spines and eight legs protruding in bunches around its body, it told you much about the consequences of this disaster.
Yuri points out the hospital and translates the rusting sign on its roof. “It says: ‘The people’s health is the main wealth of the country.’”
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