On
the
26 April, 1986 the number four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power
Plant in Ukraine exploded.
From
the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard
‘It
is now four years since the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor
on April 26, 1986. Information about its consequences is now becoming
available in spite of attempts by the Russian government to prevent
knowledge leaking out into the public domain. Glasnost may
be Gorbachev’s policy in most things but not where Chernobyl was
concerned. The scale of the disaster is far greater than has been
supposed till now.
A
significant feature of this disaster is that it was partly caused,
and to a large extent made worse, by state secrecy. For instance, it
was the state’s obsessional secrecy on all matters nuclear which
meant that the reactor’s operators were not allowed to know that
withdrawal of all the control rods could cause an explosion. All they
were told was that this was “forbidden” (New Scientist, 11
November 1989).
Similarly,
it was a military secret that a previous graphite fire had occurred,
in 1958, at Kyshtym in the Urals. Not only did the Chernobyl
management and engineers know nothing of this (except what had leaked
back to them from the West), but again according to the New
Scientist “those who had dealt with it were not called to
Chernobyl until three weeks after the accident”. During those weeks
a lot of harm was done. Fruitless attempts to dowse the fire were
unsuccessful, only resulting in contamination of the watertable.
Meanwhile radioactive material continued to escape into the
atmosphere.
Political
considerations led Gorbachev, in his TV statement about Chernobyl 18
days after the accident, to allege that the western media had lied
and exaggerated the scale and nature of the disaster with their
claims that there would be “thousands of casualties” (quoted in
Frederick Polil’s novel, Chernobyl, 1987). This was
part of the cover-up agreed to by the politbureau and recently
exposed by Gorbachev’s opponent, Boris Yeltsin.
This
cover-up involved misleading the people at risk so that many of these
within Russia believed themselves to be safe. Chernobyl is in the
north of the Ukraine, very close to the southern border of
Byelorussia and not far from the border, to the east, with Russia
proper. The plume of radioactive particles drifted north and east,
and seriously contaminated a large part of Byelorussia and adjacent
provinces of Russia.
“They
were not told. They had to guess…”
The
original disaster was bad enough. What made it worse was
misinformation, the attempt to pretend that the only areas at risk
were within a neat, circular, 18 mile (30 km) “exclusion zone”.
The result of this official policy was that people have still not
been evacuated from many seriously contaminated areas. In the week
after the disaster, official policy decreed that “communities were
left to rot in ignorance…”. Over the border, in Russia proper,
people “were very frightened. They were not told. They had to guess
…. Nobody knew what was happening. Burly peasants were collapsing
in the fields” (Sunday Times, 29 April 1990).
The
cover-up meant that the May Day parades were ordered to proceed, in
Kiev and Minsk, as though everything was normal. Thousands of
schoolchildren were thus exposed to radioactive open air. It also
meant a delay even in evacuating Pripyat, the nearest town to
Chernobyl. It is now thought that 4 million people are living with
radiation, including 34,000 in areas very seriously contaminated.
Yury Cherbak, a Ukrainian Green politician, claims that 85 villages
in Byelorussia, 19 in the Ukraine and 14 in Russia should be urgently
evacuated (The Independent on Sunday, 22 April 1990). In these
unevacuated areas, where people are still growing food crops, not
only are they eating the contaminated food they grow but, according
to the Sunday Times again, “Soviet trade officials
collected it and distributed it in Moscow, Kazakhstan and elsewhere”.
Now,
four years later, (Forty Years, 2026.Ed.) the consequences of Chernobyl are becoming
apparent. Children are suffering from leukaemia or cancer of the
thyroid. There are a number of babies born with serious congenital
abnormalities, a disaster similar to but worse than that caused by
thalidomide in Britain or Agent Orange in Vietnam. In Byelorussia,
over 2 million people are at risk, one-fifth of the population. Yet
in the capital city, Minsk, there are no ultrasonic scanners
(essential for diagnosis and treatment of leukaemia) or intensive
care units. Medicines, even for pain relief, are in short supply. The
authorities have decreed, harshly, that no treatment at all, not even
for pain relief, be given to terminal cases. In the West, leukaemia
cases have an 85 percent chance of survival. There, they only have a
15 percent chance.
Acute
food shortages mean that children are not getting a proper diet. They
die of quite common illnesses, with their immune system weakened by
radiation. Experts claim that “it is not ‘Chernobyl Aids’ that
kills them, it is the lack of proper food” (Sunday Times).
The
state showed its “concern” in February 1988 by decreeing the sort
of information which should be made available to the media. The
increased incidence of anaemia, hypertension and hyperplasia of the
thyroid was hushed up as a result of “official policy”, and there
was to be no mention of any “loss of physical capacity for work or
professional skills” (New Scientist, 28 October 1989). Who
was the state trying to protect?
Delay
and Disinformation
The
role of the state in this disaster has been to make things worse: the
delay in issuing warnings, the misinformation as to which areas were
at risk, the suppression of information on the deaths and diseases
related to or caused by Chernobyl, the refusal to allow scientists to
do research, the publication of underestimates of the amount of
radiation released, the refusal to arrange for evacuation from areas
known to be contaminated, the despatch of contaminated foodstuff from
these regions to uncontaminated regions, the lack of provision of
decent medical facilities, the secrecy surrounding the lessons learnt
earlier at Kyshtym – the state and its officials bear a heavy load
of responsibility for this massive catastrophe and its (too-often
avoidable) tragic consequences.
Probably
this is the worst environmental disaster the world has yet seen.
Large areas of land are uninhabitable yet in many of these people are
still living – living a nightmare. In one village, in a single
year, 30 babies were born with serious deformities.
The
danger to humanity, and to the planet, of continuing to allow
capitalist priorities – production of cheap, rather than safe,
energy – and capitalist political structures – such as rule by a
Party hierarchy, determined to control the information released to
the population under its rule – this is the lesson of Chernobyl.
The land is poisoned with pollution, the forest trees produce
abnormal mutated growths, and the watertable is polluted. On the
farms cows give birth to deformed calves, in the villages young women
dread giving birth to monsters. Children are not allowed out of doors
except to go to and from school.
Genetic
mutation is a high price to pay for the government’s mistakes, for
cheap electricity for export to Poland and Rumania, and for plutonium
for the military, a by-product of the Chernobyl reactor. It is a
price being paid partly because the world has trusted technical
experts too much. There were experts in the Ukraine who claimed that
Chernobyl’s four reactors were totally safe. After the accident
Britain’s best-known expert on nuclear power, Lord Marshall,
asserted that the risk from radiation inside the exclusion zone (less
than 20 miles away from Chernobyl itself) was “no worse than
smoking a couple of cigarettes a year” (Observer, 4 May
1986).
The
likes of Lord Marshall have been making reassuring noises in the
Soviet Union and doing their best to prevent doctors and scientists
revealing the truth about Chernobyl’s legacy,
Gorbachev’s glasnost did not apply in this special
case. So long as society’s class divisions mean the necessity for
the continued existence of states and national governments, and so
long as production is for profit not for use, the danger of
continuing to use such extremely risky technology will be too great –
the victims are already too many.’
Charmian
Skelton
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