Opinion - News Analysis   

Cleaning up after Chernobyl

John Vidal— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

ON APRIL 26, 1986, Konstantin Tatuyan, a Ukrainian radio engineer, was horrified when Reactor No 4 in the Chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded, caught fire, and for the next 10 days spewed the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima bombs' worth of radioactivity across 388,000 sq km of Europe and beyond. He was just married, and he and his young family lived in the town of Chernobyl, just a few miles from the reactor.

Like 120,000 people, the family was evacuated, but Mr. Tatuyan volunteered to become a "liquidator," to help with the clean-up, believing that his knowledge of radiation could save not just him but many of the 200,000 young soldiers and others who were rushed in from all over the Soviet Union. "We felt we had to do it," he says. "Who else, if not us, would do it?"

Mr. Tatuyan spent the next seven years in charge of 5,000 mostly young army reservists — drafted in from Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in what was the Soviet Union — working 22 days on, eight days off, digging great holes, demolishing villages, dumping high-level waste, monitoring hot spots, testing the water, cleaning railway lines and roads, decontaminating ground and travelling throughout some of the most radioactive regions of Ukraine, Belarus, and southern Russia.

He survived the worst environment disaster in history, he says, because he knew the danger and could monitor the radioactivity that varied from yard to yard and from village to village depending on where the plume descended to ground level, and on where the deadly bits of graphite from the core of the reactor were carried by the wind. He took precautions.

What he saw in those years, he says, appalled him: young men dying for want of the simplest information about exposure to radiation; the wide-scale falsification of medical histories by the Soviet army and the disappearance of people's records so the state would not have to compensate them; the wholesale looting of evacuated houses and abandoned churches; the haste and carelessness with which the concrete "sarcophagus" was erected over the stricken reactor; and, above all, the horror of seeing land almost twice the size of Britain contaminated, with thousands of villages made uninhabitable.

It was sometimes surreal, he says. He had people beg him to leave their homes or villages contaminated because that would guarantee them a pension; he recalls how several carriages of radioactive animal carcasses travelled for five years around the Soviet Union being rejected by every state, returning to Chernobyl to be buried — train and all. He helped fill a 10 sq km dump with radioactive lorries, cement mixers, trains and helicopters. He knows where the Chernobyl bodies are buried, he says, because he was the gravedigger. "We made up the response as we went along," he says. "It was hell."

Mr. Tatuyan has now retired, an invalid. He says he surely saved many lives and made great parts of the Ukraine semi-habitable, but the price is a heart condition, an enlarged thyroid, diabetes, pains in the right side of his body, breathing difficulties and headaches. But he is optimistic and, like several million people across Ukraine, Belarus, and southern Russia, says he now looks at his life in terms of the time before and after Chernobyl. Most of his team of liquidators are dead; the rest, like him, are ill.

Mr. Tatuyan is now 56, and his children and country are proud of him. For him, the effect of the radiation on the environment was shocking.

More than 500 km from Chernobyl, the peasant farmers of the village of Boudimca, one of the most affected in Ukraine, refuse to leave, despite the fact that many of their children are suffering from acute radiation diseases. Every child in Boudimca has a thyroid problem — known as the "Chernobyl necklace." The villagers are attached to the land. "We would prefer to die in our own land rather than go somewhere else and not survive," says Valentina Molchanovich, one of whose daughters is in hospital in Vilne with radiation sickness. "We understand the paradox, but we prefer to stay."

Though they live simple lives — each family has a cow, ducks, and a few chickens — they suffer all the ailments of stressed out western executives: high blood pressure, headaches, diabetes and respiratory problems. They know that the berries and the mushrooms they have always lived on are contaminated. "We are just so used to living here," says Ms. Molchanovich. "My parents lived here. We build our houses together. We are a very tight community."

Situation worsening

"Everyone who helped on the clean up is now ill," says Tatiana, a senior doctor at the Dispensary for Radiological Protection at Rivne. "The situation is worsening. In 1985, we had four lymph cancers a year. Now we have seven times that many. We have between five and eight people a year with rare bone cancers, when we never had any. We expect more cancers, and ill health. One in three pregnancies here are malformed. We are overwhelmed."

A doctor in the local region's children's hospital says: ``The children born to the people who cleaned up Chernobyl are dying very young. We are finding Caesium and Strontium in breast milk and the placenta. More children now have leukaemias, and there has been a quadrupling of spina bifida cases. There are more clusters of cancers. Children are being born with stunted growth and dwarf torsos, without thighs. I would expect more of this over the years.''

Mr. Tatuyan is now an environmentalist, convinced that nuclear power is no answer. "I go to the forest with friends to care for the deer," he says. On Wednesday night, he and the other liquidators will meet and celebrate the 20 years. "When we meet we make the same toast. We say: `Let's meet again alive.'"

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