Ghosts Of Chernobyl
Exploring the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and how the cleanup ultimately opened up the Soviet Union to the rest of the world
The lasting fallout from the disaster
In the first hours of the morning on 26 April 1986, a safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station went array and triggered a massive explosion. The blast lifted the cover off of one of the power station’s nuclear reactors, Reactor 4, followed by another huge explosion that left the reactor’s core exposed and spewing radioactive material. Debris from the successive blasts rained down on the plant, as a fire spread from Reactor 4 to nearby buildings. The fire raged for days, as firefighters tried to contain the blaze. Pilots ran thousands of flights overhead, dropping sandbags onto the burning reactor in the hopes of putting out the fire.
Two days later, on the morning of 28 April, scientists at a Swedish nuclear power plant – hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl and the plant town of Pripyat, in the Ukrainian SSR – picked up unusual high readings of radioactivity. Swedish officials, after some investigating, concluded that the radioactive materials had originated in the Soviet Union. In subsequent days, similar reports of unusually high levels of radioactivity came from across the globe.
But Soviet officials acknowledged nothing in the first hours and days, at one point going so far as to deny outright that an accident had occurred. In part, the minimal information coming from Soviet sources reflected the fact that they, too, were trying to figure out what exactly had taken place at Chernobyl. Finally, on 28 April, the Soviet government issued a brief statement acknowledging that an accident had occurred at the Chernobyl power plant. It took until 14 May, over two weeks after the disaster, for the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to make a public statement about Chernobyl.
By that point, those living around the nuclear power plant had already been evacuated. Within 24 hours of the explosion, local officials in Pripyat had received notice to prepare residents to evacuate the town. Some of the town’s residents had fled already on that first day.
Chernobyl’s impacts were vast and wide-ranging, though the sheer degree of devastation continues to be hotly contested decades later.
The catastrophe did immediate damage as it contaminated portions of the western Soviet Union, concentrated in what became Russia, Ukraine and Belarus after the Soviet Union’s collapse in December of 1991. Estimates from the United Nations put the number of individuals affected by the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl power station at some 8.4 million across Russia, Ukraine and Belarus alone. Some 600,000 people were involved in – and impacted – by efforts to clean up the nuclear power plant.
Around Chernobyl, trees in the nearby forest turned a sickly reddish-brown as a result of high radiation, in what became known as the ‘Red Forest’. The crew that cleaned up the accident ended up exposed to high degrees of radiation; 28 of the plant’s workers died within months of the explosion, while another 106 suffered from acute radiation sickness thanks to high radiation exposure during the clean-up process.
Food supplies, too, were contaminated as radioactive isotopes fell on crops, farms and grazing areas for livestock. A slew of new regulations and orders tried to grapple with the enormity of the problem. Soviet officials introduced new mechanisms to monitor contamination, distributing new advice to farmers across the contaminated areas. Often, these attempted solutions merely hid the problem. One group of KGB officers, for instance, found four train cars of radioactive meat in 1990. For the past four years, the contaminated meat had crisscrossed railroads, trying in vain to find any takers willing to accept it.
The devastating effects of the accident were hardly contained in and around Chernobyl or kept within the confines of the exclusion zone set up by Soviet authorities. Radioactive particles travelled far and wide, carried by weather systems and wind patterns. After all, it was precisely these weather patterns that made it possible for Swedish scientists to figure out — and inform those around the globe — that a nuclear accident had taken place in the Soviet Union.
In the days after the explosion, Soviet officials tracked the radioactive clouds emanating out of the explosion. A large accumulation, over Belarus, was headed toward Moscow where meteorologists anticipated a sizeable spring storm in the days to come. Rather than see it rain radioactive droplets over Moscow, Soviet pilots chased the clouds and peppered them with silver iodide to make it rain. Seeding the clouds brought down a heavy, radioactive rain across swaths of Belarus in order to spare the Soviet capital from those same rains.
Spikes in radioactivity could be found, too, in the United Kingdom. Scientists tested sheep, only to discover that the animals possessed radioactive isotope levels far too high for human consumption. Again, it was the rain as storms in early May of 1986 contaminated farmland, as pools seeped into the water table. Farmers in Wales faced restrictions on their livestock; their sheep were classed as radioactive, monitored and restricted for years after the 1986 disaster.
Across the globe, the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl inflamed anti-nuclear sentiments. Individual citizens and national governments demanded that Moscow take steps to prevent another such accident. Some 40,000 demonstrators showed up to protest a nuclear power plant in Brokdorf, a small town in the northern parts of the Federal Republic of Germany. The West German foreign minister, Hans-dietrich Genscher, demanded nothing short of the closure of all Soviet nuclear reactors.
The disaster at Chernobyl horrified Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. For Gorbachev, the damage done by Chernobyl drove home the dangers of the atomic age and of nuclear annihilation. Countless of Gorbachev’s advisers later recalled that the horrific accident encouraged the General Secretary to seek dramatic nuclear reductions in negotiation with his American counterpart, Ronald Reagan.
Chernobyl also spurred on Gorbachev in pursuing a policy of glasnost – or openness – in Soviet society. In the years that followed, that same policy of openness made it possible for citizens in the affected areas of the Soviet Union to express their frustration with how the government had handled (or mishandled) Chernobyl.
By 1989, there were mass demonstrations taking place in Ukraine and Belarus, as residents of the two republics tried to lift the veil of secrecy about the degree of damage caused by the accident. Demonstrators decried a Soviet cover-up of the dangers, as concerned citizens produced documents that showed that Soviet officials had pushed on with a May Day parade in Kyiv, just days after the accident, despite knowing that radiation levels were extremely high. Chernobyl became a rallying cry in the Ukrainian push for independence.
“Soviet pilots chased the clouds and peppered them with Silver iodide to make it rain”
Numerous international organisations have been involved in addressing the ongoing effects of the Chernobyl disaster, much of it focused on the safety of the site itself.
Despite the devastating accident in April of 1986, the other three reactors at the Chernobyl plant remained in operation. At the beginning of 1990, the Ukrainian parliament voted in favour of closing the plant by 1995. These timetables were sped up in the fall of 1991, after a fire broke out at unit 2 and destroyed part of the roof of the turbine hall. Unit 2 would be closed effective immediately, with the remaining two slated to be closed in
1993. But, before that could be done, parliament reversed its 1990 decision in the autumn of 1993. The reactors would remain in use.
European governments tried to make the closure of the plant a crucial issue in the early 1990s, linked to broader development assistance for Ukraine. These attempts failed: the plant remained in operation until December of 2000.
Starting in 1990, the United Nations took on a more active role in addressing the consequences of the disaster, a role made possible by the
Soviet government’s growing acceptance that international assistance was needed. The General Assembly called for international cooperation to deal with the ramifications of Chernobyl.
A vast array of initiatives received support from the United Nations, dealing with all aspects of the issue. Since 1986, according to the UN’S estimates, various UN bodies and major non-governmental organisations have started some 230 research and assistance programs to address issues arising out of the Chernobyl accident.
The most visible sign of international cooperation to deal with the aftermath of Chernobyl, however, is the vast engineering project to contain the radioactive remains of the nuclear reactor. In 1986, in the months following the accident, the Soviet Union constructed a shelter to seal off Reactor 4. But this initial structure, known as the sarcophagus, began to crumble, threatening the release of new radioactive contaminants.
An international effort supported the construction of a new structure to surround Reactor 4, a project known as the New Safe Confinement. A massive metal half-cylinder, measuring 109 metres high and 257 metres in length, the New Safe Confinement covers both the old, crumbling sarcophagus and the damaged reactor. It was installed in late 2016, some 30 years after the initial accident. And the project’s cost is immense: the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, responsible for coordinating the funds, estimates the total cost at some €1.5 billion.
When one thinks of the so-called ‘ghosts’ of Chernobyl, the most immediate connection is to the exclusion zone ringing the nuclear power plant. Chernobyl, as the site is often summed up, is a ghost town. Tourists and journalists flock there to see an abandoned site, the latest batch inspired by HBO’S hit television series, Chernobyl.
Seemingly frozen in time, the buildings of Pripyat show signs of life from a state that no longer exists, that of the Soviet Union. It is hardly surprising, then, that it is tempting to see Chernobyl as something of the past, maybe even as a relic unique to the Soviet era.
Historians, scientists and activists, however, all remind us that the high-profile accident continues to be a pressing issue, decades after the initial accident. News reports detail the ongoing impact of high radioactivity levels on agriculture across Europe, not just in the three countries most affected by the disaster. Others continue to debate how disease rates are linked to Chernobyl. Ongoing international cooperation, like the immense project to build and install a new structure to confine the radioactive rubble remaining, is a stark reminder that the ghosts of Chernobyl remain. We’re still living with the fallout.
“their Sheep were classed as radioactive, monitored and restricted for years after the 1986 disaster”