Chernobyl: Crime Without Punishment
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[hl!rnobyl [hl!rnobyl [rime without Puni!ihment Alia A. Yaro!lihin!likaya Originally published in 2006 by Vremya Published 2011 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2011 by Alla Yaroshinskaya. The author wishes to express her thanks to Rosalie Bertell and Lynn Ehrle for their voluntary editing of the translation of this volume and also the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility for their financial support of the translation. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2011017274 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yaroshinska, Alla. [Chernobyl 20 let spustia. English] Chernobyl : crime without punishment/Alla A. Yaroshinskaya; [translated from Russian by Sergei Roy].—North American ed./ edited by Rosalie Bertell and Lynn Howard Ehrle. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-4128-4296-9 1. Chernobyl Nuclear Accident, Chornobyl, Ukraine, 1986— Environmental aspects. 2. Chernobyl Nuclear Accident, Chornobyl, Ukraine, 1986—Social aspects. 3. Radioactive pollution—Ukraine—Chornobyl Region. 4. Soviet Union— Politics and government—1985–1991. I. Bertell, Rosalie, 1929– II. Ehrle, Lynn. III. Title. TK1362.U38Y36513 2011 363.17'99094777—dc23 2011017274 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-4296-9 (hbk) Contents Introduction, Rosalie Bertell vii Prologue: Life Weighed on Chernobyl Scales xiii 1. Rudnya-Ososhnya: A Deception Zone 1 2. “Halt! Life Hazard!” 7 3. Brainwashing in Zhitomir 25 4. Voices Crying in the Parliamentary Wilderness 37 5. “Top Secret: Ban Chernobyl Theme!” 45 6. Crime without Punishment 57 7. The Cover-Up 71 8. Byzantium in the Kremlin 83 9. Dissident Experts 109 10. “The Monster is Huge, Massive, and Barking!” 125 11. Reactor ’Round Our Neck 145 12. Did Chernobyl Babies Smoke? 167 13. Korosten, Luginy, and All the Rest 175 14. “I Only Dipped My Finger in the Milk!” 197 15. Warning Signs from the Urals 215 Chernobyl 16. Secret Records of the Kremlin 229 17. The Enemy Uses Poison-Tipped Needles 257 18. Mikhail Gorbachev: “You are wrong!” 271 19. Guilt Established—But No Trials 285 20. Cesium, Curies, and Cover-up 303 21. “Curtains of Fog and Iron” 319 22. Scientific Shell Game 345 23. Who Stole Chernobyl’s Green Meadows? 363 Epilogue 371 vi Introduction On April 26, 1986, about seven years after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl experienced an explosion, meltdown, fire, and massive release of radioactivity. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been poised to be- gin a concerted public relations effort to market nuclear power in the developing countries. It had been mandated by the United Nations, when it was founded in response to President Eisenhower’s Peaceful Atom Program, to promote nuclear technology to the whole world. Imagine its consternation when the Swedish government proclaimed that the then Soviet Union had experienced a nuclear reactor accident! It had waited patiently until it thought the world had forgotten Three Mile Island! The first time I visited the failed Chernobyl reactor site, I saw that it was in prime agricultural and orchard land. In fact, it was even called the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Prypiat, the nearest city to Chernobyl, was a place where the ancient art of icon painting had begun, and its library contained many priceless icons from the Middle Ages. Prypiat was a modern city prior to the disaster. It had high-rise apartment buildings, a new school with a large playground, and a public library. Looking in through the library windows, I could see the precious icons strewn on the floor together with books and other debris—now all radioactive waste. The school swings and slides stood waiting for children and the apartment buildings were empty, all of the windows closed against the spring air, and the streets were empty. This area was inside the exclusion zone. We had driven from Kiev to the border of the exclusion zone and then transferred to buses that only operated within the zone. Surrounding the city of Prypiat and the failed reactor were blooming apple and cherry trees and even a few elderly people who refused to leave the land they knew so well. I learned that the people of Prypiat were country people with a volunteer fire department that was first on the scene when the vii Chernobyl accident occurred. Like other rural fire departments, the wives relieved their husbands in the early days of the fire so they could have a meal and take some rest. Because of years of indoctrination by radiation experts who claimed nuclear reactors posed no risk, children played in the yards or went to the store and people stood out in the street watching the fire. When buses finally arrived to remove them from harm’s way, many refused to leave their farms and farm animals. The Soviets had to round up the animals (and kill them later when the farmers were gone) before people would evacuate. There was a forest, heavily contaminated, which had been cut down and buried. There was one tree still standing, one with a branch that had grown strong and lay parallel with the ground. The people told me that this tree was used during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in World War II as the hanging place for patriots. There were wreaths of flowers around the base of this tree and remembrance candles. It would not be buried like the rest of the trees! We saw the burying ground for the large trucks and diggers that had been brought in to fight the blaze. We also met the young men who were running the other nuclear reactors on the site—walking every day by the failed reactor, (which was) still fissioning and spewing out radioactive materials. As we neared the reactor, my Geiger counter registered quite a high reading, and my camera film was overexposed so that none of the pictures I took turned out. The following account, by reporter Paul Hofheinz in Moscow, ap- peared in the July 20, 1987 issue of Time magazine. Soon after the Chernobyl meltdown, Soviet officials ordered the permanent evacuation of villages within 30 km (19 miles) of the power plant, but heavy nuclear fallout covered a much broader area. In some parts of Narodichi, a Ukrainian agricultural district whose boundaries lie some 60 km (37 miles) from the reactor, levels of radioactivity are still nine times as high as the acceptable limits, according to the local Communist Party chief. Vladimir Lysovsky, a doctor at Narodichi District Central Hospital, contends that in the past 18 months, there has been a dramatic rise in cases of thyroid disease, anemia and cancer. Residents also have begun complaining of fatigue and loss of vision and appetite—all symptoms of radiation sickness. Worst of all, there has been a startling drop in the immunity level of the entire population. “Healthy people are hav- ing trouble getting over their illnesses,” Lysovsky notes. And children are the most affected. viii Introduction Farmers, meanwhile, are seeing an explosion of birth defects among livestock. Colts have appeared with eight limbs, deformed lower jaws and disjointed spinal columns. Photographer Kostin reports that 197 freak calves have been born at the Yuri Gagarin collective farm in Vyazovka. Some of the animals had no eyes, deformed skulls and distorted mouths. At a farm in Malinovka, about 200 abnormal piglets have been born since the accident. Later, I met the woman doctor who had been in charge of the emergency medical tent set up for the so-called “liquidators” of the fire. She decided who would be sent to Hospital 10 in Moscow for special treatment for radiation sickness. She was upset when I first met her because a young woman, a well-trained laboratory technician, whom she chose to take with her to help in the clinic, had just died. She was twenty-eight years old and had been in good health prior to the disaster. I asked about her death, and the doctor told me she died of “adult sudden death,” adding, “I never thought I was giving these young people a death sentence. I chose the best we had!” The doctor told me that she had autopsied some of these sudden deaths and found that the person’s internal organs had been severely damaged. The victims looked healthy externally, just as they had looked before the accident, but their vital organs had been damaged. She said that their internal organs looked like those of very elderly people. I only stayed in Kiev for a week, but I visited the hospitals and saw the former “liquidators” and so many children bearing signs of un- usual sickness with internal digestive, neurological, blood, and heart problems. There was also an almost immediate increase in cancers, contrary to current belief that cancer would not occur for ten to twenty years. At first, the local physicians were calling the people’s complaints “radio-phobia,” but they soon learned to respect the true sickness, especially in children, and became ashamed of that term. Being a cancer scientist, I recognized the early cancers as those promoted by the radiation.