Lyudmilla Ignatenko was sleeping when her new husband, a firefighter, said he was going to the Chernobyl reactor to put out a fire. What would she say to the young brides and husbands of the brave Fukushima 50?

So much can change in only a few hours. Cells are destroyed, lives are broken.

At the Pripyat Hospital later that morning, she could barely recognize her 25-year-old love, Vasily Ignatenko. He was bloated, his eyes swallowed by flesh.

She still didn’t know the nuclear reactor had exploded during a routine maintenance check, spewing uranium fuel and radioactive graphite. But she knew something was terribly wrong. Over the next two weeks, she watched her beloved die a grotesque death.

“Every day I met a brand-new person,” she told Ukrainian journalist Svetlana Alexievitch 10 years later. (Her story is captured in Alexievitch’s wounding book, Voices from Chernobyl.)

Lesions broke out on his precious lips and cheeks, and then peeled off in white film. His body turned blue, red, grey-brown. The skin cracked on his arms and legs. Boils swelled into place. His hair fell out in clumps.

“He was producing stool 25 to 30 times a day. With blood and mucus,” she recounted.

“The last two days in the hospital — pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I’d wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff.”

The army buried him, shoeless because his feet were so swollen, in a sealed zinc casket, under cement tiles. In Moscow. He was a national hero. He was also a radioactive threat. (Many orderlies refused to work in the hospital. They were right to worry. Soldiers changed the bedding.)

Fukushima’s Dai-ichi is not Chernobyl. Hydrogen explosions and fires have damaged some buildings, but the reactors’ inner cores have not been breached, we’ve been told. The highest reported radiation level in areas accessed by workers is 600 millisieverts, according to the operator. The nuclear plant workers and firemen like Vasily who died of acute radiation syndrome in the weeks after the Chernobyl explosion were blasted with up to 13,400 millisieverts, according to one UN report.

Lyudmilla says her love left for the fire dressed in a T-shirt. The Dai-ichi team of rotating workers are protected from radioactive dust by goggles, plastic suits and respirators. They carry dosimeters — instruments that gauge their cumulative exposure to radiation rays, so they can ensure they don’t exceed Japan’s newly heightened legal limit, we’re told.

Five workers have died, but none from radiation. No workers have been hospitalized for radiation exposure, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. But we just don’t know. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, isn’t offering many details. We don’t even know how many workers in total are rotating through the plant, what their jobs are. We are left to troll the Internet for blogs from workers.

What risks are these volunteers taking to fulfill their prime minister’s plea to save the country? What will the repercussions be?

Two radiation experts I spoke to on Friday said they will be fine, as long as the crews are successful in pouring water on the spent uranium rods — which the U.S. government says are exposed to air in one reactor. But then nuclear toxicologist Dr. Janette Sherman told me: “They are going to be profoundly sick. Many are not going to survive.” She just published Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature.

I know this: I’d claw my husband to death before allowing him to volunteer for the job.

Two months after Vasily died, his 23-year-old bride rode back up to Moscow by train to visit his grave. She was eight and a half months pregnant. While talking to his spirit at the cemetery, she went into labour.

She named their baby girl Natashenka — the name he’d chosen. The infant died four hours later of cirrhosis of the liver and congenital heart disease.

The army took her body too.

But she wasn’t a hero.

Catherine Porter’s column usually runs Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca