Chernobyl's radiation legacy: Zombie reactors and an invisible enemy

Updated

As the Soviet Union grappled with the scale of the disaster unfolding at Chernobyl, radioactive material spewed into the environment.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1986 explosion inside reactor number four of the nuclear power plant, dozens of first responders received fatal doses of radiation, forests surrounding the reactor were poisoned, and nearby waterways were contaminated.

Despite attempts to douse the fire in the core with sand, boron and lead, the reactor burnt for 10 days, releasing huge amounts of radioactive materials beyond the plant's perimeter.

Three decades on from what is considered to be one of the worst nuclear accidents in history, the fallout from Chernobyl continues to impact lives.

Carried in the prevailing weather patterns, the radioactive particles pouring out of reactor four spread rapidly.

The vast majority of particulates fell over parts of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine where more than 5 million people now live in contaminated areas.

But modelling by the Met Office, the UK's national weather service, shows how, within two days of the disaster, the radioactive plume was transported more than 1,000 kilometres.

In fact it was a nuclear facility in Forsmark, Sweden that first detected unusually high levels of radiation in the atmosphere and began investigating the cause. Until this point, the disaster at Chernobyl had been kept under wraps by the Soviet Union.

In all, an area of more than 200,000 square kilometres was contaminated by a significant amount of radiocaesium (Caesium-137) — a by-product of nuclear fission which can take centuries to decay completely and is known to cause cancer.

Mapping of the ground deposits of Caesium-137 after the accident shows just how widely the particulates spread and eventually settled across Europe.

Areas where it rained as the plume passed over were more likely to see higher levels of deposited radiocaesium.

Closer to the site of the disaster, parts of the area still remain so heavily contaminated that a 2,600-square-kilometre "zone of alienation" remains in place around the reactor.

Data captured as part of the global citizen science project Safecast shows high levels of radiation remain more than three decades later.

In Pripyat, a ghost town on the outskirts of the reactor, pockets of radiation can be found which are among the highest levels recorded in the dataset.

At Pripyat hospital No. 126, where first responders dumped contaminated clothing, spikes in radiation around 700 microsieverts per hour (µSv/h) have been recorded, with an average of about 36µSv/h in the area. Prolonged exposure at these levels can be dangerous. In general background levels of radiation are usually around 0.1µSv/h.

There's also the highly contaminated Red Forest to the south and west. It got its name from the colour the trees turned as they died after the blast. Here researchers continue to uncover highly radioactive pockets of soil. Access to this area is largely restricted, but the Safecast data shows areas inside the forest reaching an average of around 30µSv/h.

Then of course there's the reactor itself. A place so irradiated it sits entombed in a giant sarcophagus made of steel and concrete. Some estimates suggest the core will remain radioactive for thousands of years.

There's no data at the core because access to the area is heavily restricted for safety reasons.

Azby Brown, the lead researcher with Safecast, said many of the hardest-hit areas, like the abandoned town of Pripyat, will remain unsafe to live "for generations".

"If you just look at the half life of Caesium-137, it's 30 years. So it's been through one half life, meaning naturally half of it has decayed, so anywhere you went 30 years ago in Chernobyl was twice [as radioactive] as what it is today," he said.

"Some of it gets moved by weathering, by wind, by rain etcetera … but often a rule of thumb is it takes 10 half lives for something to really be considered gone, which would mean like 300 years.





The 'invisible enemy'

Despite the lingering risks, there are some who've chosen to ignore the warnings and return to live inside the exclusion zone.

Sofia Bezverhaya was living just 30 kilometres from the plant in the village of Kupovate when the plant exploded.

The breach of reactor number four occurred on a Saturday. But Sofia, the local council administrator, heard nothing of it.

"It was only on the Monday that we've found out there'd been an accident," she told Foreign Correspondent. That day, she took a phone call from a Communist Party official. "There's been an accident," she was told. "Prepare for the evacuation."

"They kept telling us, it's just for three days … [but] all of us had that uneasy feeling creeping into our souls, that we might just leave our homes and never ever come back. And that's what came to be."

This fallout was an "invisible enemy", Sofia said. Although she "neither saw it nor felt it [and] it had no colour and no taste", it would go on to take the lives of many of those close to her.

But the then 40-year-old was determined to return home. One year after the meltdown, amid confusion over the precise dimensions of the exclusion zone being established by Soviet authorities, she and several-hundred others did just that.

"Our grand- and great grandparents are buried here. And we also want to be buried here, in our village. It's our dream."

The official death toll from Chernobyl is disputed, but a UN report into the "true scale of the accident" found as many as 4,000 people could die as a result of radiation exposure.

Once Sofia returned, despite official warnings to avoid locally grown produce, she had little choice but to continue to plough her own yard for food. And more than three decades later, she's still doing it.

From the garden bed, which runs beside the length of her blue weatherboard home, she grows tomatoes, zucchinis, pumpkins, capsicum, sorrel, potatoes and onions.

"For me, my resort is my work in the garden … where I can watch a squirrel collecting nuts, and hear the singing of nightingale."

Kupovate is firmly within the boundaries of the exclusion zone around the reactor. But once a year, Sofia Bezverhaya said, her garden vegetables are tested, and the results are within acceptable limits.

It's an anomaly which demonstrates the caprice of the fallout; the red lines of the exclusion zone simply do not prescribe the limits of the contamination.

Victims of contaminated food

While there are areas close to the crippled reactor which are perfectly safe, throughout vast stretches of the north-west of the country, many kilometres away, Ukrainians are still grappling with the legacy of the Chernobyl eruption.

The Australian Government's official travel advice for this region warns tourists not to eat dairy, game, fruits or vegetables "unless they are imported".

But in a country as poor as Ukraine, where many still subsist on what they can grow themselves, that's a luxury few can afford.

A study of 14 villages in Rivne — a province 200km west of the reactor — found radioactive milk at more than 12 times the safe level for children. That study was conducted between 2011 and 2016 and published last year, 32 years after the explosion.

Levels of Cs-137 found in milk in western Ukraine 1000 Permissible level in adults 100bq/kg 800 Cs-137 activity concentration (bq/kg) 600 400 200 0 2004 2008 2012 2016 2020 2024 2028 2032 2036 2040 2044 Levels of Cs-137 found in milk in western Ukraine 1000 Permissible level in adults 100bq/kg 800 Cs-137 activity concentration (bq/kg) 600 400 200 0 2005 2015 2025 2035 Source: Environment International

The paper warned that in the absence of protective measures for the rural population, the radiation poisoning could continue until at least 2040.

It's primarily Ukraine's youth — including the grandchildren of those who lived through the disaster — who are now paying for it.

Nine-year-old Kristina, from the small village of Lugove to the west of Kiev, is one of them.

"Sometimes I feel sick," she told Foreign Correspondent. "I have a headache and my stomach goes around."

In fact, Kristina has an enlarged pancreas and thyroid. She's suffering the ill effects of consuming contaminated food.

Kristina's condition is carefully monitored at the Institute of Specialised Radiation Protection on the outskirts of Kiev. The facility was established just months after the accident, and it is still taking on hundreds of new patients every year. All of them are children.

"[They] do not understand what Chernobyl was, the kind of catastrophe [it was]," the institute's chief nurse, Nataliya Moshko, said. Often, the children do not believe they are sick at all.

Still, it's better than it was. When she first began in nursing, Nataliya was caring for children diagnosed with terminal cancer, "because of the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster".

Now long dead, she insisted, "I remember every one".

The legacy of the accident endures. As of January, of the 2.1 million people registered with Ukraine's health authorities for treatment for Chernobyl-related illnesses, 350,000 were children.

"The problem is that the Chernobyl disaster with its consequences was not solved very quickly at that time," Nataliya said. "And now these vast territories of Ukraine, and many, many thousands of people are contaminated."

The children spend weeks in the hospital to receive treatment, but also to be fed a clean diet. If and when their symptoms ease, and they're discharged, they return home to the same contaminated environment which made them ill in the first place.

Food markets across the country are required to test local produce for the two isotopes which persist in the environment — Strontium-90 and Caesium-137.

Berries, mushrooms and milk contaminated by radiation are meant to be discarded, but reports abound of radioactive berries being merely discounted instead.

On a visit to a testing laboratory attached to one large fresh produce hall in Kiev, officials take great care in demonstrating the rigour with which they test for Caesium-137.

But when asked how they went about checking for the Strontium isotope, they shrug their shoulders; there's no money for the equipment needed to do so.

Hooked on nuclear power

It's hard to envisage a Ukraine free of radiation. Half of Ukraine's electricity is still generated by nuclear fission, and there are no plans for that to change.

Deputy director of the Khmelnitsky Nuclear Power Plant, Yevhen Nosykov, says there is "no alternative".

"The use of atomic energy is of crucial importance for Ukraine."

Electricity generation in Ukraine (1992-2016) 100 90 % of total 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 Fossil Fuels Renewables Nuclear Electricity generation in Ukraine (1992-2016) 100 90 % of total 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 Fossil Fuels Renewables Nuclear Source: US Energy Information Administration

Khmelnitsky has two reactors. One was closed last December when it reached the end of its designed lifespan. But it won't be closed for long. Khmelnitsky No. 1 is now undergoing a refurbishment program under a plan for it to be relaunched by the end of the year.

Of the 15 reactors in Ukraine, there are nine just like it which have already been reopened under a national safety upgrade program. The program should have been completed by the end of 2017; but that date came and went and there's still much to be done.

"We had very ambitious plans but later it appeared that we just couldn't fulfil all requirements as quickly as we wished … but we really are trying to do our best," Nosykov said.

"We should not forget that this is a very-high-profile project that requires really big funds."

Since Chernobyl, Ukraine's neighbours have taken a great interest in Kiev's capacity to ensure its nuclear energy infrastructure is safely operating. Europe is so concerned it has poured 600 million euros into the safety upgrade.

But while Ukraine is pushing its ageing reactors back into service, the safety program has been slipping behind.

"These are measures for modernising the control and management systems, these are measures for upgrading the electrical part of our first reactor, as well as measures for replacement of all the equipment," energy campaigner Iryana Holovko said.

"[But] until the end of March this year, we still have more than 400 safety upgrade measures that are not performed."

Nosykov told Foreign Correspondent he was confident another Chernobyl-type nuclear accident was impossible. But he conceded the country lacked the money to bring its fission infrastructure up to international standards.

Ukraine is also in the process of constructing new reactors. But to save money, it's doing so using the remnants of facilities which were only half-finished at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Khmelnitsky reactors 3 and 4, their concrete shells standing like crumbling monuments to the Soviet Union, are among them.

Since a moratorium on the construction of new nuclear plants was signed four years after the Chernobyl accident, those half-built facilities have been dormant, and exposed to the elements.

Holovko says Ukraine's nuclear energy policy is stuck firmly in the past.

"This is why we call them zombie reactors, because on the one hand, we have them running. We use the electricity from them. And from the other hand, we understand that there are safety shortcomings in those reactors that might lead to an accident with the potential major consequences.," he said.

"I wouldn't say that another Chernobyl is not possible. I think that if we go along this way, and if the situation will not be changed, the chances for another accident with the consequences, with the serious consequences, cannot be excluded."

Watch FALLOUT on Foreign Correspondent tonight at 1:30pm on ABCTV. Also on ABC News Channel on Saturday at 9:30pm and Sunday at 5:30pm and iview.

Credits

Reporting: Linton Besser in Ukraine and Mark Doman

Design: Alex Palmer

Development and 3D modelling: Nathanael Scott

Photography: Matt Davis

Notes about this story

For more detail on the Safecast radiation data and how it was captured, you can explore the readings and the methodology on the organisation's website.

Topics: nuclear-accident, disasters-and-accidents, environment, nuclear-energy, alternative-energy, nuclear-issues, thyroid-disorders, diseases-and-disorders, health, ukraine, russian-federation, belarus, sweden, australia

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