CHAPTER 1

Life Politics after Chernobyl

Time Lapse

On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explodedin Ukraine, damaging human immunities and the genetic structure ofcells, contaminating soils and waterways. The main reason for the accidentis by now well known. Soviet engineers wanted to test how longgenerators of Unit Four could operate without steam supply in the case ofa power failure. During the test, operators sharply reduced power andblocked steam to the reactor's generators and disabled many of its safetysystems. A huge power surge followed, and at 1:23 A.M. the unit explodedonce and then again. Large-scale pressure gradients carried the radioactiveplume to as high as eight kilometers by some estimates. The graphitecore burned for days. Helicopter pilots dropped over five thousand tonsof boron carbide, dolomite, sand, clay, and lead in an attempt to suffocatethe flames of the reactor's burning core. These interventions are nowknown to have compounded risk and uncertainty. With suffocation, thetemperature of the nuclear core increased. This in turn caused radioactivesubstances to ascend more rapidly, forming a radioactive cloud thatspread over Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Western Europe, and other areas ofthe Northern Hemisphere.

Eighteen days elapsed before Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary,appeared on Soviet television and acknowledged the nuclear releaseto the populace. Within that period, tens of thousands of people wereeither knowingly or unknowingly exposed to radioactive iodine-131,absorbed rapidly in the thyroid and resulting, among other things, in asudden and massive onset of thyroid cancers in children and adults assoon as four years later. Such onsets could have been curtailed had thegovernment distributed nonradioactive iodine pills within the first weekof the disaster. S Contradicting assessments generated by English andAmerican meteorological groups, Soviet administrators downplayed theextent of the plume and characterized Chernobyl as a controlled biomedicalcrisis. Soviet medical efforts focused on a group of 237 victims selectedat the disaster site by Dr. Angelina Guskova; they were airlifted tothe acute radiation sickness ward of the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow.Of those, 134 were diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Officialreports set the death toll at thirty-one workers (IAEA 1991, WHO1996). Behind such seemingly definite numbers lies a web of scientific,moral, and political uncertainties.

The fact is that over the years, 600,000 or more soldiers, firemen, andother workers, men and women, continued to be exposed to radiation.Many were dispatched to the disaster site to carry out cleanup work rangingfrom bulldozing contaminated topsoil and disposing it as waste toworking in one-minute intervals on the roof of an adjacent unit and shovelingradioactive debris into the mouth of the ruined one. Some of theseso-called volunteers referred to themselves as "bio-robots," a term whichsuggests that the one-minute rule was not well enforced. Others were relativelywell paid to construct the so-called Sarcophagus (Sarkofag, nowsimply called the Shelter), a structure enclosing the ruined fourth unit ofthe reactor and containing 216 tons of uranium and plutonium. Currently,fifteen thousand people work at the now decommissioned powerplant or are paid to provide technical assistance in the Zone of Exclusion.The Zone is an area thirty kilometers in diameter circumscribing the disastersite. Access to the Zone is restricted to the plant's maintenanceworkers, engineers, health professionals, and researchers.

In 1992, during my first field trip to Ukraine, I mer one of the maintenanceworkers who was on a two-week break from work in the Zone. Helived in a housing complex in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, located abouteighty miles south of the disaster site. Filled with anger, he said, "NowI'm a 'sufferer.'" He used the word "sufferer" in reference to a legalcategory introduced the previous year by a newly independent Ukrainianstate for persons affected by the Chernobyl disaster. "I get five dollars amonth compensation. What can I buy for that?" He said he had no otheroption but to continue working in the Zone. Because of his work history,no firm outside the Zone would hire him. "This is from radiation," hesaid. He lifted his pant-leg and stuck his cigarette through skin that hadpuckered up to form a ring above his ankle. It was the result, he said, ofdirect contact with a radiation source, and what clinicians would call a"local skin burn." "This happened in the Zone ... We're people no oneunderstands, in hospitals, in clinics." He characterized himself as one ofthe "living dead." "Our memory is gone. You forget everything—wewalk like corpses."

In spite of the country's publicized efforts to improve safety standardsin the Zone, a director of the Shelter complex told me in an interview,"there are no norms of radiation safety here." The country's Ministry ofHealth sets annual allowable norms of dose exposures, but, according tothe director, these norms are not strictly adhered to. That is because inUkraine's current period of sharp economic decline, employment in theZone is considered premium. Referring to the plant workers, he told me,"Taking this risk is their individual problem. No one else is responsiblefor it." When I asked him to compare his country's enforcement ofworker safety norms with those of Western Europe, he told me quitesomberly, "No one has ever defined the price of a dose exposure here. Noone has ever defined the value of a person here." In a situation whereeconomic forces drive people to become preoccupied with physical survival,the effects of leaving the value of a person undefined are far-reaching.In such a world, physical risks, abuses, and uncertainties escalate.The labor of the...