Years on, no end in sight to the suffering

John Vidal and Mark Milner
April 26, 2006
The Guardian

Hundreds of thousands of people across Europe will today commemorate the 20th anniversary of the world's worst human-made disaster - when Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded during a routine safety test and sent a plume of radioactivity a mile high to drift over 40% of Europe and as far away as Japan. Between 50 and 250 million curies of radiation, approximately equal to 100 medium-sized atomic bombs, was unleashed.

But there will be no celebrations of progress in Ukraine - home to Chernobyl - Russia, or Belarus, the three most affected countries, which said yesterday they were struggling with a legacy of ill-health, poverty and psychological illnesses affecting their people.

Yesterday Belarus said that one-sixth of the country was still contaminated and the disaster had cost it $235bn (£131.5bn) so far. In a separate study, scientists said the health of the 200,000 people in Ukraine who took part in the cleanup had been badly affected. Across the region, hospitals said they were overwhelmed by people with thyroid cancers, children with genetic mutations and adolescents with radiation-linked illnesses.

But while five independent scientific studies in the last two weeks, including one by the Russia's academy of sciences, have estimated that between 30,000 and 250,000 people have died so far as a result of the disaster, yesterday the World Health Organisation maintained its figure that only 50 people died and that it expects perhaps 9,000 to die eventually from the accident.

Greg Hartl, a WHO spokesman, said a generation of people had become deeply disturbed and poverty and lifestyle illnesses had scarred large populations. "The relocation of people proved a... traumatic experience because of disruption to social networks and the impossibility of returning home," he said.

Although vast areas across the three countries are technically uninhabitable, several hundred people have either refused to go or are now moving in to the abandoned houses in the "dead zone" surrounding the reactor.

In Chernobyl, Ivan Benidenko, his wife Natalya and father Petro have moved back, but say they get their food supplies from outside. "I am from here, I like living here. Now we are trying to rebuild a life," said Ivan. "This is the birth of a new community. It is our big hope, even though there are no children."

On the edge of a forest, Maria Urupa and her husband Mikhail were both victims who refused to leave in 1986 and now take their chances. They eat contaminated berries and mushrooms. "I am afraid of nothing here. Our neighbours were very ill, and many who left have died, and my son had stomach illnesses for years but we are lucky. We would die if we left," she said.

Meanwhile, the future of the reactor is uncertain. A sarcophagus of nearly 700,000 tonnes of steel and 400,000 tonnes of concrete was hastily built to seal the reactor in 1986, but this is now leaking and close to the end of its life. Vince Novak, the director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's nuclear safety department who is in charge of the bank's Chernobyl project said: "How the Soviets built [the sarcophagus] in 1986 for me is almost a miracle. I can't think of anyone else being able to do it in the way they did it."

The plan now is to construct a giant steel arch, costing nearly $1.2bn, which will be installed over the site. But this will not be ready for five years.

The structure will last 100 years but because 200 tonnes of uranium and almost a tonne of elements including plutonium are still inside the power station, as well as vast amounts of radioactive water and dust, the reactor may have to be monitored forever.

5.1 Read the text and say what the Chernobyl's impact is. What is the WHO forecast?

Chernobyl's generations of suffering

It is 20 years this week since the world's worst nuclear accident shot huge amounts of radiation into the Ukraine sky. Now hospital wards there, in Belarus and in Russia are filled with sick youngsters who are the latest, but not the last, casualties of the disaster. Juliette Jowit reports from the region, where only the wildlife is still flourishing. View pictures from her visit here

April 23, 2006
The Observer

Vitali Prokopenko is cradling his 10-year-old daughter Sasha in his arms as he opens the door of his flat. He ushers guests into the small living area so he can sit more comfortably with Sasha in an armchair. As he talks, his muscular hands are constantly fretting, smoothing the trousers on her withered legs, shifting her enlarged head to ease the pressure.

Early in the morning of Saturday, 26 April 1986, the world's worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl jettisoned 100 times as much radiation into the atmosphere as the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. Most fell on the now independent republics of Belarus, Ukraine, and in western Russia.

In 1996 Sasha was born prematurely at the main hospital in Gomel, Belarus's second city. She weighed only 3.7lb, but developed well in the first weeks. Then, at seven months, Vitali and his wife Tanya noticed her head 'becoming bigger and bigger'. The hospital reassured them that children's bodies grew at different rates. Soon afterwards, Sasha developed an infection and was sent to hospital in the capital Minsk, where doctors found she had hydrocephalus, a condition in which cerebrospinal fluid builds up, putting pressure on the brain and swelling the unfixed skulls of small children.

Today Sasha's head weighs 17.6lb, in distorted contrast to her undeveloped, almost immobile body. The weight gives her pressure sores and chafing. Vitali does most of the caring, while Tanya, who grew up in the contamination zone, works as an accountant. Sasha can hear well but cannot respond easily, says Vitali, but he understands that when she fidgets her legs she's hungry, wants a nappy changed or is bored. 'I get support from Sasha,' says Vitali. 'I don't know how I'd live without her.'

A girl of 10 with an enlarged head and small body who loves peach and passionfruit yoghurt could never be a statistic. Nor is Sasha - nor any of the other children and families supported by Gomel's hospice - a certain victim of Chernobyl, just over the border in Ukraine.

Only two people were killed in the explosion, but the lethal legacy of the accident could scarcely be grasped at the time. Within a few months 31 emergency workers - the 'liquidators' - had died. Two decades later, Chernobyl is blamed for thousands of deaths and has blighted the health, economic prosperity and social fabric of millions of people, especially in Belarus.

A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency and seven other United Nations bodies estimated 4,000 people would die as a result of Chernobyl. The report was greeted by relief and disbelief. Many studies from the World Health Organisation, independent scientists and campaign groups had predicted a far more catastrophic impact. In response, a group of disbelievers, led by the European Green party, commissioned their own study, The Other Chernobyl Report, or Torch, which estimated a toll of between 30,000 and 60,000 premature deaths. Last week the international Greenpeace campaign group released another study by 50 scientists claiming 200,000 lives would be lost, nearly half from cancers.

In southern Belarus, the evidence of experts and families supports the scientists who claim Chernobyl's impact is much worse than the IAEA forecast. A senior doctor at Gomel children's hospital claims that as few as one in four babies born in the region is healthy. The reasons expert opinions differ so widely range from data collection problems to corruption and a tangled web of cause and effect in a society dealing with the explosion's legacy - the mass evacuations and the devastation. Radiation would be found almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere, from the US to Japan, and on hill farms in Wales, some of which are still too contaminated to sell their produce. The greatest part of the pollution fell on the three countries nearest the reactor: more than 150,000 square kilometres - an area the size of England, Wales and Northern Ireland - in Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia were contaminated; between five million and nine million people were affected.

Belarus suffered most: according to the World Bank, 70 per cent of the radioactive fallout landed there, affecting more than 3,600 towns and villages, 2.5 million people and a quarter of farmland and forests. A quarter of Belarus still has some contamination. Most of the problem was and is in the Gomel region.

In early spring the vast birch and pine forests in the 30km 'exclusion' zone around Chernobyl are still carpeted with thick snow. But employees who ignore bans on entering or hunting here report the area is thick with wild mushrooms and berries, animals such as wild boar, elk, wild goats, wolves, hares and deer are thriving, and fish in the rivers are bigger than ever. Scientists from the US and Ukraine found nature has blossomed in the absence of almost any humans.

'In a way it [the radiation] is good for the wildlife... the Ukrainian government has to make a decision whether to make it a preserved area,' says one of the official Chernobyl guides, Sergei. But this quiet, beguiling beauty belies the evil of the silent, invisible, deadly radiation that is everywhere, immediately around Chernobyl and far beyond in Belarus.

Travelling around Belarus, it is striking how many people know more than one, sometimes several, friends and relatives who have health problems: school friends with cancer, a grandson or sister with thyroid problems.

Luba Tagai, a nurse sponsored by the Irish charity Chernobyl Children's Project International at the Vesnovo Children's Asylum, a few hours' drive south of Minsk, was eight and living 50km from Chernobyl in 1986. She is one of 4,000 children of the town recorded as having thyroid cancer. Her sister has had the cancer and she regularly gets news of friends falling ill. 'There are lots of young people with different cancers, lung cancer, thyroid glands removed, leukaemia. When I was leaving the region there was a new cemetery; now it's full.'

Luba's story is supported by health and community workers. Vesnovo's director, Vecheslav Klimovich, says that, despite a declining birthrate in Belarus, as many children as ever need beds at the 'orphanage', suffering from both physical and mental problems. At the day care centre in Yelsk, Andrei Luzan has seen the same trend. At Gomel children's hospital, the story is depressingly familiar.

'Before 1985, the common number of kids being born in Gomel region was 28,000 a year and the hospital had 350 beds,' says Olga Pushchenka, the hospital's deputy chief doctor. 'Now the number of kids being born is about 14,000 and the number of beds is the same and we don't have spare beds. The kids suffer more often, and diseases are more severe.'

The most common illnesses are respiratory and rheumatic diseases, heart and blood problems. Pushchenka says it's not right to say all these are caused by Chernobyl; social and environmental problems are also to blame. But, she adds, 'you can see the numbers'.

Later Iryna Kalmanovich, a senior doctor in the hospital's intensive care unit, tours the wards, where she says they have daily evidence of a huge increase in premature children. In several cots are unmoving babies who, like Sasha, have hydrocephalus. One two-day-old boy is trembling due to a problem with his nervous system. Many of the tiny bodies are hooked to ventilators and drips. 'We can give life, but not quality of life,' says Dr Kalmanovich, standing in the drab corridor, echoing with children's chatter. 'The number of absolutely healthy newborns is around 25 per cent, maybe 30 to 40.'

She says the hospital is full of fallout from Chernobyl: 'Young women who were girls then, now they are becoming mothers and the health of those young women is not really good.'

In a small flat in another grey apartment block in the border town of Yelsk, Valentina and Victor Panfilenka live with their children, Anna, 13, Anton, 12, and seven-year-old Zenya, who has cerebral palsy. After Anton and Anna have played the Beatles' 'Yesterday' on accordion and flute and Zenya has shown off her exercise books, and tea has been served, the Panfilenkas offer an insight into why official statistics and local opinions differ. As everyone whose illness is Chernobyl-related qualifies for extra state benefits, a bill which already costs 1 per cent of the economy, the authorities have a reason to play down problems. 'A few doctors said "give us $2,000 and we'll get the papers saying her illness is because of Chernobyl", ' says Valentina Panfilenka. 'But we're tired of proving [it], we just don't want to think about it now.'

Other impacts are indirect. The IAEA's report talks of a 'paralysing fatalism... negative self-assessments of health, belief in shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative and dependency on assistance from the state.' The post-explosion evacuation of 350,000 people scattered communities across the region and led to escalating rates of divorce, alcoholism and unemployment. Belarus's incarceration rate is the third highest in the world and nearly one in five people lives below the poverty line. People survive by growing small crops and keeping a cow or chickens, all feeding off contaminated land. The costs of Chernobyl are in the strain of caring for Sasha on Vitali and Tanya's marriage, in the tears of the parents of a girl with a brain tumour called Ann Pesenko, children with rheumatism spending spring afternoons in hospital.

The IAEA concerns itself with deaths among an estimated 600,000 emergency workers and residents of the contaminated areas at the time; it has no intention of looking at their children. A report to be published this week by British scientists picked up on this theme. It repeats the IAEA's finding that only thyroid cancer has increased, but adds: 'Most radiation-related solid [tumour] cancers continue to occur decades after exposure.'

The scientists found unexpected increases in thyroid cancer in children born after the isotopes of iodine believed responsible for it would have ceased to be a danger. 'It is still very early days in terms of evaluating the full radiological impact.'

In a small room in the almost abandoned town of Chernobyl, filled with the stench and scratching of hundreds of mice, such uncertainty will not be a big surprise. Viktor Krasnov, head of this radiobiological lab, also says research has focused on the relatively misunderstood impacts of long-term exposure to low radiation levels and found it can cause harm. 'The effect is definitely here,' he says.

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