Although the world may never know the full impact of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, the United Nations nuclear agency wants to put an end to the confusion for millions of victims of the Chernobyl accident.
The disaster occurred 18 years ago, at 1:24 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when an explosion at Reactor 4 of the Ukrainian power plant spewed a cloud of radioactivity across Europe and the Soviet Union.
Around 30 people died from radiation exposure after the accident, nearly 2,000 children later developed thyroid cancer and thousands of other fatal illnesses have been blamed on it. More than 100,000 people were resettled, causing physical, economic and psychological hardship.
Among the millions of people whose lives were affected by the disaster, thousands may have developed cancer and died as a result. But poor records and corruption have prevented the accurate registration of the workers who helped put out the fire and entomb the smoldering nuclear plant in 1986.
“We have an epistemological problem,” said Abel Gonzalez, head of radiation and waste safety at the International Atomic Energy Agency. “In Chernobyl, you can say that the only concrete sick persons that you can (identify) are the (1,800) children who got thyroid cancer and the workers who were overexposed. All the rest, we don’t know.”
Inconsistent information
Not only is there a limit to the ability of the nuclear experts to understand the full impact of Chernobyl, but contradictory studies and statements about the disaster have confused the millions of people whose lives were affected by it.
“People living in the affected villages are very distressed because the information they receive — from one expert after another turning up there — is inconsistent. People living there are afraid for their children,” Gonzalez explained.
Over the years, wildly varying reports have put the Chernobyl death toll as high as 15,000.
For this reason, the IAEA has established the Chernobyl forum, whose task will be to give “authoritative, transparent statements that show the factual situation in the aftermath of Chernobyl,” said Gonzalez, who represents the IAEA on the forum.
The forum will bring together Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, the IAEA and all other U.N. organizations involved in Chernobyl. It will review all the studies and statements on Chernobyl, filter out the good, throw out the bad and present a clear summary to next year’s U.N. General Assembly.
A native of Argentina, Gonzalez is no stranger to the Chernobyl story. From 1989 to 1991, he headed a huge IAEA study of the health, environmental and radiological impact of the disaster on villages and towns in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine that suffered the worst contamination.
'Liquidators' not well tracked
He was always convinced that many cases of leukemia would appear among the 600,000 so-called “liquidators” who worked frantically in the spring of 1986 to put out the fire in the molten reactor and entomb the plant in a concrete sarcophagus.
“I was personally convinced that leukemia in the workers — the liquidators — would be detected. But until now it has not appeared,” he said.
Gonzalez said that this may be because some of the people who were granted the status of “liquidator,” which gave them free public transport and other perks, never actually worked at Chernobyl but got liquidator cards through contacts.
“I saw this with my own eyes,” he said. “Someone with the liquidator card who never worked there.”
As a result the liquidator register is almost useless.
“If proper registration had been done, probably you would have seen some leukemia in workers. But the registration is such a disaster that it will be very, very difficult,” he said.
Because of this, the question of how many people have died as a result of the accident may never be properly answered.
“It is an issue that is impossible to settle because there are two different types of deaths — the deaths that you can check that they happened and the ones you can only imagine.”
The Chernobyl blame game
The Soviet Union’s misinformation and overall mismanagement of the disaster resulted in a tendency of victims to attribute all kinds of illnesses to Chernobyl that may have nothing to do with it.
“A woman brings her baby sick with leukemia and says it is caused by Chernobyl. How do you explain to her that if Chernobyl had never happened her child might still have leukemia?”
According to a 1996 article by Atomic Energy Insights, around 200,000 women aborted fetuses due to unfounded fears that the children would have birth defects.
Gonzalez said he was not undermining the seriousness of the disaster — merely pointing out that the ability to clearly identify illnesses caused by Chernobyl is severely limited.
The IAEA has often said that the Chernobyl changed the way the world looks at nuclear power. Unknown before April 1986, when newspapers first carried front-page headlines about the accident, Chernobyl is now a household word and the biggest public relations problem for supporters of atomic energy.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said that it was an important milestone for the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
“Chernobyl was a tragic but important turning point for the IAEA,” said ElBaradei. “It prompted us to focus unprecedented energies and resources to help the affected people and ensure that such a serious accident would never happen again.”
What is clear, ElBaradei said, is that it “had a disastrous impact on life, health and the environment in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and prompted fear and concerns in other nations of the world about the effects of radiation.”
