A traveller writes their account of Chernobyl visit as its 29th anniversary is celebrated.
The Chernobyl disaster was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occured on April 26 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities of the Soviet Union.
An explosion and a huge fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe.
The Chernobyl disaster was the worst nuclear power plant accident in history in terms of cost and casualties. It is one of only two classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles. During the accident itself, 31 people died, and long-term effects such as cancers are still being investigated.
I was taking what must be one of the strangest day trips in the world. The minibus – old, battered and with a tidemark of salt-rimmed dirt – had picked us up from our upmarket Kiev hotel and joined the traffic, heavy with Hummers and black-windowed Mercs, on the multi-lane highway out of town. The endless apartment blocks gave way on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital to small scatterings of low-rise homes, some of them detached, with gardens and parking spaces.
For two hours we drove north-east towards the Belarus border, through flat open fields – the famed Ukrainian “black earth”, from which the collective farms produced wheat for Mother Russia. Snow muffled sound and added to a sense of the unreal as we approached our destination, the place the Ukrainians call Chornobyl.
We know it as Chernobyl, the power plant where, on April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster occurred. A red-and-white striped barrier across the road marked the beginning of the 18-mile exclusion zone around the nuclear reactors. For the last few miles before we reached it, small settlements of single-storey dachas and concrete beet-processing plants lay deserted and derelict by the roadside. You need permission to enter both the exclusion zone and the three-mile inner “dead zone” at the heart of the area.
Twenty years on from the accident that changed the world’s attitudes towards nuclear power, permission does not seem to be hard to get; companies offering day trips from Kiev are becoming as widespread as the city’s Ukrainian brides’ agencies.
I wonder just how much regret the men of the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4 had to live with (if, indeed, they survived), following their decision to test how long the turbines would continue to supply power after the main electrical supply failed. These older-style reactors were known to be unstable at low power settings. The resulting disaster – the explosion, fire and release into the atmosphere of tons of radioactive material and gases – became infamous. But on April 26, 1986, no one was aware of the unfolding catastrophe, not even the 45,000 workers and their families living in Pripyat, the so-called “workers’ paradise” city with its new apartments, schools and hospitals.
We drove through Pripyat’s almost completely deserted streets after a briefing at the Chernobyl City Visitor’s Centre, where explanations of roentgens (units of exposure to radiation) and statistics about radiation and pollution were sobering. But they did not have the same impact as standing in the disintegrating remains of a Pripyat school, staring at photographs of children proudly smiling for the camera at a gymnastics display. The fading pictures were still pinned to the noticeboard outside that very gym. Birch saplings were growing through the ruptured block flooring; snow was falling through the gaping roof. I wondered how many of the children were still alive and well. The town was not evacuated until days after the explosion.
The Mary Celeste theme is repeated throughout Pripyat. Apartments still contain the families’ possessions: they could take nothing except some photographs and money. Everything was, and remains, contaminated. But this hasn’t deterred scavengers. A rusting Ferris wheel and dodgems stood in the playground, ready for the 1986 May Day holiday, which was never observed. Every dodgem car’s electric motor has been removed.
Like the fields full of disintegrating “hot” vehicles – helicopters, tanks, trucks, concrete mixers, bicycles and wheelbarrows – the zone is a surreal picture of abandonment. It is said to be safe to visit for a few hours (even hotspots have roentgen counts of only about 22), as long as you touch nothing, especially metal, and take care where you walk, as the buildings and even the drains beneath your feet are beginning to collapse.
It’s hard to tease apart fact and fiction about the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. Millions of people were probably irradiated. Leukaemia and thyroid cancer rates (especially in children) in countries across eastern and northern Europe increased, yet official figures put the accident’s death toll merely in double figures. The tens of thousands of Soviet citizens conscripted to help the clean-up, and who must have been badly affected, do not seem to be counted among the official victims. International furore over the incident – and especially the secrecy surrounding it – accelerated the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
At the No 4 reactor, we stood across the roadway in the double-glazed observation room, watching the roentgen counter clock tick happily away between 12 and 14 (a perfectly normal count for most cities, we were assured). I stared at the intimidating bulk of the huge reactor, with its surrounding “sarcophagus” of concrete, built to shield the lethal contents, and listened to an explanation of why 28 countries are donating billions of dollars and limitless expertise to building a further new overcoat for this troublesome building.
I had expected the reactor to be cordoned off and abandoned, but workers were being disgorged from buses outside, preparing to cross the road for their next shift. Hundreds of people – electricians, carpenters, doctors, hydrologists, miners, meteorologists, scientists, cooks and cleaners – work each day in the heart of the dead zone, still trying to contain and clean up the reactor. “We can work in Chernobyl city for 15 days at a stretch,” Oleg Maxim, our guide, explained. “But then we have to leave the exclusion zone completely and go back to the city for at least 15 days.”
Those working inside the reactor, even protectively clothed and with respirators, can stay for only five minutes. The earlier jokes about returning from this day trip glowing in the dark started to sound more than a little trite.
We checked our radiation levels by gripping the bars of an ancient dosimeter (it looks like a Soviet-style speak-your-weight machine), before being served the lunch provided on the all-inclusive tour. Our rad levels were all fine, but none of us had any appetite. It could have been the brassica-heavy menu (cabbage salad, cabbage borscht, chicken with cabbage dumplings) or perhaps it was wariness, despite the assurances that the food, like everything else consumed in Chernobyl city, is brought in from outside the zone.
But how far outside the zone is far enough? After two decades, British farms are still deemed to be contaminated. The Department of Health last month admitted that more than 200,000 sheep are grazing on land contaminated by fallout from the explosion.
Appetite loss lasts only so long in the Ukrainian winter. By the time we had made the return journey to Kiev, our six-strong group was ready for dinner at a traditional restaurant, where over Russian beer and Ukrainian vodka we talked over the day’s outing. It was, we agreed, the most sobering and bizarrely memorable day out we had ever taken.
This article originally appeared in the Telegraph.
