ANALYSIS

December 9, 2000

Closure of Chornobyl: The End of an Era?

On 15 December, the Ukrainian authorities will close the Chornobyl nuclear power station permanently, as part of their agreement with the G-7 countries and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. The latter have agreed to finance the harnessing of two new reactors in western Ukraine: Rivne-4 and Khmelnytsky-2. The capacity of the two new reactors will maintain Ukraine’s portion of nuclear-generated electricity at 46% of the total output.

The Chornobyl station was conceived thirty years ago by the USSR Ministry of Power and Electrification and the first reactor unit came on line in 1977. The reactors were graphite-moderated RBMKs constructed only in the USSR and they were built in twins. Chornobyl was Ukraine’s only graphite-moderated plant, located 80 miles north of the capital of Kyiv, and 7 miles south of the border with Belarus. Pripyat, a town for reactor workers, with a population of 45,000 in 1986, was located 2 miles to the north, and the town of Chornobyl, with a population of 10,000, is 7 miles to the south. In April 1986 at the time of the disaster, Chornobyl had four reactors in service, with units 5 and 6 under construction. Similar stations were operating near Leningrad, at Kursk, and at Ignalina in Lithuania. Another RBM under construction near Smolensk was redesigned in midstream as a water-water pressurized (VVER) complex.

The accident of 26 April, which arose from a test on safety equipment, blew the roof off unit four and spewed radioactive products into the atmosphere for the next two weeks. The wind initially blew the cloud to the north-east and north-west over the territory of Belarus, Poland, and the Baltic States, but after four days, the winds changed direction and the cloud moved southward over the city of Kyiv and into Kirovohrad region. The Kyiv May-Day parade took place on schedule though the Ukrainian party leaders had ensured that their grandchildren were safely removed beforehand.

The Soviet authorities maintained initial silence about the event for 40 hours, and then the local authorities evacuated an area 6 miles in radius around the reactor. On 2 May, after Polituro officials Evgeniy Ligachev and Nikolay Ryzhkov arrived on the scene, that area widened to 18 miles (30 kilometers). However, the authorities did not reveal the full extent of radioactive fallout for three years. Today, it is estimated, nearly 6 million residents of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia live on contaminated land, including 3.2 million people in Ukraine. The most discernible health consequence to date has been thyroid gland cancer among children, caused by radioactive Iodine released in the first week after the explosion. About 3,000 children suffer from the disease, which was negligible prior to the accident. In Ukraine, deputy health minister Ol’ha Bobyleva reported last year that 1,200 children have this form of cancer, and four children have died to date. The peak of thyroid gland cancer, which has also affected adults, is expected in 2001-2005.

Information about the number of victims proved very hard to ascertain. Not only was all health information about the effects of Chornobyl classified, but also the authorities placed the official death toll at 31 and refused to raise it despite a plethora of future casualties, including incidentally two chairmen of the rotating government commission formed to deal with the aftermath of the disaster. The main victims of the accident were initially firemen and first-aid workers, and more recently members of the teams of decontamination works (termed "liquidators" in the former Soviet Union). Of the 350,000 liquidators who came from Ukraine, over 12,500 have died, most of them in the 35-50 age group at the time of death. Of the 12,500, health authorities determined that over 4,300 passed away from causes directly attributable to Chornobyl.

Similar figures are found in Belarus, which was affected by high-level fallout in about 20% of the republic. In both republics, the health statistics make grim reading with dramatic rises in all types of morbidity since the accident (though the incidence of Leukemia remains within the European norm and the illnesses are not necessarily related to Chornobyl). In remote regions, the soil remains highly contaminated, especially with radioactive Cesium, but the majority of the population lives off the land and consumes radioactive products.

In 1994, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) belatedly declared the Chornobyl plant to be inherently unsafe and recommended its closure. This decision followed a period in which the Soviet and then Ukrainian nuclear authorities tried to make improvements to the reactor, reducing its shutdown time, tightening its operating rules, and increasing its uranium enrichment. None of these measures eradicated the fundamental dilemma that the RBMK is unstable if operated at low power.

In December 1995 at a meeting of the G-7 countries and Russia in Ottawa, Ukraine agreed to close the plant by the year 2000 after being offered approximately US$2.3 billion in compensation. Thereafter the issue was clouded by bad faith on both sides. Ukraine shut down Unit 2 after a fire in 1991, and then closed down unit 1 on schedule in 1997. Unit 3, which shares a building with the destroyed fourth unit, remained in operation until last week, when it was shut down after a serious malfunction. The plant may be closed by default rather than design, though Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma has insisted that the plant would close even if funds were not forthcoming from the G-7 countries.

As for the destroyed reactor, workers and robots covered it with a concrete tomb over the summer and fall of 1986. This was initially termed the "Sarcophagus" but has more recently been called The Shelter. The former director of the Chornobyl plant, Serhy Parashyn, noted in 1998 that the Shelter was collapsing, and an international consortium received the task of designing a new cover at a cost of US$750 million to be completed by 2006. Nuclear fuel remains under the central room of the fourth unit, and experts have not dismissed the possibility of a chain reaction in these remains. Twenty-nine unsafe zones have been exposed, five of which are highly dangerous. In a recently published book, Ukrainian scientists maintain that if the building construction within the Shelter crumbled, then radioactive dust would contaminate the immediate area.

The closure of Chornobyl is not good news for the plant workers. About a quarter of the 30,000 residents of Slavutych, the town built for plant workers 40 miles to the northeast, to replace the former city of Pripyat, face unemployment. Plant workers complain that Chornobyl has been singled out by the IAEA because of its international reputation, declaring that there are more dangerous reactors still in operation elsewhere. The plant closure is an economic misfortune, but the disaster itself marks a devastating physical and psychological tragedy, the effects of which appear to worsen rather than ease over time.

David Marples, a professor of history at the University of Alberta is author of three books on Chornobyl. He has visited both the nuclear plant and the contaminated regions on several occasions.