Day of the Liquidators

Today, the 14th of December, it's the official day of the liquidators.

In 1986, over 650 000 people, most of them men, helped in trying to alleviate the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, working to avoid that the effects grew into larger, uncontrollable proportions and to clean up the big mess afterwards. Many of them died a slow, painful death. 

So let's all spend our thoughts on, and give our thanks to all those men without whom we would live in a very different world.

To all the brave firefighters, soldiers, pilots, drivers, sanitary workers, people who worked on the roof of the fourth reactor, those who built the sarcophagus, and to everyone else participating (no one shall be forgotten); there are really not enough words to express the importance of your work, but the whole world owes you a big

THANK YOU!

Unsweetened Truth

Here in “the west”, we have more or less always been spoiled with information and nowadays everything is revealed, even information that we neither want nor need, but the citizens of the USSR did for sure not enjoy the same luxury and even after the fall of the great union, it shall not be taken for granted that the old secrets are revealed. “What I am about to tell you, will never be published by any Ukrainian paper” says 46 years old Sergey Nikolaevich Bondarenko, a former liquidator who was one of the soldiers who participated during the evacuation of Pripyat. “Nor will they talk about it on television. The official truth is a sweetened up version presented with the courage  and pain of our people, but the real truth is too inconvenient for our government, and therefore it’s important not to shut up.”

S. Bondarenko with comrades.
Please do not copy. 

When the alarm sounded, at the Chernobyl Nuclear Powerplant in April 26th, 1986, Sergey Bondarenko was 19 years old and situated with his army unit, the special motorized military units MVD USSR in the Kiev Red Order Decorated Military District. At dawn, the unit №5403 SMCHS was alerted. The soldiers were put in fully armoured vehicles, each and every one of them carrying their private service weapons, gas masks, shields, helmets, vests and grenade This was all by the means of preventing riots and this was all that they knew for the first period of time. No one knew what was going on or where they were going, until the senior officers received their orders to without any delay set course to Chernobyl, a small town in the outskirts of the Kiev region. 

On their way to Chernobyl, the path of the 5403rd unit was crossed by other parts of the Kiev Garrison, which had also been alerted, and five hours after the first explosion at the 4th reactor complex, Bondarenko’s unit arrived in Pripyat. 

“The first day after the accident was a mess” says Sergey Bondarenko. “No one knew what to do and the residents of Pripyat were not informed about anything and thus suspected nothing. Only military chemists carrying dosimeters were silently scanning the neighbourhood to measure the radiation levels.”

The soldiers were given indicators to be carried, but these had expired and could not properly measure the airborne radiation. Sergey Bondarenko tells further from his memory:

“ On the night of 26 April 1986 the orders from the chief of intelligence were for our entire division to be taken 20 kilometers from the present location and to the forest of the river Pripyat, to rest. There on the river bank, we met with employees from the Chernobyl NPP, who as if nothing had happened, were fishing. To our questions about what happened in Chernobyl, they gave evasive answers, explaining that it is only just simply a standard situation and that the consequences were under special control.”

Shortly after that, Bondarenko and his comrades were forced to relocate again, as they were informed of that the levels of radiation on this site were too high. That evening the soldiers were given a not very solid dinner consisting of one can of minced sausages, two slices of bread and four sugar cubes. It became necessary to sleep but there were no place to sleep nearby the forest and there were no tents, so it was decided to sleep in the open air, fully exposed to the radioactive fallout. 

“Our camping place was in a radioactive forest, and 19 years old soldiers were washing themselves in a river contaminated by heavily radioactive metals”

Then the evacuation of Pripyat began. The instructions were to evict the population in six hours (the procedure demanded eight hours) and Pripyat was divided in different sectors, each to be taken care of by groups of soldiers wearing their usual uniforms. I ask Sergey Bondarenko why they weren’t wearing protection suits and his answer is very concise - if the military men would have been wearing protective suits or masks, the residents would have understood that something was wrong, and it was important to avoid outbreaks of panic.  Each entrance of each aparment block had its own bus waiting for the residents and the main task of the soldiers was to inform people to bring their documents and food enough to last for a few days. The evacuation would only be for three days, the residents were told. But when they left, their houses were immediately sealed.  Sergey Bondarenko recalls the horrible sight of watching the people leave their homes. Many were carrying for them important things, and even such things as TV-sets and carpets, but everything had to be left by their homes. Children were crying and people were upset - the evacuation of Pripyat was only relatively calm. 

“All through the night of April 27th, we guarded a deserted city” tells Sergey Bondarenko “My comrades and I were on patrol until the morning. The town was dead. Only single apartments were lit up and on some of the balconies, dogs were howling at the moon. We had to check up on these apartments. There were people who had permission to remain in the town - plant workers, policemen, doctors and military [officers]. We went to check on the rooftops and saw the ominous glow from the power station. It continued to burn even on this third day” 

The soldiers were almost completely cut off from the world outside what would become the 30 kilometers wide exclusion zone, but their pocket radio receivers still managed to receive transmissions from the radio program of Seva Novgorodtsev, “Seva Oborot”, which allowed them to take part of BBC transmissions in Russian in matters of new as well as music. And it was through the BBC that the soldiers first found out about what had happened at the ChNPP; days before it was officially announced on Soviet TV.  

On the 30th of April came the orders to leave the Chernobyl zone and return to Kiev.  Before the departure, the soldiers were shown formal gratitude for the evacuation of the village and protection of its inhabitants. After that, arrived a truck loaded with water tanks, so that 150 soldiers could wash up after their duty in the zone. Everything was polluted, and their uniforms were buried by the roadside. Documents and personal belongings were taken away and not to be returned until the arrival in Kiev. 

In Kiev the members of the units were set in quarantine. Visitors were prohibited. If parents or relatives still came to visit, they could do so from a two floors difference. The soldiers were not allowed to tell anything about where they had been or what they had done, and to make sure that no one made a slip of the tongue, there were intelligence officers surveiling it all Also letters were searched. Every day these liquidators had to go to leave blood samples at the hospital, whilst the doctors would not respond to any questions.  After three months, the quarantine was lifted. 

“Practically everyone who were in the zone developed dermatitis” says Sergey Bondarenko “There were cases of soldiers fainting, but that wasn’t paid attention to. On the identification cards (of the Soviet Armed Forces) they wrote the radiation doses received to 10 Roentgen for soldiers and 25 for the officers. In 1996 they wrote me up for 43,6 Roentgen. Whence this figure come, I do not know.”

In 1996, Sergey Nikolaevich Bondareko was taken in for the first of the operations on his thyroid glands. There was a tumor detected, as a long term result of the exposure of radiation. Bondarenko was given a so called Group-2 pension for disabled, and granted 2000 Ukrainian gryvnas per month (approx. €180), which is barely enough for a month’s supply of food if you have a family.  These are horrible conditions to live on, especially if facing a permanent health condition. Many liquidators were initially offered a large pay, good pensions, cars and other bonuses if they took on the life demanding tasks of cleaning up after the disasters, but they received nothing; their own country turned its back on them and they’re still struggling to be allowed to live a decent life.

Sergey Nikolaevich Bondarenko, speaking for
the liquidators. Please do not copy.

Much more remains, of what Sergey Bondarenko told me, and much remains to be said and done about the situation of the surviving liquidators and about those who are gone. But let us focus on those who are alive.  Sergey Bondarenko is still fighting for the rights of the liquidators. To be treated as the human beings they are. 

Food for thought?

Official photo: Helicopter flying towards the burning 4th block.

Being questioned, the Chernobyl officials first refused to admit any flaws with the RBMK reactors - those had been around for years. They didn't know better.

Thus the blame was put on the officials and workers who were supposed to be well familiar with the rules. They were. But they weren't aware of the over ten accidents in other Soviet reactors that was kept secret by the government. So they knew the rules but not the risks because nobody told them of what had happened or what could happen. 

How can you run a new machine properly without first having read the manual, and if you run this machine for someone else who wants you to do a perfect job and who has the manual but won't give it to you, how do they expect you to perform correctly?

This all looks very simple, doesn't it? But it isn't. It just manifests the entire complexity of the Chernobyl affair. I wonder if we will ever find out the truth.

Valery Alekseevich Legasov: About the Disaster at the Chernobyl NPP

Valery A. Legasov.

Valery A. Legasov, born in 1936, became an academic at the age of 36. At the time of the Chernobyl accident, he was the chairman of the Department of Chemical Technology at the Chemistry Department of Moscow State University. Legasov was the man sent to the Chernobyl NPP to aid, try to gain control over the problem and to investigate the disaster; what caused it, what the consequenses could be and how it at all could happen. 

It may seem funny that a professor in chemistry was sent to the site of a nuclear disaster, but the truth is that Legasov was the only man present in Moscow at the time who was at all qualified to attend the emergency. Legasov,  by his wife being refered to as a strong and honest individual who wasn't afraid to speak his mind was the very person insisting on the evacuation of Pripyat, and obviously his voice was heard in this matter. Apparently this was not the case concerning some following issues - The Soviet regime allegedely forbade him to speak the truth, during the IAEA conference in Vienna (August 1986, where of course also Hans Blix attended), concerning the RBMK reactors and previous accidents and problems with said reactors throughout the Soviet Union.

After the immediate threats of the ChNPP's 4th reactor had settled and the Sarcophagus was built, Legasov would experience that his carreer had been damaged due to the being forced to hide the truth. For this he'd try to make up by writing several papers which were either censored nor not at all published. Eventually, the sense of failure became overwhelming for Valery Legasov, who committed suicide in 1988. On April 26th,  the 2nd anniversary of the disaster, Legasov's hanged body was found by his son returning from school. By then Legasov had been dead for approximately four hours. Valery Legasov became 51 years old.

The suicide of Legasov wasn't mentioned in any Soviet media.

Anatoly Dyatlov, the vice deputy chief engineer at the ChNPP, in charge of the experiment at reactor block 4 at the morning of the accident, was (as I've mentioned before) persecuted and sent to prison for criminal minsmanagement of potentially explosive enterprises. This man wrote a book entitled "Чернобыль - Как это было" ["Chernobyl - As it was"], where he told the story from his own point of view, blaming the construction of the RBMK reactors for what had happened. Dyatlov also wrote a letter to Hans Blix where he tried to explain the cause of the disaster, but not much more is currently know about this letter.

Valery Legasov didn't write any books, but (supposedly) the hours before his death, he made voice recordings covering five cassettes where he told about the Chernobyl affair. These tapes were found and eventually transcripted to written text. Some time ago, I found these documents. In spite of a long habit concerning the modern technology involving computers and so on, I still am not comfortable with reading from a screen so today I printed the 123 pages of Legasov's text set recordings. Leaving the copying service office, I started looking over the papers and found that it's actually understandable to me. I think that it will be possible for me to translate this. I am going to give it a try. As a matter of fact, I will start right away. 

The Children of Chernobyl - Part III

Okay, let's get down to business, shall we. 

14 years after the Chernobyl disaster, the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Nuclear Radiation) report of 2000, it is said that there were no stated indications of the Chernobyl fallout's effect on children, spare from a theoretical view. Maybe this report has been revised since then, but if you start reading this at page 497, you will discover the opposite and five years later, USCEAR reported about 6000 cases of thyroid cancer cases amongst children who in one way or another were exposed to the radioactive fallout from the destroyed 4th reactor. In this text I explain why the thyroid glands of young individuals are extra sensitive to readioactive exposure. Iodine-131 has a tendency to be stored in milk from mammals. This includes cow milk and goat milk as well as the milk from human females. As children need milk for the development of skeleton and teeth, Iodine contaminated milk consitutes a health danger, but that's not all. The isotope of Strontium, Strontium-90 resembles Calcium (milk is rich on Calcium) and goes straight to the bone in the very same way. Strontium-90 increases the risk or bone growth retardation when it comes to young individuals and may cause skeleton cancer based in the bone marrow for human individuals all ages. 

By 2005 UNSCEAR, even though having admitted the 6000 cases of thyroid cancer, still states that:

"...there is no clearly demonstrated increase in the incidence of solid cancers or leukaemia due to radiation in the exposed populations. Neither is there any proof of other non-malignant disorders that are related to ionizing radiation. However, there were widespread psychological reactions to the accident, which were due to fear of the radiation, not to the actual radiation doses.
There is a tendency to attribute increases in the rates of all cancers over time to the Chernobyl accident, but it should be noted that increases were also observed before the accident in the affected areas. Moreover, a general increase in mortality has been reported in recent decades in most areas of the former Soviet Union, and this must be taken into account when interpreting the results of the accident-related studies."

One year later, this is contradicted by UNICEF. The deputy director at the time, Kul Gautam, stated that: 

"One thing is absolutely clear. Increased incidence of childhood thyroid cancer caused by radioactive Iodine fallout has been the most dramatic health impact of Chernobyl. There are over 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer affecting the ‘Chernobyl generation’ of children. But cancer is only the tip of the iceberg. Widespread iodine deficiency in the vicinity of Chernobyl and other parts of Belarus, Russian Federation and Ukraine is leading to a whole generation of children growing up potentially brain-damaged."

In Gautam's statement, compared to the report dealt with here, it's all focusing on the effects of radiation on fetuses and the possible retardation of brain development but that is perhaps one of the least risks. At least compared to the unknown number of cases of leukemia, various kinds of leukepenia and skeleton deformations. 
UNICEF as well as UNSCEAR may have been correct, but still rash in some of their conclusions, as most of the defections cannot be seen in the first generations but in Belarus - that received a large part of the Chernobyl fallout, there's been over 10 000 confirmed cases of thyroid cancer amongst children, 25 years after the accident, and we'll see these numbers increase in all the affected areas of the former Soviet Union and Europe for the next decades to come. 


I deliberately avoid stating more numbers as these are unknown and sources continue to contradict each other and I'm not looking to upset people with shocking images, but the main disorders and defects tens of thousands of children suffer from as a consequence of the Chernobyl disaster are thyroid cancer, leukemia and other forms of cancer related to blood and skeleton. Many children born just before, and after the disaster in the fallout areas have problems with their lungs, heats, immune system, and they will never recover. 

Correnspondence and Encouraging and Series of Events

 I went back to the library today, to attend the no known exhibition and found a note in the guestbook reading: 

"Awesome you who tell the truth - the way it should be"

This sincerely brought warth to my heart and will be added as fuel to what makes me proceed with my work. 

I've been writing many letters lately.

Encouraging is always also when people take their work seriously.

As mentioned in this post, I very recently found out that there's still a Swedish organisation caring for children of Chernobyl. I choose the word "still" because when I was visting the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum in Kiev there were, as a part of the exhibition, brochures in Swedish, encouraging donations for supporting summer camps for Chernobyl children. These pamphlets were from the late 80's and I cannot recall ever having seen anything like that here. Thus, I was happily surprised when the secretary of information at Tjernobylbarnens Vänner sent me a reply to my message this soon. What surprised me is the fact that this organisation is only 6 years old and has nothing to do with what I saw in Kiev, but even more was I pleased to see that there are people who care not out of tradition, but out of their hearts. Every summer since 2005 they have arranged camps for up to 32 Ukrainian children between the ages of 6 and 15, all suffering health consequenses from the Chernobyl disaster.

A Swedish trade is to have a bad conscience and to feel guilty. Or is it rather about big hearts with a certain sense of taking on responsibility? I honestly, don't know, but to mind is brought the efforts of Liutenant Colonel Vladimir Michailovich Maksimchuk.

Vladimir M. Maksimchuk

Maksimchuk was one of the Chernobyl firefighters who attended not at the night of the disaster, but when there again was a large danger at hand. On the 32rd of May in 1986 sources indicate there that another fire had started at the NPP. The fire rapidly approaced the engine room of the 4th reactor, which was full pipes containing hydrogen gas. Again there was a risk of thermal explosion and Vladimir Maksimchuk and his men were sent in to put out the fire. They could only work firve at the time, for no more than ten minutes each, but Maksimchuck himself stayed close to the area for 12 hours. He received more than 7 Sv/Gy of radiation and was later sent to be hospitalized. 

As soon as Vladimir Maksimchuk had begun to recover, he was sent back to duty. In 1989 he lead the extinguishing work at a chemical plant in the Luthianian city Ionave. In spite of being very ill from radiation sickness, Maksimchuk proceeded with his profession until 1994. In April 1994, the Swedish Red Cross offered the already deadly ill Maksimchuk medical treatment and he was to be transfered to Stockholm by helicopter but it was too late. On May 22nd in 1994 another hero of the big disaster died.

I keep asking myself about the reasons for Sweden to have shown such concern for Chernobyl, its victims and children. May it have something to do with the fact that this country was the very one to expose to the world that something wasn't quite as it should? May it be a way of saying that "as we discovered this mess, it's our duty to help cleaning it up"? Or rather because that they actually asked for help? 


Someone once said:

"Yellow and blue and Chernobyl and Poltava entwine Sweden and Ukraine forever" 

I'll resume my research concerning Chernobyl fallout effects on children and also concerning Vladimir Maksimchuk.

The Children of Chernobyl - Part I

"I didn't like your photos of the old toys. All abandoned like that it gives me the sense that the children who once played with them went the same way."

Withered and lost. 

So said my brother after having seen my photos from Pripyat. 

At the time, not knowing any better, I calmed him by saying that everything was all right because "the evacuation happened fast enough". 

May it be that the very process of evacuation went fast enough, but still that wasn't good enough. By the time of evacuation, 36 hours had already passed since the second explosion at the 4th reactor block at the ChNPP and since then, there had beel a fallout of Strontium-90, Caesium-137 and Plutonium-239; not to mention Iodone-131.

For a growing, still physically evolvling individual, the thyroid glands, where Iodine is stored, are extra sensitive to ionizing radiation, and already at the evacuation of Pripyat the childrens' thyroids were absorbing the radioactive Iodine like sponges. -Had the wind blown in a different direction, larger parts of Ukraine would have been affected, but instead Belarus took the big hit, receiving approximately 75% of the Chernobyl fallout and especially Strontium-90 and Iodine-131 would play a great part in the this far visible consequences.

In Poland, having been alerted concerning that something was boiling down like a dried kettle, they started to treat their children with a special fluid equivalent to the Iodine pills that are furtherly known, shortly after the Chernobyl breakdown, and concerning Pripyat, it was said that Iodine pills were given to the children before the evacuation but as I do not have a concrete reliable source for this information, I will not state this as a fact.

In Kiev, Iodine pills were handed out to the population 14 days after the accident as a symbolic act (which the people did not know much about), but of course in vain - Iodine-131 has a half life of only 8 days, so by then the pills were not of much use. 

The Romanian born Igor Kostin, was the only photographer in the world to document the early stages of the disaster. At the night of the accident he is said to have been alerted by a helicopter pilot who usually worked with Kostin concerning journalistic assignments, and the next day they would fly together, over the ChNPP. Some days after that, Kostin would be back in Kiev, photographing the May 1st celebrations, which he would later refer to as the Parade of Death. By then the radioactive cloud was all over Ukraine's capital.

The children of nothern Ukraine and Belarus were the first victims of the Chernobyl disaster, after the first firefighters and liquidators. An alarming increased number of thyroid cancer cases amongst children and young individuals from the concerned areas were reported up to 20 years after the disaster, but since then it has been hard to find any recent updates concerning the cases of illness, health defects and physical abnormalities.  

There are a number of organizations actively working to support the children of Chernobyl in different ways. Most of them are serious but my task of investigation concerning this is how they get their fundings and how they're used.

Searching for information, I found the Swedish Tjernobylbarnens Vänner (site in Swedish only) and I have written to them and asked about their work. The same concerning the Irish Chernobyl Children International. There are Belarusian and German equivalents as well, which I intend to get in touch with as well to try to get a more recent picture of the  biological outcome this far in matters of birth defects, chronic illness and so on. Some effects are yet to be seen. 

The Belarussian Yury Bandazhevsky, former director of the medical institute in Gomel performed experiments on hamsters, feeding pregnant female hamsters Caesium contaminated food. The result was severe birth defects on the unborn ebryos that were deformed or missing eyes or vital organs. Due to his research, Bandazhevsky was deprived of his work and employment and put under house arrest for several years. His wife, Galina Bandazhevskaya, has given an interview for the Chernobyl Children International. It's poorly translated and the writer's text is too much angled but there are still some few interesting facts.

The issues are piling up. As you can see, I have a lot of things to go through. The Chernobyl matters aren't only concentrated, but speread like the fallout and it will take time to clear the radioactove dust coulds.

Rounding up the Swedes

It is obvious that my presense is required at the exhibition. Having caught a cold, I could not be there this afternoon as planned, but two friends who visited the exhibition told me about the mess that had occurred; the banner detaching from the wall and the library personnel loading a lot of junk around it all. As this came to my knowledge late in the afternoon, of course I had no choice but to go there and take care of these nuisances. 

The disturbances were easily gotten rid of, and I could then find the peace to enjoy the flowers sent to the exhibition. Yes that's right, someone actually sent flowers to the exhibition all the way from Stockholm and it was a very pleasant surprise. There was a card attached as well, with a greeting reading "Hoping for a radiating success!"

A few days ago, I was made aware of that some have gotten the impression that this blog was only due to the exhibition and that I would quit writing after that and I admit that I might have stated something that may have encouraged such impressions, but the truth is that... it's not true: I will keep on posting in this blog for as long as there are things to be told.

Hans Blix visiting all-Union Scientific Center of Radioactive Medicine

Some days ago, I decided to write a letter to Hans Blix. Mr. Blix was the chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency between 1981 and 1997 and the first foreigner to visit Chernobyl after the disaster ( as early as in May 1986) where he would discuss the matter of safer nuclear power in the Soviet Union. 

I figured that Hans Blix may be able to answer some of my questions, also because of knowing the political climate of that period (unfortunately politics are inevitable even in this matter) and when a friend actually presented me with proper contact information to Hans Blix, I realized that I would not have to go through with the usual "journalist's routine" but could rather get on straight ahead. 

Blix also met Valery Legasov, the nuclear chemist send from Moscow to investigate the Chernobyl accident (who committed suicide on the anniversary of the disaster in 1988). Also Legasov is an important key in the Chernobyl  jigzaw  and there are details that haven't been written, so when and if I manage to establish contact with Hans Blix, now 84 years old, there are chances that it'll all mean an important deal to my research.

A few weeks ago I contacted the nuclear power plant in Forsmark, who first discovered the Chernobyl fallout, asking to get in touch with someone who worked at the NPP at the time. I received a name and an address. Anders Markgren, assistant information officer at the Forsmark NPP, is now also on my list.


As you can see, I have no intentions of ceasing this.
Today, my father asked me if anyone closely involved ever wrote anything objective and truthful about the disaster. I could only mention Valery Legasov and say that it's possible that his writings are the closest to the truth as we can get, but he is -unfortunately- dead and dead men doesn't answer questions. 
I intend to find out how close to the truth you can get 25 years later. 




[Note: The photo is from profimedia.si]

A Brief Story About Pripyat.

Welcome to Pripyat. The monument on the road to Pripyat still remains.

The town of Pripyat was founded in 1970, to be inhabited by future employees of the nuclear power plant that at the time was under construction about 3 kilometers away.

Pripyat was refered to as an "atomgrad", that is an "atom town" (in the Soviet Union there were nine atomgrad, each of them connected to a nuclear power plant and founded for the purpose to house the workers) and would eventually come to be inhabited by close to 50 000 people from 25 ethnic groups.

In 1977, the first of the ChNPP's four reactors was ready to operate and två years later, Pripyat was officially proclaimed as a city.

Pripyat is commonly and often spoken about as a "young" city, where the average age of the citizens was 26 years. Most of the inhabitants were of course employed at the NPP, but naturally, the town also had an evolved infrastructure with factories, a hospital, schools, police office, fire brigade, culture centers and so on.

May 1st celebrations in Pripyat. From pripyat.com

A solid education was highly valued and in Pripyat there were no less than 15 elementary schools, five secondary schools and one training school. Any higher education than that was not offered, but neither was there any direct need for it, as it was natural for the inhabitants to stay, settle and live their lives in Pripyat rather than look out into the rest of the world. As a matter of fact, it was a question of the opposite; every year approximately 500 people arrived from different parts of the Soviet Union, to become citizens of Pripyat.

Pripyat offered its people a good life. There were all the attractions and comfort that a modern Soviet city could offer, and more. The small city was before its time and thus in many ways manifested the Soviet ideals of happiness through work and ideological connection and fellowship and even today you can see many traces of the old communist Soviet - especially in the school ruins, where Lenin still lives on and the walls are still decorated by sayings and epigraphs like:

"The quality of knowledge today is the high efficient work of tomorrow"

Pripyat was also a city of architectural and cultural innovation. New projects were designed and put to be tested in Pripyat before being adapted to the Soviet standard and many new constructions were on blue prints. A shopping center; an arts gallery; recreational and educational centers for children ("Pioneer's Palace"), and a hotel were all planned to have opened by the end of 1988. 

After the explosion in the 4th reactor, many Pripyat inhabitants gathered on the railway bridge, just outside of the city, to watch what was happening at the nuclear power plant. . They saw beautiful flames in all the colours of the rainbow - it was the graphite burning and the flames reached higher than the pillars of smoke, but what the onlookers didn't kow, was that the radioactive wind that swept right towards them, exposed them to a dose equivalent to 5 Sv (500 Roentgen. Exposure to 750 Roentgen/h, that is 7,5 Sv, is a certainly lethal dose for a human being). They had been told not to worry - all levels of radiation were perfectly normal. 

Of the people standing on the railway bridge (nowadays also known as "death's bridge") that night, no one survived.

The citizens of the city were urged to continued calm; they were again informed that there was absolutely nothing to be alerted about and it took just over 36 hours before Pripyat was finally evacuated. The following is the information that reached the people on Sunday the 27th of April:

"Attention, citizens of Pripyat! The City council informs that due to the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the radioactive conditions in the vicinity are deteriorating. The Communist Party, its officials and the armed forces are taking necessary action to combat this. But, with intentions to keep people as safe and healthy as possible, prioritizing the children, we need to temporarily evacuate the citizens to the nearest towns of the Kiev region. For these reasons, starting from April 27, 1986 14:00 every apartment block will have a bus at its disposal, supervised by the police and city officials. It is highly advisable that you bring your documents, vital personal belongings and a certain amount of food with you, just in case. The senior executives of the public and industrial facilities of the city have decided on the list of employees who will remain in Pripyat to maintain these facilities in a good working order. All resident buildings will be guarded by police during the evacuation period. Comrades, as you will be leaving your residences temporarily. please make sure you have turned off all lights, electrical equipment and water, and shut the windows. Please keep calm and orderly in the process of this short-term evacuation."

And indeed the evacuation of Pripat was handled  orderly as well as efficiently and  within only a few hours the city was completely emptied, spare from soldiers and the workers and officials that had been oredered to stay. Believing that the evacuation would last for only a few days, people only brought their most necessary belongings, but most of them would never see their homes again. There were those who tried to return, having realized that Pripyat was forever lost, to fetch belongings of affection. Some succeeded, but many more encountered alarm wired buildings and armed military.

Not only Pripyat was evacuated, but at all, about 100 000 people were forced out of their homes, of which approximately half were from nearby villages. Of these villages, many were completely destoryed, but to where the houses remained, some people would choose to return; most of them old people who neither could nor wanted to adapt to a new life at a new, to them strange place, and thus they returned to their old houses and farms.

Resident buildings of Pripyat, May 2011

Today Pripyat is a ghost town. Nature has made its re-entry; roads and streets are almost completely over grown and the windowns of the buildings gape dark and empty and the most of it has been plundered and destroyed by the passing through of outsiders. 

The official frequency of visitors to the Zone is approximated to a couple of thousands per year, but no one knows for sure how many illegal visits are performed every year. 

To gain access to the Exclusion Zone (the 30 km radios around the ChNPP), special permission is needed, but nonetheless many have ignored this and instead found other ways to enter, often motivated by the "adventure", but also to gather "souvenirs" and trophies, and thereby also more likely to cause even greater destruction than the "normal" tourism, which is held under relatively strict control.

Pripyat is decaying naturally, just like any other place created by man that's left unattended, but the destructive tourism is increasing the effect.

"Take nothing but photographies,

leave nothing but footprints."

Since the 20th of June and forth, the Ukrainian government have closed the Zone for all tourism.

Bad Facts

Knowledge is power. -Especially in the sense that it prevents you from being fooled by errors and mistakes made by others. However, knowledge is not always the essential, say rather that an even more important key lies within critical  thinking which have learnt you not to trust everything you see or hear. With this quality added, you're not as likely to be deceived as without it.

Starting about 2 years ago, I periodically engage in searching for literature and documentaries concerning Chernobyl and by now I can say that I've seen a large amount of documentaries and docudramas. What ties these together, is following a common story - the same story that we all now know was what happened at the Chernobyl NPP and what became the consequenses. I have been surprised to find most of these documentaries almost perfectly neutral, as a director would have all the chances in the world to hand out backbites in such a subject, but most of them have chosen a direct approach to tell the story "as it is". 

For some reason the American documentaries are different. I'm not going to speculate in why, but one example is the documentary "Chernobyl: Nuclear Meltdown" where the narrator seems more interested in criticising the Soviet Union than telling about the disaster and circumstances around it. This was for me no big business; having shaked it off as a typical example of bad, sensationalist journalism, I was more shocked to find that even National Geographic had failed to make a proper documentary. 

This film by NE, an episode of their documentary series "Seconds from Disaster" was produced and aired in August 2004 and is angled to such a degree that you, watching it, will doubtlessly start to wonder whether they just want to point out a scape goat, in this case Leonid Toptunov [Toptunov was a young engineer and the operator responsible for amongst other things, the movement of the control rods of reactor 4 on the night of the accident] who is pictured as an ignorant commander of the safety tests run in the 4th reactor block that night, and his superiors, Aleksandr Akimov and Anatoliy Dyatlov - two important persons on location as well as in the aftermaths, aren't even mentioned. 

For a long time, Akimov and Toptunov (who both died from irradiation three weeks after the accident) were the popular men to blame the disaster on, and the later imprisoned Dyatlov (being found guilty for criminal mismanagement of potentially explosive enterprises) even more so, but you cannot interview dead men, so instead National Geographic chose to enhance the role of Boris Stolyarchuk, the senior control engineer of reactor 4 that night, who is still alive. (Also Stolyarchuk was accused for being responsible for the accident, but was later freed from all charges). We can here clearly see an example of  changing the angle of a story due to convenience. The parts of the operating personnel of the 4th reactor on April 26th, 1986 have simply been altered. 

The above is probably the largest error of this documentary, but there are many more. For example, NE promise to "reveal" how the Soviet nuclear power plant and its reactors functioned, but that doesn't happen. They might as well be describing the basics of how any nuclear reactor works.

Also, according to NE, a Pyotr Khmel was a firefighter chief, but really - his name was Grigory Khmel and he was one of the fire engine drivers. It's highly annoying to see how NE obviously have spent a greater effort on digital effects and heavy metal guitars than bothered to check up sources of proper information, even for such a small detail. Had it only been this, they may have been able to get away with it all, but there is simply too much negligence and carelessness involved in this film to make it acceptable, and the following quoting of the narrator is really pushing it all over the edge of the roof and into the reactor core along with the graphite:

"After 10 days the toxic cloud has reached the United States and Asia, and there's a threat to other countries as well."

It is true that the US, nine days after the Chernobyl disaster measured radioactive particles in the atmosphere, but the amount was so small that it hardly opposed a threat to anyone. In spite of normally trying to write in a sensible and objective way, I must make an exception this time as I can't refrain from commenting on how utterly stupid this is. As this documentary is 45 hastily produced minutes of too much faulty information, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if you're curious and still want to watch it, you may find it here: 

Breaking the news in Sweden - page 6

Here's page 6 refered to in the previous post. As I'm translating it, I notice that they've made some proof reading errors, but I will not correct them here's almost exactly what it reads. Also I find it quote interesting that the sources give different information and no one has corrected them, but questioning Swedish old media will be another issue, some other time. 


Finally I would like to point out the tone of this article and how the insecurity, suspicion and lack of knowledge concerning Soviet and their doings very much reflect the atmophere of that time, that had only just begun closing in to the end of the Cold War

Big nuclear accident in Soviet

By Harald Hamrin,

DN-correspondent

Moscow: The Soviet Union did on the Monday evening officially admit that there's been an accident at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. No information was however released concerning the time of the accident or concerning the exact extent. 

A message from the official news agency TASS however indirectly reveals that there has been damage to humans related to the accident.  A government commission has been appointed to investigate the cause of the incident, which is the first of its kind that the Soviet Union admits to. 

- There has been an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, TASS announced with their first short press release, about nine o' clock on the Monday evening, local time. One of the reactors has been damaged.

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant lies 150 kilometers north of Ukraine's capital Kiev.

According to TASS press releases, actions have been taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident.

- Aid will be given to the affected, announced the news agency, that thereby indirectly confessed that the accident has craved victims to some extent.  At the same time TASS announced that a government commission has been appointed, obviously to investigate the cause of the accident.

Patterns

According to experts of the west, at least one serious nuclear accident has happened in Soviet. It concerns a plant near the town of Kystym in the Urals where radioactive leakage appear to have occurred related to an accident in the late 1960's. This has however never been admitted by Soviet officials, and even during the Monday evening, TASS firmly claimed that such accidents did never happen in Soviet.

On the other hand, the official new agency gave a detailed  report concerning nuclear accidents in other countries. Only during 1979, no less than 2300 nuclear accidents happened in the U.S, according to the TASS press release, quoting the American organization "Critical Mass":

- "The prime reasons of the dangerous situation is the bad quality of the reactors and of other types of equipment, as well as insufficient  control of the technical state of the equipment, negligence of the personnel in matters of safety, and insufficient professional training" writes TASS.

No information 

The news agency especially recalls the Harrisburg accident in 1979, and another in Zion, Illinois when 40 000 litres of radioactive water leaked out. 

Nowehere was there to be found, in any of the two messages that TASS sent out on Monday evening, even a hint of when the Chernobyl accident happened. Lacking of official Soviet information concerning this, only thorough and time demanding meteorological studies of wind direction and wind speed, during the coming days, will be able to determine when the accident happened.

In Moscow, experts from the west however tell DN that approximately 24-72 hours should be counted backwards from the time when of the first increased readings of radioactivity were measured in Sweden.

This should mean that the time of the accident was some time between Friday morning and Sunday morning. 

Light Water Damage

The reactor now topical concerning the Chernobyl accident, is a kind of graphite moderated light water reactor. It has an effect on 1000 megaWatt. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant started operate in 1977 and today they have at least four reactors of the same kind operating. A fifth reactor may recently have been brought into operation and yet another reactor is under construction. At all, the Chernobyl NPP will thus be fully equipped with six reactors, with a total output of 6000 megaWatt. 

The Chernobyl reactor is one of the two reactor types that are currently at disposal of the Soviet Union. About 15 graphite moderated light water reactors are estimated to be currently operating in the Soviet Union. The most powerful of these, with an effect on 1500 megaWatt, is situated in Latvia's capital Vilnius. Added to these, are about the same amount of pressurized water reactors.

30 Reactors

The at all approximately 30 reactors currently at Soviet disposal  are gathered in barely twnty nuclear power plants. The major amount of these are situated in the European parts of Soviet, where the power necessities are high  and conventional energy sources are already almost completely emptied. 

Large nuclear power plants, except the already mentioned, are situated in Leningrad on the Kola peninsula, outside Kursk in the southwest of Russia, outside Zaporozye in Ukraine and near Minsk in Belarus.

However, in Siberia, there are new efforts made concerning water power. At the Communist Party's 27th congress of February and March this year, decisions were made concerning further expansion of the Soviet nuclear industry. Amongst other things, it was decided to make further investions in the now unfortunate 1000 megaWatt graphite moderated light water reactors, as the Soviet standard rector. 

Atomic cloud over Sweden

By Micke Jaresand and Bo Westmar

Soviet has faced their Harrisburg, although worse. Most likely, a nuclear meltdown has occured at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, north of Kiev, the capital of the Soviet republic of Ukraine. A radioactive cloud, caused by the accident, made the levels of radiation increase in large parts of Scandinavia.

The accident was confirmed by news agency TASS on the Monday evening. It's the first time the Soviet goverment admits a nuclear accident to have occurred. 

The calculations of wind directions that SMHI [Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute] have made, indicates that the accident occurred early during the Saturday.

-The core is heavily damaged. The particles we've found, show that they were exposed to very high temperatures, that can only be reached at nuclear meltdowns, an initiated source tells DN. 

Amongst other elements, they've discovered niobium, lanthanum and neptunium in the fallout.

Leaks  

Differently from the reactor breakdown in Harrisburg, in the U.S, large amounts of radioactivity have leaked from the reactor in Chernobyl. The reason is that the Soviet reactors are lacking of the solid "shell" that for example Swedish reactors are equipped with. 

- The Swedish reactors are constructed for an over pressure equivalent to five Earth atmospheres. These Soviet reactors can barely take any over pressure at all. 

In Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine, there are now three, maybe four, operating reactors, each having an effect on 1000 megaWatt, each of these bigger than the Swedish reactors. 

In the Soviet reactors, the fuel rods are lowered into graphite and cooled by steam under high pressure. The Swedish are water cooled. 

- What can be suspected, is that the cooling channel with fulel rods doesn't work, and that the fuel rods have molten, and thereby maybe also the graphite, a reactor expert tells Dagens Nyheter.

A similar accident happened during the 1950's with a graphite moderated reactor in Windscale, England.

In Soviet, there are similar reactors, also in Leningrad there are four and in Ignalina, Liuthania, there are two operating and two more planned. 

It was early on the Monday morning when the first signs of increased radiation levels were discovered in Sweden. Workers that were passing through the routine controls at inter alia the nuclear power plants of Forsmark and Studsvik, had radioactive particles on their clothes. 

At Forsmark, was first feared a leakage within their own facility, but measurings made contradicted this.

Radioactivity

In Studsvik, thoroughly measuring the radiation, increased levels were measured even on cars' tyres as well as on several employees.  The measuring showed results twice as high as the normal background radiation.

Also at the nuclear power plant of Barsebäck, raised levels of radiation were measured, about 4-5 times the normal readings. 

Measuring the inner city of Stockholm, showed twice the normal readings .

In Helsinki the readings were even higher. Already on the Sunday evening, levels up to six times as high as the normal state were measured.

According to the first measurings, Gotland was the most affected area in Sweden, but on Monday morning, Fårösund was controlled and it showed that readings were not higher than in the rest of eastern Sweden.

Wind   

During the latest days, a steady wind has blown over the country, coming from the south-east,  and already early on the Monday, you could assume that the radioactive fallout come from Soviet. 

- It's not the first time radioactive fallout from Soviet is discovered. The same thing happened three years ago, and also last year. This time, however, it's about significantly higher readings. 

The levels of radioation are higher than those measured during the bomb tests of the 1960's and are similar to the levels of those after the bomb tests in China during the 1970's.

Gunnar Bengtsson at the RPI wants to downplay the risks of the fallout that Sweden is exposed to:

- The radiation isn't even reaching the highest levels [approved at the Swedish nuclear power plants]. People who live in Radon houses are exposed to far more radiation than the levels measured today. 

Late on the Monday evening, the RPI still registered a slow increase of radioactivity in the air and ground. This indicates, they still have a leakage from the damaged reactor in Ukraine.

Evironment and energy minister Birgitta Dahl is pleased about how the Swedish safety organization worked after the alarms of increased radiation levels. 

- Primarily it was about protecting people in Sweden. That's why it was necessary to make sure that the emissions didn't come from a Swedish nuclear power plant, says Birgitta Dahl. 

Birgitta Dahl turned to Hans Blix, the chairman of IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency and asked him to ask ambassadors from other countries concerning the fallout. At the same time, the Swedish embassy [in Moscow] sent out the same question [to the Soviet government].

When Moscow confirmed, the [Swedish] embassy had already other questions to follow: 

- We will require detailed information about what has happened.  It's important to get to know the extent of the accident, and whether there's a risk of further emissions, or if it's all over, says Birgitta Dahl. 

The enivronment and energy minister will also repeat a several years old demand that all civilian Soviet nuclear power plants should be put under international surveilance.

The food can be contaminated

Av Roland Gyllander

Of the elements that may be spread throughout our atmosphere and rain down on our environment after nuclear explosions and accidents at nuclear power plants, caesium, iodine and strontium, are the most important.

Through grazing animals, these [elements] may easily contaminate meat and diary products and through our daily intake be stored in the human body, 

Caesium-137 is well know in this coherence, as this element could be traces all over Earth after American hydrogen bomb tests in the 1950's. 

In 1963, shortly before the test ban treaty, very powerful loads were detonated and the consequense was that the , increasedlevels of caesium-137 in Swedish diary milk two years later increased to the highest levels ever measured - a half of a billion parts Curie (1 curie = 3.7 x 10¹⁰ bq). 

The elements now found in Swedish measuring facilities -  iodine, caesium, strontium, ruthenium and molybden -  indicate emissions from a nuclear power plant. 

In Stockholm 1 Bq (bequerel) of iodine [131] was measured per m³ air, which means one decaying iodine atom per second and it's approximately 1% of the levels of 1965. 

The emission levels are currently from a health aspect non significant compared to the ionizing background radiation we are constantly exposed to, partly from kaluim-40, emitted from our own bodies, partly from the cosmic radiation from the sky, and partly from radioactive elements from the bedrock or buildings. 

Radiation damages living cells partly because of that the radiation dicrectly affect the cell functions, partly due to that natural body elements are transformed into poisonous substances. 

The degradation mechanisms may be very complicated, and it's often pointless to try to classify one radioactive isotope as more dangerous as another. 

Plutonium is mostly harmelss at skin contact but deadly to inhale. Some isotopes of iodine have a half life of a few hours but are still concidered as very dangerous as they affect the thyroid glands.

Criticism towards preparedness

*Lacking information

*Insufficient evacuation organization

*Only one geiger counter for measuring radioactivity

The criticism concerning the evacuation from the 600 Forsmark NPP workers, grew as the line grew longer and longer outside the  Norrskedika sports ground, a few kilometers south of Forsmark.

A few minutes past 11:00, speakers asked the employees, consultants and temporary visitors to leave Forsmark and go to Norrskedika. Only the group who are responsible for reactor operations during incidents and breakdowns will remain.


The announcement, lasting for half a minute, promised more information at Norrskedike. Further, that measuring of potential radioactivity would be performend, but the problems began already during evacuation. The road block set up to prevent traffic to Forsmark, also blocked cars from leaving the nuclear power plant.
- We had to wait for at least half an hour by the road block, says Inga Tellander, a temporary visitor from Stockholm.




The radio


When those who were at the nuclear power plant eventually arrived at the assembly point, they received no information whatsoever concerning what had happened. Some in line had radios and could follow the broadcasts from Radio Uppland.


Inside a room at the sports grounds, the workers' outer garments were measured, but no garmets showed any radioactive readings. On the other hand their shoes, measured by smaller geiger counters, did. In those cases the geiger counters reacted, the shoes were decontaminated with water and alcohol.


But because there was only one measuring station set up, it took a long time to perform the control. At least half of all the shoes measured, showed radioactive readings.
- At least twice as high as the normal radiation. It's obvious that the  radiation comes from a reactor of some kind, told Ero Mattilainen, responsible for the measuring and decontamination in Norrskedika.




Irritation


While their shoes were decontaminated, no one was allowed to leave the building. Everyone also had to leave their names and phone numbers in order to be available for contact during the coming 48 hours. But the irritability increased, there was no information explaining why no one could exit the premises.


In Uppsala, the county administration gained knowledge regarding the abnormally high radioactivity, a quarter past eleven. Managed by governor Ingemar Mundsbo, a preparedness organization began to operate. But the preparedness group rather fast notet, that there was not much they could do: The radioactive emissions did not come from Forsmark. At half past three, operation manager Karl-Erik Sandstedt, announced that the operations [at the NPP] would proceed without any restrictions and with full staff. 


The county administration opened up ten telephone lines to be able to keep worried people informed, but only very few calls were received and the population around Forsmark thus took it easy regarding the radioactivity alert.


Left, is however the criticism concerning deficiency of information and organization. And the question: What would have happened if the emissions were caused by a serious failing of one of Forsmark's reactors?