In Chernobyl, a disaster persists

Any Ukrainian over 35 can tell you where s/he was when s/he heard about the accident at the Chernobyl plant.

"I remember calling my husband. There had been rumours for days about a nuclear accident. We had even hung blankets on the windows to stop radiation because we didn't know what to do," said Natalya, a 46-year-old financial analyst in Kiev, whose husband was a journalist on a daily newspaper.

"He told me there had been a fire at the atomic plant in Chernobyl. That was for me the first confirmation that the reactor had collapsed," she said this week, seated at her desk in her central Kiev office.

"We had no idea what to expect. It was awful."

As Japan battles to prevent a meltdown at its earthquake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the people of the Ukraine are preparing to mark the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident.

The physical and financial legacies of that disaster are obvious: a 30km uninhabited ring around the Chernobyl plant, billions of dollars spent cleaning the region, and a major new effort to drum up 600 million euros ($840 million) in fresh funds that Kiev says is needed to build a more durable casement over the stricken reactor.

Just as powerful are the scars that are less easily seen: fear and an abiding suspicion that despite the reassuring reports by authorities and scientific bodies, people may still be dying from radiation after-effects. 

While debate about the health impact continues, there is little doubt people in the Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus carry a psychological burden. Repeated studies have found that "exposed populations had anxiety levels that were twice as high" as people unaffected by the accident, according to a 2006 United Nations report. Those exposed to radiation were also "3-4 times more likely to report multiple unexplained physical symptoms and subjective poor health than were unaffected control groups."

There are, of course, crucial differences between Chernobyl and the disaster unfolding in Japan.

The Chernobyl accident was the product of human error when a test was poorly executed, while the Japanese failure was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami.

Chernobyl occurred in a secretive Soviet society which reformer Mikhail Gorbachev was only just opening up. The authorities embarked on an attempted cover-up and only partly admitted the truth three days later, denying themselves the chance of rapid international aid.

Despite criticisms that Tokyo could be a lot more transparent, Japan's disaster has taken place in a relatively open society and international help has been quick to come.

Most importantly, thick containment walls at the Fukushima Daiichi plant shield the reactor cores so that even if there is a meltdown of the nuclear fuel it's unlikely to lead to a major escape of dangerous radioactive clouds into the atmosphere.

At Chernobyl, there was no containment structure.

"When it blew, it blew everything straight out into the atmosphere," said Murray Jennex of San Diego State University.

Despite those differences, though, the Chernobyl experience still contains lessons for Japan and other countries, says Volodymyr Holosha, the top Ukrainian emergency ministry official in charge of the area surrounding the Chernobyl plant.

"We were not ready for it — neither technologically nor financially," Holosha told reporters in Kiev last month. "This is a priceless experience for other countries."

Experiment gone wrong
In the early hours of April 26, 1986, in the model Soviet town of Prypyat, a satellite of the much bigger Chernobyl, workers at a nuclear power plant demobilised the safety systems on reactor number 4, which had come on line only three years earlier.

It was a risky experiment to see whether the cooling system could still function using power generated from the reactor alone in the event of a failure in the auxiliary electricity supply.

It could not. There was a massive power surge that blew off the reactor's heavy concrete and metal lid and sent smouldering nuclear material into the atmosphere.

Dozens of plant staff died on the spot or immediately afterwards in hospital. Hundreds of thousands of rescue workers, including Red Army conscripts, were rushed to the site to put out the fires, decontaminate the area, and seal off the damaged reactor by building a concrete shell around it.

At first, authorities denied there was a problem. When they finally admitted the truth more than a day later, many thousands of inhabitants simply picked up a few of their belongings and headed off — many of them to the capital Kiev 80km (50 miles) to the south, never to return.

Iryna Lobanova, 44, a civil servant, was due to get married in Prypyat on the day of the explosion but assumed that all ceremonies would be cancelled.

"I thought that war had started," she told Reuters this week.

"But the local authorities told us go on with all planned ceremonies." Nobody was allowed to leave the town until the official evacuation was announced on the Sunday — 36 hours later — "following an order from Moscow", she said.

Lobanova went ahead with her wedding — and left the next day with her husband by train.

Legacy of bad health
The make-shift concrete shelter hastily thrown up in the months after the explosion is often referred to as a "sarcophagus", a funeral term made even more fitting by the fact that it houses the corpse of at least one plant worker which rescuers were unable to recover.

The official short-term toll from the accident was 31, but many more people died of radiation-related sicknesses such as cancer. The total toll and long-term health effects remain the subject of intense debate even 25 years after the disaster.

"[The disaster] brought suffering on millions of people," said the emergency ministry's Holosha.

"About 600,000 people were involved in mitigating the consequences of the accident. About 300,000 of them were Ukrainians. Out of those, 100,000 are disabled now."

A 2008 United Nations study cited a "dramatic increase in thyroid cancer incidence" in the Ukraine and just across the border in Belarus. Children seemed to be especially vulnerable because they drank milk with high levels of radioactive iodine.

"One arrives at between 12,000 and 83,000 children born with congenital deformations in the region of Chernobyl, and around 30,000 to 207,000 genetically damaged children worldwide," German physicians' organisation IPPNW said in a report in 2006.

Those figures are far lower than health officials had predicted. Indeed, the UN says that overall health effects were less severe than initially expected and that only a few thousand people had died as a result of the accident.