Chernobyl Twenty Years On

Until the early hours of April 26, 1986, Pripyat was just another town in the Soviet Union, along the border between the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republics. Then, a few explosions went off at Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Estimates are that 50 tons of uranium vaporized instantly and went high into the atmosphere. Another 70 tons of “fuel” got blown around the reactor. Some 700,000 liquidators had to fight the radiological inferno. They are now all dead or very sick. They are all heroes.

Pripyat remains the most radioactive town in the world. Chernobyl was the worst man-made disaster ever, and the fatality figure rises with each cancer death. Before it’s all over, the meltdown could claim 200,000 lives. The story is a sad tale of sclerotic management by Soviet apparatchiks who operated on a platform of deliberate lies. Whether anyone has learned anything about nuclear power or weaponry in the intervening decades is more than debatable. Nonetheless, the disaster proved that there is an odd streak of self-less bravery in homo sapiens that redeems them as a species.

That is not to say that the liquidators had much choice in the matter. Vladimir Usatenko, an engineer who helped build the sarcophagus over the reactor core and who later was elected to Supreme Soviet, told the BBC, “We could not refuse the work, because the military prosecutor was watching us closely and we were under military law.” Compulsion, though, does not diminish the courage.

Yury Bertov and Mykola Bondarenko were engineers working a few hundred meters from Reactor Number 4 when it exploded. They recalled for Deutsche Welle that, although the engineers around them knew better than most how unlikely their survival would be, no one ran. Mr. Bondarenko said, “That night, no one fled. We all knew the risks, but we all stayed.” The question is why? Why stand one’s ground in the face of an almost certain radioactive death? The Liquidators who live in Ukraine get a special pension amounting to 26 Ukrainian Hryvnia a year, about US$5. Clearly, they didn’t do it for the money.

As usual, the answer comes from a fireman, a guy whose job is to run into burning buildings when every instinct is to avoid just that. Anatoli Zakharov, who had been stationed at Chernobyl since 1980 at Fire Station Number 2, parked his fire engine next to the reactor shortly after the explosions. The missing men of the Fire Department of New York on September 11, 2001, were of the same breed, but their ends came quicker. Mr. Zakharov received the Order of the Red Star in 1986 and was declared a total invalid in 1992. He told Adam Higginbotham of The Observer, “Of course we knew! If we’d followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation -- our duty. We were like kamikaze.”

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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