We’ll get to the books shortly, but first, if you had to describe what happened at Chernobyl to someone who knew nothing about it, what would you say?
was a large nuclear power plant in the north of ukraine, built on the largest swamp in europe, the pripyat marshes. During what was considered a routine test on April 26, 1986, plant operators violated a series of safety regulations, overriding them in order to conduct their test. they got to a point where they had finished their test and turned it off; they thought it was just a normal shutdown. the reactor was behaving a bit erratically, but they just hit the stop button thinking the control rods would lower into the reactor, shut off the neutrons around them, shut down the chain reactions, and they could go home. that reactor was going to be shut down for a while for routine maintenance.
You are reading: Best books about chernobyl
but what happened was that due to a design flaw (of which the power plant operators were not aware), pressing the stop button and causing the control rods to lower the reactor to levels really low in energy, it actually sped up the chain reaction. in. tremendously heated the reactor. there was a big bang, and then a second big bang. Scientists have long debated whether it was a steam explosion, a chemical explosion, or a nuclear explosion. In 2016 alone, a team of Swedish physicists determined that it was, in fact, a nuclear explosion because the radioactive fallout was so high (3,000 meters) and traveled such great distances. a steam or chemical explosion would not have had the propulsion capacity for the radioactivity to be so high. When people say that nuclear power plants don’t go off like nuclear bombs, Chernobyl belies that fact.
“a steam or chemical explosion would not have had the propulsion capacity for the radioactivity to be so high”
What happened next is also fascinating. As we see on the HBO show, the firefighters came in and started to contain the fire. They didn’t have much protection or really any knowledge of how to deal with a radioactive emergency, and you see that play out at the crash site on the show. and if you zoom out from the crash site and look at the wider territory, all sorts of interesting things are happening. at first, the radioactivity was directed to the northwest, which is how the Swedes noticed it. they told the world about the accident before the Soviets announced it. but then the winds changed and the radioactive fallout headed northeast. a great spring storm was gathering. The Soviets at the state committee for hydrometeorology were watching it and realized there was a tremendous cloud of radioactive that was heading straight for big Russian cities like Voronezh, Yaroslavl and Moscow.
To save urban Russia, they manipulated the weather and rained radioactive fallout on rural Belarus. this mission began between 24 and 36 hours after the accident and continued for months. but they did not tell anyone in belarus, not even the leader of the communist party. he didn’t find out what was going on or about the accident until several days later.
“in order to save urban russia, they manipulated the weather and rained radioactive fallout on rural belarus. but they didn’t tell anyone in belarus”
Then, people lived in what has essentially become a largely unknown second chernobyl zone in southern belarus. It’s almost totally unpopulated now, but people lived there for 15 years with really high levels of radioactivity. scientists say you shouldn’t live on more than one curie to five curies per square kilometer; these people lived at levels reaching a maximum of 40 to 140 curies per square kilometer. they began to move around 1990 but, due to lack of funds and international support, they did not complete the resettlement until 1999.
Chernobyl is seen as the world’s worst nuclear accident. but the discussion around it and especially the aftermath have produced so many inconsistent accounts and disputed facts. the Soviet archives have been declassified relatively recently and I know you have spent a lot of time working on them. Do they solve any of these issues or make them more complicated?
They certainly raise a lot of questions. if you go to any page of the un, be it unicef or international atomic energy or the world health organization (who), you read that between 31 and 54 people died as a result of the accident, that 4000 people in the future would get such once fatal cancers from chernobyl, and that 300 people were hospitalized after the accident. but what you see in the classified files is that moscow gave orders to inform foreigners about hospitalizations from only one hospital – that’s hospital number 6 in moscow, which appears on the hbo show. at the same time, people were arriving at many hospitals throughout the region of the accident.
Files show that at least 40,000 people were hospitalized, many of them women and children, due to exposure to Chernobyl. the ukrainian government has already compensated 35,000 people whose spouses died of a chernobyl-related health problem. And those are just people who were married and had documented exposure. that number does not include children or infants who were born and died within 28 days, so it excludes many people. it also does not count people in belarus and russia, who received the most consequences. at the pripyat visitor center, ukrainian officials estimate that 150,000 people have already died from chernobyl exposure, and that’s in ukraine alone.
The files are interesting because Soviet public health officials, researchers, and radiation monitors were writing on classified documents. they basically thought they were having a private conversation with each other that would never be revealed to the public. in those documents that you see, from that summer after the accident, the doctors report that the children have enlarged thyroids: they begin to develop bronchial and pulmonary disorders that do not go away. they get this “sick baby syndrome” which shows they have malfunctioning autoimmune systems. pregnant women have trouble carrying their babies to term. there are a lot of miscarriages and miscarriages, and then they have a lot more complications at birth and an increasing frequency of babies dying within 28 days of birth.
By 1988, the standard reports, which talk about what percentage of children are classified as “healthy” in the region, reveal that between eighty and ninety percent had a chronic health problem or another and only about ten to twenty percent of the children were classified as “healthy.” Before 1986, those numbers were reversed: Records show that roughly eighty percent of children were classified as healthy. Doctors in 1988-89 also began to report an increase in children with cancer, primarily thyroid cancer and leukemias. Thyroid cancer is a really rare cancer among children. the background at the time was that one in a million children had it. In 1989, there were 20 children with confirmed thyroid cancer in northern Ukraine alone. and there were another 30 in belarus. In 1991, Belarus had more than 100 cases of children with thyroid cancer. all this starts to come out of the archives. By 1990, Belarusian and Ukrainian officials publicly say they have a public health disaster on their hands and ask international agencies for help.
Let’s look at your book options. Your first book is Chernobyl: A Tragedy Story by Serhii Plokhy.
This is a really good book. Plokhy is a historian of Ukrainian politics for the most part. he is a prolific author and a very good historian. he is really good here in establishing the background of the disaster itself, the construction of the plant, the days leading up to it, and the times when the accident occurred. describes the problems of standardizing building materials and getting things built on time: there are these boom and bust cycles where workers who usually work slowly have to meet their end-of-the-month or yearly quotas and just meet with the deadlines. Plokhy describes the construction policy of these plants and the nuclear city that accompanies them. he then talks about the accident itself, the delay in informing the public, the news censorship, the trial of the nuclear power plant operators (who he believes were scapegoated), and the political results of all this deception.
argues that politically the accident amounted to a strong desire for Ukrainian sovereignty and separation from the Soviet Union. But he also focuses on the fact that Ukraine had been a nuclear power: it had a ring of nuclear missiles on its western border to defend the Soviet Union and several nuclear power plants. The Ukrainians were persuaded to hand over these nuclear missiles to Russia in exchange for promises to protect their sovereignty.
at the end of the book, plokhy makes a really interesting point where he says that in 2014, the us, the eu and russia—which had guaranteed ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for the missiles—turned their backs on that promise. It is hard to imagine Russia’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of eastern Ukraine if it were still a nuclear power. He sees that the passive acceptance of Russia’s actions was a true betrayal of the promises that the EU, the US and Russia made in the 1990s to Ukraine.
One of the most shocking aspects of the disaster was the inconceivable delay in informing the public. the authorities took ten days to give public health recommendations. it might seem that they were more concerned with containing information than with radiation. could you say a bit about that?
The explosion occurred around 1 a.m. m. on April 26, and the following Monday, Sweden reported that an accident had occurred. the delay was not only the result of the lie, it also took many hours to resolve, convey, and then come to believe that the impossible had happened. echelons of Soviet officials, whether cabinet party leaders or technicians, were sent to the crash site to try to determine what was going on. each different ministry wanted their own man on the ground to brief them because they couldn’t trust other sources or each other. therefore, it took a while to piece together what exactly had happened.
We see this in other major nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Fukushima. there were delays in informing the public what was happening. In Fukushima, Japanese officials waited not just a few days, but two months before admitting that a meltdown of these reactors had occurred. American Met-Edison officials told the public all was well the very morning they were venting radioactive gases from the reactor to save it from a major explosion. The HBO series is based in part on certain cold war tropes that we have about the Soviets. Although the Japanese don’t fit that model, it would be interesting to see that docudrama as a sequel to Chernobyl.
“in Fukushima, Japanese officials waited not a few days but two months before admitting that a meltdown of these reactors had occurred”
I have the transcript of the politburo meeting where the Soviets discussed the causes of the accident on July 3, 1986. It’s the first time that Gorbachev was really fully informed about what was going on, and he was furious that the Swedes They were the ones who told the world. here he was, trying to promote the soviet union’s new image of openness and transparency, and he was seen presiding over a huge cover-up. in fact, he points out that all of these people trusted the government. For the holiday weekend, everyone came out for May Day parades in kyiv, Minsk, and other provincial and polluted cities. Due to that inconceivable decision, families with their children went out to march and were exposed.
Ukrainian leaders wanted to cancel the parade and send as many children out of the city as quickly as possible, but Moscow officials were concerned about public hysteria. That’s a theme we see in almost every nuclear emergency: The public is supposed to trust its officials, but the bureaucracy, whether Soviet, Japanese, or American, doesn’t trust the public with hard information.
In 1989, Soviet officials published the first maps of the nuclear fallout from Chernobyl. imagine if you have been living in the village and your child has not been well and you have felt bad and suddenly you realize, looking at the map, that you have been living for three years with high levels of radioactivity. that’s a pretty shocking and horrible thing to learn. still, i saw no cases of people panicking, rioting, or mass hysteria. Soviet records show that when people were finally told complicated and technical details, they possessed a profound and uncanny ability to grasp knowledge above their pay grade and figure out what to do next.
It seems that there are different stages of denial. While there is deception and cover-up, it has also been suggested that Soviet physicists originally believed that it was impossible for a nuclear reactor to explode.
I think plokhy breaks that myth. he does a very good job of describing a 1975 accident at a leningrad reactor of the same type as chernobyl: the rbmk reactor. he gives the best version in english of what happened with the leningrad nuclear accident, which was very close to exploding. at that time soviet nuclear engineers realized that they had a real problem with this rbmk reactor as when you pull most of the control rods out of the reactor and hit the stop button (which suddenly drops the rods) , it does what it shouldn’t do: it speeds up instead of slowing it down. it’s like you have a car where when you hit the brakes, it speeds up, that’s what happens with the rbmk jet. that was a shocking realization for Soviet nuclear engineers.
“it is as if you had a car that when you hit the brakes, it accelerates, that is what happens with the rbmk reactor”
When they learned that in 1975, they changed regulations requiring plant operators to leave at least 30 control rods in the reactor at all times. but what they didn’t do was include in the instruction manual a note that if you didn’t follow this rule, the plant would go off like a nuclear bomb. they changed the operator’s manual, but not the layout, to reflect the problem. out of an instinctive urge for secrecy, they didn’t tell the operators how important those instructions were.
One of the comments in plokhy’s book that intrigued me was that, regarding cleanup, “even today we don’t know which of the strategies the Soviets tried and the technical solutions they implemented actually worked.” So, in terms of technical knowledge, haven’t we learned anything from Chernobyl about how to deal with nuclear disasters?
isn’t it horrible? we know a lot about what they did and didn’t do, and the takeaway message is that a burning graphite reactor is an intractable situation. Everything they tried didn’t work, and in Plokhy’s opinion, they basically had to let the reactor burn out on its own. estimates of the radiation released are between 50 million and 200 million curies. the higher number is probably more correct. that’s a lot of radioactivity.
His next book is Making Energy: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry by Sonja D Schmid.
She does a great job here of discussing in great, easy-to-read technical detail what an rbmk reactor is and why the Soviets chose this design over other possible variants. She gives a biography of the development of nuclear energy in the Soviet Union and shows the immense challenges involved in managing and sharing this experience.
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says that although the disaster involved Soviet organizations, people, and technologies, we cannot point to a unique, inherently Soviet aspect of nuclear power reactor operation as the primary cause of the catastrophe. Chernobyl was at the end point of a long history of decisions and practices, all of which, he points out, worked quite well for some time. she is against retroactively condemning Soviet nuclear engineering practice as inevitably leading to worst-case scenarios.
“we cannot point to a unique, intrinsically Soviet aspect of the operation of nuclear power reactors as the main cause of the catastrophe”
He also says that the Soviet Union was not the only place where scientists showed excessive hubris, or where there was conflict between military and civilian operations that produced nuclear reactors and nuclear power. it’s not just the place where there were supply problems, mismanagement and ambitious people. These are common factors in almost all societies. and i think schmid does a great job of pointing out the politics behind developing technologies and managing complicated technology.
While it’s called a “pre-Chernobyl story,” the Chernobyl disaster is at the heart of the entire book, which traces the development of the nuclear power industry looking back to what happened in 1986. It also has many accessible and interesting information about the structural flaws of the rbmk reactors, how they compare to the rival vver reactor design, and how these flaws (such as the “positive void coefficient” problem) contributed to the meltdown.
yes. I think it’s important to note that the positive void coefficient comes from the United States. The first US reactors were graphite-moderated water-cooled reactors that were built to produce plutonium at Hanford. the former had a positive void coefficient which was later corrected by the Americans. Through espionage, the Soviets stole the plans for a graphite-moderated reactor. all understanding of plutonium as a new man-made element was passed on to the Soviets through espionage.
So it’s not surprising that the Americans first had this problem in their early reactors and that the Soviets hijacked that problem by incorporating American technology. they are not the only people in the world who have had problems with this positive coefficient of void.
rbmk reactors were cheaper to build, which is a highlight in the miniseries, but they could also produce more than twice the electrical output of the vver.
yes. rbmk reactors are very large reactors, they are not vertical; they’re horizontal and buried in the ground, and they’re really useful reactors in the sense that you can recharge them while they’re still running. it can take out fuel rods in one part of the reactor while the other part of the reactor is still running strong. that saved them from having to turn off the power and shut down the reactor, spend a couple of months refueling, and then turn it back on with all the slow and expensive procedures that that requires, while the reactor is shut down. Grid. one of the reasons they chose that reactor is because it was efficient and affordable.
One thing to keep in mind is that the operators of the nuclear power plants worked as capitalists in the sense that they were paid by the amount of electricity they produced. workers got bonuses if they produced more electricity. when they were running the test, they wanted to see how long they could keep the turbines running once the reactor had shut down. that was a question about power supply: can we still feed power with the reactor in shutdown mode?
“Nuclear power plant operators worked like capitalists in the sense that they were paid for the amount of electricity they produced”
the other value of an rbmk reactor, and the americans saw it too, is that it is a dual purpose reactor. With a few tweaks, you can produce not only electricity but also plutonium. when the Soviets built reactors abroad, they built single-purpose reactors that didn’t produce plutonium. that was a geostrategic decision to make sure that places like poland and other countries they were helping didn’t have a chance to easily produce nuclear weapons.
your next book choice is voices from chernobyl by svetlana alexievich.
in Russian, the title reads “a sentence from chernobyl: a chronicle of the future”. It is important to note that Alexievich calls his book a work of literature, not a work of history. she works in a really impressive way, doing about ten years worth of interviews for each of her books, talking to hundreds of people for hours on end and really getting to know them. she and often she creates compound characters, listing the names of several people at the beginning of a section. she works with the language of her subject, edits and makes changes to make it a beautiful read as literature. As you read it, you realize that most people don’t speak this way, so poetically and with such emotional transparency.
the first chapter of his book is about a woman, lyudmilla ignatenko. she is the wife of a firefighter who goes out in the middle of the night to put out the fire. she looks for him at the city clinic in the morning, but he is being rushed to moscow. so she stubbornly follows him to moscow and makes her way to the hospital. she stands inside the plastic next to her bed and stays for weeks as he dies. she is pregnant. It is a very moving story that Alexievich has captured. Craig Mazin did a brilliant job of reproducing this story in his Chernobyl miniseries. the child did not survive and because fetuses are so efficient: because the placenta is a great pathway, much of the radioactivity that came from his exposures was passed on to the fetus. developing fetuses with rapidly reproducing cells often have many mutations that cannot be corrected.
alexievich continues to tell stories of people who lived after chernobyl. alexievich is from belarus and belarusians especially see chernobyl as their particular tragedy. they received the biggest hit of radioactive fallout; a large percentage of the country had some form of contamination from chernobyl. she tells these stories from the perspective of different people who have been assigned the task of cleaning: farmers, scientists. it’s a very beautiful piece of work and I think it gives you the emotional picture of how people dealt with the anxieties, fears and health problems that arose, and their growing sense of disillusionment with their political leaders and the communist party.
The narrative was, and I think in the ’70s and early ’80s, people believed it, that they lived in one of the best countries in the world. they had free access to health and education; everyone had a job; They had paid vacations. the Soviets had taken a rural backwater country and turned it into a modern superpower in just a few decades. Chernobyl really worked to dismantle that narrative of success, the pride people had in their country and the trust they had in their leaders. Alexievich’s book helps to express this dissolution very well.
is devastating in the way it captures the complexity and disorder of the human response to disaster. there is fear and anxiety, but also reflections on things that embarrass them, things they have never told anyone, or how some use humor to cope.
yes. In that way, I think it’s priceless. nonfiction can have trouble capturing the full power of human emotion. novelists and literary nonfiction writers can get much closer to it. she worked so closely with people and spent so much time talking with them that she earned their trust. You need to have a very low-key interview style where you sit down with people and allow them to remember. I do a lot of interviews myself, and you realize they often give a packaged story, “this is the story I always tell,” but she gets over it and I think she realizes that as people talked, they became they surprised themselves. . they came to quite novel and new realizations while talking to her. she’s a real genius at getting those stories.
“gives you the emotional landscape of how people dealt with their anxieties, fears, the health problems that arose, and their growing sense of political disillusionment”
she, of course, won the nobel prize for literature, and voices from chernobyl was one of the notable works that helped her win that award. it is well deserved. It is also interesting that in both Russia and Belarus, she was not praised and celebrated for winning the Nobel Prize. She was treated like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak were treated when they won the Nobel Prize, as if they were somehow traitors to the West.
his next book is atomic spaces: living in the manhattan project. this is not a book about chernobyl per se. can you tell me about this one and why you chose it?
it’s not, no. I cheated with that. this is a relatively little known book, but i think it’s absolutely brilliant. it is one of the first nuclear stories informed by the declassification of US archives at the end of the cold war. somehow chernobyl is related to this. Because of Chernobyl, the Soviet Union and Gorbachev found themselves on rocky ground and had tremendous problems financing the cleanup. Gorbachav said that Chernobyl was the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union. and it was incredibly expensive. Of course, he could say that in order to deflect any blame he paved his way after the collapse of the USSR, but there is some truth to his speculation.
After the collapse of the soviet union, one of the consequences for this country was that the us department of energy no longer had a justification for classifying documents. In the months before Chernobyl happened, American citizens had been pressing the Department of Energy to release documents about the nuclear legacy, and the doe had begun to do so. peter bacon hales writes a history of that nuclear bomb production process, but especially of the creation of spaces, the creation of nuclear stockpiles, and the placement of the people who worked in these spaces in their special communities dedicated to the production of nuclear bombs .
He uses this cold war notion created by george kennan of “containment”, meaning that the united states had to contain communism wherever it appeared. the idea of containment is used to talk about how US officials tried to contain nuclear waste (an impossible task), but also, more importantly, how they tried to contain information about off-site radioactive exposures and exposing citizens. they spread information on what he calls a “need to know.” this was widespread.
this instinct not to pass on essential information even to workers on site reminds me a lot of the situation plokhy talks about in his book. the Soviet nuclear physicists knew about the design problem, the positive void coefficient, and the fact that this was a really unstable reactor when switched on and off, but they did not pass this information on to the operators who really needed to know it.
“this instinct not to pass on essential information even to workers on site reminds me a lot of the situation plokhy talks about in his book”
peter bacon hales shows that this phenomenon occurs throughout the manhattan project. he writes so beautifully about it. It can be said that, as one of the first researchers to work on these newly declassified records, he was genuinely angry, as an American citizen, about what the legacy of the Manhattan project meant for the American landscape. that anger translates into some really powerful prose. really worth reading.
How does Chernobyl compare to other radioactive legacies, such as nuclear tests?
As an accident, Chernobyl qualifies as the biggest nuclear accident of all time. but we have other spills of radioactive isotypes in the environment that were much larger than chernobyl.
for example, in my book plutopia, i wrote about plutonium production plants, the hanford plant in the united states and the maiak plant in siberia, each of which released at least 350 million curies of waste radioactive in the surrounding environment. that is much bigger, of course, than chernobyl. The reason these places aren’t household names is because the Chernobyl explosion happened one night; it was a big dramatic accident that the media focused on. But at the Maiak and Hanford plants, radioactivity was released into the environment as part of the normal order of business. it’s quite chilling to realize that while there were a few accidents at those plants, the spill of 350 million curies of radioactive waste was mostly a disaster by design. Engineers dealt with this radioactive waste by dumping it into rivers, or releasing it down smokestacks so it could travel downwind, or by burying it in the ground.
“We have other spills of radioactive isotypes in the environment that were much larger than those of Chernobyl”
Nuclear tests also go unnoticed as a nuclear event. we talked a lot about hiroshima and nagasaki, which were two comparatively small bombs. But in the years following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the major nuclear powers tested more than 500 bombs in the atmosphere. 520 nuclear bombs exploded, and those bombs were not dropped on populated points like the hiroshima and nagasaki tragedy, but they worked like bombs: the radioactive clouds went up to the stratosphere and traveled quickly, especially in the northern hemisphere following the trade winds and coming down with rainfall.
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chernobyl released an estimated forty-five million curies of radioactive iodine. that’s just a radioactive isotope. Iodine is a powerful, short-lived isotope that affects humans because it is taken up by the thyroid. causes thyroid cancer and other health problems. nuclear atmosphere tests, the Soviet and American bombs alone, emitted twenty billion curies of radioactive iodine. just so you have an idea of the difference.
The United States was an unusual country in that we had a proving ground that was not in the colonies. The UK chose Western Australia and the South Pacific, France chose Algeria and the South Pacific, and the Soviets had Kazakhstan and the North Pole. but we put a testing ground right in the heart of the united states, in nevada. The first head of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, thought it was a bad idea to have a continental test site. many nuclear engineers agreed with him. But they went ahead because the Korean War was making it difficult to access the peaceful terrain.
while doing the tests, they realized pretty quickly that radioactive hotspots not only landed at ground zero in nevada, but were also in minnesota and upstate new york, iowa, and tennessee. what happened was that the radioactive fallout went up into the sky and traveled with the trade winds from the north and east and fell in the first places it rained: in the humid midwest and southeast.
“in the years that followed hiroshima and nagasaki, the great nuclear powers tested more than five hundred bombs in the atmosphere”
That’s something we haven’t really dealt with. the national cancer institute did a study and estimated that there were up to two hundred thousand additional thyroid cancers from those consequences, and that was a study that looked at thyroid cancer alone. We haven’t really looked at any other possible health outcomes. but what we do know is that since the 1940s, in this country and in many countries in the northern hemisphere, we have increasing rates of cancers of all kinds, but especially pediatric cancers that used to be a medical rarity. Male sperm counts in the northern hemisphere have been cut in half since 1945. Now, these are correlations, but if there is a causality, we really don’t know; We have not done those studies. So when scientists say we have no evidence of any health problems from global radioactive fallout, it’s not because the study has been done. that is what sociologists call “undone science”. And I think we should ask our leaders and our scientific experts to get more curious.
Her latest book is The Politics of Invisibility by Olga Kuchinskaya.
This is an interesting book. Olga Kuchinskaya is a sociologist who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book traces the attention and inattention given to Chernobyl’s problems in the years after the accident. she finds that, of course, there were silences imposed by censors at first in the years after the accident. Soviet officials did not want anyone to talk about radioactivity, radiation-related illnesses, or radiation levels. they didn’t publish a map until 1989 showing where the radioactive fallout had fallen and where the radioactive hot spots were. she then comments on how the issue blew up around 1989 in the local and national press, eventually becoming an international story. that story really focuses on the large-scale public health problems that regional and local officials reported in the years after the accident, especially the belarus academy of sciences.
“Soviet officials didn’t want anyone talking about radioactivity, radiation-related illnesses, or radiation levels”
went somewhat independently and quietly set up their own interesting case-control studies. They chose children from the contaminated areas and compared them with distant control areas in clean areas of Belarus. they were reporting these unusually high rates of leukemia, children with severe anemia, and women with delivery problems. Belarusian scientists at the academy of sciences, not the ministry of health, were really doing a good job. as censorship lifted, in 1990 they were able to show their work to the public and talk about it. that really alarmed people.
kuchinskaya talks about how officials and politicians in belarus used and instrumentalized chernobyl as a way to argue for national sovereignty: ‘look what moscow did to us. therefore, we need to have our own sovereign state.” kuchinskaya focuses on belarus, and she is originally from belarus, but similar processes were happening in ukraine as well. politicians said that chernobyl was our national cross; showing you why the communist party, or moscow, or russia, was to blame for the problem; and why we needed to have independence.
but then in the 1990s with independence, these countries became very poor and really struggled to handle the aftermath of the disaster. the soviet union dissolved, so they no longer have soviet budgets. belarus especially was in economic straits. And so the new emerging leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for some 25 years, begins to suppress this interest in Chernobyl as a public health problem.
in fact, he had one of the leading scientists, yury bandazhevsky, jailed on trumped-up charges of embezzlement. Another guy, Nikolai Nesterenko, was also harassed by the Belarusian authorities. Kuchinskaya talks about how Chernobyl disappears from public view, became a dangerous topic, or one to mention every year only on the anniversary. She writes about how this new invisibility turns into ignorance and how the aftermath of Chernobyl has become an area of unknowing. the effects of radiation dissolved into health problems of nonspecific origins. that makes the problem invisible again.
watching this hbo series now, it’s interesting to think about kuchinskaya’s theory of these waves of visibility and invisibility as we go through them. now, of course, we are in a period of intense visibility. young people who didn’t know about chernobyl are saying, ‘why didn’t we know about this? why didn’t they teach us this in school?’ and many older people were unaware of the details and nuances of the disaster. I think part of the reason we’re having this new period of intense focus on chernobyl is because so many countries are thinking about what to do about climate change. How do we reduce the use of fossil fuels? one solution, of course, is nuclear power.
“part of the reason we are having this new period of intense focus on chernobyl is because so many countries are thinking about what to do about climate change”
some people say that nuclear energy is safe: “look at chernobyl, only 35 people died”. Other people say, using the same accident, that nuclear power is scary and unsafe: “Look at Chernobyl, ninety-three.” a thousand people possibly died.’ at the end of the chernobyl series, he gives this number: between 4,000 and 93,000 dead. there is a large envelope of uncertainty between those two figures. but they are still scary. His book is an interesting read at the moment, especially during this new period of visibility.
I also want to ask you about your most recent book, Handbook for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019). Can you tell us about the project?
i went to the ukrainian archives to see if they had anything in the archives of the ministry of health about the medical consequences of chernobyl. the archivist said: “I don’t think you will find anything; that was a forbidden subject during the Soviet period.” but I searched and almost immediately found entire multi-volume collections, titled in Ukrainian “the medical consequences of the chernobyl disaster.” when i found that out in 2014 i realized i would be on this project for years, because of this klondike of records. they had been declassified for a while, but the archivist didn’t know they were there because I was often the first person to ask for a lot of these files.
The only other researcher who had done much archival work on Chernobyl was a truly amazing Ukrainian historian named Natalia Baranovska. she described her story in the book. when ukraine was in political and economic trouble, no one had time to deal with chernobyl anymore. But Natalia realized that these documents were perhaps being lost or destroyed, so she searched everywhere: Moscow, kyiv, Minsk, the very site of Chernobyl. She worked on and off at the Chernobyl site for many years until she contracted thyroid cancer herself. she published collections of documents and some books which were a very useful start for me.
Your documents took me to other places. i hired two research assistants and we worked through the archives in belarus, in minsk down to the provincial level, down to the county hospital records. we went to moscow; we look at the federal level; we look at the level of the ministry of agriculture and we look at the reports of food saturation with radioactive contaminants.
What we found were two really important things. One is that the dynamic qualities of radioactive isotopes mean that they move very quickly through the environment and migrate through food supplies. Within a couple of months, Soviet agronomists and radiation monitors reported high levels of radioactivity in the food sources people really depended on: milk, dairy products, grains, berries, mushrooms, and meat.
i found a certificate that said there were 300 liquidators in a wool factory in chernihiv. the liquidators were cleanup workers who had documented exposure from dealing directly with the radioactive accident. but chernihiv didn’t get much radiation from chernobyl; it was about 50 miles from the chernobyl site. so i was confused by that. I drove there with my research assistant, we looked around and interviewed people. we found that these wool workers, mostly women, had been cleaning and collecting bales of wool measuring 30 millisieverts per hour (msv/hr). translate, it’s like picking up an x-ray machine when it’s on, many times a day.
“there is a lot of focus on the chernobyl zone, but the real drama of the accident unfolded in the rural interior some 50 to 100 km from the site”
what I found was that this radioactivity affected people at great distances from the accident site. There is a lot of attention in the Chernobyl zone, which is where tourists and journalists like to go, but the real drama of the accident unfolded in the rural hinterland some 50 to 100 km from the site. From the medical records, we discovered that the doctors and public health officials submitted the reports they were supposed to submit. what was going on with them medically. what they show are increasing frequencies of a whole set of diseases, mostly related to the thyroid, the cardiac system, the digestive tract, the autoimmune system, and problems with fertility and reproduction. then the cancers started after about eighteen months to three years. so I was curious why we didn’t know about this story.
as kuchinskaya showed, it appeared in the press in the 1990s and then disappeared. so, i went to the international agencies that took over the management of the disaster when the soviet union collapsed in 1991. i’m not talking about a general conspiracy, but i discovered that some key players in the united nations scientific committee on the effects of atomic radiation worked to help Soviet leaders downplay the narrative of the effects of the disaster.
They did so by gathering evidence of health effects. they found evidence of a childhood cancer epidemic; They brought those biopsies to the United States, but then did not include reports of childhood thyroid cancer in their reports. in fact, they said the reports of thyroid cancers were “hearsay” and “anecdotal in nature.” but they had evidence of what became a huge epidemic of thyroid cancer among children. A WHO scientist, Keith Baverstock, tried to spread the alarm about the growing number of children with cancer in Belarus: the number was 102 cases in 1991 against a background rate of one in a million. he had a who-funded mission to go to minsk and bring with him world specialists in thyroid cancer. which was canceled at the last minute. he got some money and left anyway and his bosses tried to fire him, pressured by an iaea administrator.
We discovered that three key officials from the UN family of nations have approached other UN organizations and said whatever you do, don’t fund the chernobyl aid programs for Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. you can give them funds for economic relief, but not for chernobyl because it was not necessary. they kept saying the doses were too low. they said we saw a lot of medical problems when we did a study there, but they are not caused by chernobyl because, extrapolating from hiroshima, the doses are too low to cause problems. So, I report that in my book, that this politicized science is emerging. and I wondered why. why would they do that?
then i realized that at the end of the cold war, the major nuclear powers (especially the united states) were facing billions of dollars in lawsuits from people they had exposed in the production and testing of nuclear weapons . These were Marshal Islanders, Downwinders in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and people who lived near bomb production sites.
In 1987, a group of health physicists gathered for an industry conference in suburban DC and were approached by a member of the energy department who told them that the biggest new threat to the nuclear industry is the demands. the attorney told the scientists they needed to be trained to serve as expert witnesses on behalf of the government. then a justice department attorney led workshops at that conference, training health physicists to become expert witnesses to deflect lawsuits. that game plan worked very well. so the narrative can be: ‘look at chernobyl: the worst nuclear accident in the world, and only 54 people died’. and that is not a problem. that means all the other people claiming damage at other nuclear sites are simply wrong. there is no damage. that game plan worked.
the lawsuits mostly failed: they also failed in the uk, they failed in france, they failed in australia and new zealand, and they failed in russia. There have only been a few cases of nuclear downwinders winning compensation. That was the threat that people in the nuclear industry saw, and that was the threat that Chernobyl presented. If these cases of large-scale low-dose health problems were true, then the liabilities would be astronomical.
So how much data do we have on long-term exposure to low doses of radiation?
That’s the amazing thing. We know a lot about acute radiation exposure. You see it on the HBO special, with the graphic representations of what happens to a body with acute exposure. yet again and again, scientists have been saying for decades that we don’t know much about low-dose exposure. right after chernobyl exploded, un scientists said we have to use this as an opportunity to do a large scale experiment on low dose exposures; that we needed to do a large-scale, long-term study of the health effects of Chernobyl on par with the study of atomic bomb survivors which, at the time, had been going on for several decades.
but that study was never funded because these critical international atomic energy agency officials kept saying over and over that they didn’t see any signs of chernobyl-related health problems and didn’t expect to see any in the future because, extrapolating from hiroshima , the doses were too low. at the time, another branch of the un was planning a huge fundraising campaign to raise about a billion dollars, in today’s money, to do two things: get people out of those contaminated areas from the second chernobyl, and fund a large long-term study. that engagement campaign failed spectacularly after the international atomic energy agency released the document I referred to earlier in 1991, saying they found no health problems related to chernobyl, at a time when they had evidence available in the form of biopsies of an emerging pediatric cancer epidemic.
That was a really costly falsehood for the legacy of nuclear health history. because we don’t have those studies. To this day, scientists say we don’t know much about low-dose radiation, but we do know that it causes some problems and we need to find out more. I am not against nuclear energy. Like most people, I am concerned about climate change and alternatives to fossil fuels. but i would like to know more i would like there to be more transparency and i would like there to be more good science in the realm of low dose studies. if we’re going to have a new nuclear renaissance, I think we need to know a little bit more first.
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