This article originally appeared in the May 12, 1986, edition of U.S. News & World Report.
It was the recurrent nightmare of the 20th century. A nuclear power plant explodes, the core begins to melt, a conflagration ignites that spreads a cloud of radioactivity over large parts of the earth.
The Soviets have only provided the most fragmentary bits of information on the haunting disaster at its Chernobyl nuclear plant, which apparently started on April 25. The explosion and fire blew the top off the reactor and sent a radioactive plume across large parts of the Soviet Union and much of Eastern and Western Europe. According to the official Soviet account, only two died and fewer than 200 were injured–albeit 18 seriously.
No specific information about radiation levels or other damage has been forthcoming. A week after the explosion, Soviet officials said human error was apparently the cause. But despite Soviet efforts to downplay the event, Western experts believe the disaster was catastrophic, possibly causing thousands of casualties and contaminating an area the size of Rhode Island.
By the first of May, a week after it began, the 4,000-degree Fahrenheit fire that was burning in the reactor’s graphite core appeared to be out and the worst of the damage perhaps past, but the political and economic fallout from history’s worst nuclear-power-plant accident was just beginning to be felt.
— It’s already clear that the explosion cause of the secrecy with which the represents a major blow to the Soviet economy and Mikhail Gorbachev’s push to modernize it. The impact will also be great on Soviet foreign policy.
— Pressures are intensifying for the Soviet Union to upgrade the safety features of its nuclear reactors. The other 25 countries with nuclear plants–including the United States–are also and conducting a campaign for Soviet standing a third of a mile from the feeling the heat.
— Calls for international agreements on nuclear nonproliferation and standards for dealing with nuclear crises are growing louder.
— The nuclear industry–already stalled in the U.S., where no new plants have been started since 1979–is facing an even more uncertain future. Chernobyl could be a turning point for nuclear power, curbing its growth in some countries.
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The Kremlin’s calamity
Besides the toll of human suffering and physical damage from the accident, the Soviet Union is paying a political price for the catastrophe. Ever since coming to power, Mikhail Gorbachev has been carefully crafting a new image of the Soviet Union, courting European public opinion on nuclear-arms issues and conducting a campaign for Soviet technological progress.
But the incident at Chernobyl has undercut his well-laid plans, and his political standing in the world community has plummeted. The backward state of some Soviet technology has been glaringly exposed. Moscow, which had been allying itself with environmental movements in Western Europe, is now on the defensive. Says one Soviet specialist: “Anti-Soviet feeling in Europe has increased tremendously because of the secrecy with which the accident was handled. It will be much more difficult for the Soviets to exploit our allies against us.”
The immediate and long-term health effects of the radiation are an overriding concern. Massive doses of radiation result in death within days, or even hours. Exposure to somewhat lower amounts–equivalent to what victims standing a third of a mile from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic blasts experienced–destroys bone marrow that produces the body’s blood cells. The affected person comes down with infection and nausea and can be made sterile. Without a bone-marrow transplant, death can occur within six weeks.
Low doses of radiation–about what Japanese survivors experienced a mile or so from the blast–may not cause any immediate symptoms but can lead to birth defects and cancers of the bone marrow, breast and thyroid. One particular worry concerns iodine 131, a radioactive particle present in the Chernobyl cloud, which enters the food chain and can cause thyroid cancer or abnormal functioning of the thyroid gland. Potassium-iodide pills can block the effects of thyroid irradiation. In Warsaw, three days after the accident, hundreds of children lined up for an oral dose of the preventive medicine.
Just how many cancers will be caused by low levels of radiation from the Soviet plant is not known, but alarms are being sounded. Says Zbigniew Jaworowski of Poland’s Central Laboratory of Radiation Prevention: “We can expect in the next 20 to 30 years that there will be an increase in cancer of the thyroid and cancers of other organs of the body.”
The economic impact is liable to be just as profound. The region surrounding the plant is now blanketed with a layer of radioactive particles, contaminating grasses and animal feed. The accident could not have happened in a worse spot. Located in the heart of the Ukraine, about 80 miles from Kiev, the Soviet Union’s third-largest city, Chernobyl sits near the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, where 47 percent of the country’s winter wheat is grown.
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Even so, a week after the reactor exploded, agricultural experts were saying that the effect on Soviet agriculture may not be as great as was first thought. Earl Merritt, vice president of Earth Satellite Corporation, a company that monitors global agricultural conditions via satellite, predicts that the impact will be “fairly minimal.” Even if the area within 50 miles of the plant were declared a total loss, only a small proportion of the Ukraine crop would be affected. The psychological effects of the blast may exact a greater economic toll. Already, in neighboring Poland, milk from grass-fed cows is being banned. West Germany slapped an embargo on Soviet fruits and vegetables.
The disruption of the country’s supply of nuclear power will deliver another harsh blow to an already depressed economy. According to some reports, the Soviets have closed nuclear reactors of the same type as the one that exploded, effectively shutting off half of the country’s nuclear power supply and cutting the nation’s electricity supply by about 5 percent. Before the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet Union had 50 functioning reactors, which accounted for 11 percent of its electricity. Behind the U.S. and France, the Soviet Union is the world’s third-largest producer of nuclear energy.
The disaster almost certainly will set back the Soviets’ ambitious nuclear-power program, an underpinning of Gorbachev’s national modernization plan. One aspect of the plan was to increase nuclear-power output so that Soviet oil exports, an important source of hard currency, could be increased. In addition, the Soviets had high hopes of selling their nuclear technology abroad. Russian plants are now operating in Cuba and Finland. At the time of the accident, negotiations for a nuclear facility were under way with the Indian government.
By the year 2000, the Russians had hoped to draw 30 percent of their electrical energy from nuclear power, three times as much as today. “The Soviets have plenty of energy problems with the collapse of oil prices,” notes Jan Vanous, director of Plan-Econ, which publishes information about the Soviet economy. “This is all they needed.”
Nuclear safety
The Chernobyl disaster is inevitably renewing the debate over the safety of nuclear power plants far beyond Soviet borders. The outcry has been the loudest from such countries as West Germany, which gets nearly a third of its energy from nuclear power. At a gathering in Bonn the day after the Soviet accident was revealed, the antinuclear political party, the Greens, hoisted a poster proclaiming: ” Chernobyl ist überall” (Chernobyl is everywhere).
Antinuclear movements are gathering steam in Europe. Sweden, with 10 nuclear reactors, is already committed to closing its nuclear plants by 2010. Recently, for the first time, tiny antinuclear groups began popping up in Eastern-bloc countries. In Hungary last year, an environmental group called the Danube Circle collected 6,000 signatures on a petition protesting a hydroelectric plant.
On the other hand, nuclear-power advocates have plenty of their own ammunition to fire back. The nuclear-power industry can boast a generally good safety record for the 306 commercial plants now in operation worldwide. The fatalities at Chernobyl were the first in the 35-year history of nuclear-generated power that can be directly attributed to an accident.
Other major mishaps have occurred. In October, 1957, a fire broke out in a British plutonium reactor at Windscale near the Irish Sea, spewing radioactive iodine into the air for three days. An estimated 39 cancer cases were subsequently traced to the accident. About six months later, a devastating accident at a nuclear-waste facility in Kyshtym in the Soviet Union contaminated as much as 400 square miles in the southern Ural Mountains. The area was permanently evacuated. Road signs now warn motorists passing through not to stop, to drive fast and to keep their windows rolled up.
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The worst U.S. disaster took place in 1979 at General Public Utilities’ Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa. The reactor lost its coolant, triggering a partial meltdown of the radioactive fuel in its 150-ton core. All told, plants in 14 countries have recorded 151 “significant” incidents since 1971, according to a report by the General Accounting Office. Energy officials point out that maintenance standards and the quality of equipment–and thus nuclear safety–vary from country to country. Even Japan has an ambitious nuclear program and, experts say, one of the safest. The Japanese just flicked the switch on their 32nd reactor and plan to draw 35 percent of their energy from nuclear plants by 1995. Japan also has one of most stringent inspection standards of any country. Government engineers investigate plants once a year, during which time a plant can be shut down for as long as three months.
France, which relies on nuclear power for more of its energy needs than any other country, and Canada, another heavy user, also have exemplary safety records. Both governments are involved in running the facilities and require that plants be of the same design to simplify upkeep and repair.
In contrast, the U.S.S.R. has drawn criticism for sloppy manufacturing of ?uclear plants and inadequate maintenance. Generally, the Soviets have not built the thick containment buildings of steel and reinforced concrete that surround all but a few U.S. reactors.
About half of Soviet reactors are graphite-moderated and water-cooled, an inexpensive technology that Western experts say is more likely than other reactor systems to catch on fire. “The Soviets will certainly now have to re-examine the proposed expansion of their nuclear program and figure out how to make existing plants more secure,” says Max Jakobson, former Finnish representative to the United Nations.
Yet scientists point out that there is a limit to how much safety technology can guarantee. Most accidents–including the one at Three Mile Island–involved a combination of equipment failure and human error. Warns Harvard University physicist Richard Wilson: “With 300 big reactors in place around the world, we’ll average a meltdown every 30 years.”
But is there a realistic alternative? In a growing number of countries, the Faustian bargain with nuclear power already has been struck. Both Japan and France have dense populations, no fossil-fuel resources, and a strong nationalistic and political desire not to be dependent on foreign oil. “The choices are stark,” says Charles Ebinger of Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. These countries are “so overwhelmed by their concern for energy that they won’t forgo nuclear power.”
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Even if the world wanted to turn its back on nuclear power, the cost would be prohibitive. Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C., says the cost of dismantling each nuclear plant could reach into the billions. By the same token, the cost of building new nuclear-power plants is skyrocketing. In the seven years since the Three Mile Island accident, worries about escalating costs, not safety, have ground the nuclear industry in the United States to a virtual halt. The likely result: A nuclear stalemate.
The disaster at the Chernobyl plant isn’t likely to resolve the world’s nuclear dilemma. Optimists hope that it will at least increase the momentum for international cooperation to deal with the hazards of nuclear power.
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