Application 11 A Continuing Catastrophe


Chernobyl
A Continuing Catastrophe



Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi A Annan:


Chernobyl is a word we would all like to erase from our memory. It recalls an event – the explosion of a nuclear reactor – which happened in April 1986, opening a Pandora’s box of invisible enemies and nameless anxieties in people’s minds, but which most of us probably now think of as safely relegated to the past.

Yet there are two compelling reasons why this tragedy must not be forgotten.

First, if we forget Chernobyl we increase the risk of more such technological and environmental disasters in the future. Alas, errors of this kind cannot be remedied. But their recurrence can be prevented.

Secondly, more than seven million of our fellow human beings do not have the luxury of forgetting. They are still suffering, every day, as a result of what happened fourteen years ago. Indeed, the legacy of Chernobyl will be with us, and with our descendants for generations to come.


This booklet (Chernobyl – a Continuing Catastrophe/authors note) illustrates the health, economic, environmental, psychological and social effects of the catastrophe, and the heroic but desperate efforts at rehabilitation made by local communities. It depicts a gloomy situation where the victims often feel unwanted, without the means to recover and sustain themselves.
In 1997 the United Nations launched a Chernobyl humanitarian programme. Unhappily, funding for this programme has fallen far short of what is needed. The original list of 60 projects has had to be shortened to only nine, selected as the absolute priorities for funding through the United Nations Appeal for International Cooperation on Chernobyl.

These nine projects could, if implemented, make a vital difference to the lives of many people. Indeed they may fairly be described as the minimum of the international community should do, not only for the victims of Chernobyl themselves but also to ensure that future generations throughout the world can learn some lessons, and reap some benefits, from their ordeal. I appeal to Governments and to institutions – both intergovernmental and non-governmental – to give these projects their most serious and urgent consideration.

I also appeal to the international community as a whole to rethink its response to nuclear accidents, bearing in mind our humanitarian obligation to help those whose lives have been shattered or disrupted, as well as the prudential need to prevent future catastrophes. In the case of Chernobyl, the victims live in three countries: Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The exact number of them may never be known. But three million children require physical treatment, and not until 2016, at the earliest will  we know the full number of those likely to develop serious medical conditions. The most vulnerable victims were, in fact, young children or babies unborn at the moment when the reactor exploded. Their adulthood – now fast approaching – is likely to be blighted by that moment, as their childhood has been. Many will die prematurely. Are we to let them live, and die, believing the world indifferent to their plight?

Kofi A Annan
Secretary-General of the United Nations 
  

Foreword to the OCHA-report “Chernobyl a Continuing Catastrophe”
 published by United Nations, New York and Geneva 2000.

OCHA

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs



 

The Holy Bible:


“And the third angel sounded, 
and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; 

And the name of the star is called Wormwood: 
and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, 
because they were made bitter.” 

In Ukrainian language Chernobyl is the name of a grass, wormwood (absinth). The  word scares the holy bejesus out of people. Maybe part of the reason for this, among religious people, is because the Bible mentions wormwood in the book of the Revelations (8:10-11) which foretells the end of the world.



The church of Chernobyl April 26, 2001


The Chernobyl Catastrophe 

The story




The explode reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant 26 April 1986.



Forty seconds after 01.23 hours on 26 April 1986 during a safety experiment at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the north of the Ukraine, an operator pressed a button. Owing to a design fault, the reactor went into meltdown and released a cloud of radiation that spread across the entire Northern Hemisphere. Over the next few weeks, the operator lay dying in hospital alongside his colleagues, his radiation tanned skin turning darker each day until it was completely charred. Over and over again, he asked himself what had gone wrong. Whatever conclusion he reached, he could never have understood the full magnitude of the catastrophe, the consequences of which would continue to devastate the region for decades. An area of 155,000 km2, home to 7,1 million people including more than 3 million children, was contaminated with hazardous levels of radiation. At least 100 times as much radiation was released by this accident as by the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined

This is how the UN describe the accident. And one thing is certain. They are not overdoing it. In fact, the operator in charge, Valenj Chodemtjuk, never succeed to come out. He remained inside the reactor and was berried in the melt-down. The UN-report says, that he was too highly contaminated to be moved. The truth is, that he was never found. His colleague Vladimir Sjisjnok succeed to come out, but he was heavily burned and died after just a few hours.
Reactor number 4 was completely destroyed by explosions that blew the roof off the reactor building. Of the first emergency workers to arrive on the scene, 134 were diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Of these 28 died within the first tree months. They were taken to hospital no 6



in Moscow for treatment, research and above all to be hide. They are all berried at the Mittini cemetery in Moscow in lead coffins under 50 cm of concrete as radioactive waste. Their families were refused to take their bodies back to Ukraine. April 26 every year the families are aloud to come to Mitini cemetery to honour their loved once. After the Chernobyl victims had died hospital no 6 had to be cleaned and restored, since the staff and the patients at floors over and under their department also became sick from radiation. But that was just the beginning.






The Mitini cemetery in Moscow April 26, 1997.

Officially 237 persons got acute radiation sickness working with the accident. They were all treated 
at hospital no 6 in Moscow, where some American doctors worked at the time. That is probably the 
reason that those 237 are known. Today it is known – thanks to the former SS Alla Yaroshinskaya, 
how made copies from KGB:s secret documents -  that all other hospitals were full of Chernobyl 
victims too. Totally they were 100 000 persons or more. No one knows for sure. 

After the explosion and the fire, about 50 millions curie radio nuclides were thrown out into the air. 
The cloud with radio nuclides went away with the winds as seen below. Most of it fell down in the Chernobyl area and 70 per cent fell in Belarus. At least 23 per cent of the country was poisoned by 
among other radio nuclides Cesium-137 that can give leukaemia. The country lost 485 villages - 70 
of them are berried in the soil for ever. That was of course a national catastrophe for a country with 
10 million inhabitants and no nuclear power plants of its own. Today at least 2,1 million people 
where of 700 000 children lives on radioactive contaminated territory. In some areas the mortality 
is 20 per cent higher than the nativity.


The radioactive fallout

The radioactive cloud from Chernobyl blow away and nuclides fell to the ground where
it happened to rain.

Radioactive fallout was registrated not only in Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation. It was discovered in large parts of the whole Northern Hemisphere of the planet. The northern part of Ukraine, the South-East of Russia and the territory of Belarus was contaminated to the greatest extent. The level of the radioactive fallout on the territory of Belarus, a non-nuclear state, was two times as high as that of Ukraine and Russia together. At least 4,8 per cent of much larger Ukraine and 0,5 per cent of the huge Russian Federation was contaminated.

At least 2,4 million hectare agricultural soil is no longer possible to use. At least 18 million hectare agricultural soil is contaminated with 1 curie Cesium-137 per square meter or more. About 500 000


hectare agricultural soil is contaminated with of Strontium-90 (that can give bone cancer) in a concentration of 0,3 curie per square meter or more. Belarus is a land of forests, but 26 per cent of the
forests and half of its meadows are, due to professor Michel Fernex, to find in the flood area to the rivers Pripyat, Dnepr and Sozjs in the forbidden exclusion zone.

April 26: The Chernobyl accident occurred at 01.23.58.
April 28: The radioactive cloud reached Sweden and the accident became official.
April 29: High background radiation was registrated in Polen, Germany, Osterreich and Rumania.
April 30: Schweizerland and North Italy
May 1-2: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, north of Greece and Japan
May 3: Israel, Kuwait, Turkey
May 4: China
May 5: India
May 5-6: USA and Canada


In Sweden a fallout of about 1,5-2 Ci/km2 was enough  to slaughter thousands and
thousands of reindeers. Still we do not pick berries and mushrooms in the affected 
forests. In Russia, Belarus and Ukraine  15 Ci/km2 is seen as normal.



The radioactive fallout from Chernobyl affected the whole northern hemisphere.