The Chernobyl Legacy
The official death toll from Chernobyl is disputed, but a UN report into the “true scale of the accident” found as many as 4,000 people could die as a result of radiation exposure.
The legacy of Chernobyl: Zombie reactors and an invisible enemy ABC News, Foreign Correspondent By Europe correspondent Linton Besser, Mark Doman, Alex Palmer and Nathanael Scott, 3 Sep 2019, As the Soviet Union grappled with the scale of the disaster unfolding at Chernobyl, radioactive material spewed into the environment.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1986 explosion inside reactor number four of the nuclear power plant, dozens of first responders received fatal doses of radiation, forests surrounding the reactor were poisoned, and nearby waterways were contaminated.
Despite attempts to douse the fire in the core with sand, boron and lead, the reactor burnt for 10 days, releasing huge amounts of radioactive materials beyond the plant’s perimeter.
Three decades on from what is considered to be one of the worst nuclear accidents in history, the fallout from Chernobyl continues to impact lives.
Carried in the prevailing weather patterns, the radioactive particles pouring out of reactor four spread rapidly.
The vast majority of particulates fell over parts of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine where more than 5 million people now live in contaminated areas. But modelling by the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, shows how, within two days of the disaster, the radioactive plume was transported more than 1,000 kilometres.
In all, an area of more than 200,000 square kilometres was contaminated by a significant amount of radiocaesium (Caesium-137) — a by-product of nuclear fission which can take centuries to decay completely and is known to cause cancer. Mapping of the ground deposits of Caesium-137 after the accident shows just how widely the particulates spread and eventually settled across Europe. Areas where it rained as the plume passed over were more likely to see higher levels of deposited radiocaesium.
Closer to the site of the disaster, parts of the area still remain so heavily contaminated that a 2,600-square-kilometre “zone of alienation” remains in place around the reactor.
Data captured as part of the global citizen science project Safecast shows high levels of radiation remain more than three decades later.
At Pripyat hospital No. 126, where first responders dumped contaminated clothing, spikes in radiation around 700 microsieverts per hour (µSv/h) have been recorded, with an average of about 36µSv/h in the area. Prolonged exposure at these levels can be dangerous. In general background levels of radiation are usually around 0.1µSv/h.
There’s also the highly contaminated Red Forest to the south and west. It got its name from the colour the trees turned as they died after the blast. Here researchers continue to uncover highly radioactive pockets of soil. Access to this area is largely restricted, but the Safecast data shows areas inside the forest reaching an average of around 30µSv/h. Then of course there’s the reactor itself. A place so irradiated it sits entombed in a giant sarcophagus made of steel and concrete. Some estimates suggest the core will remain radioactive for thousands of years.
There’s no data at the core because access to the area is heavily restricted for safety reasons. Azby Brown, the lead researcher with Safecast, said many of the hardest-hit areas, like the abandoned town of Pripyat, will remain unsafe to live “for generations”.
“If you just look at the half life of Caesium-137, it’s 30 years. So it’s been through one half life, meaning naturally half of it has decayed, so anywhere you went 30 years ago in Chernobyl was twice [as radioactive] as what it is today,” he said.
Despite the lingering risks, there are some who’ve chosen to ignore the warnings and return to live inside the exclusion zone.
Sofia Bezverhaya was living just 30 kilometres from the plant in the village of Kupovate when the plant exploded.
The breach of reactor number four occurred on a Saturday. But Sofia, the local council administrator, heard nothing of it.
“It was only on the Monday that we’ve found out there’d been an accident,” she told Foreign Correspondent. That day, she took a phone call from a Communist Party official. “There’s been an accident,” she was told. “Prepare for the evacuation.”
“They kept telling us, it’s just for three days … [but] all of us had that uneasy feeling creeping into our souls, that we might just leave our homes and never ever come back. And that’s what came to be.”
“Our grand- and great grandparents are buried here. And we also want to be buried here, in our village. It’s our dream.”
The official death toll from Chernobyl is disputed, but a UN report into the “true scale of the accident” found as many as 4,000 people could die as a result of radiation exposure.
Once Sofia returned, despite official warnings to avoid locally grown produce, she had little choice but to continue to plough her own yard for food. And more than three decades later, she’s still doing it.
From the garden bed, which runs beside the length of her blue weatherboard home, she grows tomatoes, zucchinis, pumpkins, capsicum, sorrel, potatoes and onions.
“For me, my resort is my work in the garden … where I can watch a squirrel collecting nuts, and hear the singing of nightingale.”
Kupovate is firmly within the boundaries of the exclusion zone around the reactor. But once a year, Sofia Bezverhaya said, her garden vegetables are tested, and the results are within acceptable limits.
It’s an anomaly which demonstrates the caprice of the fallout; the red lines of the exclusion zone simply do not prescribe the limits of the contamination……… https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-03/chernobyls-radioactive-legacy-zombie-reactors-an-invisible-enemy/11432430
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