Falling Fall-Out

From Novosti today:

The latest radiation measurements in the area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine, indicate that the levels of radioactive contamination are falling, Ukraine's Emergency Situations Ministry reported Wednesday.
Sergei Parshin, head of the Ukrainian government's agency for Chernobyl evacuation and resettlement, said the officially designated evacuation zone of 2,800 square kilometers (1,100 square miles), from where all the inhabitants were relocated after the 1986 nuclear accident, may now be partly reopened for settlement. In this case, some of the evacuees will be able to return home, but will lose the welfare benefits they have been getting until now, he said.

Plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years, Cesium has a half-life of 30 years, but suddenly radiation levels are dropping enough to send people back to their homes. Homes, by the way, from which they were evactuated nearly twenty years ago. I think it's terribly convenient that some of the exclusion zone is suddenly habitable again. As you may know, the Ukraine doesn't have the best economy. Apparently it's economy is on the rise, but they still owe millions of dollars promised to Chernobyl victims. And each year they pay out close to a million. However, if they can start sending people back to their homes, then they can cross those funds off their IOU.

At the same time, they’ll be showing that perhaps the accident wasn’t as terrible as everyone thought. I mean, sure, they still want the rest of the world to pitch in to fix the shoddily-built sarcophagus that covers up the shoddily-built reactor, but that doesn’t mean people can’t live there. Just think…they can go home. They thought they’d never get to see their homes again, but it turns out they get to go live in them. Hooray! I bet they can’t wait to return to their beloved houses. Houses that have been abandoned for almost two decades. I bet they’re in great shape.

Animal and vegetable life around Chernobyl is flourishing. There are actually more species of animals living there now than there were before the accident. And, no, I don’t mean eight-headed cows and birds without wings. I mean real animals that usually inhabit other places have branched out to live in the exclusion zone. Plants grow beautifully there, too. The problem is, you can’t judge a book by its cover. The plants and animals should never become consumable produce and meat because they’re radioactive. No one should be eating them. Markets in Moscow and other large cities are monitored daily to ensure that no highly radioactive consumables are being sold. So if people move back, nearer to Chernobyl, they can’t grow crops or raise animals to make a living and they shouldn’t do so even for their own sustenance.

The Ukranian government clearly has ulterior motives for re-opening these zones for human habitation. The areas nearest the Chernobyl plant are inhabitable neither economically nor environmentally. It may look like a beautiful, picture-postcard place to live. But it isn’t. It’s deadly and no humans should be living there.

Cover Up

This article from Novosti, the Russian News and Information Service, is really frightening. I was under the impression that the new sarcophagus (Shelter-2) for reactor #4 at Chernobyl was already under construction. As it turns out, the only work being done right now is to patch up the old one (Shelter-1). What worries me is that they’ve got human beings working essentially on top of an unstable reactor containing 185 tons of radioactive fuel. Estimates place the reactor’s radioactivity level at 17 million curies.

Keep in mind that before the original sarcophagus was built, many people were brought in to clean the rubble off the roof of the reactor building. These men among all the liquidators - the title given to those who helped clean up after the accident - were exposed to the most radiation. Some were exposed to more than five times the maximum annual dose of radiation allowed for workers in nuclear facilities. After the clean-up, the sarcophagus had to be constructed. They initially tried to use robots, but the radiation made the electronics malfunction to the point of being useless. So they switched to humans. These humans weren’t much further away from the reactor than those who’d been on the roof.

It is estimated that approximately 600,000 people were officially involved in the liquidation process after the Chernobyl accident, but it’s impossible to know how accurate this number is. Soviet secrecy and general bureaucratic disorganization make it difficult to ascertain exactly how many people were involved in the effort.

Only 28 liquidators died officially from Acute Radiation Sickness (ARS). That is not an accurate number of how many would eventually die or suffer major complications from ARS. The problem with pinpointing the exact number of deaths directly related to Chernobyl is that the accident was not a closed experiment. The liquidators had different genetic make-ups, different health histories and they went on to do different things. So, though many may have died from cancer, this can’t be directly attributed to Chernobyl because the liquidators may have had a history of cancer in their family, been cigarette smokers or had exposure to any number of other carcinogens. There are so many variables involved in the life of a human being that many lives lost or shortened by the Chernobyl accident will never be attributed directly to it. The official figures (and there are several, depending on who is providing them) are obviously gross understatements. Even the psychological problems of the liquidators (many suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) can be attributed to other things like the fall of Soviet Communism and the often dire economic situation in the Ukraine.

During the initial construction of Shelter-1, few precautions were taken due to the emergency nature of the situation. Men were sent on the roof with little, if any, protective gear and ordered to just quickly throw some rubble down and run. This time around, there are stricter safety precautions in place. Workers are still complaining of radiation sickness. The reason for this is thought to be that the safety procedures are not being precisely followed. This is completely ironic because it was breach of procedure that led to the Chernobyl catastrophe in the first place. And we’re back to my last post where I discussed people not learning from their own or other’s past mistakes.

And, just in case you’re not at least a little bit alarmed by this situation, I’ll leave you with this extremely comforting statement made last Monday by Yevgeny Velikhov, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and president of the Kurchatov Institute: "We in Russia have a powerful Emergencies Ministry, like the U.S. Homeland Security Department. But staff working there are familiar with man-made radiation explosions only in theory, and if this theory is applied in practice, chaos and confusion may ensue."

Nuc-U-lar Nonsense

President George W. Bush can't even pronounce the word "nuclear." However, this week he signed into law a bill that could potentially fund almost $13 billion worth of nuclear power projects. The U.S. stopped commissioning new nuclear power plants in 1979 after the partial meltdown of Unit 2 at Three Mile Island. It appeared that, even before the Chernobyl disaster (an understatement) in 1986, we had learned our lesson. Apparently G.W. was left behind on that one because he thinks it's a great idea to start building nuclear plants again.

I plan to use this space to cover basic history and current news of nuclear energy. I'm not going to discuss atom bombs. Those are obviously dangerous, as they are intended to be. Nuclear energy is argued by many to be the safest, cleanest source of energy. I disagree. With nuclear energy there can be no errors. A few degrees can mean the difference between a clean, safe reactor and a reactor whose 1,000-ton biological shield is thrown askew, releasing thousands of types of radionuclides into the atmosphere. Humans are not perfect, we make mistakes all the time. For this reason, we should not be playing with nuclear fuel.