ENVIRONMENT: Fighting for The Facts About Chernobyl

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Senthil Ratnasabapathy

VIENNA, Apr 14 1996 (IPS) - The habit of officials to send out incomplete, contradictory or misleading data on nuclear crises — when they release data at all — meant the consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster were more severe than they need have been.

But for journalists and NGOs tracking last week’s world conference in Vienna on the long term consequences of Chernobyl, it was clear that the habit has not died and the officials have learnt nothing from the catastrophe.

Once again the data was incomplete, contradictory or misleading, echoing the days after the blast itself when thousands were exposed to lethal radiation while bureaucrats struggled to find ways of presenting the disaster in a ‘less negative light’.

The conference, organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European Union’s executive Commission, brought together around 700 politicians, scientists and other experts — a confluence of opinion that drew forth a flood of often conflicting reports.

Top of the paper pile was 600-page booklet of extended synopses on the papers to be submitted to the four day conference, eight sets of background papers and various reports by national nuclear, health and environmental authorities. The NGOs added their data to the heap — Greenpeace alone produced three reports.

Journalists, who were frequently accused of misrepresenting or sensationalising the incident without benefit of knowledge, struggled to divest these much needed facts from the paper piles.

But from the start the confusion was at all levels — from the number of deaths among the post-blast ‘liquidator’ teams to whether or not there has been an increase in the incidence of leukaemia among those subjected to increased radiation around the plant.

Many of the officials, including some from the WHO, insist that there has been no noted increase in carcinogenic illnesses besides thyroid cancer and that was the official version included in the concluding document.

However, another senior WHO official conceded at the final press conference that there had been in fact an increase noted among a ‘selected’ group of liquidators in the Russian Federation.

“I am about to explode,”one exasperated news agency correspondent said as she listened to the contradictory statements from conference sanctioned experts, often speaking without clear identification.

More confusion was to follow on the issue of the liquidators, the thousands of men and women who moved in to the plant after the explosion to seal up the shattered reactor and clean up the fall- out after the blast on Apr. 26, 1986.

First of all, nobody knew how many liquidators had been sent into the plant. Some said 200,000; one report quoted a Soviet Union document saying just over 450,000; most journalists eventually settled for a figure of between 600,000 to 800,000.

Equally acrimonious was the subject of later deaths among the liquidators caused by radiation. The official conference would not comment, and said they had no concrete evidence to prove a connection.

But here the NGOs took over. Their conference started with a figure of 6,000 liquidators who died of various illnesses, suicides and road accidents. But as the days progressed, so the number of victims changed.

Natalia Preobrazhenskaya, head of the organisation called ‘Saving Children of Ukraine from the Chernobyl Tragedy’ says 60,000 of the 360,000 Ukrainian liquidators have died so far due to Chernobyl induced causes. At the final press conference another reported cited a figure of 33,000.

It was left to Brian Hanrahan, who was the Moscow correspondent for British BBC TV at the time of the accident, to voice the frustrations of the journalists — but also to remind officials that the information gap lingers over Chernobyl like the health consequences of the blast itself.

He said the government and other officials are to be blamed for the mistrust they have caused among the general public. Hanrahan traced the Soviet reaction to Chernobyl from the very first official statement that said nothing but that “measures” were being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident.

The explosion in the fourth reactor at Chernobyl blew out the roof, killing 31 immediately and dispersing death into the atmosphere that spread across Ukraine and Belarus and then all over central and northern Europe.

Four days later state radio was reporting that radiation levels in water in the accident area were down, even as foreign agencies were saying that students in the Ukrainian capital were being told not to drink it.

It was not until May 6 that the first on-the-spot reports appeared in the state daily Pravda newspaper, which maintained there was “no grounds for unwarranted scepticism.”

The reticence of the former Soviet state media was one thing, but even the Vienna based IAEA was coming out with three page statements “basically saying nothing,” Hanrahan told a session on the public perception of the accident.

The final conference document showed some recognition of the consequences of selective release of information. “It is understandable that a population who had not been told the complete truth for several years,” it conceded, “continue to mistrust official statements.”

But Hanrahan maintained: “Officials should give out information, whether it is bad or good.”