ENVIRONMENT: Ten Years Later, Chernobyl Legacy Still Baffles Many

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Senthil Ratnasabapathy

VIENNA, Apr 12 1996 (IPS) - Ten years after the Chernobyl disaster, detailed studies of the incident have failed to fill all the gaps in knowledge; not only about the incident itself and its direct consequences, but also how radiation affects its victims.

In her concluding remarks to the International Conference on One Decade After Chernobyl, German environment minister Angela Merkel, pointed out that there are areas, such as the health sector, that have defied scientific expectations.

“The unexpected incidence of thyroid cancer in particular among children and its unusual type show that our radio-biological knowledge of the development of cancer urgently needs to be broadened,” Merkel, chairwoman of the four day conference said.

Scientists among the 700-plus delegates say incidence of thyroid cancer has been increasing in recent years with the latency period between the accident and the diagnosis ranging between four to ten years — although it was not expected that early.

Similarly, the expectations of leukaemia incidence has also surprised scientists, the final document of the conference says.

The delegates included high ranking politicians, such as president of Belarus Aleksandr Lukaschenko, and scientists from many nations and organisations.

The conference, which does not have an any advising or recommending authority, heard a number of reports on a number of sectors, such as health, environmental and socio-economic consequences of the nuclear industry’s worst ever accident.

But while conference officials were jubilant at the “success” of bringing hundreds of politicians and scientists from extreme spectrum together, some critics thought otherwise.

About 30 protestors from Greenpeace and the Austrian green group Global 2000 hung a huge placard outside the conference hall accusing the participants of taking a “no see, no hear, no speak” attitude towards what they see as the suffering of the Chernobyl victims.

Manuela Kraeuter, a spokesperson for Global 2000, accused the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), co-organiser of the conference, of trying to “belittle” the consequences of Chernobyl accident and said this was evidence that the U.N. agency is working “on behalf of the nuclear lobby”.

What is now known is that serious design defects some of which were known to nuclear safety officials of the then Soviet Union but were not taken seriously and this, plus the failure of plant staff to adhere to existing safety guidelines caused the fourth reactor at Chernobyl to explode in the early hours of Apr. 26, 1986.

However, the exact mechanisms that led to the explosion are not yet known. The explosion ripped open part of the reactor lid sending thousands of kilogramnes of radioactive material high into the atmosphere.

Strong winds in the following days carried these radioactive material throughout northern Europe, but a good part of it was deposited around the plant, located close to Ukraine’s border with Belarus and Russia. About half a million people were evacuated from a 30 kilometre exclusion zone, where radiation is still high.

Officially 237 people received excessive dose of radiation. Of the 237, 28 have died. All in all, according to Ukrainian officials, 31 people have died. But the true number of people who have since died since or suffering as a result of Chernobyl induced illnesses was an issue hotly debated in Vienna this week.

While the official estimates put out by western scientists, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the IAEA have been very conservative — they claim there is not yet clear proof of an increase in leukaemia or birth defects as a result of the blast — others take the opposite opinion.

According to Natalia Preobrazhenskaya, head of the Ukrainian organisation ‘Saving the Children of Ukraine from the Chernobyl Tragedy’, 60,000 of the 360,000 Ukrainian ‘liquidators’ — staff tasked with the clean-up after the blast — have died due to various illnesses caused by Chernobyl radiation.

There are varying figures, but it is estimated that between 600,000 to 800,000 people were employed as liquidators, to clean up the rubble and construct the sarcophagus.

What is not disputed is that thyroid cancer, caused by excessive ingestion of iodine, has been increasing among children, particularly those who were born just before the accident or were conceived before the accident.

To date, about 800 cases have been registered, most of them in Belarus, where about 70 percent of the radioactive material from Chernobyl settled.

Whether or not the incidence of leukaemia is increasing has also been disputed. According to the official conclusions of the conference, apart from thyroid cancer there has been no other “statistically significant deviation in the incidence rates of other cancers”.

However, Igor Mischenko, a doctor attached to the children’s hospital in Charkov, 400 kilometres east of Ukraine’s capital Kiev, told IPS there is a link between Chernobyl and leukaemia.

Currently accompanying a group of children recuperating after leukaemia treatment, Mischenko said about 35 new cases of leukaemia are registered in the hospital each year.

Actually, the non-increase of leukaemia has come as a ‘surprise’ for the scientists who have been expected an increase. But, noted Merkel, this should perhaps lead to a re-evaluation of present methods in predicting cancer and other forms of illnesses caused by nuclear catastrophes.

At present, such predictions are made based on the extensive studies made of the survivors of the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

“In the light of the experience from Chernobyl consequences, it has to be questioned if these models apply without any adaption to different exposure situations,” Merkel said.

Another aspect that has been highlighted by the Chernobyl accident is the present system of rehabilitation for those who have suffered one way or another due to a nuclear accident and those who live in lastingly contaminated areas.

“Classical post-accident management based on intervention criteria is not sufficient in order to deal appropriately with the complex social situation,” Merkel said. “We have to establish new framework conditions in order to respond to the psychological situation of people who have to live in lastingly contaminated regions.”