Mary Mycio's Open Salon Blog

Nuclear Family Bonds

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:08:28 -0400

“For 25 years, Hiroshima was the elder brother to Chernobyl. Now Chernobyl is elder brother to Fukushima.”

Japanese cherry blossoms radiate from the ghostly figure, dressed in what might be a shroud, or perhaps a gown, adorned with traditional Ukrainian embroidery. The new installation in the lobby of Ukraine’s Chernobyl Museum entwines the two nations with a poem about Kiev’s chestnut trees embracing Japan’s sakura like a sad and worried brother. Below it, a pair of French backpackers and a trio of Turks watch a video loop replaying the serial explosions that rocked the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant after Japan’s March 11^th earthquake and tsunami triggered the worst nuclear disaster since Unit 4 at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station (named after V.I. Lenin, naturally) exploded 25 years ago.

It seems ironic that the video screen bears the logo of Japan’s foreign development agency – a red sun hugging a blue globe. In 2010, Japan gave $74,000 to improve the museum’s displays, including touch screens and DVD players. Now, it is like a funhouse mirror, with the Japanese DVD players intended for showing scenes of the Soviet nuclear disaster 60 miles north of Kiev in what is now Ukraine showing scenes of the disaster in Japan instead.

Japan has supported Chernobyl studies and projects in Ukraine for years. Though one people suffered from the Bomb, and the other, a civilian nuclear plant explosion, both were bound by scars of the atomic age. That both, after Fukushima, are now also victims of the “peaceful atom” is almost getting weird. No two peoples could seem further apart in their stereotypes than the productive and dutiful Japanese from the ne’er do wells of post-Soviet Ukraine.

But they actually have more in common than you might think.

Both take their shoes off before entering a home. Both honor their ancestors with annual cemetery feasts. And both traditionally ward off evil spirits with sprigs of wormwood, sometimes mistranslated to the Ukrainian as chOrnobyl (or, more usually, bastardized in Russian as “chErnobyl) In Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, I used wormwood as a metaphor for expulsion, the ending of human life in a place because of radioactive contamination. Now Japan’s evacuated no-man’s lands await their own wormwood forests.

The world’s worst (so far) nuclear disaster happened in what was then the Soviet Union 25 years ago. Ukraine inherited it along with independence. It also bore the brunt of the clean up. Of 829,000 “liquidators” (so called because they were supposed to be “liquidating the consequences of the accident”, in the official parlance) from throughout the USSR, nearly half came from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – including the heavyweight Klitschko boxing brothers’ father, who recent died of cancer at 64.

Regardless of nationality, though, the vast majority of liquidators had no idea of what they were supposed to do there and most didn’t actually do very much.

That’s the opinion of Yuri Andreyev, the head of Ukraine’s Chernobyl Union, a non-governmental group for liquidators. As a 35-year-old engineer, he was in the control room 12 hours after the explosion hit Unit 4. “Only 20,000 people, maybe 30,000 did any good at Chernobyl,” he said in the Union’s modest three-room office, where employees bring their own lunch and anyone with a Chernobyl problem is welcome. The rest – more than 800,000 people – were sent there just to prove that the Communist government in Moscow was “doing something”. Their radiation exposures were completely unnecessary.

Some studies show liquidators have worse health than the general population. But the research is sufficiently flawed for the Ukrainian authorities to deny that specific illnesses were caused by radiation exposure and thus avoid paying for medical treatment. While Chernobyl’s 8000 thyroid cancers are well studied, neither governments nor nuclear industries have provided any significant funding for researching more controversial health effects of radiation such as breast cancer and heart disease. Whenever you hear that “there are no studies proving any connection between radiation and [insert medical condition]”, you can be pretty sure it’s because no studies have actually been done.

Though many of Andreyev’s fellow Chernobyl veterans have since fallen ill or died, those who remain collectively wield more knowledge about what to do – and what not to do – in a Level 7 nuclear disaster than just about any other group of people on earth. Given Japan’s long-standing nuclear bonds with Ukraine, you would think that that Tepco (Fukushima’s owner) or Tokyo would have called on that expertise at some point during the ongoing disaster.

Unfortunately, you would be wrong. While Kiev offered Tokyo its best nuclear disaster specialists within the first days, Japan turned them down. An outraged colleague from NBC who was in Kiev at the time told me it was because the Japanese didn’t want any associations with Chernobyl.

That’s the problem with nuclear energy. The industry has always treated safety as a PR problem, as though any admission that the technology was not perfectly safe would lead to the closure of every single plant tomorrow. Well, Fukushima showed that it isn’t perfectly safe and that disasters will happen. No one is even pretending otherwise anymore. And yet, the nuclear plants are still running and will continue for some time.

Eventually, Japan did accept some dosimeters and masks from Ukraine but never did take up the offer of nuclear disaster specialists.

Not officially, at least. According to Andreyev, the Japanese Embassy in Kiev quietly worked through Japanese-Ukrainian friendship societies and other NGOs to try to hire the specialists privately, as day laborers -- without any contracts.

“They wanted to lawlessly exploit our people’s qualifications and economic difficulties the same way they exploit their nuclear gypsies,” he said, referring to the migrant laborers drawn from Japan’s underclass to clean up the radioactive spills and other incidents that happen regularly in the nuclear industry. They have also been drafted into the Fukushima clean-up, lured by pay that would be a pittance for professionals. “But we said ‘no’,” Andreyev continued, as his next meeting poked her head in the door: a liquidator’s widow. “This can only be done by highly qualified personnel, with their own equipment and dosimeters, through an intergovernmental agreement.”

Andreyev clasps his hands on a desk stacked with magazines and books. A secretary comes in for his signature, but he waves her off. “The Japanese didn’t want that. They see themselves as the brightest in Asia and because of their arrogance, have made their disaster worse.”

Dr. Genn Saji, a former Japanese nuclear regulator who has so far sent out 134 email updates about Fukushima, had a different view. He blamed the “political amateurs” in Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s government, which hasn’t been tapping Japanese talent to deal with the disaster, much less international expertise. “They simply do not understand the specialized knowledge necessary for accident management,” he wrote in an email.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if at least part of what Andreyev was true. For 25 years, Hiroshima was the elder brother to Chernobyl. Now Chernobyl is elder brother to Fukushima. Officially accepting Ukraine’s experience would have meant acknowledging that the roles had reversed. Hiring it privately was less humiliating because Ukrainian day laborers would be subordinates and under Japanese control.

The result is that Fukushima could have been avoided, and if it could not have been avoided entirely, it could have been much less bad than it is.

Andreyev recites a litany of “stupidities” committed at Fukushima because no one heeded the lessons of Chernobyl: they shouldn’t have cooled the cores with water, they shouldn’t have dumped sand, they should have had back-up power at higher levels where it couldn’t flood.

Despite the obstacles, Andreyev has been trying to get his message out in many dozens of interviews with Japanese and other foreign media, sprinkled with tips like making sure that workers protect their heads. While radioactive particles wash easily off skin, hair must be shaved off if it is contaminated.

He cautions against building a heavy, concrete Sarcophagus around the ruined reactor core, as the USSR did at Chernobyl. The thing was never hermetically sealed, and was only supposed to be a temporary solution. But after 25 years, the Sarcophagus is now itself contaminated. What to do with it next would consume another article, but Andreyev suggested that the Japanese initially erect a light shielding of fabric or film to isolate the buildings from the environment.

When I told him that Tepco is planning a polyester shelter at Unit 1, Andreyev sighed. “At least that message got through.”

Sitting under photographs of the Chernobyl Unit 4’s blackened and cratered innards – before the Sarcophagus was constructed – Andreyev sounds exasperated when I ask him if Fukushima changed his mind about nuclear energy. “As of now, there are no other ways to preserve civilization,” he said, dismissing alternative fuels. “For windmills or solar to fuel all of Ukraine’s energy needs, they would have to cover 30% of our territory.”

Like it or not, we are stuck for the foreseeable future with the 440+ nuclear reactors around the world unless we all give up our electronic gizmos and condemn the developing world to the perpetual poverty that would shrink its growing appetite for energy.

If nuclear energy is as dangerous as Chernobyl and now Fukushima prove it to be, we have to somehow reduce those dangers by heeding the lessons of both. Andreyev thinks the solution lies in internationally enforceable safety standards and the establishment of a global nuclear disaster SWAT team for the inevitable disasters of the future. “Even an advanced country like Japan proved helpless,” he concluded. “They didn’t know what to do.”

In that light, Japan’s refusal to officially accept Ukraine’s nuclear disaster specialists does not bode well.

Chernobyl: A Photoessay

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:04:11 -0400

The V.I. Lenin Atomic Energy Station at Chernobyl first went online in 1977, when Leonid Brezhnev was the USSR's increasingly incoherent General Secretary. By the time the #4 reactor was completed in 1983, Soviet spymaster Yuri Andropov was in charge. When that reactor exploded in the wee hours of April 26, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev -- the Soviet Union's last General Secretary -- had been in office for a year.

According to the official Soviet reports, a safety experiment gone awry led to a steam explosion in the #4 Reactor. With the force of up to 40 tons of TNT, the explosion ignited an extremely hot graphite fire that burned for six days, lifting the radiation high into the atmosphere where it drifted around the globe, leaving patches of radioactivity that contaminate sheep in Wales and wild boars in Germany to this day. Then the core melted for four more days, belching radiation closer to the ground.

When comparing Chernobyl to Fukushima, the explosion and graphite fire are cited as big differences that make Chernobyl worse. But by lifting the radiation into the air, the graphite fire did much to spare the local population -- much the same way that the winds are blowing radiation out to sea at Fukushima. As for explosions, Fukushima has had three: two hydrogen explosions in Reactors #1 and #4 and a third at #3 that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported came from the spent fuel ponds and shot radioactive debris at least a mile away. Strangely, this event is not receiving much media attention.

When nuclear fuel -- be it in a reactor core or spent fuel cooling pond -- explodes or burns, some of the radioactive atoms or radionuclides vaporize and get carried by the wind. At Chernobyl, radionuclides also got carried by dust and in bits of the core called "hot particles". Here, hot particles coat pine needles in the first year after the disaster. Such surface contamination is the main problem in the lands around Fukushima now. I can be pretty blase about radioactive zones after going to Chernobyl 25 times, but I would not go to Fukushima without a respirator.

In this map of cesium contamination during Chernobyl's first year, the darkest color shows the highest levels. These are from reactor debris expelled in the initial explosion. Note the two lobes extending north and west. They contain much of the plutonium contamination as well.

The Chernobyl clean-up required 800,000 "liquidators" who were ordered and in many cases forced to work in the zone on short tours of duty to limit radiation exposure.

All of these vehicles were used in the Chernobyl clean-up and are too radioactively contaminated to ever leave the zone.

In the early years, workers had to change into progressively contaminated vehicles as they approached the power station.

It took 90,000 liquidators to build the Sarcophagus to house the ruined 4th reactor. It is not hermetically sealed and was never meant to be. Parts of the structure are held together only by friction and it is riddled with cracks and gaps. Birds nest in it and carry bits of radioactivity outside. My dosimeter shows background radiation levels 90 times normal.

The visitor’s center has a model of what they think is inside. The brown sphere in the middle is the reactor core. The so-called Cascade Wall on the left is filled with radioactive debris from bulldozing the plant's grounds.

This bleak photo was taken by Richard Wilson in the winter of 1987 and it is it is how I imagined the zone when I moved to still-Soviet Ukraine in 1991 -- like a giant radioactive parking lot north of Kiev; dead, like a moonscape.

When I finally did go in 1996, I was shocked to find that the lifeless radioactive desert I imagined had actually become a wildlife sanctuary the size of Rhode Island. Nature proved more resilient than anyone had thought. Today, more than 95% of the radionuclides are no longer on surfaces but a few inches deep in the ground. Radiation is no longer "on" the zone but "of" the zone. It is part of the food chain.

Note the radiation symbol at the bottom. This is a nuclear waste dump.

The Pripyat swamps are Europe's largest wetlands, though the Soviets drained them for agriculture. But when 135,000 people were permanently evacuated from the 18 mile zone around the reactor -- almost exactly the same number that had been living within 18 miles of Fukushima before the disaster -- the lands started returning to their primordial state. After many years, the vast majority of radionuclides are fixed inches deep in the waterways' sediments.

This pine is displaying radiomorphism, a change of shape due to radiation. Instead of growing straight up with branches perpendicular to the trunk, the radiation disorients the plant, which grows more like a bush. Radiomorphism was common in plants in the early years, when radiation levels were higher all around the zone. Now, you'll only find it in the so-called Red Forest, which sits atop the western lobe of very radioactive debris from the initial explosion, and also atop radioactive waste that was just bulldozed into the ground, without any containment.

Some plants especially concentrate radionuclides, such as moss, which takes its nutrients from the air, so it collects radioactive dust that kicks up on windy days. Mushrooms are also very radioactive because their mycelia are like sponges in the most contaminated layers of soil.

Pripyat, the Chernobyl plant's company town, was located less than two miles away. It was billed as the "youngest city on the planet" but it was surely its shortest lived.

Pripyat's 45,000 residents were evacuated on April 28. They were told it was for three days. It turned out to be forever. Prypiat.com is a website that brings together the city's former residents.

In the abandoned and completely looted apartments, you can find Communist junk and old Izvestia newspapers proclaiming the tired Soviet propaganda of pre-perestroika. By 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev had already called for reforming the USSR and opening it with glasnost, but neither concept was any more than just words before Chernobyl. After the disaster, Moscow revealed more to Western governments -- and nuclear industries -- than to the affected people. Such secrecy has been endemic to the international nuclear industry from its very origins and is currently being dramatically displayed in the dosing of the bad news from Japan.

There is a myth that Pripyat is a time capsule of Soviet times, with uncollected mail in mailboxes and other touching signs of lives hurriedly left behind. But it isn't true. Yes, the detritus is Soviet, but very little of it is left after 25 years. There is no mail left in mailboxes, except by people who want to stage a scene.

What is left of the library.

Another commonly staged scene. The objects in this kindergarten were not left like this after the evacuation. Photos from soon afterwards show neatly made beds, with toys and books lined up on shelves. Anything you find in the Zone these days is very unlikely to be in the position or place it was left in.

Nature is smashing through the concrete and steel of Pripyat.

The first building collapsed in 2006.

Experts predict the rest will be rubble in 100 years.

In the autumn of 2005, a group of German vandals slipped away from their Zone guide to cover Pripyat with graffiti. It was a huge scandal in the Zone, where most people viewed it as something close to sacrilege.

Outside of Pripyat and the town of Chernobyl, where the zone's administration is based, a common scene is what looks like a hole in the forest.

It is actually an abandoned country road, overgrown with the forest. Though Pripyat was evacuated within two days, the rural areas took much longer. As more and more contaminated areas were identified over the following decade, a total of 350,000 people were resettled in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

Some people returned, despite the prohibitions, especially the elderly. In 1987, there were 1200 so-called "self settlers". Some left, but most died from natural causes. These days, there are only about 300 -- and two thirds of them are women.

Some are gregarious, and enjoy having visitors. But I have seen some very isolated and sad people on my zone travels. Most people don't live in radioactive zones because they have happy stories.

One of the strangest international borders must be the one between Belarus and Ukraine that runs through the middle of the evacuated region. Crossing the border is illegal, though, because there are no border checkpoints in the zone. It is amazing how isolated the two zones are from each other. There is virtually no communication between them. My travel from Chernobyl to the Belarus side of the zone involved quite a bit of derring-do.

These swamps in Belarus were drained for farmland in Soviet times but have been re-flooded, becoming a magnet for aquatic birds. Thousands of ducks, swans, egrets and rare black storks took off right before I took the picture. The white speck in the middle is the last egret. It is a very radioactive area. The roadside readings were 20 times norma. Birds can be very sensitive to strontium-90 because it imitates calcium, concentrating in eggshells and bone. Reports of strontium around Fukushima are very worrisome.

This moose watched us from the other side of the road. Large animals have rebounded in the zone. I have seen more wild boars, elk, moose, roe deer, wolves and other animals around Chernobyl than anywhere else in my life. Radiation is affecting them. Small creatures are especially vulnerable. But because the health of wild animal populations is measured by their numbers, Chernobyl's large animals are healthy -- even if the health of individual members suffers from the effects of radiation. If they live long enough to reproduce, they are biologically successful. No one has yet confirmed a mutant. If they are born, mutant animals die in the wild and get eaten by scavengers before they are found.

Przewalski's Horses went extinct in the wild in the 1960s but they have been a captive breeding success story. There are now so many of them worldwide that breeders have decided to try releasing them in the wild, but few populated places are safe for wild horse herds. Ukraine's Askania Nova is one of the world's largest captive breeding centers. In a controversial program 21 horses were released into the wilds of Chernobyl in 1999. By 2003, the herds had expanded to 65. Today they number over 90 and young stallions and mares have started forming new herds.

The Elephants Foot is at the very center of Chernobyl but belongs to no creature known before. It is the nickname for a mass of melted fuel that melded and solidified in room 217 in the reactor's bowels. Instead of the 180 tons of fuel you would find in an intact reactor, the Sarcophagus holds 3000 tons of fuel melded with building materials too lethally radioactive to approach. Scientists had to shoot the Elephants Foot with an AK-47 to knock off a piece that they could study remotely. It will be radioactive for what may as well be forever.

One of the radiation resistant robots developed by Sarcophagus engineers to trundle through the ruin's interior. Reportedly, Ukraine offered its nuclear emergency assistance to Japan very early on, but the Japanese declined because they didn't want associations with Chernobyl. For such a robotically excellent country, it seems odd that there are no radiation resistant robots being used in the Fukushima emergency. But that is evidently because the Japanese nuclear industry didn't want to pay for them so they never got developed. Battery operated robots for measuring high radiation levels when control systems are out should be mandatory at every nuclear reactor.

After 25 years, the Sarcophagus itself is radioactive waste. With financing from 26 donor countries, the New Safe Confinement to cover it was supposed to have been completed by 2008. But the date keeps getting pushed back. Now it is 2015.

It is likely that similar tombs await the four crippled reactor buildings at Fukushima, which just doubled the odds of similar worst cases disasters happening at one of the worlds 443 nuclear reactors in the coming decades. When visiting Chernobyl on April 20, UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon publicly admitted what has only been whispered by experts until now. “The unfortunate truth is that we are likely to see more such disasters in the future.” That is an astonishing admission after years of assertions about nuclear safety and assurances about the vanishingly low probability of severe accidents.

While time will tell of the many lessons Fukushima has to teach, surely the most important is that (probably) rare but regular nuclear disasters will be the new normal from now on.

Nuclear Worst Cases

Wed, 6 Apr 2011 19:04:57 -0400

While the world’s nuclear energy powers convened in Vienna on Monday to report on what their countries have done to meet their obligations under the 1994 Convention on Nuclear Safety, we won't know much about it. The proceedings are secret. But surely the most attention will be on Japan’s Fukushima reactors leaking and belching radioactivity in a disaster that may have already exceeded Chernobyl on many levels. This time one lesson of both of these worst case disasters has to be learned.

Because it wasn’t learned the last time the world’s nuclear powers convened a meeting in Vienna against the backdrop of an ongoing nuclear crisis. Four months after Chernobyl, in August, 1986, Soviet experts met their Western counterparts for an unprecedentedly open meeting to discuss the disaster. Open amongst themselves, that is. When the doors closed for the secret discussions, it seemed that East and West emerged with a rare Cold War consensus on the need to protect their nuclear industries from their respective publics. The result was spin rather than analysis.

In the West, that meant stressing the design differences between the Soviet-type reactor that exploded and nearly all reactors in the West. To this day, talking heads discussing Fukushima repeat like a mantra: “Chernobyl would be impossible in Western reactors” as if Fukushima isn’t proving that nuclear disasters can be very different and equally bad. Unfortunately, when Chernobyl was blamed only on the flawed reactor design back in 1986, the entire incident was deemed to hold few lessons for anyone else.

Instead of focusing on what was different, however, if they had looked at what was exactly the same, Fukushima could have been prevented. If it is not recognized now, it will probably happen again.

After Chernobyl’s #4 reactor exploded, spewing the radiation equivalent of 20 Hiroshima bombs around the globe, it is understandable that it gets all of the attention. More instructive, but virtually unknown, is what happened at Reactor #2. When #4 exploded, it ignited many fires and the water used to extinguish them flooded the electrical systems, knocking out the power to #2’s cooling system and putting the reactor in danger of melt down. It was exactly what the tsunami did in Fukushima.

Whether from a tsunami or fire hoses, water knocked out the power to the cooling systems at both Fukushima and Chernobyl #2, and that is because both reactors’ main and back up power systems were at ground level or below. Had the lesson of Reactor #2 been learned, Fukushima would have had waterproofed back-up power located above ground -- because all current reactors of whatever design require cooling, cooling requires electricity and electricity does not like water. Nothing as dramatic as a tsunami is needed either. Fires can break out anywhere and fires are put out with water.

It is not clear why the loss of coolant incident at Chernobyl #2 never received any attention. Maybe the Soviet government didn’t tell. Or maybe the West didn’t ask. But the delegates in Vienna must take note of it now and not only to adopt critical new safety rules. In calculating the risks of nuclear energy now that Fukushima has shaken the odds, each serious incident must be counted to predict the statistical probability of future accidents.

Chernobyl’s Reactor #2 was brought under control in two days, averting a total meltdown and how it was done should be required reading for all nuclear plant operators. Hopefully, the brave plant workers in Japan will eventually succeed in averting an even worse disaster. But Fukushima is already too contaminated to realistically salvage and will surely meet a fate similar to Chernobyl #4: entombment and encirclement with a no-man’s land.

After Chernobyl, experts predicted serious nuclear accidents happening once every 30 years. Fukushima came five years early, probably because there are many more reactors worldwide and more to come, especially in the developing world. While the corruption afflicting many such countries may not touch the safety of their nuclear industries, I have my doubts.

Another nuclear disaster will probably happen again. Not in exactly the same way as Chernobyl or Fukushima. Each will be different. But nuclear power is not going away and the price we pay for it may yet include a few more entombed reactors surrounded by radioactive no-man’s lands. Whether they are considered an acceptable environmental price will depend. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl has become an accidental wildlife sanctuary in the absence of people. For a small island nation like Japan, that may be too high a price.

Many lessons will emerge from Fukushima. But I hope that the experts in Vienna learn at least one common lesson from the two worst – and completely different -- nuclear disasters in history (thus far): Make sure that back-up power to your cooling system is located above ground and can’t get wet.

And do factor in extreme weather from global warming.

Mary Mycio is the author of Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl and recently completed a thriller about nuclear smuggling.

The UN's Chernobyl Victims

Mon, 4 Apr 2011 21:04:42 -0400

As the world continues to watch the multiple disasters unfolding at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan and comparisons with Chernobyl become not only apt but advised, a variety of real and imagined experts have been referring to the 2005 United Nations report on the disaster’s long term effects on health, the environment and society and its conclusion minimizing the disaster’s health effects.

On the day the UN report came out with it meta analysis of all existing research on Chernobyl, I was coincidentally driving to the Ukrainian portion of the 1800-square mile Zone of Alienation that was evacuated in the 1986 disaster’s wake. I was going to a training seminar for environmental journalists. But in truth, when I still lived in Kiev, I went to the zone whenever I could, never failing to be moved when traveling its crumbling roads and backwoods trails, past abandoned villages and haunting ghost towns slowly succumbing to the radioactive wilderness born of the disaster.

Traffic gets much lighter as you drive through the populated regions surrounding the zone. In the early post-disaster years, when contamination levels were higher, these were places that people left – if they could. But even 20 years later, when much of the radioactivity has decayed away, you won’t see the dense new private developments that have been springing up all over rural Ukraine in the last decade. Most of the dwellings visible from the road are old fashioned cottages of plaster, thatch and corrugated metal. No one wants to build anything new there. Radioactivity decays, but feelings of betrayal haven’t faded and it seems that few believe the official assurances – whether they come from Kiev, Moscow, Vienna and now Japan – about what’s safe and what isn’t.

Little wonder then that the UN’s claims about the disaster’s relatively benign effects provoked such mistrust when they were first announced. Greenpeace (predictably) called it a “whitewash,” especially in its conclusion that Chernobyl would lead to 4,000 cancer deaths over the long term among the most affected people. Those included about 200,000 “liquidators” who took part in the clean-up, and nearly 400,000 people who spent time in the most contaminated areas. That is, indeed, on the low side of the number of fatal cancers – ranging between 4,000 and 75,000 – predicted by experts in 1986.

Those predictions were highly speculative for a variety of reasons, including the fact that no one knew for certain how much radiation the disaster released, how many people were exposed and what their doses were. To this day, no one knows the answers to those questions. But instead of speculating about what isn’t known -- or funding actual research to find out -- the UN experts based their conclusions on the limited studies of what is known – even if that isn’t very much and focusing on it paints a completely distorted picture.

For example, the total number of liquidators was 600,000. But instead of predicting cancer deaths among all of them, the report did so only for about 200,000. That isn’t because the other 400,000 are not at higher risk. It’s because researchers didn’t have data – radiation doses, health effects – for them. Thus, in predicting 4,000 cancer deaths, the report simply ignored two-thirds of the liquidators. That is to say nothing about the tens of millions in the former Soviet Union and worldwide that had higher radiation exposures. Because no one has counted them, it is as if they don’t exist.

Similarly, the report says that there has been no detectable increase in solid, non-thyroid cancers – but it also points out that there haven’t been any serious studies of the issue.
In other words, the report didn’t find anything because no one looked for it. This can be said for many of its conclusions.

But even if the prediction of 4,000 “extra” cancer deaths proves to be correct (though the cancers will be impossible to detect against the natural background of non-Chernobyl related cancers), we should be careful about taking that to mean that nuclear power carries acceptable risks. For 25 years, Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident ever. But as Fukushima is very possibly going to be equally bad or even worse, it wasn’t the worst nuclear accident possible.

My mantra on this blog is that Fukushima is facing a fate similar to Chernobyl: entombment and encirclement with a radioactive exclusion zone. If the global expansion of nuclear power continues as currently seems certain, we can expect more major accidents on the level of Chernobyl and Fukushima every few decades, and some may be in transitional and developing countries that lack Japan’s considerable resources. A few more radioactive no-man’s lands dotting the globe may be the price we pay for generally reliable and safe – and occasionally spectacularly disastrous -- nuclear energy.

But in soberly assessing the benefits and risks of nuclear energy, including the health effects society can expect from what may become rare but regular disasters, it is a mistake to base any conclusions on the UN’s seriously flawed 2005 Chernobyl report.

Level 7 at Fukushima

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 21:03:52 -0400

When Japan announced on Tuesday that the nuclear calamity at Fukushima is now a Level 6 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), just behind Chernobyl at a Level 7, they finally admitted what many experts had already understood by late last week -- Fukushima was far, far worse than the Level 5 accident at Three Mile Island. In fact, it is already a Level 7.

Just because the Chernobyl accident has been the only nuclear accident (thus far) to be awarded the dubious distinction of being a Level 7 does not mean that it is the only type of Level 7 possible. That is why the often heard statements to the effect of “Fukushima can’t be another Chernobyl” may be technically true but ultimately misleading.

Yes, Chernobyl and Fukushima have many differences: each disaster’s causes, their reactor designs, the way in which they disperse radiation -- with an explosion of the radioactive core at Chernobyl and none seemingly likely at Fukushima.

Consider other differences: Chernobyl involved one exploding reactor. Fukushima involves at least three reactors and four spent fuel ponds that have lost their coolant. Chernobyl’s core burned and melted for ten days. Fukushima has been belching radiation for nearly three weeks, and with no end in sight. Chernobyl seriously affected larger parts of the globe -- some British farmers still can’t sell their sheep because of it. Fukushima may be more localized. Chernobyl exploded chunks of core around the inner area, including a good deal of plutonium. Fukushima may release more biologically active isotopes such as I131 and Cs137. Chernobyl had serious health effects. Fukushima probably won’t – except for the heroic plant workers -- because of timely evacuations.

That said, pointing out those differences is misleading. Events can be totally different yet equally bad. That is why INES uses a scale of 1 to 7 – where 1 is the most benign and 7 is the worst – to assess a variety of ways in which an accident can affect people and the environment, radiological barriers and controls, and defense in depth.

You can even ignore the last two concepts to understand why Fukushima is already a Level 7 disaster. A disaster is rated by the highest level it gets on any one of INES criteria. If an event is Level 7 because of the amount of radiation it releases, it is a Level 7 “major accident” even it is only Level 2 in the number of people injured.

The Japanese have not been very informative about radiation levels around the nuclear plant, and especially near the reactor cores and spent fuel ponds. The number 1000 milliSievert is often bandied about, though it surely underestimates the true levels. Reportedly, the plant’s measuring devices can only give a maximum reading of 1000 milliSievert. They can’t measure anything higher. In Chernobyl, too, it took days to bring in military devices that could measure the deadly radiation levels expected during nuclear war – rather than the sensitive instruments that measure the trace levels expected during a nuclear power plant’s operations.

Nevertheless, some of that radiation is being detected by the global array of radiation monitoring stations used to detect above ground nuclear tests. Using data from California and Japan, scientists in Vienna have estimated that in just the just first three days, Fukushima released 20 percent of the radioactive iodine as the total released by Chernobyl and as much as 60 percent of the radio-cesium. Fukushima has been emitting a good deal of radiation since then, so the total could be much more. But even the Viennese estimates already make it a Level 7.

The tipping point from a Level 6 into a Level 7 radiation release is ‘tens of thousands of terabecquerel” of Iodine-131. You don’t have to understand what a Becquerel is to know that a “tera” is a 1 followed by 12 zeros or 10¹². “Tens of thousands” adds four zeros to 10¹², making it 10¹⁶. More than that is Level 7.

So, what did the Viennese scientists find? For Iodine-131, the amount measured at 10¹⁷ or ten times as much as 10¹⁶. Since the INES defines a Level 7 radiation release as the equivalent of “several tens of thousands of terabecquerels”, any number of Becquerel with a 10¹⁷ next to it exceeds that significantly. Radioactive cesium estimates are even higher, and more worrisome, because it is so long-lived.

If the Viennese scientists are correct – and no authoritative voices have disputed them – Fukushima is already a Level 7 nuclear disaster that will rival Chernobyl as the worst on record and will surely meet the same fate: entombment and encirclement with a no-man’s land too radioactive for people to safely live. It may become an accidental wildlife refuge like Chernobyl – if it is left alone – but declaring a no-man’s land will come at a high price for a small island nation like Japan.