by Guy Martin
We spoke to Marie, a lass who lived there with her husband. As old as the hills she was. The TV lot asked if there was anything I could help her with. Her gate was dragging on the floor, so they wanted me to try and fix it for some TV bullshit. I pointed out that we didn’t have any tools, or really anything we needed, and that they still wanted to do it pissed me off some more. Really, the gate wanted ripping out and starting again, not bodging up. I tried fixing it, but it was worse than when we started with it. This was an example of doing something for the sake of doing it and that’s not what we tend to do. I know it’s TV, so it’s all done for the sake of it, but this was a prime example of TV bullshit. Brian was revving up.
After a couple of days in Ukraine, James, the director, said, ‘We can’t carry on like this.’ I was just being awkward. One of them would say something and I’d tell them they were talking shit for some reason or other, rather than playing the part of a performing monkey, which I know I am. I was still pissing them off by saying I felt I was doing nothing constructive. I was being awkward for awkward’s sake.
James came up with an answer. He’d got hold of a pushbike, an old knacker, and told me he thought I needed to burn some anger off. He said, ‘Either do that or you can fly home tomorrow night.’ So I got on the bike and I was all right. I needed to get a sweat on and do something. I appreciated that he came to the situation with tools to sort the problem – get your head sorted on the bike or fuck off home.
We were staying 20 miles down the road, because visitors can’t sleep in the exclusion zone. Once I got the bike I’d take different routes from the hotel to the gatehouse where I’d meet the TV lot. I’d set off an hour before everyone else and get a bit of a sweat on. The roads were really bad, so the cars couldn’t travel quickly.
On the first day I got talking to a bloke from Belgium who was part of a photography club who had travelled to Chernobyl and were milling around as we pulled up. As we spoke he was getting quite emotional about the horror that had happened 30-odd years before. I’d been there a few hours by that stage, and I’d been looking around in amazement thinking, Life’s ticking along quite nicely, really. Then, almost in the next breath, I’m talking to this Belgian who’s describing the devastation. It made me think, I don’t see it the same way you do, to be honest.
Chernobyl is only famous for one thing, and that’s the reason we were there: the nuclear power station explosion that happened on 26 April 1986, described as the biggest man-made disaster of all time.
The explosion was caused by a test gone wrong. The power station management wanted to see if they could run the reactor at a really low-power output, because they wanted to find out how the reactor would behave if there was a power cut, and if it would create enough power to keep the core cool and safe. They had tried to run this test a few times and they’d never completed it because, every time they did, a call from Kiev, 65 miles away, would come in, saying, ‘We’ve got a big demand for power, we need more power.’
Chernobyl opened in 1977, and was extended with new reactors over time, so by the date of the 1986 disaster the newest reactor, No. 4, was six years old. On that day in April, they got halfway through doing this test, shutting the Russian-designed RBMK-1000 reactor down to its low state, when they nearly stalled it. This RBMK design was about as basic as nuclear reactors get, but thought to be safe enough that it didn’t need expensive extra structures around it to protect it in the event of a failure. And this was after they’d had a partial meltdown of reactor No. 1 in 1982.
During the test there was a power surge and the workers panicked. This design of the nuclear reactor has 1,660 ten-metre-long graphite tubes full of uranium fuel. To control the nuclear reaction, boron carbide rods are raised or lowered in the huge bath of uranium. During the test the heat and pressure gauges went off the scale, the workers panicked and dumped all the boron carbide rods in the uranium to control it. This was supposed to slow down the nuclear reactions and lower the heat and pressure, but it did the opposite. Because of the design of the reactor, the uranium rods had come out of the graphite sheath, so wouldn’t go back into their case (like the throttle was wide open) and it jammed and wouldn’t shut off. Also, because this test was going on, a load of the safety systems had been turned off.
At the time, Chernobyl was the biggest nuclear power station in Ukraine and it was set to be the biggest in the world. They had nearly finished construction of the fifth reactor – it still has its scaffolding round it, all the cranes are in position, rusting since the day of the explosion – and they had planned to build a sixth and a seventh.
In their panic, the staff realised, ‘Shit, it’s going too fast now!’ They had opened it too much, but the design is a bit shit and there was nothing they could do. The reactor began running away, uncontrollably. Because the reactor was wide open, this created boiling water and a steam explosion and this caused a nuclear explosion, as there wasn’t enough water around the rods to keep them cool. It doesn’t matter what buttons they pressed then, the thing was in freefall.
When it exploded it blew the 500-ton top off the reactor. The job was well and truly fucked. Fifty tons of uranium fuel was vaporised and blown into the atmosphere. Flames were shooting 600 metres into the sky. Another 70 tons of uranium and 900 tons of the radioactive graphite rods were blown out into the surrounding areas.
People didn’t know what to do. At the time folk were picking up pieces of the graphite casings that had been blown out of the building. You could touch them, because they weren’t hot, but anyone who did touch anything from the reactor was dead within days.
Only two people died in the initial explosion (it was nearly two in the morning), but the radiation starting killing people within days and eventually did for thousands. The radiation alters the hardwiring of the body and that can lead to cancer and all sorts of things.
The remains of the reactor were burning at 2000˚C for ten days. It was like nothing anyone had had to deal with before, and this was Soviet Russia, so they weren’t asking for help or advice from other countries. The outside world only knew anything might be up days after the explosion, when workers at a power station in Sweden started setting off the radiation detectors in their plant. They were highly contaminated. At first the Swedes thought a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere, but when they checked more they realised it was more likely to be a power station. Swedish diplomats got on the phone to Moscow who denied it at first, then admitted something had happened at Chernobyl. Sweden got it worst, after Russia. Radioactive rain fell on the country, contaminating the land that reindeer grazed on, and reindeer meat was too radioactive to sell for a while after.
The Russians tried to smother the reactor fire by dumping sand and lead on it. The helicopter pilots who’d flown over the place, trying to put out the fire, died of radiation poisoning. Their friends have said they were buried in lead coffins, that were welded shut, so they didn’t contaminate the ground they were buried in.
There’s a famous picture of a plane flying 100 feet above the reactor. You can just see the wheel of the plane in the corner of the photo. There were three blokes on board and they lasted two days. The amazing thing about what went on there, with the rods and blowing the 500-ton lid off the reactor, was the explosion was 400 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but there is still 96 per cent of the energy left in the reactor.
They brought in robots to try and work on it, but they kept breaking down so they brought in the ‘biorobots’, the reservist Soviet soldiers, who they used to shovel sand on the fire: ‘Right, you’ve done your three shovels, go sit down for an hour.’ But within a minute they were being blasted with lethal doses of radiation. There’s film from the time of the ‘biorobots’ throwing on half a shovelful of stuff at a time. It’s not even pissing in the wind, it’s even more pointless than that and they’re being subjected to radiation that will kill them. For what? They were doing their duty, these reservists, part-time soldiers who had other
full-time jobs but were retained for times of emergency or war. And that was the end for most of them. There’s stories of people being so poisoned by radiation that their eyes changed colour. Not all the biorobots died and I even met one. He looked fit enough, and I told him so and he thanked God for that.
They realised that smothering the fire wasn’t putting it out, but it was causing it to burn through the concrete of the reactor. If it kept burning, it would reach the solid ground, the bare earth the power station was built on, and then it would heat up the water table so fast it would explode and then the other reactors would blow. Miners were brought in from all over Ukraine to dig around reactor No. 4 to allow liquid nitrogen to be poured in to freeze the ground, while they thought of a better plan. The miners were working by hand, because scientists were worried power tools would affect the stability of the place. All Russia’s liquid nitrogen was sent to Chernobyl, but by the time it was finished the reactor’s core temperature had dropped to a safe level. All the miners who worked there died of radiation poisoning.
They reckon half a million men and women worked on the recovery, repair and sealing of the reactor and the contaminated area over the next few weeks, months and years, many of them being poisoned with unsafe amounts of radiation. It was just lucky that Ukraine wasn’t wiped off the map. I’ve heard that Ukrainian experts say we were lucky the whole of Europe wasn’t seriously contaminated.
We were in the Chernobyl area for six days, but we were never short of stuff to do. We spent a couple of days with Simon, an English bloke who was part of the international group, the EBRD, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The EBRD raised €2.2 billion from a load of different countries to make a structure, called the New Safe Confinement (NSC), to contain the site and radioactive material in it. He knows the job inside out and he’s in charge. He gave us the facts of the job in hand now, what they were doing to make it safe, how much the arch-shaped steel structure that contains the site cost, how long it took to build, how long it took to put in place, what radiation it’s stopping.
The arch is something else. Because of the danger to workers from the radiation that’s still there, they couldn’t build it over the reactor on site, so it was constructed hundreds of metres away then moved into position when it was partly complete. It’s the world’s biggest movable land-based object, weighing 3,600 tons. It’s 162 metres long and over 100 metres high and is now in position over the sarcophagus the Russians built more than 30 years ago.
It was reactor No. 4 that exploded, and No. 3 has been stopped, but it kept putting out power until 2001. It still hasn’t been decommissioned yet. All this material has millions of years of half-life and they don’t know what to do with it.
Simon was a brilliant bloke and with Ian he explained the different types of radiation. Alpha rays can be stopped by paper, beta rays by a big bit of steel, but you aren’t stopping gamma rays unless you’ve got depleted uranium or a fair thickness of lead. They’ll kill you. The other ones will kill you, too, but they’re easier to stop. Then there’s stuff like polonium-210, a radioactive metal that is harmless if it touches your skin, but if you ingest it, it will screw you over, like it did Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian secret service officer who defected to Britain and was poisoned, with polonium-210, in 2006.
I climbed up to the top of the arch, 100 metres of stairs up the outside of it, measuring radiation with one of the Russian workers on the way up. The radiation was much stronger about two-thirds of the way up, where it was in line with the top of the ruined reactor. The Russian bloke was not keen on staying up there for long. Next we went right inside the arch, and saw the steel block sarcophagus that was built to contain reactor No. 4. Everyone was aware of how much radiation was being emitted and that we could only stand in this spot for 30 seconds, but we could stand in a different area of the reactor building for a minute. I had to stand in a particular place and not any closer. Now the arch is up they can start using remote-controlled machinery to dismantle the reactor.
I went into reactor No. 3 and stood on top of it, where the rods would have been. It’s safe, for a few minutes at least, but the uranium that has been taken out of there is still in its wet state, which is not ideal really. It needs to go through a special drying process, then it can be stored and left alone. They just haven’t gone around to it, they’ve had a lot on.
Chernobyl is the place where the power station was built, but that was never the main town in the area. The new town of Pripyat was built to serve the power station and benefited from the work there, and that’s deserted now. It’s just over ten miles from Chernobyl and it wasn’t until two days after the explosion that most of the folk were evacuated, tens of thousands of them. They were told they’d be able to return, and not to take anything with them, but no one has, except the few old people. It’s still fairly radioactive. Some say it’s not going to be properly safe for human habitation for 24,000 years.
Pripyat has been ransacked. There are cordoned-off areas now, but there didn’t use to be and it has been looted. The coppers could work out what came from there easily enough, because they’d go around the car boot sales and markets with Geiger counters, and find the stuff riddled with radiation.
We went into some big tower blocks that I don’t think we were really supposed to go in and every room had been stripped bare. All of the flats were exactly the same, and none I saw had a separate bedroom. They had a kitchen, bathroom, a main room and some had a balcony, but there was fuck-all of any use left.
A fairground had been built for the town, with a big Ferris wheel, and it was going to open on the May Day holiday, but it never did, for obvious reasons. There’s a dodgem car ride, and all the cars are there, but the electric motors have been nicked out of them. Everywhere is overgrown, and now no one lives there the town is supposed to be full of wildlife. They reckon elk, boar, deer and wolves are all doing well. Bears have been spotted in the area for the first time in over a hundred years and European bison and lynx have been reintroduced. I didn’t see any of that, but I saw a load of Przewalski’s horses, Mongolian horses that went extinct in the wild, but are doing well now the breed has been reintroduced from captivity into the exclusion zone. Even though there’s all this talk of an increase in wildlife, I reckon if you left Caistor and the surroundings to go wild, there’d be a load more animals mooching about than what I saw in and around Chernobyl. And there are examples of mutations on the wildlife in the area, from the insects, through birds to bigger animals.
There are hundreds of stray dogs in the exclusion zone, too, because the residents weren’t allowed to take anything with them, including pets. A day and a half after the explosion they got 1,200 buses in and shipped out the whole town and surrounding villages and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have it sorted in two or three days.’ Thirty years later …
Not long after the evacuation marksmen went in to shoot the dogs, but they obviously didn’t get all of them because the descendants of those original dogs hang around where the humans are. They’re all dead friendly. There are loads of people there, thousands working in and around the exclusion zone, and some have made shelters for the strays. The dogs eat whatever the humans chuck out. They got a good feed when I was there.
I spent time with Tim Mousseau, an American biologist who was there to research how the animals were dealing with high background radiation for a long period of time and what affect it was having on them. He’s been doing this research for eight years. He’s found out the dogs are dying earlier than he would expect. They only live about three years. Even though the weather was mint when we were there, ten to fifteen degrees, the shorter lives of the dogs is as much to do with the harsh winters and hot summers as the radiation.
Tim and his organisation put ear tags on the dogs to keep tabs on them, and whoever catches them takes the GPS-registered tags off and downloads the information to see where they’ve been. To catch the dogs they use a Ukrainian vet to shoot the dog with a d
art from a blowpipe, like someone from the Amazon. He was a dog man. I can tell a dog man, and I could tell he had a lot of compassion for these strays.
During the filming, one of the TV lot went up to him and said, ‘We want Guy to shoot the dogs.’ When I heard that I said, ‘You can fuck off!’ It wasn’t Brian speaking, it was me. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not going to try shoot a dog with a dart!’ Later I told them that they shouldn’t be saying that. It doesn’t matter if it’s for TV; they’re dogs, and we don’t fuck about with dogs. A vet can shoot them, because he knows what he’s doing, but I don’t. James explained it wasn’t meant like that, but if not then I don’t know how they meant it. I’m happy to fly a jet, but you don’t mess with the dogs.
So the vet shot two of the Chernobyl dogs, knocked them out, and I helped lift the pair of them to where he could examine them and do everything he needed to do. He was brilliant with them, dead gentle. One of them had a really manky ear, so he cleaned that up, while I was picking ticks off the other one. But they were fit dogs, and dead friendly. The vets are neutering them as they go along, to bring the number of dogs in the area down to a population the non-profit organisation that looks after them can deal with. The dogs mainly live around the guard posts. They look a bit wild, a bit husky-ish, but don’t show any aggression. They obviously know which side their bread is buttered.
Right near the end of our time there I went on patrol with the dedicated police force that guards the exclusion zone. I’m not totally sure who they’re guarding it from, probably tourists and maybe a terrorist threat, too; because of the spent fuel storage warehouse that is more of a concern. The main reason they have checkpoints is to make sure radioactive material is not taken outside the zone where it could contaminate clean areas. They have caught folk in there, though.
