The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  —And no-one abroad either?

  —No-one else will; it was Hans Blix who told us that. Because we are one of the great powers with a large army, and money goes to developing nations. Today, no-one will give us anything. But we mustn’t lose hope.

  —Do you think Chernobyl ushered in a new era for humanity?

  —Humanity has not understood. We haven’t understood that this could be the end of everything. If the fire in reactor 4 had not been put out and if reactors 3, 2 and 1 had caught fire, Europe would have been uninhabitable. The whole of Europe would have been covered with radioactive material, and there would have been nothing we could do. That’s where nuclear energy can lead.

  We have lost all these territories and we won’t be able to return there for many years. The people here have lost all their “joie de vivre”. Before, you know... Belarus was a really beautiful country... there was the hay making, people extracted the juice from silver birches to make a drink, it was a great life. The Belarusians are a very interesting people. Now they’re no longer happy. They’re afraid of everything. The soil is radioactive, the potatoes, the wild strawberries as well....they’re frightened of everything. Perhaps there is a general consciousness, as you say, beginning to emerge. If this poison covered the whole of the world, what sense would life have?

  —Are the foreign scientists that come here aware of this anguish?

  —It’s as if they’ve come from another planet to observe us. We feel like hostages here. All these experts draw conclusions, but not ones that are any use to us. We need concrete evaluations. Their conclusion is simple—there’s nothing so terrible here, we can carry on living here. As a deputy, I put in a request to the Supreme Soviet, asking that the IAEA experts’ conclusions be discussed in detail by the Supreme Soviet. Because the IAEA exerts a great influence. If it presents its findings at the United Nations, it will be very difficult for us to prove anything to the contrary. They don’t say how things are. These experts have not done any research. They are defending the interests of the nuclear industry.

  —Can modern science meet the challenge that has been presented to humanity by the disaster at Chernobyl?

  —I don’t think so. We’re not ready yet. And yet only science can provide the answers. It’s here that people need to work, to listen, to see the people’s suffering. Then at least, the scientists would understand. No country can face this problem alone. We need to mobilise everyone to come and work here, immediately, so that the international community as a whole realises what has happened here.

  —Who would supply the money?

  —I think there are honest people in the world. They will give what they can. I do believe that. That’s why they need to be informed. But if no-one hears or sees anything, no-one will ever know. We need to use this accident to help the whole world. If we treat Chernobyl too lightly, it will be the end for all of us.

  —Don’t you think that the scientific world should admit that it is unable to give unequivocal clear answers that can be understood by all, to the challenge represented by Chernobyl, and undertake research to meet this challenge?

  —We need to study the whole issue in depth. Starting with humanity itself. It should be a lesson in what not to do. A lesson about the risks of nuclear arms and of civil nuclear energy for people and for the ecology of the planet. You say quite rightly that the environment that has been created here is entirely new. Man can’t adapt to it. We struggle as best we can. We can’t go and live on the moon. We are condemned to living here. What can we do? We have to find a solution. Maybe the people of Belarus should go and live in the other “clean” republics, abandon this area. Everyone living in areas contaminated by 30, 15, 10, even 5 or 1 curie should leave. The area should be reforested and then abandoned: but having said that, the area needs to be looked after in ideal conditions, with its rivers and forests, like a botanical garden, and research needs to be undertaken here. We can’t just create an enormous nuclear waste dump open to the skies in the centre of Europe. If we polluted it, if our actions have caused the land to become ill, it’s our job to nurse it back to health. I mean invest everything in it.

  I’ll say it again: there is no-one in the world that really understands the situation. No-one has access to all the information about the problem, in all its complexity. On the other hand, there are research centres across the world with enormous wealth…

  As I listened to this desperate appeal by Anatoli Volkov, I was unaware that two other solitary and extraordinarily competent men were launching themselves in the same struggle: the physicist Vassili Nesterenko, an expert in radioprotection and Yury Bandazhevsky, the youngest doctor of pathology in the USSR, whose work would create a nightmare for the nuclear industry and would lead to his imprisonment. The two men had not yet met each other. They were destined to come together some years later and join others from the West, to oppose the cover up and the deceit surrounding the disaster at Chernobyl.

  Chapter V

  THE STRATEGY OF IGNORANCE

  “The environment that has been created here is something completely new. Human beings cannot adapt to it. We struggle as best we can. We can’t go to the moon; we have to live here. What else can we do? We have to find a way out. We need to study the environment and do research which is vital for the international community…” This was as much as Anatoli Volkov was calling for at that time. But back then in November 1990 neither of us was aware that in the course of a meeting held in Vienna between 25th and 29th August 1986—or in other words, only four months after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station—the West had already settled on the “reassuring” figure of 4000 as the number of deaths that were likely to result from the accident,13 rather than the 30–40,000 initially put forward in the report presented by the Soviets. The Soviets had come under pressure to divide their predicted death toll from the accident by ten: 4000 extra deaths from cancer were “acceptable” for the Western experts. It meant they could dispense with any serious scientific research into the health consequences of Chernobyl.

  13 A figure that was repeated in the joint WHO/ IAEA/ UNDP communiqué, issued on 5th September 2005 to mark the 19th anniversary of the disaster.

  Shocked by the disaster, the representatives of the “Evil Empire” had apparently been sincere in their analysis of the situation, but the figures they were putting forward would have sounded the death knell for the nuclear industry. The strategy of ignorance was set in motion. Even today, the minimisation of this “ordinary accident, just like any other” is cloaked in a semblance of scientific credibility. Apparently there are no ill effects on health: “[…] from the point of view of health generally, positive perspectives should be adopted as regards the future health of the majority of people (around Chernobyl)”.14 This explains the complete absence of any initiatives coming from WHO in the five years following the accident. Their experts, sent periodically to the USSR, “validated”, in their pseudo-scientific reports, the minimising of the consequences of the disaster and the reduction in the number of evacuations of inhabitants from the contaminated territories.

  14 “Exposures and effects of the Chernobyl accident” (Annex J), 49th Session of UNSCEAR, Vienna 2–11 May 2000. This statement was repeated at the Kiev conference in June 2001 by Norman Gentner from UNSCEAR; see the film Nuclear Controversies, W. Tchertkoff, Feldat Film, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZR_Fvp3RrQ).

  Professor Legasov, the man who had flown over the burning reactor with Nesterenko, was the Soviet representative at the meeting which took place behind closed doors at Vienna. The minimisation of the figures was imposed against his will. He committed suicide in April 1988, on the second anniversary of the disaster at Chernobyl.

  In August 1986, the Soviet scientists gave up their independent judgement and submitted to the West’s political thesis. Based in ignorance, a dogma was established from which the nuclear agencies constructed an apparent
ly scientific version of the truth and imposed it from their position of authority.

  Based on what logic?

  1. A SCIENTIFIC ARTIFICE

  The argument that is put forward to deny any link between the new diseases observed among the inhabitants of the contaminated areas of Chernobyl and the chronic low dose internal radiation that they receive every day through their food, is that this causal relationship is impossible: it does not fit with the correlation between levels of radiation and the pathologies found in the Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs, who were exposed to very high external doses of radiation at the moment of the explosion. Compared to the doses at Hiroshima, the doses at Chernobyl are insufficient to cause these diseases. This has become a dogma, an accepted truth, an axiom, a postulate, a matter of principle that is not open to discussion.

  But to explain Chernobyl today, using Hiroshima as a model, is an evasion of the truth, a subterfuge that has no scientific basis. It is a mistake to compare these two disasters. The two events and the mechanisms by which they cause us harm are different.

  There was no atomic explosion at Chernobyl. There were two thermal explosions within seconds of each other and there was a fire that burned for ten days. Background radiation around the power station today is low. However, enormous quantities of artificial radioactive elements were ejected by the thermal explosions and were dispersed over great distances by wind and rain. Some of them will disappear only over the next few centuries: caesium-137 and strontium-90 in three hundred years; plutonium-239 in two hundred and forty one thousand years. These elements contaminate the environment, plants, animals and human beings. They have destroyed the health and life of hundreds of thousands of young liquidators who ingested or inhaled radioactive particles while working around the power station, and they will contaminate future generations, the descendants of the inhabitants, who are becoming more and more ill as a result of their consumption of radionuclides over the last twenty-eight years. The nature of this event is not comparable to what occurred in the two Japanese towns.

  In order to understand how it differs from Hiroshima we need to know something of the parameters governing atomic explosions. For example, there are a number of variations depending on altitude:

  • underground explosion (no material ejected into the atmosphere);

  • surface explosion (the most polluting, giving maximum fallout);

  • low altitude explosion, at a height from the ground, equal to the radius of the fireball, resulting in local fallout;

  • medium altitude explosion (at Hiroshima—600 meters) at a height greater than the radius of the fireball. Little local fallout15;

  15 However, in Hiroshima a large number of deaths and serious illnesses were recorded in people who arrived in the city from other areas and who were not directly exposed to radiation during the explosion. One possible explanation is the effect of contamination by residual radioactivity from neutron induction, created by the explosion of the bombs: all the rubble, the ash, even the stones become temporarily radioactive. In addition, M. Horio and T. Kikushi reported in “Radioactive dust from nuclear explosions” (in Bulletin of the Chemical Research Institute Japan, July 1955) that fission products had fallen in the western part of Hiroshima on the day that the bomb exploded and that at Nagasaki, a radioactive dust obviously containing certain fission products covered the whole area of Nishiyama. (quoted in Atomic Park, Jean-Philippe Desbordes, Actes Sud, 2006). The lies and the cover up began in 1945. In addition to the ban on publishing any personal testimony, the U.S. occupation forces, put in place the ABCC (Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission), an organisation which collected information, in the utmost secrecy, about the effects of radiation on humans, in particular, survivors of irradiation (hibakusha), without offering them any medical treatment. After the Americans left in 1952, the organisation was renamed RERF (Radiation Effect Research Foundation) and the work was continued by Japanese scientists. (cf. Hiroshima, 50 ans, Autrement, 1995, p 80).

  • high altitude explosion, well above the radius of the fireball. Global fallout only.

  It should also be understood that during an atomic explosion the temperature can reach 100 million degrees Centigrade, in other words much hotter than the sun, whose surface temperature is 6000 degrees. After this type of nuclear explosion at an average altitude (Hiroshima), most of the radioactive elements are sucked up very rapidly in an updraft—at twice the speed of sound—into the stratosphere, and are then dispersed from the mushroom cloud over the rest of the globe with minimal vertical fallout at the blast site, compared to Chernobyl16.

  16 Description by Maurice E. André, former officer of the NBCR (nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological) working exclusively for the Belgian Air Force.

  2. PROXIMITY EFFECTS

  What is the principle or the basic mechanism of radioactivity? Radiation loses energy as it passes through a material. It is this energy, absorbed into the material, which is measured to evaluate the level of radiation, or absorbed dose. It is measured in rad (radiation absorbed dose) or gray (1Gy = 100 rad). The Hiroshima model, created by physicists studying the effects of uniform acute external high level doses of radiation on the whole body, is mathematical, reductionist and simplistic. It applies exclusively to the concept of dose as applied to a mass of 1 kilogram or more. It cannot be applied to biological mechanisms (which have not been studied) caused by low internal exposure doses, or isotopes, or hot particles, incorporated at the microscopic (histological) level in the cell. This model denies what it has not studied because it is incapable of apprehending it within its own parameters. At present the experts refuse to consider any new models: they block the way to the validation of alternative research and they continue to deny the evidence of a health catastrophe in the areas contaminated by Chernobyl. The difference between the two “phenomena”—Hiroshima and Chernobyl—is that in the case of internal low dose contamination (Chernobyl), it is not the value of the “dose”, but the direct proximity effect of the material concentration of radioactive elements in the body tissues that must be taken into account. It is not the job of a physicist to describe processes at this level but of a pathologist. An honest physicist would simply acknowledge the need for this research. This is how Maurice E. Andre explained the difference between the two approaches in an article published in 1976, ten years before Chernobyl:

  The technical aspect, which will be developed below, reveals that a tiny speck of plutonium, a micron in diameter (a millionth of a metre), causes death by simply lodging in the lung. This speck will deliver 100,000 rad per year to the area of the lung surrounding it, a tiny area, limited by a sphere with a diameter of about a tenth of a millimetre, with the speck at its centre.

  But first I need to explain the trick used by pro-nuclear scientists to mislead scientists from other fields and the general public. Before examining that calculation, I will illustrate its falseness by means of an example where the false logic is more obvious. Here is the example: it is possible to assert that a bullet is not dangerous. All that is needed is to make an abstraction of the point of impact (which obviously absorbs all the kinetic energy of the projectile) and to hypothesise that all the kinetic energy of the bullet is absorbed by a larger area—for example the entire surface of the body—in which case, it can be shown that the flesh will not be ruptured. In this example, it is very easy to spot the false logic which fails to take into account the real situation in which a bullet hits a very precise area rather than the whole body or a whole organ. The bullet ruptures the flesh because it concentrates all its energy in a small area: given an equal amount of energy, the smaller the area, the more certain the rupture.

  In the case under review, it is seriously misleading to the public to employ a calculation in which the energy released by a speck of plutonium in a given time is supposedly spread throughout the lung whereas in reality it is concentrated very precisely in a tiny area of the lung and is theref
ore extremely dangerous and can cause death.

  For the benefit of non-scientists, a speck of Pu-239, a micron in diameter, lodged in the lung will damage the tiny sphere surrounding the speck because it is being bombarded approximately every minute (1414 times every thousand minutes, to be exact) by alpha-emitting radionuclides travelling at about 20,000 kilometres per second.

  Under continuous attack the body is unable to repair the affected area, however small. It is as if one were to ask some builders to construct a house around someone with a machine gun who is firing a bullet once a minute, without any warning, in any direction.

  In this analogy, the builders are the biological material that is drained towards the destroyed area to make repairs, and the house under construction is the area of the lung that needs to be repaired. The radioactive speck is the machine gunner firing at regular intervals continuously for a number of years (a particle of plutonium has a half-life of twenty-four thousand years, a very long time in comparison to a human life, and will continue to emit radioactivity at the same rate up to that point). This type of continuous intense bombardment may be on a very small scale but this makes no difference to the fact that it will, come what may, lead to cancer of the lung.