The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  —I can take you to Dr. Kenigsberg, deputy director of the Belarus government register, for example. You can talk to him, he’s an expert. We can go there right now.

  —Yes, I know Dr Kenigsberg and I have some idea of his measurements. There are other measurements, they have been done, and are still being done, and it’s shocking to see how high the values are today among children.

  —We have to see what the data says, but I refuse to think that whether a radiation dose is internal or external… what counts is the dose received by whatever mechanism and to prey on people’s consciousness to say that somehow because it’s internal it’s worse does a disservice to the people.

  —There are cardiac diseases found in humans which may be lethal, found in children which may lead to sudden death.

  —OK but we know the complications, these things are arising but to simply say that these things have occurred following the accident and to infer from that a blind acceptance that they are radiation related doesn’t allow the public health authorities of these countries to serve their people.

  —They are dose related in children.

  —I have not seen any information on that.

  —There are universities in Belarus having worked on this topic for nine years, and you have never had any interest to what they did.

  —They may be working on it, but what counts is whether this information is published in the peer-review literature. Give us the information, don’t come and tell me that the information exists out there. We have official links with Belarus, with the Russian Federation and the Ukraine. There are people whose responsibility it is to pass on information and to submit any information that we may not yet have received. These are conscientious people, devoted to improving health. They are scientists, experts, and we use them as sources of information.

  When I asked Michel Fernex what he thought about this interview, he answered in three words: “It was useless” I was worried because I did not think we would get anything out of it. In fact, this interview is interesting. Gentner’s replies are a clear demonstration of the strategy of ignorance in the two senses of the term: they reveal the dogmatic desire not to know the truth, “I refuse to make a distinction…” and in so doing, probably reveal a real ignorance about the situation (unless someone at UNSCEAR is conducting research in secret). His replies belong to the rhetoric of the nuclear lobby as a government system. Officials from the nuclear lobby can only send bureaucratic responses, devoid of scientific meaning, and are unable to understand simple questions based on real facts. They are living on another planet. They emit a string of automatic slogans, from within an extremely narrow intellectual bandwidth. Replying to the question about the percentage of internal to external contamination, Gentner even admits he “is not a specialist in dosimetry”. What is his area of expertise then? Replying to the crucial question of which illnesses are related to the highest concentrations of caesium in the body, he cuts the discussion short, claiming that the major problem is with external radiation. Yet he concedes that vegetables are contaminated. He is obviously unaware of something the IRSN has only just discovered, and that Bandazhevsky has demonstrated178, that the accumulation of caesium concentrates differentially in the organs that are most active. Struggling to answer these concrete questions, Gentner ends up hiding behind Dr Kenigsberg, who, in his turn hides behind the IAEA, while he acts as their official purveyor of information, information validated by their peers… at the CEA and at Los Alamos. A chain of solid endorsements with no head or tail other than the bomb, power and money. The final speaker is Professor Vassili Nesterenko.

  178 See Part Three, Chapter 2. “2. The French Context”, p. 179.

  Nesterenko.—I would like to talk to you about the radiological situation in Belarus, remind you of certain figures. As we know, following the Chernobyl accident, 23% of the territory of Belarus was contaminated. More than 2 million people, including 500,000 children live there. Over the last fifteen years, 135,000 people have been evacuated, 1,700,000 hectares of cultivable land have been contaminated and as much again of forest. About 260,000 hectares have been taken out of agriculture and today constitute an ecologically radioactive reserve. The economic damage to Belarus is estimated at around 235 billion dollars.

  After the release of long-lived radionuclides on the territory of Belarus, the long-lived isotopes accumulated in the topsoil and this determines the radioactive charge on the people today. I was astonished to hear people claiming that we have already assimilated 70% of the radioactive charge and that from now on, we can concentrate on something else. I would like to remind you that over the last fifteen year, new human beings have been born, and they, thank God, did not experience the first radioactive shock. But for the last fifteen years they have been eating contaminated food. The inhabitants of these areas receive between 80% and 90% of their radioactive charge from consuming locally produced food. I would draw your attention particularly to milk, because the inhabitants and in particular the children in rural areas, receive between 60% and 80% of their annual radioactive dose from milk. In second place is the contamination from products gathered from nature and from the forest. These are the dietary habits of the inhabitants of Polessie, and they will not change.

  At Olmany, in a village in the Stolin district, in the Brest region, 220 km from Chernobyl, the milk contained 2,600 Bq/l when we measured it last January. This sort of information puts us under an obligation to be vigilant because, I repeat, the main radioactive charge comes from milk. Recently we have discovered something particularly alarming. In certain areas of Belarus, 80% of the milk and cereals contain strontium in excess of the admissible levels. In this case, radical measures are needed: grain that is already stored in silos needs to be disposed of.

  Food products spread across the whole republic like grasshoppers, and it is not surprising that in Minsk, a “clean” town, we found children with a radioactive charge of 700–900 Bq/kg. The children receive higher doses because the dose coefficient in a child is 3 to 5 times higher than in an adult. The safety standards in food are the same for adults and children, and since all members of the family eat the same food, children receive a higher dose.

  I would like to draw your attention to the work of Professor Bandazhevsky. We worked together. He concluded that, in children, 50 Bq/kg is the threshold at which pathologies of the vital organs such as the kidneys, the liver, the heart, etc appear.

  The state of children’s health today is such that, if we do not take urgent measures, I do not know what the future holds for them. Suffice to say that according to the estimates presented at parliamentary hearings that I have attended over the last five years, their health is getting worse each year. In April our Ministry of Health reported that, before Chernobyl, 85% of our children were “practically healthy”—this is the expression used by our doctors—but this figure has fallen today to less than 20% and less than 5% in the Gomel region.

  Savkin (ICRP, vice-director of the Scientific Centre at the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow).—You have put forward the figure of 50 Bq/kg per body weight, which is less than 1mSv per year. You claim that at this precise level of internal radiation, changes in vital organs, as described by Bandazhevsky, are possible.

  Nesterenko.—I think what we are forgetting here is the considerable inequality in the accumulation of radionuclides in the organism. With an average of 50 Bq/kg in the body, there will be a concentration of 1000 Bq/kg in the kidneys and more than 2500 Bq/kg in the cardiac muscles. These figures are taken from examinations by Dr Bandazhevsky on corpses. Illnesses arise at these levels, these are established facts.

  Savkin.—But caesium has always been regularly distributed, within a margin of about 10%, throughout the soft tissue. So we are talking about a new scientific phenomenon which needs to be analysed and evaluated very carefully. I have another question: after conducting your radiological examinations, how do you explain the results t
o people and what advice do you give them? Who does this? The dosimetrist, the teacher, or the doctor? To what extent is there a distribution of roles in a task requiring such delicacy, linked as it is to psychological effects and to the effort to mitigate those effects.

  Nesterenko.—Medical advice,—doctors participate in our programmes—is given by doctors naturally. Teachers are given recommendations which they then communicate to parents. These recommendations are written in collaboration with the doctors. They are given out along with the gamma spectrometry measurements. And then, as I have said, we have centres where teachers and doctors work together. They help to make the public aware.

  Savkin.—You said that it is the children who are the most irradiated population compared to adults. The data using a spectrometer that has been presented by the Ministry of Health, the official data, shows that the critical group are workers: adults. But in your area, it seems to be the children. How can you resolve this fundamental contradiction in Belarus: children have now been found to be the critical group for internal radiation by caesium?

  V. Nesterenko.—We measure the whole population, and then we isolate the critical group. This is standard practice. Whether you look at radioprotection norms in Russia or Belarus, they are the same. We isolate ten to fifteen people, those who have the greatest accumulation. In general, this group—I’m talking now about dose not accumulation—eight will be children. These are our figures. We have 110, 000 measurements179. Our spectrometers are certified by the government homologation centre. You are welcome to visit the institute and see for yourself.

  179 Gonzales talked about 16,000 measurements in total, undertaken by the IAEA.

  Sushkevich (WHO Geneva).—The questions posed by Dr Savkin are really very important. As a member of the dosimetry committee of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), he is trying to elucidate the elements that could help us to adopt, or, on the other hand, to critically evaluate the data that you have presented. And so, these questions in themselves and the responses to these questions compel us to consider the need for complementary verification.

  Nesterenko.—We are open to cooperation with anyone. When I started this work—because I had already worked with spectrometry before Chernobyl at the institute—we had always thought that children, with their very rapid metabolic rate, would not accumulate much. But, unfortunately, I repeat, it is in children that we find the highest accumulation.

  DISCUSSION OF THE FINAL RESOLUTION

  The importance of this session, led by Dr Hiroshi Nakajima, lay in the adoption of the final resolution, whose recommendations would provide the basis for governments in the area of radioprotection. Every word had been weighed and debated. The destiny of millions of people depended on it. The reputation of the nuclear industry would undoubtedly depend on it also.

  Some time after, I requested the definitive text of the resolution and I compared it with recordings of the discussion. In the minutes written up following the arguments that had caused the biggest debates, I checked whether the proposed amendments, sometimes accepted on the spot by whoever was presiding, had been included in this crucial text. Gennadi Sushkevich, the WHO representative in Geneva, vice-president of the organising committee, had presided over the session. The draft text submitted to the assembly was discussed chapter by chapter.

  • Introduction

  The first point to be debated was about the extent of the consequences of the disaster. The draft text was geographically restricted: “Significant exposure has been found in large parts of the population of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine”.

  After a wide ranging discussion with contributions from Professors Yablokov, Nyagu, Guskova, Sushkevich, Busby, Solange Fernex and Bruno Chareyron from CRIIRAD, the proposition put forward by the latter was accepted and appeared in the text of the final resolution: “Significant exposure has been found in large parts of the population of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and in parts of other European countries 180 ”.

  180 See Contaminations radioactives: atlas France et Europe, CRIIRAD and André Paris, Editions Yves Michel, 2002.

  • Medical lessons from Chernobyl

  1. Statistics

  Yablokov immediately raises the question of statistics. “We need to write: “lack of reliable medical statistics”. This is a lesson that is costing us very dear now. The absence of good medical statistics has cruelly affected all our conclusions. We need medical statistics that are credible at an international level. This is a lesson that we must learn from Chernobyl”.

  Not accepted: “Lack of reliable medical statistics” does not appear in the text. Statistics are not mentioned at all. We know that at the UN, it is the IAEA that deals with the matter, in order to reduce costs181.

  181 Agreement WHO-IAEA, Article VII: “…the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization undertake, bearing in mind the general arrangements for statistical co-operation made by the United Nations, to avoid undesirable duplication between them with respect to the collection, compilation and publication of statistics, to consult with each other on the most efficient use of information, resources, and technical personnel in the field of statistics and in regard to all statistical projects dealing with matters of common interest”.

  2. Aetiology

  Draft text: “The worsening of people’s state of health could be caused by radiation, or by non radiological effects, as well as by the deterioration in the socio-economic situation”.

  Preobrazhenskaya.—We need to change the words “could be” to “are”. And get rid of “socio-economic situation”. I agree, a man who is starving is not going to be in a good state of health. But we are talking now about the damage from radiation, in combination with other factors. Can I remind you that our countries, in particular, experienced a much worse economic situation after the war, but there were no cases of thyroid cancer or leukaemia.

  Sushkevich.—But we need to take into account all the factors that could have had an influence.

  Nyagu.—Factors common to all catastrophes.

  Preobrazhenskaya.—Listen to me, you must know that cancer, brain tumours and leukaemia are not caused by starvation. Quite the opposite, it stimulates the immune system.

  Souchkevitch.—But stress can cause cancer.

  Preobrazhenskaya.—I’ve put forward a proposal. Decide for yourselves. Thank you.

  Buzunov (Scientific Centre for Radiobiological Medicine, Kiev) Gennady Nikolayevich, I think she is right because no study has shown an influence on health from the deterioration in socio-economic situations.

  Preobrazhenskaya.—We’ve been living here for fifteen years. The people who come here and think we are happy, and are coping, are behaving like Marie-Antoinette. When she was told “The people are demanding bread”, she replied “Let them eat cake!” Well, the people who live on patisseries need to understand… we’re ill because of radiation not because we haven’t got bread. Thank you (Applause)

  Yarmonenko.—This applauding, it’s inadmissible. It’s absolutely inadmissible. For heaven’s sake, we’re not at the opera, this is a scientific conference! As far as I’m concerned, it is completely incorrect to take out the words “socio-economic factors”…

  Preobrazhenskaya.—Only “economic”!

  S. Yarmonenko.—Removing socio-economic factors from the list of causes is quite simply scandalous. We have tried for four days—I don’t know how well we’ve succeeded—to show that it is only the combination of influences that has an effect. I was very impressed by the comment made yesterday that we are dealing with radio anxiety rather than radiophobia. These somatic illnesses are not caused by radiation. It is a combination of causes. We need to leave the text as it is: it is precisely the combination of all these factors that has led to these disturbances.

  Not accepted. The words “could be” and “economic” remain in the final text: �
��The worsening state of health could be the result of a combination of radiological effects, non radiological factors, as well as the deterioration in the socio-economic situation”.

  Dimitry Mikhailovich Grodzinski.—Given that the aim, written in the first part, is that those who make the decisions will be guided by this resolution, I think that the “lessons” constitute the most important chapter, because the decisions will be taken on the basis of these lessons. That is why I am proposing to reinforce them and add two others.

  First: Dose monitoring after the accident did not function at all well. As a consequence, governments that have nuclear reactors should take into consideration this experience of how limited the possibilities are of evaluating dose over such a large area. It seems to me that it is a very important lesson to be drawn from this experience.

  Second lesson: I am worried here about raising a complicated issue, but I would introduce a chapter on “insufficient knowledge of the effects of chronic low dose radiation” This is how it seems to me. And I have to tell you that the director of the ICRP thought it was possible that we would reach an impasse, if we only use standard epidemiology as our base. We absolutely have to study the mechanisms of effects at the cellular level. Then, and only then, will we have a result that allows us to predict the situation in which human beings may find themselves in the future. This is why, I am asking you now, to be indulgent towards a man of my respectable age and introduce this point.

  G. Souchkevitch.—Thank you Dimitry Mikhailovich. These questions are entirely in line with what we discussed about chronic irradiation. There are indeed many points that need clarification and we will have to return to the subject again. It really is an important lesson from Chernobyl. Thank you.

  Not accepted 182

  182 The obvious sign that it is the fundamental lesson from Chernobyl is that it is treated with respect, reverence, and then dismissed. It is a lesson that causes real embarrassment for upholders of the Hiroshima dogma. Up until now, the correlation established by Bandazhevsky is the only serious scientific explanation for the aetiology of the somatic illnesses found at Chernobyl. The Hiroshima model cannot explain these illnesses. Never in the modern era has the world of official science sunk so low or opened itself up to ridicule as in the invention of concepts like “radiophobia” and “radio-anxiety”. When Solange Fernex said “The era in which the Holy Inquisition could persecute Galileo for his scientific discoveries is in the past. The truth about the health consequences of Chernobyl can no longer be covered up, as was the fact that the earth revolved round the sun during the Renaissance”. Alas, history has periods of regression. The dissimulation has lasted decades.