Chernobyl: Ten Years Later
by John L. Roeder
Our Winter 1987 issue featured a report on the worst accident ever to befall a nuclear power plant -- Unit 4 at Chernobyl, then in the USSR, now in Ukraine. Because the RBMK reactor design there produces a positive power coefficient at low power, an e xperiment performed on 26 April 1986 at low power with most emergency and control systems turned off led to an uncontrollable power surge. Lack of physical containment allowed the resultant explosions to blow the roof off the power plant and emit radioact ive material which the Ukranian Ambassador to the U.S. has likened to that from a medium-size nuclear strike. Forty-five people are known to have died from the accident, and the local rate of incidence of thyroid cancer in children under 15 has multiplied by 200.
These are some of the facts coming to light in a series of retrospectives reported by three of the many journals commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl accident: Science, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), and Scientific American. While Science and C&EN depended on their own reporting staffs, Scientific American enlisted Ambassador Yuri Shcherbek, who is also a graduate of Kiev Medical College with an advanced degree in epidemiology, to write the first of their three-part series, "Confronting the Nuclear Legacy."
Ambassador Shcherbek writes that "The region within 30 kilometers of the Chornobyl [he uses the Ukranian spelling] is now largely uninhabited," and C&EN reports that 415 settlements in neighboring Belarus have been evacuated. Although no other increased cancer rates have been attributed to the Chernobyl accident, Shcherbek writes that "Cancer of the thyroid metastasizes readily" and quickly calls attention to the stress produced by the accident -- "a psychological syndrome comparable to that suffered by veterans of wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan." He adds that "about 5,000 are now too ill to work" and believes that Greenpeace's estimate of 32,000 eventual deaths is "defensible."
Shcherbek writes that Ukraine dealt with the problem of the debilitated and contaminated nuclear plant by holding an international competition to find the best long-term solution. The one chosen "entails the construction of a 'supersarcophagus' around the existing one," which is rusting and has over a thousand square meters of cracked concrete. Although budget cuts threaten future investigatory work, 200 scientists are still investigating the accident at Chernobyl (and regularly inject neutron-absorbing solutions lest accumulating water in the sarcophagus moderate neutrons to reactivate a chain reaction in the nuclear fuel remaining there). And while the Group of Seven industrial nations have signed a memorandum of understanding to close all four nuclear power plants at Chernobyl by the turn of the century, two of those units are still operating at the same site -- to provide needed electric power.
Meanwhile, according to the April 1996 issue of Physics Today , the amount of radioactivity from the Chernobyl accident currently in the environment is "much less than that discharged into the environment at Russian production reactor and spent-fuel reprocessing sites."
References
Don J. Bradley, Clyde W. Frank, and Yevgeny Mikerin, "Nuclear Contamination from Weapons Complexes in the Former Soviet Union and the United States," Physics Today, 49(4), 40-45 (April 1996)
Michael Freemantle, "Ten Years After Chernobyl: Consequences Are Still Emerging," C&EN, 74(18), 18-28 (19 Apr 96).
John L. Roeder, "Chernobyl," Teachers Clearinghouse Newsletter, 6 (1), 7 (Winter 1987).
Yuri M. Shcherbek, "Ten Years of the Chornobyl Era," Sci. Am., 274(4), 44-49 (Apr 96).
Richard Stone, "The Explosions That Shook the World," Science, 272, 352-354 (19 Apr 96).
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