Chernobyl, 26 aprile 1986

...E quando ci domanderanno che cosa stiamo facendo,
tu potrai rispondere loro: Noi ricordiamo.
Ecco dove alla lunga avremo vinto noi.
E verrà il giorno in cui saremo in grado di ricordare
una tal quantità di cose che potremo costruire
la più grande scavatrice meccanica della storia e scavare,
in tal modo, la più grande fossa di tutti i tempi,
nella quale sotterrare la guerra.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

mercoledì, 26 aprile 2006

Chernobyl, 26 aprile 1986

Sobreviviendo a Chernobyl

A VEINTE AÑOS DE LA PEOR TRAGEDIA NUCLEAR

El 26 de abril de 1986 la ciudad fue sacudida por una explosión. El mundo supo de qué se trataba antes que los propios ucranianos: un escape radiactivo equivalente a cien bombas atómicas. Aquí, dos mujeres que recalaron en la Argentina cuentan cómo fueron aquellos días, la desinformación que sufrieron y las consecuencias que sufren sus hijos.

Página/12,
Miércoles, 26 de Abril de 2006

Era la una y veinte de la madrugada, hace exactamente 20 años. Dos explosiones en el cuarto reactor de la planta nuclear de Chernobyl esparcieron alrededor de 200 toneladas de material radiactivo equivalente a más de 100 bombas atómicas como la de Hiroshima. Era el peor desastre nuclear de la historia. Según el gobierno de Ucrania, la radiactividad afectó a 2,6 millones habitantes, incluidos 600 mil niños. Algunas estimaciones señalan que las muertes ya son 200 mil desde entonces. Dos décadas después de la tragedia, Ulana Peremyshleva y Alexandra Paliuk, dos ucranianas venidas a la Argentina, compartieron sus historias con Página/12, replicando la de miles de sus compatriotas impulsados a emigrar, como ellas, para que sus hijos tuvieran un futuro con aire limpio y se curaran de las múltiples enfermedades provocadas por la radiactividad.

“A la Argentina hay que amarla y cuidarla. Acá los chicos nacen bien, respiran aire sano. Muchos de los chicos que vinieron a este país se recuperaron”, subrayó Ulana, emocionada porque fue el país que para su familia actuó como segundo hogar. Ella vivía en Zetomir, a 200 kilómetros de Chernobyl. Ese nombre para la ciudad proviene del ruso y es como mundialmente se la conoce, pero en idioma ucraniano es “Chornóbyl”. Su traducción parece premonitoria: “negro dolor”.

El motivo principal por el cual vino a la Argentina hace ocho años “fue porque estaba embarazada y no quería que mi segunda hija naciera allá. Me fui cuando tuve la oportunidad de hacerlo”. Llegó a Buenos Aires con un embarazo de seis meses.

Veinte días antes del accidente nuclear, el seis de abril de 1986, Ulana traía al mundo a Ana. “Cuando mi hija tenía cinco años empezaron las dificultades: fiebre, no comía, no hablaba. Los médicos no sabían precisar el diagnóstico, se trataba de una infección en los riñones. En mi familia nadie había tenido problema con eso antes y los médicos no me decían el origen de lo que le pasaba a mi hija”, relató. En ese momento, un cirujano, “el único que hacía cirugía de riñones a niños en Ucrania, me dijo que la única posibilidad era la operación y eso me asustó mucho”.

Un día surgió la posibilidad de viajar a Alemania, donde “los médicos me dijeron todo. Le hicieron estudios detallados gracias a los cuales sabían cómo se movían los riñones”. En esa instancia, “me preguntaron si yo trabajaba en una fábrica de tóxicos o algo por el estilo”. Después “me preguntaron si vivía cerca de Chernobyl y después de mi respuesta no quedaron dudas de la causa del problema”.

A Ana le funciona un solo riñón “siempre con peligro de infección en las vías urinarias” y después de su estancia en Alemania comenzó a tomar medicamentos durante años. Tras un tiempo en Alemania, regresaron a Ucrania, donde “los médicos de Kiev no nos querían tratar con las indicaciones de los doctores alemanes”. ¿Por qué? “No sé, a pesar de que Ucrania era independiente desde 1991, el régimen (comunista) seguía latente.”

El día de la catástrofe “nuestra radio tenía la información paralizada. Mi marido escuchaba una emisora de Estados Unidos que traducía al ruso lo que pasaba y él me comentó que decía que algo terrible había pasado. Mi marido me dijo: esto significa kaputt”. Días después del estallido, “salí a la vereda, pensé que era feriado, no había nadie en la calle”. En esos días “pasaba el coche bomba tirando agua hasta el segundo piso de las casas. Recomendaban usar pañuelos en la cabeza, bañarse varias veces al día”, agregó Alexandra Paliuk de 44 años, vecina actual de Ulana en la Catedral Católica Ucraniana “Santa María del Patrocinio”, al 3900 de la calle Ramón Falcón. Ella vivía hace 20 años a 70 kilómetros de Chernobyl, en Niyen. “Mi hijo tenía 3 años y cuando me enteré de lo que pasaba me trasladé a Lbib, cerca de Polonia”. En esa época, “todo el mundo quería sacar a sus hijos de la zona afectada, llevándoselos a otros países o más lejos de donde vivían, pero no se podía comprar boletos, no se podía hacer nada”, recordó con sus ojos celestes llenos de lágrimas.

Nadie se enteró de lo que había pasado el mismo día por los medios de comunicación nacionales. Después de un tiempo, las dos mujeres recordaron que el 1º de mayo de 1986, el Día del Trabajo, fecha que se conmemora con desfiles, “hacía mucho calor, como nunca” en plena estación primaveral. Además, inusualmente en esa fecha “los funcionarios que estaban en el escenario portaban en sus cabezas, igual que su familia, gorros, y todos se retiraron antes de que los actos finalizaran, cuando todos los años se quedaban hasta que concluyeran”. Después de esa fecha comenzaron los rumores de lo que había pasado, cuando “Suiza da la alarma al hallar altos niveles de radiactividad”, comentó Alexandra, a quien sus paisanos llaman por la forma ucraniana: Lesia.

El día del estallido “recuerdo que la lluvia que caía en la calle era amarilla y las hojas se pusieron como en otoño”, precisó Ulana. Ella muestra bronca y tristeza: “El gobierno salvó a sus hijos, pero la gente común no le importaba al gobierno. Los médicos tampoco decían nada”.

Una amiga ginecóloga “me dijo que casi el 70 por ciento de los chicos que nacían eran monstruos, había muchas deformaciones. Yo al sexto mes de embarazo perdí a mi primer hijo, no me lo mostraron, me dijeron que fue por una infección”.

En 1994, Argentina y Ucrania “firmaron un acuerdo que permitía abrir una visa por un año, renovable”, contó Lesia y ése fue el motivo por el cual tantos eslavos vinieron al país, pero una vez que llegaron comenzó otra historia, la de volver a comenzar sin tener nada o casi nada, llevando en muchos casos una tragedia a cuestas.

Las mujeres advierten que hay muchos casos como el de sus familias o peores. Ahora, Lesia hace changas porque no le dejan revalidar su título de economista. Ulana se especializa en historia del arte y recuerda aquellos tiempos en que era guía del Museo de Bellas Artes de Ucrania en épocas del comunismo. Hoy no puede conseguir trabajo.

“La humanidad hizo un monstruo y no supo cómo deshacerse de él. Con el uso de este tipo de energía, un pequeño error se convierte en una catástrofe”, sintetizó Lesia.

¿Alguien se hizo responsable de lo ocurrido? “No, desde el ’86 hasta el ’91 hubo subsidios para los afectados. Yo tenía derecho a recibirlo, pero no tenía energías para ir a cobrarlos. No quería nada de ese Estado”, relató Ulana. Además, “sólo lo cobraba gente de una zona muy pequeña, es decir, el subsidio era para una zona limitada”, reforzó Lesia.

Ana, la hija de Ulana que nació en el ’86, hoy tiene 21 años. “Los médicos del hospital Ramos Mejía me dijeron que hay menos peligro que antes. Ya no toma medicamentos pero se sigue haciendo los controles para ver cómo están sus riñones”.

Cuando todo pasó, los científicos “sabían lo que ocurría, pero la gente no se enteró de inmediato”, señaló Ulana al recordar que “con el tiempo esto afectó a toda Ucrania. Este efecto durará unos 200 años”, sostuvo. Por otro lado, Ulana quiso aclarar que los denominados “liquidadores” encargados de limpiar y tapar el área del desastre cerca al reactor “no eran voluntarios”, eran “obligados” y “estaban horas bajo la radiactividad”. Buena parte de ellos murió.

Miles de padres se desesperaron por salvar a sus niños, pero el daño estaba hecho y no se podía revertir. Muchos de los chicos “que nacieron 3 años antes y tres años después del estallido tuvieron problemas inmunológicos, ginecológicos, entre otros. Lo que ocurre es que en sus tres primeros años de vida terminan de desarrollar sus sistemas y en ese período fueron afectados por la radiactividad”.

Chernobyl fue epicentro de una catástrofe que se expandió por otras partes del mundo. Ulana y Lesia, como cientos de miles de ucranianos, conocen la manera de que no se repita: que no haya más centrales nucleares.

Informe: M. Sol Wasylyk Fedyszak.

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Hell on Earth

Chernobyl was the world's worst environmental disaster. Twenty years on, John Vidal reports on the clean-up, the false medical records, the communities that refused to leave and the continuing cost to people and planet

John Vidal
The Guardian, Wednesday April 26, 2006

Twenty years ago today, Konstantin Tatuyan, a Ukrainian radio engineer, was horrified when Reactor No 4 at Chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded, caught fire, and for the next 10 days spewed the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima bombs' worth of radioactivity across 150,000 sq miles of Europe and beyond. He was just married, and he and his young family lived in the town of Chernobyl, just a few miles from the reactor.

Like 120,000 people, the family was evacuated, but Tatuyan volunteered to become a "liquidator", to help with the clean up, believing that his knowledge of radiation could save not just him but many of the 200,000 young soldiers and others who were rushed in from all over the Soviet Union. "We felt we had to do it," he says. "Who else, if not us, would do it?"

Tatuyan spent the next seven years in charge of 5,000 mostly young army reservists - drafted in from Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Chechnya, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in what was the Soviet Union - working 22 days on, eight days off, digging great holes, demolishing villages, dumping high-level waste, monitoring hot spots, testing the water, cleaning railway lines and roads, decontaminating ground and travelling throughout some of the most radioactive regions of Ukraine, Belarus and southern Russia.

He survived the worst environment disaster in history, he says, because he knew the danger and could monitor the radioactivity that varied from yard to yard and from village to village depending on where the plume descended to ground level, and on where the deadly bits of graphite from the core of the reactor were carried by the wind.

He took precautions but he also kept meticulous - albeit illegal - records of his own accumulating exposure. Every year the authorities told him he was "fit for duty", and when he left Chernobyl they gave him a letter saying he had received just under the safe lifetime dose of radiation. He knew he had received more than five times that amount.

What he saw in those years, he says, appalled him: young men dying for want of the simplest information about exposure to radiation; the wide-scale falsification of medical histories by the Soviet army and the disappearance of people's records so the state would not have to compensate them; the wholesale looting of evacuated houses and abandoned churches; the haste and carelessness with which the concrete "sarcophagus" was erected over the stricken reactor; and, above all, the horror of seeing land almost twice the size of Britain contaminated, with thousands of villages made uninhabitable.

It was sometimes surreal, he says. He had people beg him to leave their homes or villages contaminated because that would guarantee them a pension; he recalls how several carriages of radioactive animal carcasses travelled for five years around the Soviet Union being rejected by every state, returning to Chernobyl to be buried - train and all. He helped fill a 4 sq mile dump with radioactive lorries, cement mixers, trains and helicopters. He knows where the Chernobyl bodies are buried, he says, because he was the grave digger. "We made up the response as we went along," he says. "It was hell."

Optimistic

Tatuyan has now retired, an invalid. He says he surely saved many lives and made great parts of the Ukraine semi-habitable, but the price is a heart condition, an enlarged thyroid, diabetes, pains in the right side of his body, breathing difficulties and headaches. But he is optimistic and, like several million people across Ukraine, Belarus and southern Russia, says he now looks at his life in terms of the time before and after Chernobyl. Most of his team of liquidators are dead; the rest, like him, are ill.

Tatuyan is now 56, and his children and country are proud of him. For him, the effect of the radiation on the environment was shocking. "The first thing we noticed was that many miles of trees in the forest turned red," he says. "They had to be cut down and buried. All the animals left. The birds did not come back for four years. It was strange not hearing them.

"In the winter of 1986/87, there was an infestation of mice because the crops had not been harvested. So the population of foxes increased. Most of them had rabies, and hunters were called to come and kill them. The wild pigs came back first. Then the wolves. Because people were evacuated, thinking they would be gone for only a few days, they left their dogs. But the dogs then crossed with the wolves and were not afraid of humans. It was very dangerous."

Today, the forest is moving in on the modernistic town of Pripyat, built for the reactor workers just a few miles from the plant. According to ecologists, weathering, decay and the migration of radionuclides down the soil have already led to a significant reduction of the contamination of plants and animals. Some scientists are upbeat. Biodiversity, says the Institute of Ecology in the Ukraine, has increased due to the removal of human influence. Moose, wild boar, roe and red deer, beavers, wolves, badgers, otters and lynx have all been reported in the area, and species associated with humans - rats, house mice, sparrows and pigeons - have all declined. Indeed, of 270 species of birds in the area, 180 are breeding.

But it is not as simple as that. Other scientists report mammals experiencing heavy doses from internally deposited Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 radioactive fallout. One study has found mutations in 18 generations of birds; another that radioactivity levels in trees are still rising. Contamination has been found migrating into underground aquifers.

Levels of Caesium-137 are expected to remain high all over Europe for decades, says the United Nations. In parts of Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania and Poland, levels in wild game, mushrooms, berries and fish from some lakes are well over a safe dose, as they are in all the most affected regions of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. In Britain, there are still restrictions on milk on 375 hill farms, mainly in Snowdonia and the Lake District. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of square miles of agricultural land still cannot be used for farming until the soil has been remediated.

Humans have fared badly. In the past few weeks four major scientific reports have challenged the World Health Organisation (WHO), which believes that only 50 people have died and 9,000 may over the coming years. The reports widely accuse WHO of ignoring the evidence and dismissing illnesses that many doctors in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus say are worsening, especially in children of liquidators.

The charge is led by the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, which last week declared that 212,000 people have now died as a direct consequence of Chernobyl. Meanwhile, a major report commissioned by Greenpeace considers the evidence of 52 scientists and estimates the deaths and illnesses to be 93,000 terminal cancers already and perhaps 100,000 deaths in time. A further report for European parliamentarians suggested 60,000 deaths. In truth no one knows.

More than 500km from Chernobyl, the peasant farmers of the village of Boudimca, one of the most affected in Ukraine, refuse to leave, despite the fact that many of their children are suffering from acute radiation diseases. Every child in Boudimca has a thyroid problem - known as the "Chernobyl necklace". The villagers are attached to the land. "We would prefer to die in our own land rather than go somewhere else and not survive," says Valentina Molchanovich, one of whose daughters is in hospital in Vilne with radiation sickness. "We understand the paradox, but we prefer to stay."

Though they live simple lives - each family has a cow, ducks and a few chickens - they suffer all the ailments of stressed out western executives: high blood pressure, headaches, diabetes and respiratory problems. They know that the berries and the mushrooms they have always lived on are contaminated. "We are just so used to living here," says Molchanovich. "My parents lived here. We build our houses together. We are a very tight community."

But others are, literally, dying to leave the village. Mikola Molchanovich, a distant relation, is the father of Sasha, a 12- year-old girl who this month was also being treated for constant stomach aches in a children's hospital in Rivne. He says: "My wife is in hospital giving birth, my son is in another hospital being treated for radiation sickness. My sister has 30,000 becquerels [units of radioactivity] in her body. Some people have 80,000, or more."

"This is our community; my parents lived and died here. We used to be able to collect 100kg of mushrooms a day - the whole village would collect them. Some of our cows have leukaemia. The people who moved away from the village are healthier and better. I would go if I had the chance. But I am trapped. I cannot sell my house because it is contaminated. People are becoming weaker. We cannot feel it, we cannot see it, yet we are not afraid of it."

Situation worsening

"Everyone who helped on the clean up is now ill," says Tatiana, a senior doctor at the Dispensary for Radiological Protection at Rivne. "The situation is worsening. In 1985, we had four lymph cancers a year. Now we have seven times that many. We have between five and eight people a year with rare bone cancers, when we never had any. We expect more cancers, and ill health. One in three pregnancies here are malformed. We are overwhelmed."

A doctor in the local region's children's hospital says: "The children born to the people who cleaned up Chernobyl are dying very young. We are finding Caesium and Strontium in breast milk and the placenta. More children now have leukaemias, and there has been a quadrupling of spina bifida cases. There are more clusters of cancers. Children are being born with stunted growth and dwarf torsos, without thighs. I would expect more of this over the years."

Tatuyan is now an environmentalist, convinced that nuclear power is no answer. "I go to the forest with friends to care for the deer," he says. Tonight, he and the other liquidators will meet and celebrate the 20 years. "When we meet we make the same toast. We say: 'Let's meet again alive.'"

SocietyGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,1760930,00.html

The Unforgettable Fire

by ANDREW MEIER
The Nation, from the April 17, 2006 issue

In the spring of 1986 the English language, and nearly every other, acquired a new word for catastrophe: Chernobyl. On April 25, 1986, when Reactor No. 4 at the nuclear power station near a leafy village some eighty miles north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev began to melt down, the world

had no notion of the disaster about to unfold. Neither did Moscow. In a classic confusion of priorities that would open the floodgates for glasnost and, in due time, a rethinking of the Soviet nuclear landscape, the Politburo was concerned above all with bad press. A year earlier a new general secretary had arisen, Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet even as word spread that the accident at the station had already reached an unprecedented scale, with the specter of a radioactive Armageddon rising over Europe, Gorbachev and company seemed less concerned about the damage issuing from Chernobyl than the damage to Moscow's reputation.

Having entered the English vernacular, "Chernobyl" has gained currency in the twenty years since the accident. "To go Chernobyl"-whether it be a relationship, teakettle or political career-is to melt down. Yet as scientists will tell you, what is commonly called the "accident" at Chernobyl was anything but. For this disaster was born of human decisions. The engineers at the plant had long been eager to test a theory. Those on the night shift decided to conduct an unauthorized test. Not specialists in nuclear science, they powered the reactor down, disabled emergency backup systems in order to see how long the turbines could operate and, hoping to learn how the reactor's coolant system would function on low electricity, instead learned how its core would melt. The explosion tore off the reactor's 1,000-ton steel-and-concrete roof, spewing the now famous radioactive maelstrom into the heavens. In all, Chernobyl released 100 times more radiation than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The true death toll will never be known. The government of Ukraine has tallied more than 8,000 dead, nearly all victims of the fire and cleanup. The toll, in environmental and chromosomal damage, continues today and will for generations.

The Kremlin's first reflex was to try to conceal the mess-even from rescue workers. Firefighters and thousands of other local workers were dispatched to the burning station with no warning. The scientists who flew in from Moscow came with only their razors. (They imagined they would stay just a couple of days.) No special clothing was distributed. No one was immediately evacuated from the nearby settlements, the so-called nuclear villages where the station's workers and their families lived. Thirty-one workers died immediately from exposure. Hundreds more fell violently ill in the first hours. Only after the Swedes detected the fallout did Moscow admit that Chernobyl had become a man-made nuclear Vesuvius. Finally, more than thirty-six hours after the fire broke out, villagers were evacuated. The 48,000 inhabitants of Pripyat, the settlement in the woods closest to the plant, left their homes with as much as they could carry. By May 5, anyone living within twenty miles of the station was evacuated. The marshes and woods around Pripyat were cordoned off from the rest of the world. The region, comprising some seventy-six villages and settlements where more than 100,000 people once lived, has been known ever since simply as "the Zone."

The world has lived for twenty years with the word "Chernobyl," but few have ever heard of tiny Belarus, a forlorn nation of 10 million devastatingly contaminated by the "test" at Reactor No. 4. More than 18,000 children in Ukraine have been treated for radiation fallout. They have suffered all varieties of cancer, kidney and thyroid ailments, digestive and nervous disorders, loss of hair and skin pigmentation. But an estimated 70 percent of the radionuclides released from Chernobyl fell on Belarus. Hitler leveled 619 Belarussian villages. Chernobyl took almost as many: 485. Of these, the "liquidators"-the Soviet term for the workers condemned to perform the cleanup-buried seventy in their entirety. Today, one-fifth of the territory of Belarus, a country of farmers, is contaminated.

Svetlana Alexievich's remarkable book, recording the lives and deaths of her fellow Belarussians, has at last made it into American bookstores. (The book was published in 1999 by the British house Aurum, in a translation by Antonina Bouis.) Hers is a peerless collection of testimony. The text is well translated by Keith Gessen, but it is unfortunate that the book's American editors have altered its title. Voices From Chernobyl, which just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, appeared in Russian in 1997 as Chernobyl'skaya molitva ("The Chernobyl Prayer"). The original title is not only more poetic but more accurate. Alexievich has not merely given us a work of documentation but of excavation, of revealed meaning. It is hard to imagine how anyone in the West will read these cantos of loss and not feel a sense of communion, of a shared humanity in the face of this horror.

A prominent Belarussian writer and journalist, Alexievich is doubtless well aware of what her title has lost in translation. She sees herself not as prophet (in the old Soviet writer's extracurricular tradition) but as a guide intent on repairing her country's fractured sense of community. What she longs for is sobornost, that sense of belonging and shared ideals sacrificed long ago to Bolshevik unanimity. Throughout her work, she has sought to bring to light the hidden stories of the Soviet era. One of her first books, U voiny-ne zhenskoe litso ("War's Unwomanly Face"), an oral history of Soviet soldiers in World War II, which broke with the heroic narratives of official history, was suppressed for two years before Gorbachev allowed it to be published in 1985. That book and its follow-up, Poslednie svideteli (1985), a collection of 100 "children's stories" of war, sold millions of copies in the former Soviet Union and made Alexievich a glasnost celebrity. Her career hit its peak with Zinky Boys (1992), an unflinching look at the Soviet war in Afghanistan ("zinky" alludes to the zinc coffins in which more than 15,000 Soviet soldiers returned home).

As voiceless narrator and hidden editor, Alexievich is aware-too much so, her critics contend-of her singular pursuit. "For me people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes," she told me a few years ago in her small apartment in Minsk, Belarus's capital. "Someone has to open them." A graduate of Soviet training schools, Alexievich worked for years within the perimeters of state-sanctioned journalism. In time, however, she reached beyond accepted traditions. Taking the late writer Ales Adamovich as her model, she has created, with greater fluency in each new book, a genre she calls "documentary-literary prose." "My writing is not just all facts and voices," she told me. "I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts." For Voices From Chernobyl, Alexievich traveled to the irradiated regions and looked for survivors wherever she could-interviewing more than 500 in all. But she discovered that she remained "hostage to the standard conceptions" of Chernobyl, unable to find "a new way to see it, so it could be understood." She was too close. This tragedy, unlike the wars she had explored in previous works, was hers too. Alexievich was also a victim of Chernobyl. She suffers from an immune deficiency, discovered after she completed this book. With characteristic humility, however, she decided to let her interlocutors stand on the stage alone.

Alexievich spent three years traveling through Belarus. She sought out witnesses, "workers from the nuclear plant, the scientists, the former Party bureaucrats, doctors, soldiers, helicopter pilots, miners, refugees, re-settlers." As she recalled in my interview with her: "One of the first liquidators I visited met me with joy. 'How good it is you've come now,' he said. 'We didn't understand everything,' he said, 'but we saw everything.' Two months later he died."

The stories collected here are not only haunting but illuminating. She begins with Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of fireman Vasily Ignatenko:

I don't know what I should talk about-about death or about love? Or are they the same?... We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, "I love you." But I didn't know then how much. I had no idea.... We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked on the second floor. There were three other young couples, we all shared a kitchen. On the first floor they kept the trucks. The red fire trucks. That was his job. I always knew what was happening-where he was, how he was.... One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. "Close the window and go back to sleep. There's a fire at the reactor. I'll be back soon".... I didn't see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he's still not back.... The smoke was from the burning bitumen, which had covered the roof. He said later it was like walking on tar. They tried to beat down the flames. They kicked at the burning graphite with their feet.... They weren't wearing their canvas gear. They went off just as they were, in their shirt sleeves. No one told them.

And she speaks with another widow of a liquidator:

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: "You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl." He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn't believe anyone.... The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. "She should at least have fingers," I thought. "She's a girl."

One of the helicopter pilots who flew day and night over the burning reactor tells Alexievich that the plan was to dump enough sandbags on the fire to quell the flames. According to scientists today, this tactic only added to the radioactive clouds. The pilot recalls:

I talked to some scientists. One told me, "I could lick your helicopter with my tongue and nothing would happen to me." Another said, "You're flying without protection? You don't want to live too long? Big mistake! Cover yourselves!" We lined the helicopter seats with lead, made ourselves some lead vests, but it turns out those protect you from one set of rays, but not from another. We flew from morning to night. There was nothing spectacular in it. Just work, hard work. At night we watched television-the World Cup was on, so we talked a lot about soccer.... For me, Afghanistan (I was there two years) and then Chernobyl (I was there three months) are the most memorable moments of my life.... I didn't tell my parents I'd been sent to Chernobyl. My brother happened to be reading Izvestia one day and saw my picture. He brought it to our mom. "Look," he says, "he's a hero!" My mother started crying.

Another survivor is Sergei Sobolev, a "professional rocketeer," now an official with a Chernobyl veterans group who helps run a small Chernobyl museum:

They've written dozens of books. Fat volumes, with commentaries. But the event is still beyond any philosophical description. Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self-understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me. The way they enlighten me about Stalin, Lenin, Bolshevism. Or the way they keep hammering away at their "Market! Market! Free market!" But we-we who were raised in a world without Chernobyl, now live with Chernobyl.

And one of those soldiers sent to the front:

Your mind would turn over. The order of things was shaken. A woman would milk her cow, and next to her there'd be a soldier who had to make sure that when she was done milking, she'd pour the milk out on the ground. An old woman carries a basket of eggs, and next to her there's a soldier walking to make sure she buries them. The farmers were raising their precious potatoes, harvesting them really quietly, but in fact they had to be buried. The worst part was, the least comprehensible part, was that everything was so-beautiful! That was the worst. All around, it was just beautiful. I would never see such people again. Everyone's faces just looked crazy. Their faces did, and so did ours.

The Chernobyl reactor was a Soviet construction of unique design. It is commonly known as an RBMK-1000, a Russian acronym that stands for Reaktor Bolshoi Moshchnosty Kanalny-a Reactor of Large Power with Channels. Nuclear scientists in the West do not like the RBMK design. They fear its lack of a containment shell and worry that its core demands great quantities of combustible graphite. When I studied in Moscow in the first years after the Chernobyl disaster, I used to visit a friend in a dacha complex for elite Soviet academics in the woods outside Moscow. Across the way lived the hero-scientist who designed the RBMK model. He never came out of his dacha. He had fallen far from favor. His design, however, lives on.

The disaster at Chernobyl did nothing to diminish the popularity of nuclear power in Russia among the authorities. The country has ten operational nuclear power plants, with thirty-one reactor units (and six more still being built). Eleven of these are the Chernobyl-standard RBMK reactors. At the same time, in Pripyat and the abandoned villages around it, a strange phenomenon has evolved in the decades since the disaster. Officially, the Zone remains off-limits. Scientists who travel there report remarkable findings-an abundance of natural beauty, of renewed flora and fauna. Debate rages over the scale, and half-life, of the damage. Reactor No. 4 is known today simply as "the Cover." How many tons of nuclear fuel its core holds remains unknown. Nor does anyone know how much radiation is seeping from the Cover's fissures, or how long it will stand. But one element of the unforeseen afterlife is undeniable: More and more former residents have returned to the Zone. By now more than 1,000 people have come back to live among the spectral villages of the radioactive marsh and woods. A Ukrainian website that offers Ukrainian brides and Ukrainian babies now advertises "Chernobyl Tours," as if the Zone were a vacation spot.

Belarus, as even George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice have grown fond of saying, is Europe's last dictatorship. President Aleksandr Lukashenko, a half-mad Soviet throwback freshly re-anointed in March, brooks no dissent. He is no fan of Alexievich, a feeling she naturally returns in kind. "This land is a socialist reservation," she told me. "Life has stopped here.... People feel there's no exit. Even when it comes to the legacy of Chernobyl, we keep quiet. It still is not part of our culture." The effects of the disaster will not disappear under the weight of repression, however. In the author's interview with herself that introduces the Russian edition, Alexievich writes that she has the eerie sense of not so much reporting on the past as "recording the future." It is a pity, then, that her extraordinary collection of testimony has lost its original subtitle. Voices From Chernobyl is subtitled The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Alexievich's choice had carried a warning. She called it "A Chronicle of the Future."

Copyright © 2006 The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060417/meier

Postato da: treball a 26/04/2006 18:08 | link | commenti (1) |
memoria, repetita iuvant, social, unforgettable, heroes, international, environment, collateral damages, mad planet, europae

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