Deadly Meltdown
By John Greenwald
The first warning came in Sweden. At 9 a.m. on Monday, April 28, technicians at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, 60 miles north of Stockholm, noticed disturbing signals blipping across their computer screens. Those signals revealed abnormally high levels of radiation, a sure sign of serious trouble. At first suspecting difficulties in their own reactors, the engineers searched frantically for a leak. When they found nothing, they lined up some 600 workers at the plant and tested them with a Geiger counter. This time the signals were even more alarming: the workers' clothing gave off radiation far above contamination levels. Outside, monitors took Geiger counter readings of the soil and greenery surrounding the plant. The result showed four to five times the normal amount of radioactive emissions. Clearly, something was wrong -- terribly wrong.
Farther to the north and east, rain and gentle spring snow was falling over parts of Finland and Sweden. From there, as well as from points south and west, from Norway and Denmark, came the same disquieting signals. Somewhere, some mysterious source was spewing dangerous radiation into the atmosphere, into the air that people and plants were breathing. By now thoroughly frightened, the Swedes quickly confirmed that the source was not in their country. They immediately turned their suspicions southward, to their powerful neighbor, the Soviet Union.
A glance at prevailing wind patterns confirmed their fear. For several days, currents of air had been whipping up from the Black Sea, across the Ukraine, over the Baltic and into Scandinavia. But when the Swedes and their neighbors demanded an explanation from Moscow, they were met by denials and stony silence. For six hours, as officials throughout Scandinavia insisted that something was dangerously amiss, the Soviets steadfastly maintained that nothing untoward had happened.
Finally, at 9:00 p.m. on Monday, an expressionless TV newscaster on Moscow television read a four-sentence statement from the Council of Ministers that seemed to raise at least as many questions as it answered. The terse, almost grudging announcement said in full: "An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl power station, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Those affected by it are being given assistance. A government commission has been set up." The announcer then picked up another piece of paper and went on to discuss a story on a Soviet peace fund.
Thus began by far the gravest crisis in the troubled, 32-year history of commercial atomic power. A catastrophe had occurred over the weekend at the Chernobyl plant, 80 miles north of Kiev, where a reactor meltdown and explosion caused untold death and suffering and raised the prospect of long- term health and environmental damage on a far greater scale than anything yet unleashed by peaceful nuclear use.
The fallout caused an international uproar against the Soviet Union for its lax safety measures and its concealment of the fact that the dangerous radiation was floating toward neighboring countries. Moreover, the accident seemed certain to put the worldwide use of nuclear power under still sharper attacks. In West Germany, the antinuclear Greens quickly staged protest rallies under banners bearing the slogan CHERNOBYL IS EVERYWHERE.
Throughout the week, an anxious, puzzled and increasingly frustrated world struggled to understand the extent of the disaster. The task was made impossibly difficult by the Soviets' stubborn refusal to provide anything more than a few sketchy details. Moscow's obstinance condemned people everywhere to fragmentary and often conflicting accounts that tended to shift abruptly as new facts became known. Not until the weekend did a Soviet official come forth with the beginnings of a straightforward account. Boris Yletsin, a candidate-member of the Politburo, said reservoirs near the plant were contaminated and the area remained too radioactive for residents to return. In remarks to the West German television network ARD, Yletsin said of the accident, "The cause lies apparently in the subjective realm, in human error. We are undertaking measures to make sure that this doesn't happen again."
For the Soviet Union, the consequences of Chernobyl could be devastating. Anywhere from two to 2,000 people near the plant were reported to have been killed by causes ranging from the initial blast to lethal radiation, and tens of thousands may have been evacuated from the endangered region. Meanwhile, radioactive gases and particles have spread over a vast section of the Soviet breadbasket in the Ukraine, and water supplies for the more than 6 million inhabitants of the Kiev area are threatened with contamination. Milk from local cows will probably be tainted for months to come.
While Soviet pronouncements sought to minimize the extent of the damage, information gathered from satellite photos suggested a hellish scene at the accident site. All evidence pointed to a nuclear reactor fire burning out of control in the gentle, rolling Ukrainian countryside and steadily releasing radiation into the air. That makes the catastrophe unimaginably worse than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, where a containment building kept most radioactive material from escaping out of the plant. The Chernobyl unit, by contrast, lacked such a protective structure.
Fueled by the white-hot graphite core of one of Chernobyl's four reactors, the runaway blaze burned at temperatures of up to 5000 degrees , or twice that of molten steel. The crippled reactor itself was unapproachable--too hot from the fire ravaging it, too dangerous radioactively. "No one knows how to stop it," said one U.S. expert. "It could take weeks to burn itself out."
On Tuesday, Annis Kofman, a Dutch amateur radio enthusiast, reported picking up a broadcast in which a distraught ham operator near Chernobyl announced that two units were ablaze and spoke of "many hundreds dead and wounded." In Kofman's account, the man cried, "We heard heavy explosions! You can't imagine what's happening here with all the deaths and fire. I'm here 20 miles from it, and in fact I don't know what to do. I don't know if our leaders know what to do because this is a real disaster. Please tell the world to help us." In the absence of any Soviet description of events at the scene, this dramatic but unconfirmed account was seized on by the media and widely carried.
Soviet officials were reluctant to seek much outside assistance while still trying to pretend that not much had happened. Tuesday morning at 8:10, a scientific liaison officer from the Soviet embassy in Bonn appeared, unannounced and without an appointment, at the office of the Atomforum, a nongovernment agency that represents West Germany's nuclear power industry. He asked Atomforum's Peter Haug if the Germans knew anyone who could advise his country on how to put out a graphite fire. A similar request went out the same day to the Swedish nuclear authority. The U.S. Government stepped forward to offer assistance, but the Soviets politely rejected it, saying that they had the means to deal with the situation. Moscow did invite Dr. Robert Gale, a UCLA bone-marrow-transplant specialist, to provide medical aid to Chernobyl victims.
As the reactor continued to burn, military helicopters reportedly flew over the site and dropped wet sand, lead and boron onto the burning reactor. Available evidence at week's end suggested that the fire was dying out.
The most frightening part of the nuclear accident was the radiation that spewed from the reactor and then was carried by winds on its silent, deadly path. In the first few hours of the Chernobyl disaster, lethal forms of iodine and cesium were released into the atmosphere. They were accompanied by other highly dangerous radioactive emissions. At first the radiation cloud drifted above some of the Soviet Union's best farmland, but then it moved north toward Scandinavia. By week's end an ominous pall of radiation had spread across Eastern Europe and toward the shores of the Mediterranean. How far it would travel and whom it would affect depended on the vagaries of meteorological patterns. For many days, perhaps weeks, it would keep millions of people on edge, despite assurances from officials worldwide that any danger was minimal.
At close range, though, the radiation-bearing plume could be deadly. The immediate danger was, of course, greatest for those nearest the disaster. Said Kerry Dance, president of GA Technologies, a San Diego reactor builder: "The people who are in trouble are those right at the site." Henry Wagner, a professor of radiation health sciences at Johns Hopkins, speculated that local residents risked exposure to extreme doses of radiation that could cause cerebral hemorrhaging, nausea, vomiting and death within hours.
While the lack of detailed information makes estimates of the health impact extremely difficult, Wagner offered further guidance. At distances of perhaps three to four miles, victims stood a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, though not without bone-marrow andgastrointestinal-tract damage. People living five to seven miles from the accident could experience nausea and other symptoms but would be unlikely to die. Smaller amounts of radiation within a range of 60 miles from the site would result in significantly increased deaths from leukemia and other forms of cancer during the next 30 years. People living 200 miles or more from the accident would run much smaller risks. The Swedes and many of those affected in Eastern Europe probably received the exposure equivalent of one to two chest X rays.
The damage to the earth around Chernobyl was probably equally severe. Up to 60 sq. mi. of Soviet farmland is likely to remain severely contaminated for decades, unless steps are taken to remove the tainted topsoil. Reason: cesium 137 and strontium 90, two radioactive particles spewed by the blaze, decay very slowly. It could take decades for the ground to be free of them. Together with the shorter-lived iodine 131, the substances promise to pose short- and long-term problems for people, crops and animals. Says James Warf, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California: "I wouldn't be surprised if the immediate area has to be evacuated for generations."
Though air currents could bring some radioactivity to North America, U.S. Government sources expressed little worry. "We don't expect any significant health effects in the United States," said Sheldon Meyers, acting director of the Environmental Protection Agency's office of radiation programs. Still, the U.S. is taking no chances. The EPA increased its measurement of airborne particulates from twice a week to daily in order to spot fallout quickly.
From Bali, where they stopped last week on their way to the Tokyo economic summit, Reagan Administration officials had conflicting reactions when news of the Soviet disaster reached them. On the one hand, the White House fears that the mishap could further damage the U.S. nuclear-power industry and even provide fresh ammunition to nuclear-disarmament advocates. On the other, the Reaganauts were eager to seize the opportunity offered by the Soviets' reluctance to disclose the accident and Moscow's refusal to give full details. Said Secretary of State George Shultz: "When an incident has cross-border implications, there's an obligation under international law to inform others and to do it promptly. We don't think they've provided what they should have."
White House Spokesman Larry Speakes tried to deny that anything similar could happen in U.S. atomic plants. Said he: "Ours are quite different from the Soviet system and have a number of redundant safety systems built in." Noted another White House aide: "We don't want the hysteria building around the Soviet accident transferring over to the American power industry."
By week's end, when the traveling White House reached Tokyo, the Administration's anger at Moscow had grown. In his Saturday radio address, Reagan declared, "The Soviets owe the world an explanation. A full accounting of what happened at Chernobyl and what is happening now is the least the world community has a right to expect."
In Europe, leaders were furious with the Soviets for initially concealing the disaster, and fearful of its health effects. Said Swedish Energy Minister Birgitta Dahl: "We shall reiterate our demand that the whole Soviet civilian nuclear program be subject to international control." In West Germany, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher urged Moscow to shut all nuclear-power plants similar to the one at Chernobyl. The West Germans asked that an international team be allowed to visit the site. Danish Prime Minister Poul Schluter called the situation "intolerable and extremely worrying." In Poland, where officials said there could be a sharp increase in cancer rates in the next two to three decades as a result of the mishap, people were especially angry. Said one Warsaw resident: "We can understand an accident. It could happen to anyone. But that the Soviets said nothing and let our children suffer exposure to this cloud for days is unforgivable."
In the absence of detailed information, Europeans and their governments took frantic steps. Polish authorities banned the sale of milk from cows fed on fresh grass and said children from birth to age 16 would receive iodine solutions to keep their bodies from absorbing the element in radioactive form. That created lines of up to 100 customers at Warsaw drugstores, while special all-night pharmacies had block-long queues even at 4 a.m. Washington advised women of childbearing age and all children against traveling to Poland because of potential health risks. Rumania, declaring a state of alert in all parts of the country, urged people to stay home and to avoid drinking rainwater.
The Austrian state of Carinthia asked that pregnant women and children under six remain indoors. Outdoor fruit and vegetable stands were instructed to wash and cover their produce. Officials warned Swedes and Norwegians to be careful about the water they drank. The British embassy in Moscow organized an airlift of more than 100 British students from the Soviet Union, and cautioned 30 who had been in Minsk when the nuclear cloud passed overhead to shower and wash their hair every two hours.
Many people were just plain scared. In Oslo, callers were on the phone to the State Institute for Radiation Hygiene after news reports told of an invisible radioactive cloud over the most densely populated part of Norway. Sample queries: "I am a mother of small children. What measures should I take against the radiation in the air?" "I am pregnant. Are the radiation beams dangerous to the child I am bearing?" Public-health assurances that the radiation was too low to pose a hazard failed to stem the concern. "Mass hysteria in a situation like this is not uncommon," said Are Holen, a catastrophe researcher in Oslo. "We experience a danger that we cannot see and cannot register with any of our other senses, and that leads people to be worried and afraid."
The Soviets' lack of candor struck many observers as part of an ingrained national trait. Says Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "There is a traditional fear and concern within the Soviet Union about panic. After all, mass panic is what set off the revolutions in 1905 and 1917. The authorities have an inordinate fear of the masses running wild."
Because the Soviets kept details secret, Moscow and the Western press contradicted each other with pronouncements that left the world mystified about the actual developments at Chernobyl. While one U.S. news agency reported 2,000 dead and others emphasized the serious dangers the radiation created, the Soviets insisted that only two people had died. When some Western papers carried increasingly sensational but unconfirmed accounts of the reactor's condition, TASS reported that the fire was under control. At week's end the official Soviet news agency buttressed earlier claims of the plant's safety by reporting that Politburo Members Nikolai Ryzhkov and Yegor Ligachev had toured the damaged facility.
Stung by the Western reporting, the Soviet media launched a week-long counterattack. Each limited disclosure about Chernobyl was followed by a shrill TASS account of nuclear problems in the U.S. and Europe. On Wednesday the Soviets went further. In a three-minute news brief carried on all three Moscow channels, an announcer lashed out at the foreign coverage. Said he: "Some news agencies in the West are spreading rumors that thousands of people allegedly perished during the accident at the atomic power station. It has already been reported that in reality two people died and only 197 were hospitalized." Viewers then saw a grainy black-and-white photo of what was described as Chernobyl's stricken Unit No. 4. Commentator Alexander Galkin said the photo proved that the damage was less severe than Western reporters had claimed. In fact, the photo showed that part of the reactor's roof had blown off and that there was substantial damage to the walls.
One Soviet official made an unprecedented appearance before a House committee Thursday to give Moscow's view of events. In a deft and tough- minded performance, Vitali Churkin, 34, second secretary of the Washington embassy, offered little new information but acknowledged that the crisis was not yet over. "Definitely there has been an accident which has not been liquidated yet and theoretically poses a threat to people outside the Soviet / Union," Churkin said. "We are still trying to manage the situation." He added that the Soviets initially withheld news of the disaster because they wanted to know the extent of the damage before making an announcement. When pressed by sometimes testy Congressmen about the meagerness of Soviet disclosures, Churkin replied blandly, "We have been very forthcoming."
Soviet citizens received vastly less information about Chernobyl than was available to the outside world. In Kiev, foreigners were the first to learn of the seriousness of the accident when authorities warned West German technicians on Tuesday that the Chernobyl area was being sealed off. Most of the Soviet Union spent last week in a festive mood for the annual May Day pageant, which combines celebrations of international worker solidarity with the rites of spring. Amid the red flags and bunting that adorned Moscow's bridges and thoroughfares for the four-day holiday, headlines about the ruined reactor would have been unwelcome indeed. Wearing a hat and light topcoat, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev waved frequently at the hundreds of thousands of marchers who went past him in Red Square and showed no sign whatever of being preoccupied with other matters.
Yet the week's gaiety could not conceal that the Soviets' handling of the tragedy had created a severe diplomatic setback for Gorbachev, who has been trying to give the West the impression of openness and public debate. Gorbachev missed an opportunity to turn a potential public relations disaster into a triumph of Soviet good-neighborliness and statesmanship. Had he recognized the international dimensions of the radiation leak soon enough, had he thought through the consequences of trying to keep the catastrophe a secret and had he openly invited foreign scientists and technicians to help put out the fire, Gorbachev might have scored a brilliant diplomatic success. But by acquiescing to the Soviet instinct for glum silence, he showed anew that he remains very much a creature of the stolid system that brought him to power.
Although the Soviets kept virtually silent about the origins of last week's accident, Western experts in Moscow and elsewhere were gradually piecing together the probable sequence of events that led to disaster (see diagram). The trouble seems to have begun Saturday, April 26, when a mishap caused a loss of the water that continuously cools the uranium fuel rods in the reactor's core. With the coolant gone, superheated steam could have triggered ) a series of irreversible reactions leading to a meltdown of the fuel and a blast that ripped through the roof of the building that housed Unit No. 4.
As outside air rushed in, oxygen in the atmosphere would have fueled a raging fire in the graphite, which burns like coal when ignited, throwing a plume of volatile radioactive elements into the air. U.S. officials calculated that the particulates and gases surged nearly a mile high, where they were caught by prevailing winds and then blown over a wide swath to the northwest.
Though the accident was a type of core meltdown, the ultimate nuclear power nightmare, U.S. experts also called it a burnup. Meltdowns technically occur in reactors containing pools of water. When the water boils away, the molten core sinks into the earth in the so-called China syndrome, a term used by scientists, and popularized by the 1979 movie of the same name, that mordantly suggests that the radioactive mass might plunge all the way through the earth. The Chernobyl plant had no such pool, by contrast, and engineers expect the reactor to be consumed by intense heat.
The four huge RBMK-1000 reactors at Chernobyl were mighty but in many ways outdated machines. "It's a crude technology," said a senior Administration official. "They haven't changed it in 30 years." Although capable of producing 1,000 MW of power (vs. 850 MW for a typical U.S. nuclear generator), the Chernobyl unit had some design features dating back to the atomic pile that Enrico Fermi used in 1942 to create the world's first chain reaction at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. Both systems employed graphite to moderate the nuclear reaction. Most U.S. units regulate with water instead. About half of all Soviet reactors employ graphite rather than water.
In addition to employing old technology, Soviet engineers and scientists have tended to show much less concern for safety than their Western counterparts. Says Physicist Robert Sachs, director of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and a strong nuclear power proponent: "Those of us who know something about Soviet safety policy have wondered how they have gotten away without a big accident for as long as they have." The lack of a containment structure for the Chernobyl reactor, which might have limited the emission of radioactivity into the atmosphere after the explosion, is only the most glaring example.
Publicly, however, Moscow describes its nuclear generators as thoroughly up < to date. In an article on Chernobyl in the February 1986 issue of Soviet Life, an English-language publication, Ukrainian Power Minister Vitali Sklyarov boasted that "the odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years." In any case, he added, "the environment is also securely protected."
Yet a recent article in another Soviet publication revealed local worries about safety at Chernobyl. A story printed a month or so ago in Literaturna Ukraina, a Kiev publication, attacked shoddy building practices and workmanship at the power station. Writer Lyubov Kovalevska, who lives near the facility, noted "deficiencies" in the quality of construction and demanded that "each cubic meter of reinforced concrete must guarantee reliability and, thus, safety." The article's headline: "It Is Not a Private Matter."
The quality and safety of Soviet-built nuclear reactors is a subject that will soon be close to home for some Americans. The Soviets are helping Cuba install a pair of reactors near the town of Cienfuegos, some 250 miles south of Miami. U.S. experts say that the twin units will use water rather than graphite to moderate the fuel reactions and will apparently be housed in containment buildings. Though full details are unknown, some U.S. physicists familiar with the Western-style reactors say they are probably no more dangerous than several now used in Florida.
Following the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet Union reportedly closed all reactors that were built with the same design, a total of some 20 units that produce an estimated 5% of the country's electricity supply. Nonetheless, the Soviets seem certain to press ahead with their ambitious program of nuclear construction. Gorbachev has made atomic energy, which provides 11% of the country's power, a cornerstone of his drive to double the size of the Soviet economy by the year 2000. Thirty-four new nuclear plants are under construction. The plants are needed all the more because Soviet oil reserves are dwindling. Still, the disaster will inevitably delay new construction, particularly of graphite-core units. "This comes at a bad time for them psychologically," said a Western specialist in Moscow, "since there's been so much talk about speeding up productive processes."
Outside the Soviet Union, the Chernobyl meltdown is likely to cast a long global shadow. "Chernobyl will reanimate the entire nuclear debate in Western Europe," said Thomas Roser of Bonn's Atomforum. "All the people who object to nuclear power will have this week's disaster as a symbol."
Nuclear foes are clearly spoiling for a fight. That is nowhere more true than in West Germany, where confrontations between protesters and police have long been common. Says Dieter Kersting, a leading opponent of plans to build a fuel-reprocessing facility in a forest clearing near the Bavarian town of Wackersdorf: "The Chernobyl catastrophe clearly strengthens our position." Noting that officials have consistently called the chances of a meltdown virtually nil, Kersting added, "Who can believe those assertions now?"
The mishap comes at an awkward time for Britain, where planners are eager to build a new generation of nuclear plants. While Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared last week, "The record of our own nuclear-power industry is absolutely superb," Chernobyl could force long delays in approval of the utilities. Once the disaster became known, environmental groups quickly called for demonstrations.
In the Netherlands the Cabinet postponed debate on two new atomic plants and announced a special safety investigation. The decision followed newspaper editorials demanding such a move. The conservative Amsterdam De Telegraaf urged caution, calling for a promise "that not even a single shovel will be put into the ground for the construction of new nuclear energy plants" until the Soviet accident is fully analyzed and understood.
Defenders of nuclear power scrambled last week to distance themselves from Chernobyl. "The design of the Russian reactor is unique," British Environment Secretary Kenneth Baker told Parliament. "There is no other station like it in the world. British engineers have evaluated this design and rejected it as unstable." James Moore, a vice president for power systems at Westinghouse, concurred: "The Soviets racked up an open car going 100 miles an hour. We drive 30 miles an hour in a tank. We have taken the conservative approach."
France, which gets a world-leading 65% of its energy from the atom, seems to have weathered Chernobyl without incident. The French have virtually no antinuclear movement to contend with, and most view their atomic energy plants as a source of pride rather than a problem. "French opinion overwhelmingly favors nuclear power," says Bertrand Degalassus, a spokesman for France's atomic energy commission. In Japan, which draws 26% of its electric power from atomic reactors and has virtually no natural energy sources, the future ) of nuclear use seems secure. The government of Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone last week stressed the safety of Japanese generators.
The Chernobyl disaster is likely to have political and diplomatic repercussions that reach far beyond that small Ukrainian town. When the Soviet Union was faced with a major crisis last week, its leaders reacted in a historic defensive style. Rather than opening up to explain how the Chernobyl accident happened and how the rest of the world could protect itself, Moscow built up a wall of silence that showed a contemptuous disregard for its neighbors.
During the past year Mikhail Gorbachev has attempted to build an image of a new style of Moscow ruler--responsible, candid and sophisticated. Yet today's Soviet leadership looked very much like those of the past. Soviet credibility in Western Europe, which had been a target of much of the new diplomatic offensive, has been particularly damaged. Gorbachev's goal of taking up the mantle of the recognized champion of a nuclear-free world has certainly been set back. Last Tuesday, when a Soviet diplomat was trying to elicit West German help with the accident cleanup while providing as little information as possible, a West German scientist finally lost his temper and shouted at him, "This is not some little game we are playing. You are now responsible for endangering life on our planet." The world will not soon forget that, nor how the Soviets reacted to Chernobyl.
With reporting by David Aikman/ Moscow and Michael Duffy and Johanna McGeary/Washington