Revisiting Chernobyl
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Nerun Yakub
A few more days to go to the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear disaster on earth ---- a meltdown of reactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant in the early hours of April 26, 1986. The powerful explosion tore out a 1,000 tonne, two feet thick steel lid and blasted through the surrounding concrete containment chamber, proving ultimately to be the most expensive accident on the planet, in economic, environmental and human terms. It is believed to have been triggered by human error ---- when operators were testing a new voltage regulating system. The exposed graphite burst into flames, raging for ten days and unleashing a cloud of radiation that affected some 20 countries within a huge radius. Fifty per cent of the fallout ---- said to be a hundred times more radioactive than the atomic experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ---was within 35 km of the reactor complex itself. Thanks to the Chernobyl fallout the world's background radiation has increased threefold. Most of the firemen who fought to tame the flames died of radiation burns and sickness from gamma and beta radiation from the exposed reactor core. Those who did not die soon after suffered horribly from lethal doses as their bodies were ravaged by the effects of radiation. Dead cities, towns and villages in the vicinity even today bear testimony to the mind-boggling fallout from Chernobyl. Kofi Annan in 2006 was heard deploring the fact that at least three million children in the Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation need continuous treatment due to Chernobyl. Estimates of deaths potentially resulting from the disaster vary widely and nuclear advocates tend to trivialize the dreadful hazards ---- so powerful is the industry. WHO estimates 4,000 deaths, Greenpeace 200,000 or more, while a recent Russian publication says 'excess deaths' due to the disaster in the 1986-2000 period would be nearly a million men, women and children. According to one report, the contaminated regions registered a 250 per cent increase in congenital heart defects, cancers and various nervous system disorders and infant mortality went up 300 per cent. Chernobyl can be said to have had a sobering effect on the nuclear industry for sometime and activists campaigning for a phaseout of nuclear energy unearthed many nuclear scandals, dangerous lies and cover-ups regarding leaks and accidents and secret and indiscriminate dumping of high and low level nuclear wastes to strengthen their arguments. Many were convinced that the intractable problems generated by nuclear energy and weapons manufacturers ---- not to forget the hellish waste disposal dilemma --- are argument enough against the propagation of such plants and weapons. But the extremely powerful military-industrial nexus never says die, although the recent Japanese experience with the quake-tsunami-damaged reactors at Fukushima --- the radiation level from which has progressively risen to the Chernobyl level of 7 ---- has once again increased anxiety levels about nuclear reactors in general, no matter how technologically advanced they may be. Public misgivings have been growing in India as well, which has 20 nuclear plants already and is forging ahead with more in the pipeline. Last Tuesday a showdown between locals protesting the 'world's biggest' mega-nuclear power project in Maharastra (Jaitapur, on the Konkan coast) and the police led to much violence and one death. Concern is palpable everywhere. A three-day conference was held in Kiev this month, seeking to raise enough funds to upgrade the fortification of the damaged Chernobyl reactor, encased in a sarcophagus of concrete and metal since the late 1990s, and said to be at risk. It was not until 2000 that Chernobyl could be finally switched off. But our nuclear advocates remain unfazed. A former official of the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission (BAEC) was found waxing lyrical some months ago about the virtually limitless raw materials that mother earth can still deliver to produce nuclear energy. As the long-term solution to the world's energy needs lies in going nuclear, he says, it makes sense to tap all available sources efficiently. The known recoverable resources of uranium is said to be over five million tons. Then there are non-conventional sources ---- 22 million tons extractable from rock phosphates and another four billion tons dissolved in sea water! Add to this the spinoffs from big- power disarmament treaties since 1987! Both Russia and the US had pledged to reduce their nuclear arsenals substantially. This would release a lot of nuclear elements that would be usable as fuel in both old and newer reactor models ! Besides, there would be plenty more available if the waste from all thermal reactors were allowed to be reprocessed into plutonium! Thermal reactors are said to be really inefficient as they extract only 2.0% of the energy from the uranium they use, leaving 98% locked in the so-called spent fuel! Is the worthy man advocating setting up a nuclear waste reprocessing plant in dear Bangladesh? God forbid! The disposal of mountains of nuclear waste has been a political hot potato ever since activist groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and others raised worldwide alarm about the user countries' disposal of low, medium and high-level radioactive wastes wherever they could, usually behind people's backs. The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, USA, which started 22 years ago, is yet to be ready, because people know the risks! The Atomic Energy Commission, together with the nuclear industry have long been carrying out elaborate public relations campaigns, promoting the idea that, below a certain level, radiation does no harm to humans. They point out, we all are exposed to natural background radiation, are we not? And isn't evolution the gift of radiation over space-time? Concerned scientists of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (CNR) maintain that, this fact does not give a 'handful of nuclear bureaucrats the right to dig up, stoke up, and create, more and more radiation on earth.' The real hazard of radioactive contamination is not in the number of people dying but in the genetic injury to the human species as a whole, says nuclear physicist Gofman. Genetic injury from ionizing radiation is the most serious consequence of the heady developments in the nuclear industry. The population as a whole stands exposed to extra radiation doses through the occupational exposure of workers. The ordinary public is unaware of this hazard concerning genetic damage and the nuclear establishment does everything to keep people in the dark. How tragically unaware we are in Bangladesh was evident soon after the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in 1986. Milk importers scrambled to bring shiploads of irradiated milk from countries that were heavily contaminated. It was stupid, importers declared, of a starving nation to find faults with a luxury food item like milk! Don't the poor here eat pesticide-polluted grain that comes under food aid? This remark was made by an otherwise responsible very senior executive of a very big company in the country and he had a foreign MBA to boot!
A few more days to go to the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear disaster on earth ---- a meltdown of reactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant in the early hours of April 26, 1986. The powerful explosion tore out a 1,000 tonne, two feet thick steel lid and blasted through the surrounding concrete containment chamber, proving ultimately to be the most expensive accident on the planet, in economic, environmental and human terms. It is believed to have been triggered by human error ---- when operators were testing a new voltage regulating system. The exposed graphite burst into flames, raging for ten days and unleashing a cloud of radiation that affected some 20 countries within a huge radius. Fifty per cent of the fallout ---- said to be a hundred times more radioactive than the atomic experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ---was within 35 km of the reactor complex itself. Thanks to the Chernobyl fallout the world's background radiation has increased threefold. Most of the firemen who fought to tame the flames died of radiation burns and sickness from gamma and beta radiation from the exposed reactor core. Those who did not die soon after suffered horribly from lethal doses as their bodies were ravaged by the effects of radiation. Dead cities, towns and villages in the vicinity even today bear testimony to the mind-boggling fallout from Chernobyl. Kofi Annan in 2006 was heard deploring the fact that at least three million children in the Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation need continuous treatment due to Chernobyl. Estimates of deaths potentially resulting from the disaster vary widely and nuclear advocates tend to trivialize the dreadful hazards ---- so powerful is the industry. WHO estimates 4,000 deaths, Greenpeace 200,000 or more, while a recent Russian publication says 'excess deaths' due to the disaster in the 1986-2000 period would be nearly a million men, women and children. According to one report, the contaminated regions registered a 250 per cent increase in congenital heart defects, cancers and various nervous system disorders and infant mortality went up 300 per cent. Chernobyl can be said to have had a sobering effect on the nuclear industry for sometime and activists campaigning for a phaseout of nuclear energy unearthed many nuclear scandals, dangerous lies and cover-ups regarding leaks and accidents and secret and indiscriminate dumping of high and low level nuclear wastes to strengthen their arguments. Many were convinced that the intractable problems generated by nuclear energy and weapons manufacturers ---- not to forget the hellish waste disposal dilemma --- are argument enough against the propagation of such plants and weapons. But the extremely powerful military-industrial nexus never says die, although the recent Japanese experience with the quake-tsunami-damaged reactors at Fukushima --- the radiation level from which has progressively risen to the Chernobyl level of 7 ---- has once again increased anxiety levels about nuclear reactors in general, no matter how technologically advanced they may be. Public misgivings have been growing in India as well, which has 20 nuclear plants already and is forging ahead with more in the pipeline. Last Tuesday a showdown between locals protesting the 'world's biggest' mega-nuclear power project in Maharastra (Jaitapur, on the Konkan coast) and the police led to much violence and one death. Concern is palpable everywhere. A three-day conference was held in Kiev this month, seeking to raise enough funds to upgrade the fortification of the damaged Chernobyl reactor, encased in a sarcophagus of concrete and metal since the late 1990s, and said to be at risk. It was not until 2000 that Chernobyl could be finally switched off. But our nuclear advocates remain unfazed. A former official of the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission (BAEC) was found waxing lyrical some months ago about the virtually limitless raw materials that mother earth can still deliver to produce nuclear energy. As the long-term solution to the world's energy needs lies in going nuclear, he says, it makes sense to tap all available sources efficiently. The known recoverable resources of uranium is said to be over five million tons. Then there are non-conventional sources ---- 22 million tons extractable from rock phosphates and another four billion tons dissolved in sea water! Add to this the spinoffs from big- power disarmament treaties since 1987! Both Russia and the US had pledged to reduce their nuclear arsenals substantially. This would release a lot of nuclear elements that would be usable as fuel in both old and newer reactor models ! Besides, there would be plenty more available if the waste from all thermal reactors were allowed to be reprocessed into plutonium! Thermal reactors are said to be really inefficient as they extract only 2.0% of the energy from the uranium they use, leaving 98% locked in the so-called spent fuel! Is the worthy man advocating setting up a nuclear waste reprocessing plant in dear Bangladesh? God forbid! The disposal of mountains of nuclear waste has been a political hot potato ever since activist groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and others raised worldwide alarm about the user countries' disposal of low, medium and high-level radioactive wastes wherever they could, usually behind people's backs. The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, USA, which started 22 years ago, is yet to be ready, because people know the risks! The Atomic Energy Commission, together with the nuclear industry have long been carrying out elaborate public relations campaigns, promoting the idea that, below a certain level, radiation does no harm to humans. They point out, we all are exposed to natural background radiation, are we not? And isn't evolution the gift of radiation over space-time? Concerned scientists of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (CNR) maintain that, this fact does not give a 'handful of nuclear bureaucrats the right to dig up, stoke up, and create, more and more radiation on earth.' The real hazard of radioactive contamination is not in the number of people dying but in the genetic injury to the human species as a whole, says nuclear physicist Gofman. Genetic injury from ionizing radiation is the most serious consequence of the heady developments in the nuclear industry. The population as a whole stands exposed to extra radiation doses through the occupational exposure of workers. The ordinary public is unaware of this hazard concerning genetic damage and the nuclear establishment does everything to keep people in the dark. How tragically unaware we are in Bangladesh was evident soon after the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in 1986. Milk importers scrambled to bring shiploads of irradiated milk from countries that were heavily contaminated. It was stupid, importers declared, of a starving nation to find faults with a luxury food item like milk! Don't the poor here eat pesticide-polluted grain that comes under food aid? This remark was made by an otherwise responsible very senior executive of a very big company in the country and he had a foreign MBA to boot!