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Chernobyl disaster

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The Chernobyl accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) is widely regarded as the worst in the history of nuclear power generation. It produced a plume of radioactive debris that drifted over parts of the western USSR, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia. Large areas of the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Russian republics of the USSR were contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of roughly 200,000 people. The accident raised concerns about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry, slowing its expansion for a number of years, while forcing the Soviet government to become less secretive. The now independent countries of Ukraine and Belarus have been burdened with continuing and substantial costs for decontamination and health care because of the Chernobyl accident.

Chernobyl plant

Chernobyl nuclear plant

The plant

The Chernobyl station is situated at the settlement of Pripyat, 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the city of Chernobyl (Ukrainian: Chornobyl) and 65 miles (104 km) north of Kiev, in Ukraine. The station consisted of four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power[MWe] (3200 megawatts of thermal power [MWt]) the four together produced about 10 percent of Ukraine's electricity at the time of the accident. Construction of the plant began in the 1970s, with reactor No. 1 commissioned in 1977, followed by No. 2 (1978), No. 3 (1981), and No. 4 (1983). Two more reactors (No. 5 and No. 6, also capable of producing 1,000 megawatts each) were under construction at the time of the accident.

The accident

On April 26 1986, the Chernobyl-4 nuclear reactor suffered a catastrophic nuclear meltdown and fire, resulting from a flawed reactor design, and mistakes made by the tired plant operators, who violated procedures intended to ensure safe operation of the plant. As at Three Mile Island, a secondary factor contributing to the accident was the fact that plant operators were insufficiently trained and unfamiliar with many characteristics of the reactor.

Procedural irregularities helped cause the accident. One was insufficient communication between the operators in charge of the experiment and the safety officers. Moreover, because of insufficient training, the operators had only a very imperfect understanding of how the reactor worked under conditions of low reactivity. Many of the reactor's engineering features, such as the dangerous positive void coefficient (see below), were virtually treated as military secrets, and the operators were unaware of them. Several safety systems were bypassed and ignored in order to conduct the experiment.

The reactor was undergoing an experiment to test the electrical backup supply which allows the reactor to run safely during a power loss. The power output of the reactor was reduced from its normal capacity of 3200 MWt to 1000 MWt in order to conduct the test at a safer, low power. The actual power output fell to only 30 MWt, however, allowing the concentration of the neutron absorbing fission product xenon-135 to rise; this product is typically consumed in a reactor under higher power conditions. As the operators attempted to restore the power to the desired 1000 MWt, the concentration of Xenon-135 limited the power output to around 200 MWt. In order to overcome the neutron absorption of the Xenon-135, the control rods were pulled out of the reactor farther than normally allowed under safety regulations.

The coolant flow increased, and the coolant was heated rapidly so that much of it began to boil. As the coolant heated, pockets of steam formed in the coolant lines. The particular design of the RBMK graphite moderated reactor at Chernobyl has a positive void coefficient, which means that the power of the reactor increases in the absence of the coolant. The power increase due to the steam voids combined with the retracted control rods caused the reactor power to quickly spike to around 30000 MWt, ten times the normal operational output. The fuel rods began to melt and the steam pressure rapidly increased causing a large explosion, displacing and destroying the reactor lid, rupturing the coolant tubes and then blowing a hole in the roof. When outside air contacted the graphite moderator of the core, the graphite began to burn. The fire dispersed most of the radioactivity.

To reduce costs, the reactor was intentionally not encased in an expensive secondary containment structure as are most western reactors. This allowed the radioactive contaminants to escape into the atmosphere after the steam explosion burst the primary pressure vessel. After part of the roof blew off, the inrush of oxygen combined with the extremely high temperature of the reactor fuel and graphite moderator sparked a graphite fire.

In order to try to limit the scale of the disaster, the Soviet government immediately sent in workers to try to clean up. Firefighers, for example, were sent in to try to extinguish the fires; they were not told how dangerously radioactive the smoke was. In the next months, many "liquidators", members of the army and other workers were sent in as cleanup staff; again, most were not told anything about the danger, and effective protective gear was unavailable. The worst of the radioactive debris was collected inside what was left of the reactor, and a large steel sarcophagus was hastily erected to seal off the reactor and its contents.

203 people were hospitalized immediately, of whom 31 died. Most of these were fire and rescue workers trying to bring the accident under control, and not fully aware of how dangerous the radiation exposure (from the smoke) was. 135,000 people were evacuated from the area, including 45,000 from the nearby town of Pripyat, Ukraine. Health officials have predicted that over the next 70 years there will be a 2% increase in cancer rates in much of the population which was exposed to the 3×1012 GBq of radioactive contamination released from the reactor. An additional 10 individuals have already died of cancer as a result of the accident.

In January 1993, the IAEA issued a revised analysis of the Chernobyl accident, attributing the main root cause to the reactor's design and not to operator error. The IAEA's 1986 analysis had cited the operators' actions as the principal cause of the accident.

Soviet scientists have reported that the Chernobyl Unit 4 reactor contained about 190 metric tons of uranium dioxide fuel and fission products. Estimates of the amount of this material that escaped range from 13 percent to 30 percent.

Contamination from the Chernobyl accident was not evenly spread across the surrounding countryside, but scattered irregularly depending on weather conditions. Reports from Soviet and Western scientists indicate that Belarus received about 60 percent of the contamination that fell on the former Soviet Union. But a large area in the Russian Federation south of Bryansk was also contaminated, as were parts of northwestern Ukraine.

Chernobyl was a secret disaster at first. The initial evidence that a major nuclear accident had occurred came not from Soviet sources, but from Sweden, where on April 27 workers at a nuclear power plant were found to have radioactive particles on their clothes. It was Sweden's search for the source of radioactivity, after they had determined there was no leak at the Swedish plant, that led to the first hint of a nuclear problem in the Soviet Union.

Short-term impact

Workers involved in the recovery and cleanup after the accident received high doses of radiation. In most cases, these workers were not equipped with individual dosimeters to measure the amount of radiation received, so experts can only estimate their doses. Even where dosimeters were used, dosimetric procedures varied. Some workers are thought to have been given more accurate estimated doses than others. According to Soviet estimates, between 300,000 and 600,000 people were involved in the cleanup of the 30 km evacuation zone around the reactor, but many of them entered the zone two years after the accident. (Estimates of the number of "liquidators" - workers brought into the area for accident management and recovery work - vary; the World Health Organization, for example, puts the figure at about 800,000.) In the first year after the accident, the number of cleanup workers in the zone was estimated to be 211,000, and these workers received an estimated average dose of 165 millisievert (16.5 rem).

Some children in the contaminated areas were exposed to high thyroid doses up to 50 gray (Gy) because of an intake of radioactive iodine, a relatively short-lived isotope, from contaminated local milk. Several studies have found that the incidence of thyroid cancer among children in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia has risen sharply (see World Health Organization, page 154; Ivanov, Tsyb Studies, page 159; European Commission Program, page 159; Ukrainian Studies, page 160; and Swiss-Belarussian Paper, page 162). The childhood thyroid cancers that have appeared are of a large and aggressive type, and if detected early, can be treated. Treatment entails surgery followed by iodine-131 therapy for any metastases. To date, such treatment appears to have been successful in all diagnosed cases.

Longer-term impact

Right after the accident, the main health concern involved radioactive iodine, with a half-life of eight days. Today, in addition to radioactive iodine, there is concern about contamination of the soil with caesium-137, which has a half-life of about 30 years.

According to reports from Soviet scientists at the First International Conference on the Biological and Radiological Aspects of the Chernobyl Accident (September 1990), fallout levels in the 10 km zone around the plant were as high as 4.81 GBq/m². The so-called "red forest" of pine trees killed by heavy radioactive fallout lies within the 10 km zone. The "red forest" is so named because it glowed red in the nights after the accident.

Soviet authorities started evacuating people from the area around Chernobyl within 36 hours of the accident. By May 1986, about a month later, all those living within a 30 km (18 mile) radius of the plant-- about 116,000 people-- had been relocated.

According to reports from Soviet scientists, 28,000 km² (10,800 mile&sup2) were contaminated by caesium-137 to levels greater than 185 kBq/m². Roughly 830,000 people lived in this area. About 10,500 km &sup2 (4,000 mile&sup2) were contaminated by caesium-137 to levels greater than 555 kBq/m². Of this total, roughly 7,000 km² (2,700 square miles) lie in Belarus, 2,000 km² (800 square miles) in the Russian Federation and 1,500 km² (580 square miles) in Ukraine. About 250,000 people lived in this area. These reported data were corroborated by the International Chernobyl Project.

The Chernobyl accident was a unique event, on a scale by itself. It was the first time in the history of commercial nuclear electricity generation that radiation-related fatalities occurred. (note: an accident at the Japanese Tokaimura nuclear fuel reprocessing plant on September 30, 1999 resulted in the radiation related death of one worker on December 22 of that same year)

Epidemiological studies have been hampered in the former Soviet Union by a lack of funds, an infrastructure with little or no experience in chronic disease epidemiology, poor communication facilities and an immediate public health problem with many dimensions. Emphasis has been placed on screening rather than on well-designed epidemiological studies. International efforts to organize epidemiological studies have been slowed by some of the same factors, especially the lack of a suitable scientific infrastructure.

An increased incidence of thyroid cancer among children in areas of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia affected by the Chernobyl accident has been firmly established as a result of screening programs and, in the case of Belarus, an established cancer registry. The findings of most epidemiological studies must be considered interim, say experts, as analysis of the health effects of the accident is an ongoing process.

The activities undertaken by Belarus and Ukraine in response to the accident--remediation of the environment, evacuation and resettlement, development of noncontaminated food sources and food distribution channels, and public health measures-- have overburdened the governments of those countries. International agencies and foreign governments have provided extensive logistic and humanitarian assistance. In addition, the work of the European Commission and World Health Organization in strengthening the epidemiological research infrastructure in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus is laying the basis for major advances in these countries' ability to carry out epidemiological studies of all kinds.

In marked contrast to the human cost, the evacuation of the area surrounding the plant has created a lush and unique wildlife refuge. It is unknown whether fallout contamination will have any long-term adverse affect on the flora and fauna of the region, as plants and animals have significantly different and varying radiologic tolerance compared with humans. However, it seems that the ecological damage due to the massive radiation spill is less severe than the ecological damage due to human occupation (see the first hand account of the wildlife preserve below).

The CIH computer virus was given the name "Chernobyl Virus" by many in the media, since the v1.2 variant activates on April 26 of each year.

Chernobyl after the accident

The trouble at the Chernobyl plant itself did not end with the disaster in Reactor No. 4. The Ukrainian government continued to let the three remaining reactors operate because of an energy shortage in the country. A fire broke out in Reactor No. 2 in 1991; the authorities subsequently declared the reactor damaged beyond repair and had it taken offline. Reactor No. 1 was decomissioned in November 1996 as part of a deal between the Ukrainian government and international organizations such as the IAEA to end operations at the plant. In November 2000, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma personally turned off the switch to Reactor No. 3 in an official ceremony, effectively shutting down the entire plant.

The sarcophagus is not an effective permanent enclosure for the destroyed reactor. Its hasty construction means it is aging badly, and if it collapses, another cloud of radioactive dust could be released. A number of plans have been discussed for building a more permanent enclosure, but all of the plans so far have been too costly and dangerous to be attempted.

Chernobyl and the Bible

Because of inaccurate translation of "chernobyl" as wormwood, a myth started spreading among English-speaking people that the Chernobyl accident was mentioned in the Bible:

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. -- Revelations 8:10-11


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