By Theodore Wilkinson. Prior to serving as AFSA President from July 1989 to July 1991, Theodore Wilkinson was director for nuclear technology and safeguards in the State Department's Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.

Causes and Costs

In the eyes of Western experts, the design for the "RBMK" reactor used at Chernobyl was riddled with faults. The reactor should also have had a "containment" dome of reinforced concrete, which is standard equipment for commercial reactors in the United States and other OECD countries.

In addition to the safety design shortcomings of the reactor, the Chernobyl accident depended on a high quotient of ignorance and incompetence. In The Truth About Chernobyl, published in English last year with a trenchant foreword by Andrei Sakharov, Soviet nuclear expert Gregori Medvedev saves his bitterest indictments for the reactor's chief engineer and the plant director, both of whom he found stubborn and inadequately trained for their jobs. The Chernobyl accident could have been forestalled if either of these two men (and several higher authorities who reviewed the plans) had not approved the suspension of certain safety procedures for the April 26 test procedures, or if under them the technicians who were actually operating the reactor during the tests had insisted on shutting them down at several points when they observed danger signs.

Compounding the tragedy was the failure of the reactor crew to recognize afterwards the enormity of what had happened. Amazing as it may seem, senior supervisors on the scene--lacking adequate instrumentation--failed to understand that the 500-ton reactor head had been blown off and come back to rest askew; and that the explosion and subsequent fires were spewing into the atmosphere what would amount to 10 times the amount of radioactive material that had been generated by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

To more recent visitors to Chernobyl, it seems hard to believe that this disastrous situation was not diagnosed earlier. Through a "boroscope" drilled through the monolithic concrete entombment around the reactor, the grotesquely twisted fuel elements and control rods inside the pressure vessel can be seen. Heavy contamination still extends to other nearby areas, including the giant turbine that was powered by the reactor.

If this contamination and damage had been identified at the outset, most, if not all, of the 29 acknowledged radiation fatalities could have been forestalled. Moreover, the nearby dormitory village of Pripyat, which lay directly downwind from Chernobyl, would have been evacuated in haste, rather than in a more orderly, military-style movement 36 hours after the accident. Three years later, the town still stood eerily silent, Pompeii-like, dominated by a motionless bright-yellow ferris wheel. In 1986 it had housed 50,000 Chernobyl workers and their families, who left with the idea that they would return in a few days.

What Price?

The figure of 29 fatalities directly attributable to the accident is unlikely to be a final one. A November 1989 item in the weekly Moscow News, for instance, reported that 250 people who were in Chernobyl during and after the accident had died, but did not break down the reasons for their deaths. Although this figure may prove to be spurious, many Soviet military personnel were severely exposed during initial efforts to contain and clean up the accident, and Soviet military authorities have yet to release any data on casualties.

Even less conclusive are estimates of the health effects of the accident on Soviet citizens at large. (After the early danger of intensive radiation from fallout has attenuated, long-term damage can still be caused by the accumulated exposure to radionuclides, such as cesium in the soil or ingested radioactive iodine, which tends to collect in the thyroid.) Writing on Chernobyl in the April 14 New York Times magazine, reporter Felicity Barringer observed early this year that "in the region...far more illness is evident than Soviet officials ever predicted." But her evidence is largely anecdotal, and a carefully documented study by a multinational group under the sponsorship of the International Atomic Energy Agency leads in a different direction. In fact, the general conclusion of this study seems to be that psychological distress is so far the only clearly demonstrable human cost from Chernobyl among the general population. The study compared populations in villages with substantial residual radiation from fallout from the accident to villages with negligible radiation levels and found no clinically significant differences. However, the spectrum of views on this issue is unlikely to be narrowed without considerably more time and carefully scrubbed data, principally north of Chernobyl in Byelorussia, where 70 percent of the fallout occurred.

In addition to casualties and potential illnesses from the accident, some 13,000 square miles of land are still considered to be at least mildly contaminated, and 200,000 people were evacuated and relocated in the months following the accident.

Figures for the ruble cost have escalated dramatically from the initial estimates. The Soviet government in 1988 set a figure of 8 billion rubles (only $2 or $3 billion at the free market exchange rate) for the immediate costs of the cleanup operation, including evacuations. More recent estimates are 45 billion rubles to date in direct costs, and up to 200 billion rubles in related costs. Barringer quotes an estimate by the new Ukrainian Green Party leader that the Chernobyl cleanup will have cost half of one year's Soviet GNP by the end of the century.