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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 44

THE NEW RUSSIA: ENVIRONMENT

Nuclear Time Bombs


Not only is Chernobyl still a danger. So are many similar
reactors, sunken submarines and radioactive waste dumps.

By JAMES O. JACKSON/CHERNOBYL - With reporting by Bruce van
Voorst/Washington


    Few environmental nightmares strike a more frightening
chord than Chernobyl. It is not merely the radioactive mess left
by the 1986 meltdown. Six years later, 19 similar
graphite-moderated nuclear time bombs are still ticking away,
alarming relics of a badly designed, haplessly run nuclear-power
program that none of the independent republics of the former
Soviet Union can afford to shut down. The potential killers
bring light, heat and power to parts of Russia, Ukraine and
Lithuania, where their immediate decommissioning would create
unacceptable economic disruption and even civil unrest.

    The handling of Chernobyl is hardly reassuring. When
workers finished the huge steel-and-concrete shell that entombs
the intensely radioactive mass of the shattered No. 4 reactor
in late 1986, Soviet officials declared the site safe for at
least 30 years. Yet today the sarcophagus is cracked, crumbling
and in peril of a disastrous collapse. The melted-down fuel is
turning to unstable dust. Contaminated objects are being
smuggled out of the poorly guarded 1,092-sq.-mi. exclusion zone.
Birds fly into the sarcophagus through holes as big as a garage
door; rats breed in the ruin. The structure is so unsteady that
a strong windstorm could smash it, sending a plume of
radioactive dust into the atmosphere. "Nothing is being done to
clean it up," says Alex Sich, an American engineer who has
studied the Chernobyl site.

    Nor has anything been done about the threat of nuclear
contamination in the oceans. Over the years four Soviet
submarines, their reactors full of nuclear fuel, sank
accidentally. The most dangerous, the world was reminded last
week, may be the Komsomolets, which caught fire in April 1989
and went down in more than 4,500 ft. of water 310 miles off the
coast of Norway. The wreck is already leaking cesium-137, a
carcinogenic isotope. So far the leakage is considered too small
to affect marine life or human health.

    But the Komsomolets also carried two nuclear torpedoes
containing 28 lbs. of plutonium with a half-life of 24,000 years
and toxicity so high that a speck can kill. Russian experts
warned that the plutonium could spill into the water and
contaminate vast reaches of ocean as early as 1994.

    At Chernobyl the concern is even more immediate. There is
ever-present danger in the operation of reactor No. 3 too.
Despite a government plan to shut down the entire plant, No. 3
was reactivated after officials pleaded that its energy was
essential for the coming winter. Like its ruined twin, No. 3 is
considered fundamentally unsafe by the International Atomic
Energy Agency. It may be even more so now: many Russian
operators have returned home, leaving a reactor run by
Ukrainians who are ill-trained, badly paid and demoralized.

    Little progress has been made on cleaning up the
surrounding region. There is no equipment to decontaminate
topsoil, and contaminated groundwater is backing up behind a
concrete barrier near the reservoir that supplies water to the
2.6 million residents of Kiev. More than 700 peasants evacuated
in 1986 have quietly moved back to their farm plots, where they
consume contaminated animals and produce. "They would rather die
here than live somewhere else," says Alexander Borovoi, a
Russian nuclear physicist in charge of the sarcophagus. Some
returned to find their homes pillaged of religious art. Although
contaminated with cesium 137 and strontium 90, some of the icons
have probably entered the world art market.

    Hot spots abound in the buildings and equipment around
Chernobyl. A disabled bulldozer sets off alarms on hand-held
radiometers, showing 10 times the internationally accepted
exposure level for nuclear-power workers. The big Mi-8
helicopters that were used to drop sand into the blazing reactor
in 1986 -- collecting such heavy radiation that some pilots died
-- rest in a field along with hundreds of contaminated trucks
and armored personnel carriers, many stripped of engines and
electronic gear. The radiation is not enough to cause immediate
illness, but looters are taking long-term risks. Health
officials estimate that 10,000 deaths will result from
fallout-induced cancers.

    Chernobyl is only one of many examples of nuclear
contamination and carelessness throughout the former Soviet
Union. A devastating 1957 nuclear-waste explosion and subsequent
dumping of contaminants near Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of
Moscow, is now thought to have released pollution totaling 1.2
billion curies, a unit measure of contamination. That compares
with about 3 million curies from the bomb that destroyed
Hiroshima. Says Murray Feshbach, co-author of Ecocide in the
USSR: "The new evidence of widespread nuclear pollution is so
incredible, it's hard to believe."

    For more than 30 years the Soviets intentionally dumped
enormous quantities of radioactive rubbish into the environment.
Russian authorities have pinpointed a series of such sites along
the country's Arctic coast, where currents can carry
contaminants to Alaska and the north coast of Canada.

    The worst of the poisoned sites is Novaya Zemlya, two
Arctic islands used as a nuclear-weapons test range. Already
contaminated by bomb fallout, the islands were turned into a
nuclear garbage bin. The Russians admit they dropped as many as
17,000 barrels of radioactive waste into the surrounding seas
since 1964. Sailors reportedly shot holes in some of the barrels
when they failed to sink.

    At least eight marine reactors, three from the nuclear
icebreaker Lenin and the others from decommissioned submarines,
have been scuttled in Novaya Zemlya's shallow bays. The dead
reactors are encased in layers of steel and may be harmless for
many years. But inside, their cores contain dangerous isotopes.

    The West has been highly critical of the Soviet nuclear
legacy but has done little to alleviate the danger. Foreigners
come mainly to gather data on the effects -- medical,
industrial and political -- of accidents, and then disappear.
"Sometimes we feel like rabbits in a laboratory," says Viktor
Ribachuk, Ukraine's deputy environment minister. Ukraine
officials argue that they cannot do without nuclear power for
the next five or six years, and many contend they will need it
permanently.

    So no one expects to see the end of these nuclear time
bombs anytime soon. There are plans afoot to extend the life of
some old reactors and to lift a post-Chernobyl moratorium on
completing others. Dangerous reactors will be running into the
21st century. The crumbling sarcophagus over Chernobyl's
devastated No. 4 may still be there too -- if it has not
collapsed by then.