Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

Some historical background

Belarus … To the outside world we remain terra incognita: an obscure and uncharted region. ‘White Russia’ is roughly how the name of our country translates into English. Everybody has heard of Chernobyl, but only in connection with Ukraine and Russia. Our story is still waiting to be told.

Narodnaya Gazeta, 27 April 1996

On 26 April 1986, at 01:23 hours and 58 seconds, a series of blasts brought down Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, near the Belarusian border. The accident at Chernobyl was the gravest technological catastrophe of the twentieth century.

For the small country of Belarus (population ten million), it was a national disaster, despite the country not having one nuclear power station of its own. Belarus is still an agrarian land, with a predominantly rural population. During the Second World War, the Germans wiped out 619 villages on its territory along with their inhabitants. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and towns: seventy remain buried forever beneath the earth. During the war, one in four Belarusians was killed; today, one in five lives in the contaminated zone. That adds up to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Radiation is the leading cause of the country’s demographic decline. In the worst hit provinces of Gomel and Mogilyov, the mortality rate outstrips the birth rate by 20 per cent.

The Chernobyl disaster released fifty million curies (Ci) of radioactivity into the atmosphere, of which 70 per cent fell upon Belarus. Twenty-three per cent of the country’s land became contaminated with levels above 1 Ci/km² of caesium-137. For comparison, 4.8 per cent of Ukraine’s territory was affected and 0.5 per cent of Russia’s. More than 1.8 million hectares of farmland have contamination levels of 1 Ci/km² or higher; roughly half a million hectares have strontium-90 contamination of 0.3 Ci/km² or above. Two hundred and sixty-four thousand hectares of land have been withdrawn from cultivation. Belarus is a country of forests, but a quarter of its forests and more than half the meadows in the floodplains of the Pripyat, Dnieper and Sozh rivers are located within the radioactive contamination zone.

As a result of constant exposure to low-dose radiation, every year Belarus sees a rise in the incidence of cancer, child mental retardation, neuropsychiatric disorders and genetic mutations.

Chernobyl (Minsk: Belorusskaya

Entsiklopediya, 1996), pp. 7, 24, 49, 101, 149

Monitoring records show that high levels of background radiation were reported on 29 April 1986 in Poland, Germany, Austria and Romania; on 30 April in Switzerland and northern Italy; on 1 and 2 May in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain and northern Greece; and on 3 May in Israel, Kuwait and Turkey.

Gaseous and volatile matter was launched into the sky and dispersed around the globe: its presence was documented on 2 May in Japan; on 4 May in China; on 5 May in India; and on 5 and 6 May in the US and Canada.

In less than a week, Chernobyl became a global problem.

Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus

[Posledstviya Chernobyl'skoy avarii v Belarusi]

(Minsk: International Sakharov Higher College of Radioecology, 1992), p. 82

Reactor No. 4, now known as the ‘Shelter Object’, still holds in its lead-reinforced concrete belly around 200 tonnes of nuclear material. This fuel is partially mixed with graphite and concrete. Nobody knows what is currently occurring inside.

The sarcophagus was hastily constructed to a unique design, one that must fill the design engineers from St Petersburg with pride. It was intended to last for thirty years, but the structure was built with a remote assembly technique, its sections joined together by robots and helicopters: hence the gaps. Today, the data suggest the breaches and cracks exceed 200 square metres in total, and aerosol radioactivity is continually leaking through them. When the wind blows from the north, traces of uranium, plutonium and caesium appear in the south. On a sunny day with the lights off, shafts of light can be seen inside the reactor hall falling from above. What are they? Rain also penetrates the building, and should moisture reach the fuel-containing material, there is the potential for a chain reaction.

The sarcophagus is a corpse which still has breath. It is breathing death. How much longer does it have? Nobody really knows: it remains impossible to access many of the structural components to assess their soundness. What everybody does know is that, should the Shelter Object fail, it would unleash consequences even more devastating than in 1986.

Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

From Belarusian online newspaper articles, 2002–2005

Before Chernobyl, the incidence of cancer in Belarus was 82 in 100,000. Today, the rate has risen to 6,000 in 100,000: an almost seventy-four-fold increase.

Over the past ten years, the mortality rate has risen by 23.5 per cent. Just one person in fourteen dies of old age; the majority of deaths occur among able-bodied people in the forty-six to fifty age bracket. In the worst affected provinces, medical screening has shown that for every ten people, seven are in ill health. Travelling through the villages, one is struck by the overspill of the cemeteries.

Many statistics have still not been revealed. Some are so outrageous that they are being kept secret. The Soviet Union sent 800,000 regular conscripts and reservist clean-up workers to the disaster area. The average age of the drafted workers was thirty-three, while the conscripts were fresh out of school.

In Belarus alone, 115,493 people are recorded as clean-up workers. According to figures from the Belarusian Ministry of Health, between 1990 and 2003, 8,553 clean-up workers died. Two people per day.

Here is how the story began.

The year is 1986. The trial of the perpetrators of the Chernobyl disaster is making front-page news in the USSR and abroad.

Now imagine a deserted five-storey block. An apartment building without residents, but full of furniture, clothes and belongings that can never be used again, because this building is in Chernobyl. Yet that block inside the dead city was the venue for a small press conference. It was held by those poised to prosecute the people guilty of the nuclear disaster. The Communist Party’s Central Committee had decided at the highest level that the case should be heard at the scene of the crime, in Chernobyl itself. The trial took place in the local House of Culture. Six defendants stood in the dock: the director of the plant, Viktor Bryukhanov; the chief engineer, Nikolai Fomin; the deputy chief engineer, Anatoly Dyatlov; the shift chief, Boris Rogozhkin; the chief of the reactor, Alexander Kovalenko; and the inspector, Yury Laushkin, of the State Nuclear Safety Inspectorate.

The seats for the public were empty: only journalists had come. But then, there were no people left in this closed city: access to the zone of strict radiation control was restricted. Was that why they chose it as the site for the hearing: fewer people meaning less publicity? There were no camera crews or Western correspondents present. Of course, everyone would have liked to see in the dock the dozens of guilty officials, including those in Moscow. Modern science itself should have been called to account. Instead, they settled for scapegoats.

The verdict was delivered: Viktor Bryukhanov, Nikolai Fomin and Anatoly Dyatlov got ten years each. The others received shorter sentences. Anatoly Dyatlov and Yury Laushkin died in detention from the effects of severe radiation exposure. The chief engineer, Nikolai Fomin, went mad. The power plant’s director, Viktor Bryukhanov, served his sentence in full, the entire ten years. When released, he was met at the gates by his family and a handful of journalists. The event all but escaped notice.

The former director now lives in Kiev, working as an ordinary clerk for some company.

And that is the end of the story.

Ukraine will shortly start work on a grandiose construction project. A new shelter known as the ‘Arch’ will be placed over the sarcophagus built in 1986 to cover the destroyed Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Twenty-eight donor countries are earmarking an initial tranche of funding for the project of over 768 million dollars. This new shelter is designed to last not thirty, but a hundred years. It is conceived on a grander scale, as it will need to have sufficient capacity for handling waste disposal. The structure will require a massive foundation: concrete pillars and slabs will be used to create what will essentially be an artificial rock base. Next, they will need to prepare the storage that will be used for radioactive waste extracted from beneath the old sarcophagus. The new shelter will be built of high-quality steel capable of withstanding gamma radiation: 18,000 tonnes of metal alone will be needed.

The Arch will be an unprecedented edifice in the history of mankind. The scale of the structure is awe-inspiring: the double shell will tower up to 150 metres. In terms of aesthetics, it will almost be comparable with the Eiffel Tower.