Brave nuclear world? Radiation, reliability, reprocessing--and redundancy. Second of two parts.

• Author: Charman, Karen
• Position: Chernobyl, Ukraine, Nuclear Accident, 1986

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the world's most notorious nuclear disaster. At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, the Number Four reactor at the Chornobyl* nuclear plant in northern Ukraine exploded and burned uncontrolled for 10 days, releasing over 100 times more radiation into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. At least 19 million hectares were heavily contaminated in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Prevailing winds and rain sent radioactive fallout over much of Europe, and it was measured as far away as Alaska. Approximately 7 million people lived in the contaminated zones in the former Soviet Union at the time of the accident (over 5 million still do). More than 350,000 were evacuated, and 2,000 villages were demolished. Radioactive foodstuffs from Belarus and Ukraine continue to show up in the markets of Moscow, and farmers on 375 properties in Wales, Scotland, and England still must grapple with restrictions due to radioactive contamination from Chornobyl.

The operating crew and the 600 men in the plant's fire service who first responded to the disaster received the highest doses of radiation, between 0.7 and 13 Sieverts (Sv). According to chernobyl.info, a United Nations Internet-based information clearinghouse, this is 700 to 13,000 times more radiation in just a few hours than the maximum dose of 1 millisievert that the European Union says people living near a nuclear power plant should be exposed to in one year. Thirty-one of those first on the scene died within three months. A total of 800,000 "liquidators"--mainly military conscripts from all over the former Soviet Union--were involved in the clean-up until 1989, and government agencies in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia have reported that 25,000 have since died.

By any measure, Chornobyl was a horrific catastrophe and has become the icon of nuclear power's satanic side. Yet controversy has dogged the environmental and health impacts of Chornobyl from the beginning. The Soviet leadership first hoped nobody would notice the accident and then did their best to conceal and minimize the damage. As a result, a full and accurate assessment of the consequences has proved impossible. Historian and Chornobyl expert David Marples wrote that authorities in the former Soviet Union classified all medical information related to the accident while denying that illnesses among cleanup workers resulted from their radiation exposure. Independent researchers have had difficulty locating significant numbers of evacuees and those who worked on the cleanup, and they have had to piece together their conclusions from interviews with medical providers, citizens, officials in the contaminated areas, others involved, and those cleanup workers they could find.

In September 2005, a report on the health impacts of Chornobyl by the UN Chernobyl Forum (seven UN agencies plus the World Bank and officials from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia) said only 50 deaths could be attributed to Chornobyl and ultimately 4,000 will die as a result of the accident. The Chernobyl Forum report acknowledges that nine children died from thyroid cancer and that 4,000 children contracted the disease, but puts the survival rate at 99 percent. It denies any link with fertility problems and says that the most significant health problems are due to poverty, lifestyle (e.g., smoking, poor diet), and emotional problems, especially among evacuees. Marples notes that the overall assessment of the Chernobyl Forum is "a reassuring message."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The reality on the ground offers a different picture. In Gomel, a city of 700,000 in Belarus less than 80 kilometers from the destroyed reactor and one of the most severely contaminated areas, the documentary film Chernobyl Heart reports the incidence of thyroid cancer is 10,000 times higher than before the accident and by 1990 had increased 30-fold throughout Belarus, which received most of the radioactive fallout. Chernobyl.info states that congenital birth defects in Gomel have jumped 250 percent since the accident, and infant mortality is 300 percent higher than in the rest of Europe. A doctor interviewed in Chernobyl Heart says just 15 to 20 percent of the babies born at the Gomel Maternity Hospital are healthy. Chernobyl Children's Project International executive director Adi Roche says it's impossible to prove that Chornobyl caused the problems: "All we can say is the defects are increasing, the illnesses are increasing, the genetic damage is increasing." Referring to a facility for abandoned children, she adds, "places like this didn't exist before Chornobyl, so it speaks for itself." Marples, who has made numerous trips to the Chornobyl region over the past 20 years, reports the health crisis in Belarus today is so serious that there are open discussions of a "demographic doomsday."

The long-lived nature of the radionuclides and the fact that they are migrating through the contaminated regions' ecosystems into the groundwater and food chain further complicate the task of predicting the full impact of the disaster. But as the global campaign to build new reactors gains momentum, it bears asking whether a Chornobyl could happen elsewhere.

It Can't Happen Here

Nobody wants any more Chornobyls. The question is, can that outcome be ensured without phasing out nuclear power altogether? The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the trade association and lobbying arm of the American nuclear power industry, says a Chornobyl-type accident is highly unlikely in the United States because of "key differences in U.S. reactor design, regulation, and emergency preparedness." Safety is assured, NEI says, by the strategy of "defense in depth," which relies on a combination of multiple, redundant, independently operating safety systems; physical barriers such as the steel reactor vessel and the typically three- to four-foot steel-reinforced concrete containment dome that would stop radiation from escaping; ongoing preventive and corrective maintenance; ongoing training of technical staff; and extensive government oversight. A key argument for nuclear power these days is the claim that nuclear reactors are safe and reliable.

The U.S. nuclear fleet has substantially increased its "capacity factor" (for a given period, the output of a generating unit as a percentage of total possible output if run at full power) since 1980. However, David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), points out that since the Three Mile Island accident in central...