A group of us were standing less than a hundred feet from the remains of Chernobyl's shattered Number 4 reactor. We were deep inside the sarcophagus which now houses it. All was dark and quiet except for the occasional beep of a geiger counter. With the help of a torchbeam, we could see a long tunnel sloping away before us, with pipes and wires leading to the monitoring devices which had been installed right under the reactor itself. According to our dosemeters, the radiation was within acceptable levels.
Most people regard Chernobyl as a deathly inferno. But it also belongs to an everyday world which you can see, touch, and even go inside. The place has enough problems without piling on our own fears. The fact that we were able to go there at all will be a revelation to many. I was one of a group of journalists who had been invited prior to next April's tenth anniversary of the disaster, by a nuclear industry bracing itself for a storm of bad publicity. In the coming months, western governments will also decide whether to accept an offer from the Ukrainian government to shut the place down forever, in return for several billion dollars of aid. In short, Chernobyl is back in the news.
Our journey had begun a couple of days earlier with the three-hour drive from Kiev. This gave us a fleeting but necessary introduction to the dismal state of the Ukraine, and the bearing this has on the fate of Chernobyl. The Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe, and getting poorer. At Kiev airport I exchanged $10 and received nearly two million Ukrainian coupons. But even this funny money plays little part in the subsistence-based countryside through which we passed. We could see people drawing water from wells, ploughing fields with horses, and piling provisions in their backyards for the winter. Hard to connect these medieval scenes with the very 20th century disaster ahead.
It was dark when we reached Slavutich, a brand new town built in the aftermath of the explosion, to house the workers. It lies 50km from Chernobyl itself. But each morning thousands of workers board electric trains for the half-hour ride to the plant: even Chernobyl has its commuters. Slavutich's comfortable flats and bungalows and well-stocked shops proclaim its 28,000 inhabitants as a labour elite.
I was lodged with Alexei and Antonina Yeshchenko in a cosy bungalow surrounded by a small garden. Alexei is the 52-year-old deputy manager of the plant, and a lifelong nuclear man, having spent part of his career on the military side. Antonina is cheerful and smiling, keen to make conversation though we have few words in common. Her kitchen has all mod cons: a microwave, colour television and cordless telephone. We talk into the night, eating Ukrainian dumplings and drinking vodka.
The next morning is crisp and bright, and we set off by bus through forests of conifers and birch. The road is straight and empty. Occasionally we cross wide blue rivers which reflect the brilliant sky above us. We all expected the landscape to be desolate-but this is nature in all its glory. After half an hour we reach a barrier across the road-not Chernobyl but, incongruously, an international border. To get to the plant we have to cross a finger of Belorussia which reaches down into north Ukraine. Eventually we reach another barrier: this is Chernobyl, or at least the beginning of the 30km exclusion zone which has been thrown up around it. No one can enter without permission. The zone is not contaminated throughout, and the authorities have tolerated the return of several thousand peasants. There is, however, an inner 10km exclusion zone which is more tightly policed.
After passing the barrier, we start to see evidence of the disaster: signs warning of contamination, abandoned buildings, rusting equipment. The villages closest to the plant have been razed. At one of them, all that is left is the playground of the children's school where we glimpse a brightly painted climbing frame. Vegetation is scantier but some young conifers are starting to claw their way back.
In the distance we can see the tall chimneys of the plant. It begins to loom large: a concrete grey hulk nearly a kilometer long festooned with pylons and electric wires. At the near end stands a tall pink structure surrounded by construction cranes. This was supposed to house the new Units 5 and 6, but work was halted by the disaster. The cranes are still in the position where they stopped that day.
Unit 4 is at the far end of the plant, the dark grey of the sarcophagus just visible. The fact that the explosion occurred at one end of this vast site was lucky in one sense: it limited the damage to the rest of the plant and made it easier to restart the other three reactors. In 1991, Unit 2 had to be shut down again after a fire in the turbine hall, which means that Chernobyl is now firing on only two cylinders. Even so, it is still one of the largest active power stations in the world, and accounts for 5 per cent of all the electricity in the Ukraine.
Six thousand people work here. All but a handful were taken on after the accident, so few have any direct memory of the events in the early hours of April 26th 1986. What happened? It was all supposed to be an experiment. For technical reasons, the Soviet-designed RBMK reactor does not operate well at low power; it is liable to surge. This tendency can be managed so long as enough control rods are lowered into the core to absorb the neutrons. That night, staff were testing Unit 4 at low power, with the emergency cooling pumps turned off to prevent them flooding the system. But the operators raised too many of the control rods. By the time they realised their mistake, the reactor had surged. They hurriedly lowered the rods again, but these went down too slowly and drove the nuclear reaction into a concentrated mass at the bottom of the reactor, where it exploded. The blast lifted the 2,000-tonne concrete lid off the reactor and spun it in the air like a coin. It came crashing down sideways into the reactor, where it still sits. The blast started a blaze which spewed clouds of contaminated particles into the atmosphere, and showered the neighbouring buildings with radioactive graphite.
Thanks to some extraordinary acts of heroism, the fire brigade managed to put the fire out within hours. But the reactor was now an open, bubbling stew of nuclear fuel and plutonium. Helicopters were dispatched to drop sand and boron to smother it, which took several days. News of the disaster was suppressed by Moscow. Only when the Swedes reported unusual concentrations of radioactivity in their atmosphere did the truth emerge. The world's worst nuclear disaster had occurred.
In the immediate aftermath the Soviets evacuated the surrounding countryside, and charged those responsible for authorising the experiment. Then began the long task of cleaning the place up and rendering it as safe as they could. They piled all the debris on to the remains of the reactor, built massive concrete walls around it, and covered the whole crackling pile with a sheet metal shell, the sarcophagus. Within six months, two of the other three units were back in operation. The official death toll is 31, including a helicopter pilot who died when his machine crashed. The number of other deaths attributable to Chernobyl has been put in the thousands, but exact numbers are a matter of heated dispute and impossible to verify since the workers and residents have now been scattered.
We step off the bus at the main entrance to the plant's administrative headquarters, beneath a giant bust of Lenin (de-Leninisation is a low priority at Chernobyl). In the main hall there is a steady traffic of uniformed staff going about their business in a humdrum sort of way. Our first day is to be spent in the active part of the plant. We change into white sanitary clothing, pin radiation dosemeters to our fronts, and head for the works. The first thing we see is a corridor so long that it vanishes into the distance. This links all four units, except that there is now a thick wall across it three quarters of the way along. As we were increasingly to find as our tour progressed, Chernobyl has an unsettling discontinuity. Everything is utterly normal until, suddenly, it becomes totally abnormal. I have only had this feeling in one other place: pre-unification Berlin.
Except for what lay beyond the wall, our tour would have been unremarkable. We were shown turbine halls, reactors, fuel stores, control rooms, all busy with people in white. The place has a shabby but efficient air. Eventually, we arrive in the control room of Unit 3. There are men sitting before computers and winking lights. On the wall is a giant diagram of the reactor, each rod with its own light.
The sight before us is a replica of the control room of Unit 4, but for Vladimir Zaitsev, the chief supervisor, Unit 4 is already history. He tells us about the new operating procedures which make his unit one of the best in the world.We file out and clamber up a staircase which takes us on top of the Number 3 reactor, where Vitaly Khabarov is in charge of the fuel rods. He looks defiant when we ask him about his job. Is he happy here? Yes. Is it true that Chernobyl workers are exceptionally well paid? Yes. Would he work here for less? "I don't know..."
From there, we descend another staircase and find ourselves looking at an expanse of blank white wall: the biological shield. Beside it stands a memorial to those who perished in the disaster, exemplified by the worker whose name is etched on the marble: 35-year-old Valery Zhodimchuk, who died trying to restart the cooling pumps.
Back at Slavutich that evening, Alexei gets out the vodka again. The conversation moves to whether the plant should be shut down. I say that the very word Chernobyl still strikes terror in western hearts, and that pressure to shut the plant down is strong-no matter how safe it has been made. Alexei becomes animated. "People in the west don't understand our tragedy," he says. "Half the people of the Ukraine live in poverty. If you shut the plant down, you would black out 5 per cent of the population." I tell him that I was impressed by the determination of the people we had met to ensure the plant's safety and longevity. But I am also aware that those same people want to protect their livelihoods.
The next day, we are to visit the sarcophagus. Although I have toured several nuclear installations before, including Sellafield, the idea of setting foot on the scene of a nuclear catastrophe still seems unsettling. One reassurance is that our health is being monitored by the UK's Radiological Protection Board who have supplied us with dosemeters. Their advice is to keep our exposure for the trip below 500 microSieverts, half the maximum permitted for a member of the public visiting a UK installation.
Our bus takes us straight to a bare brick building a short distance past Unit 4. Here we pick up Artur Korneyev, the deputy manager of the unit which looks after the sarcophagus. Korneyev has a pleasant but world-weary look. He has learnt to live with radiation. He took a large dose just after the accident, and survived. Now, he goes into the sarcophagus almost every day. "Soviet radiation is the best in the world," he says. A well-worn joke, but it draws a nervous laugh. Once again we have to change into sanitary clothing, but this time we have thick-soled rubber boots and face masks as well. Now we are standing in the bleak emptiness to the immediate west of Unit 4. Much of the debris rained down on this stretch of terrain, and topsoil to a depth of a metre had to be removed to reduce contamination. Now it is home for stray dogs and a dump for rusting equipment. A few clumps of grass have returned.
Before us we can see the sarcophagus rearing up, a grey metallic structure with buttresses giving it a slightly gothic air. It looks sleek enough from a distance, and the Russians say it should last 30 years. The building is not being left to the elements. Korneyev's unit consists of 600 people, of whom over 100 may be on the site at any one time. But the roof leaks, and contaminated water is seeping into the aquifers below. More worrying, there are fears that the whole structure could collapse under its own weight because of the metalwork and concrete which have been piled on to the damaged foundations. The west has just come up with a $1bn proposal for a permanent "tomb," which would be safer and would allow remedial work to take place inside.
We pass through a gate in the perimeter fence, thick with barbed wire. Our geiger counters start bleeping, and some of our group decide to drop out. We are now on the building site beside the sarcophagus. It was here that the construction work was handled, much of it with remote equipment. A couple of cabins covered in lead sheeting gave the workers protection. We enter through a small door and pass through the radiation monitoring station. We trudge along dark corridors, up and down stairs, lit by temporary lighting. All the windows have been boarded up to contain contamination, so I lose all sense of direction.
The face mask smells funny, and the boots make the going heavy. I feel dizzy and wonder whether this is the effect of radiation. It can't be, I tell myself, because the symptoms never come on so quickly. We are making our way through the control building for Unit 4. The place is in a dreadful state. The walls are stained and cracked. We pass open doors which give on to blackened rooms. Work has been going on to shore up sections damaged by the blast. The floor is covered in a thick layer of plastic. Eventually we pass through a large room crammed with the remains of what was once a big electrical installation, now littered with broken equipment-as if a maniac had run amok. This was the computer centre for Unit 4. We enter a room lit with a ghostly grey light. Sheets of plastic hang from the walls. A long curved shape runs at waist height down the right hand side, also covered in plastic. It looks familiar, and then I realise why. It is the mirror of the Unit 3 control panel which we saw yesterday. At this desk, Korneyev says, the buttons were pushed to initiate the fateful experiment; 20 minutes later the reactor exploded.
More corridors. The way now gets more cramped: we are approaching the reactor. We turn a corner and find ourselves facing complete blackness. Korneyev's torch picks out the tunnel-gouged out only one year after the accident-leading below the festering pile. This is as far as we can go. Ahead, shielded behind tonnes of concrete, lies the debris, still warmed by fission products. Undisturbed, it could remain like that for hundreds of years. Korneyev swings his torchbeam to a gap in the wall where we can see the huge metal beams and concrete monoliths, built to prop the place up. This adjoining space is the pump room where Zhodimchuk sacrificed his life: his body still lies somewhere in that radioactive rubble. The meters show that it contains the highest level of radiation we have yet encountered: 600 m/S an hour. Silently, we make our way back to the sunshine, where our dosemeters show a total dose of 61m/S.
Sergei Parashin is the general manager of the plant. A compact, lean man with a firm jaw, he is one of the few left from pre-accident days, having arrived in 1977. He has a straightforward message for the outside world. To close Chernobyl would be "completely unjustified," he says. The Ukraine is too poor to sacrifice one of its cheapest sources of power when it still has 15 years of design life left. And the west's fears about the safety of the plant are exaggerated-Chernobyl is now among the safer nuclear plants in the world, he claims. He is "sick and tired" of all the speculation about the plant's future. The production of electricity at Chernobyl is no longer an issue; the real job is "the revival of the human spirit."In this, Parashin is at odds with his political masters in Kiev who are open to western offers of aid to shut Chernobyl down. But he has 28,000 people in Slavutich to think about. He doesn't want western hand-outs. But he would accept $500m in loans to finish off work at the plant and the sarcophagus.
We leave the plant in sombre mood. When you have travelled this far, seen the immensity of the place, and spent two days with its workers, it is hard to accept the case for shutting it down. Closure will not alter the scale of the disaster, or cure the effects of contamination. But it will hit millions of Ukrainians, unless compensating new capacity can be built. On the other hand, western experts agree that the plant is in poor shape, and cannot be run effectively in the middle of a contaminated zone. When, later, I talk to officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, one says: "If that plant was in western Europe, I would shut it down tomorrow." The ten years since the tragedy have not made the Chernobyl problem any simpler, nor have they reduced it to a question of technical safety. Instead it has become bound up with the aspirations of Ukraine's fragile democracy. n
