The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 106

J4 THE COURIER-JOURNAL SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11. 1994 8 years after the Chernobyl disaster, it's still a disaster tar 7 2- wm fij! 1 ASSOCIATED PRESS This Is the Chernobyl nuclear plant In May 1986, shortly after an explosion caused the world's worst nuclear disaster. Inside today, water Is helping break down radioactive molten "lava" Into dust. Already, engineers believe the safest way to deal with the problem will probably be to erect a second building over the first in order to dismantle it without fear of further contamination. Either way, the final price tag is likely to be in the billions of dollars.

No one has come up with money to do this. Commercial bank loans are unlikely because Chernobyl's cleanup is a project that will never produce revenue. Getting aid from the West to pay for stabilizing the sarcophagus is itself a challenge, given the tighter wallets of most donor nations and the likelihood that collapse of the structure would only hurt people in the Chernobyl region. But with the roots of independence and democracy still very fragile in Ukraine, some argue that Western aid could help avoid another tragedy that could lead to political instability. The lack of help from the West has led to a sort of bunker mentality at Chernobyl, where officials say they deeply resent Western governments telling them to shut down the two operating reactors while not offering aid to replace them.

Bill White, deputy U.S. energy secretary, said an "action plan" developed by the Group of Seven nations last summer would help Ukraine replace energy lost in closing down Chernobyl. Under the agreement, in the short term Ukraine would agree not to open the reactor heavily damaged by fire in 1991, would set a firm date for the closure of the first two reactors, make changes in its energy policy and open a reactor at Zaporozhye in southeastern Ukraine. Western nations would, in return, provide $200 million in direct grants and some loans from international financial institutions for Chernobyl's replacement and energy efficiency programs. But Ukraine's foreign minister said shutting down the plant would cost up to $12 billion.

Ukraine's dependence on Chernobyl is exacerbated because without the nuclear power the country would be forced to rely even more heavily on Moscow, to which it already is in debt for gas and oil bills. Nuclear power constitutes about 7 percent of the country's electricity. What White describes politely as reluctance among top Ukrainian officials seems at the plant to be downright defiance. Local administrators say that if plans were made to close it, the best people would leave, making Chernobyl an even more dangerous place. ing on the remaining dangers.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the establishment of an independent Ukraine, scientific work at Chernobyl came under the control of Ukraine. Borovoi has continued to work there as part of an agreement between the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and Kurchatov, but his public comments about the lack of safety have been an irritant to the plant's administration, which is attempting to paint a picture of safety. The explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl's fourth unit after a botched safety test on April 26, 1986, spewed large amounts of radiation over parts of Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia and smaller quantities over much of eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Some 42 fatalities have been directly connected to the accident so far, and thousands of others are reported to have suffered or to have died from the fallout. In the most recent manifestation of Chernobyl's damage, hundreds of children in Belarus and Ukraine have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

The accident contaminated portions of the rich agricultural land of Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia. To this day, the plant is encircled by an 18-mile area known as the "zone of estrangement." It is officially off-limits to its former inhabitants, whose villages, buried because of the radiation contamination, are now simply hills on a barren landscape. Chernobyl was much more than a regional catastrophe. The accident awoke the world to the dangers of the Soviet-designed reactor of the Chernobyl type, which has no containment and is considered unstable at low-power levels. Such reactors still operate in Russia and Lithuania.

The accident, the result of a faulty design combined with a series of missteps by operators, also carried geopolitical ramifications. By demonstrating anew the Soviet government's incompetence, secrecy and environmental irresponsibility, the disaster helped fuel Ukraine's drive for independence from Moscow. But today Chernobyl symbolizes something else: the newly independent country's difficulties in coping with the costly legacy of Soviet rule. Since the hasty construction of the sarcophagus, the workers at Chernobyl have cut safe paths through the debris to study its dangers, but otherwise radioactivity pervades much of the unit. Some places inside would emit a lethal dose in 10 or 15 minutes.

Assessing the dangers is difficult for outsiders because of conflicting By SUSAN BENKELMAN Newsday CHERNOBYL, Ukraine More than eight years after the world's worst nuclear power plant disaster, Chernobyl's deadly debris still festers within an impermanent and uncertain tomb, posing huge potential risks. The site remains mired in a volatile mix of radioactive dust, debris and water. Work to sanitize and dismantle the devastated reactor has never begun in earnest, a casualty of Ukraine's economic crisis and of international controversy over nuclear safety in the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to operate two Chernobyl reactors and wants to restart a third, despite pressure from the United States and other Western countries to shut down all the reactors. Ukraine is balking, demanding that it receive up to $12 billion in assistance to replace their electricity money that isn't available from Washington or Europe.

At the unit that exploded in 1986, scientists who monitor the reactor for the prestigious Kurchatov Institute in Russia say that conditions are actually worsening inside the concrete and steel sarcophagus, even though its radioactivity is slowly declining with the passage of time. molten masses are break-irig down into dust, largely because of the influence of water building up inside the sarcophagus, these scientists say. This dust, which is very difficult to control, could be released into the atmosphere if their worst fear comes true and the sarcophagus collapses. intense international attention after the 1986 accident, no one has developed a clear plan to cope with and pay for the long-term consequences of the situation in part because there simply is no precedent for the kind of cleanup that must be undertaken. Only now is a Western consortium beginning to study the stability of the sarcophagus.

A study two years ago gave the tomb a 70 percent to 80 percent chance of collapsing within 10 years. "A lot of people think the Chernobyl problem has been solved, but it's not true," said Alexander Boro-voi, head of the Kurchatov team working at Chernobyl. Borovoi was sent to the plant immediately after the accident to help examine its dangers. He now heads the radiation and nuclear safety division of a scientific center charged with studying the sarcaphogus, locating the nuclear fuel and report city of 4 million. The sarcophagus itself poses a greater danger, Borovoi said.

It withstood an earthquake in 1990 and has shown no signs of shifting. But it could be corroding and some areas can't be inspected. Collapse of the structure would spread a long, narrow "tongue" of radioactive dust across the 30-kilometer zone and beyond, depending on the wind patterns, said Valery Gnedenko, director of new technologies at the Kurchatov Institute. Plant officials say they are not worried about the sarcophagus, saying its condition isn't changing. "Even though it was built in 1986, it still stands, and according to our measurements there's no sign that it will need to be changed until a very long time," said Sergei Parashin, the plant director.

Another possibility is that some structures inside the sarcophagus could fall and cause a smaller puff of dust to enter the atmosphere. The reactor lid is perched at a 150-degree angle on the top of the reactor core, where it landed after the explosion. It still sits wedged in the reactor like a partly opened tin can. The huge amount of water inside the sarcophagus needs to be pumped out and filtered, but Ukraine cannot afford the technol ogy needed to do this properly, American experts say. But at Chernobyl, they learn to make do.

A robotics lab, headed by Alexander Ivanov, has developed remote-controlled scooping and cutting devices that are primitive by Western standards. But at least they work. Fancy robots from Germany and Japan brought in immediately after the accident usually "went mad" when the radiation interfered with their electronics, Ivanov said. Today, officials insist that robots will be used in the final cleanup, citing the Soviet Union's use of thousands of soldiers known as "bio-robots" who were ordered onto the site to pick up pieces of highly radioactive debris with their hands in the initial cleanup. But the final cleanup seems a long way off.

Only now is a consortium of Western engineers funded by the European Union beginning to study the structure in order to recommend the best way to deal with it. "You can't exaggerate the difficulties of this," said Frank Ewart, a business development manager for AEA Technologies, a London-based nuclear engineering company. "Everyone has an opinion and they're all in conflict." AEA is part of the $350 million European study of the sarcophagus. interests among scientists and administrators at the plant. Borovoi, a physicist respected in the West for the work he has done at Chernobyl, is portrayed by plant officials as a scaremonger who is exaggerating its dangers in order to persuade the West to provide money for its further study and cleanup.

Among his immediate concerns is the growing amount of water that has appeared inside the sarcophagus. The water has forced operators to shut off electricity to the site, making work more difficult and dangerous. It has interfered with systems that monitor whether the dangerous mix of water and nuclear fuel are tending toward a chain reaction inside the sarcophagus. The water also contributes to the breakdown of the highly radioactive substance known as "lava," 1,300 tons of hard molten masses found in various rooms in the lower part of the reactor. Scientists estimate there are some 10 tons of radioactive dust throughout the structure.

In addition, the water becomes radioactive itself, and as it evaporates, the radioactivity becomes more concentrated. Scientists fear it will eventually leak into groundwater and drain into the nearby Pripyat River, a tributary of the Dnieper River, which supplies drinking water to Kiev, a Under the spell of the 'elephant's foot' '-CK -yci 4 VlFX yj Mm By SUSAN BENKELMAN Newsday MOSCOW Konstantin Che-cherov puts his arm around his son Fedya, an adorable boy with a broad smile and bright eyes, and declares himself a healthy man with something to live for. "Do I look like a man who is suicidal? Here is my treasure. Tomorrow's his 11th birthday. I've spent most of his life there." "There" is Chernobyl more specifically, inside the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the one that exploded in 1986.

He has worked in fields of radiation so intense that Checherov should, by all measures, be very sick by now, or even dead. But in his Moscow apartment, Che- mmmm ples of the elephant's foot," he said. "There's no need for this." But Borovoi is fighting a losing battle against the obsessive power of Chernobyl. Eight and a half years after the Ukrainian village became the site of the world's worst nuclear power plant accident, the crippled reactor casts a spellbinding hold over some of the scientists who study it, sometimes tempting them into reckless behavior in a quest to prove a sense of manhood, a pet theory, or a rationale for a life's work. For many of the scientists, the prudent as well as the possessed, Chernobyl has become the very center of their existence, a place that holds them magnetically despite mmmmm dangerous working conditions, great ing from the reactor hall to the neighboring country of Belarus, less than a dozen miles away.

Work in such high radiation fields was, according to Borovoi, necessary, brave, even heroic in the initial years after the 1986 accident, so workers could locate the fuel and make sure it was not still capable of producing a "chain reaction" that could have led to another explosion. That has been all but ruled out now. Many of the scientists have carved themselves safe paths through the wreckage to get to rooms in the plant where they need to do their work. By working two weeks on, two weeks off, they are able to somewhat limit their exposure and spend time with their families. Together, they dis- thing will be fine." The "radiation protector" he refers to is vodka.

Such behavior may seem reckless or even suicidal. But Edvard Pazukhin, a chemist from the Khlopin Radium Institute in St. Petersburg, says Chernobyl offers each scientist his own motivation to work there. For Pazukhin, Chernobyl offers a rationale for the relevance of nuclear scientists in the post-Cold War era. "In Chernobyl I felt that for the first time I could do something that others could not do," Pazukhin said.

"There aren't other such idiots who will go into these rooms and because the Chernobyl catastrophe is a global catastrophe I felt for the first time that people needed me, he said. "I worked my whole life in creating this nuclear shield against the United States against you," he told a reporter. "And I was proud of this work and I thought it was im risk, low pay, and complete isolation. In "the block," as they call the sarcophagus, the scientists live in their own world, one where international norms of radiation exposure are meaningless, where conditions "The sight of the lava is so beautiful, it's intoxicating." Edvard Pazukhin, a chemist from the Khlopin Radium Institute in St. Petersburg is high, but it is all exaggerated why must one be sick?" Konstantin Checherov, a scientist studying Chernobyl covered the elephant's foot in 1986.

They have seen the beauty of the nuclear lava in its various forms and colors hanging frozen in time like jet-black anthracite, chocolate brown or golden amber. And in 1988 they discovered that the reactor core was cnerov, a thin man of 46 with an overgrown beard and thinning hair, is very much alive, showing what he says is a covertly filmed video. about one year ago, the tape shows people in white suits and respirators working quickly but carefully next to a mass of i' -v 4 -it-' "If wmmmwrngmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmm ii ASSOCIATED PRESS These children, patients in a village near Chernobyl In 1990, had Intestinal problems caused by radiation. Hundreds of children In Belarus and Ukraine have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. portant.

But now young people, smart people are saying this isn't good, we need diplomacy, not this. And suddenly you don't feel so good about what you've done your whole life. Chernobyl makes up for this." The scientists' inability to share these experiences with the world, their isolation, is one of the sad outcomes of the accident, said Alexander Sich, an American who spent 18 months at Chernobyl working with Borovoi for a Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation on the accident. The scientists do not have money to buy Western scientific journals and scientific and engineering handbooks, nor do they enjoy Western-style scientific review of their work. Sich said he was shocked to find he was the first Western scientist to spend time researching the accident and working with the scientists.

He said that if the accident had occurred in France or the United States, scientists would have been crawling all over the site, researching it until it was clear what happened, cleaning it up with the high- are so primitive that picking up a radioactive sample by hand or running into a field of high radiation is all in a day's work. Checherov's video captures the phenomenon. In it, a woman is chipping samples from a wall. A man he identifies as Artur Kor-neyev, a radiation safety official, works without a respirator or even a mask. Another man is chopping the corner off a rusted cabinet.

The workers are moving quickly but do not wear protective lead-lined suits, which would slow them down and still not protect them entirely from radiation. Borovoi said that given the choice between working quickly with no lead suit and working slowly with a lead suit, many scientists will choose the former because they believe the net dose would be about the same. Asked about the film, Borovoi said Checherov was unnecessarily exposing himself and others to radiation in order to prove his own theory of what happened during the accident: that most of the nuclear fuel in the reactor shot out like a rocket and landed in various places, rang- empty essentially confirming a complete core meltdown. After eight years at the site, Borovoi says he fears for the health of his scientists but those interviewed didn't complain of health problems. They have seen some colleagues die, not from radiation poisoning, but from heart failure.

The scientists talk about their "colleagues" never themselves as having received lifetime doses of radiation of up to 1,000 rems 60 times higher than the lifetime limit allowed for nuclear workers in the United States. Checherov keeps his personal dose a secret, but he's known among his colleagues as having been "all over the block," as one put it. "Sure, my dose is high, but it (the health effect of radiation) is all exaggerated why must one be sick?" said Checherov. "Of course it's probably better not to get a dose, but most of this is radiation phobia. If a person eats well and takes radiation protectors every- lava, known in Chernobyl as the "elephant's foot" because of its distinctive shape.

During the accident, the meltdown of nuclear fuel and other materials produced 1,300 tons of highly radioactive lava molten mass that solidified into interesting formations and colors and can be found in various rooms throughout the reactor deep inside the concrete and steel protective shelter, called the sarcophagus, built over the reactor after the accident. Checherov himself is shown on the tape, which lasts only a few minutes, taking measurements of the mass, which emits 1,000 rads of radiation, a lethal dose in less than an hour for. someone close to it. 'There's me," he said, pointing to a guy in a white suit and gas mask. "But this is a secret.

You're not supposed to do this." Across town, Alexander Borovoi, head of a group of scientists that has studied the Chernobyl accident, simply shakes his head upon hearing of his former deputy's behavior. "We already have at least 50 sam releases than the Soviets reported. Scientists such as Alexander Ivanov, head of the robotics lab, could make more money outside Chernobyl at their institutes, abroad or even giving up their specialty for a more lucrative in business. But the magnetic power of Chernobyl enthralls them. "The sight of the lava is so beautiful, it's intoxicating," said Pazukhin.

"I imagine it's like when Neil Armstrong went to the moon it's the consciousness that you're only one of about four or five people in the whole world who can see this." est-technology robotics and providing help to victims. But at Chernobyl, whatever papers they write are neither published in the West nor subject to critical review. Borovoi, for example, first reported in an International Atomic Energy Agency report in 1990 that the materials dropped from helicopters to extinguish the fire in the reactor core after the accident missed their target. This incredible revelation was either ignored or disregarded, said Sich, who brought it to light and connected it with higher radiation.