Reno Gazette-Journal from Reno, Nevada • Page 33

Today's opinion The Legislature must raise taxes to help pay tor education, and the property tax is the logical choice. But other changes are needed too, such as a career ladder program tor teachers. See page 2C. Sunday Section 2C EDITORIALS 3C LETTERS 5-23C CLASSIFIED APRIL 26, 1987 RENO GAZETTE JOURNAL SUNDAY EDITOR: ANDREA HOWRY, 788 6314 I rnTj 1 I i V. For Soviets, lifelong fear of cancer By Carol J.

WllllamtMP MOSCOW Exactly one year after history's worst nuclear accident, thousands of Soviets face lifelong fear of cancer, and the Kremlin's new "open" image remains marred by the disaster it kept secret for three days. The accident on April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl nuclear power station has cost at least 31 Soviet lives, done untold damage to public health, and caused billions of dollars in economic losses. It has also bolstered the anti-nuclear movement worldwide, and led to better international cooperation on atomic safety. The human toll from exposure to Chernobyl's radiation, which spread around the world from its source in the northern Ukraine, will not be final for decades. Most of those living in the countryside near Chernobyl were asleep when unsanctioned experiments at the power plant's No.

4 reactor went out of control at 1:23 a.m. that day. Explosion and fire tore open the reactor. Hundreds of firefighters and plant workers tried to quell the blaze, which reached a height of five stories and threatened to engulf the adjacent No. 3 reactor.

The heaviest casualties were among this group. A grim reminder of the human cost stands today at the Mitinskoye Cemetery just outside Moscow, 450 miles northeast of Chernobyl. Twenty-six of the victims lie buried there side by side in a plot that will eventually bear a monument to the "Heroes of Chernobyl." More than 200 other plant employees and firefighters were hospitalized with radiation sickness after the accident. The medical team moni-' toring their health has not made a public forecast of their chances for full recovery. A Ukrainian nuclear engineer who emigrated after the accident said friends who worked in two Kiev hospitals claimed at least 15,000 Chernobyl victims died in those hospitals over five months.

The emigrant's statement, made to a U.S. congressional group, was denounced as a "100 percent lie" by Soviet officials. American experts say they see no evidence to support such claims. The accident forced the evacuation of 135,000 people from the northern Ukraine and southern Byelorussia, where a danger zone with an 18-mile radius was established. But the convoy of buses that evacuated the first group was not sum-See CANCER, page 4C Associated Press and gas masks wash down a West German car after it returned from Poland and radioactive dirt was detected.

DECONTAMINATION: Two weeks after the Chernobyl accident. West German firefighters in protective clothing 'A shock which will never subside' The Outside Dope How politicians move problems around U.S. By Charlotte Reese You can call it Comic Strip Politics. Or you can call it Ping Pong Justice. Several years ago, in one of Nevada's small cow counties, a young couple with three small children limped into town in an old dented Chevy with two tablespoons of gasoline left in the tank.

They were hungry, thev were tired, they were out of money. And it was nighttime. The "community clean-up committee" with the chrome stars treated them kindly, sympathized with them and patted the kids on the head. They were given a full tank of gas, a bag of groceries and directions to the next town in a different county 90 miles away. Not long ago, I told this story to a legislator from southern Nevada.

He smiled condescendingly at my naive outrage and said, "Sure. That's what we do in my town too." A couple of years ago, a Florida judge shipped a prostitute to California after she was convicted of pursuing her trade. (He overshot: he should have aimed her at Nevada where brothels are legal in some of those counties where being indigent is not). A California police chief, furious with Florida's insolence, returned the favor. He bought a one-way ticket to the alligator place and gave it to a mentally-ill sex offender.

When we play "pass it on" this way, nobody is handling the problem. A destitute family or a homeless mentally-ill sex offender presents a social dilemma that needs to be solved. Shooing these people away doesn't solve anything and shouldn't make the shooer feel any better. It just spreads the disaster and the guilt out over a larger area without doing anything that really helps. We hear a lot about states' rights and about getting the federal government out of the states and the people's business.

This is fine theory and I'd be inclined to go along with it if the states would. But "let them do it" doesn't get it done. If you were a river, you'd know what I mean. The $20 billion clean water bill passed by Congress in February is supposed to help clean up the nation's streams, partly by providing money to build sewage treatment plants. The interesting point here is that this responsibility used to fall to the states and is expected to revert to them again sometime around 1990.

But if the states couldn't do it before, who says they'll do it now? States are not equal. Not in money nor in their desire to remedy certain problems. It's a little like taking in laundry. If you are willing to do a good job, you will prosper and your clients will be happy. But if you start complaining because the clothes are dirty, you'll soon be out of business.

States can't go out of business, but unfortunately, they can complain about the dirty laundry, refuse to accept certain items and get away with it. When they do, the seams of the states and of the nation start bursting and it is people who leak out of the breaks: people who breathe and drink pollution; people who must endure homelessness and poverty; people who are victimized by crime; people who suffer from all those things that individual states cannot or will not do. If the states can't or won't do these things, the federal government must. And that is something of a shame. It's a shame because historically federal government waste is greater than state government waste.

If we have to shuffle the poor and the mentally ill into the next county, across the state line, or across the country and if we can't clean our own streams, then we need help. We can get that help from our government in Washington. The federal government is a government of the people, paid for by the people, and it ought to be accountable to all the people. There's nothing wrong with asking a rich uncle to help out especially when you support him. Charlotte Reese is a free-lance writer living in Genoa.

Chernobyl strengthened the anti-nuclear movement. 5 Alexander Euler Social Democrat Switzerland's Parliament being kept off the market because of excess radiation. In Scandinavia's far north, where Lapps raise reindeer as livestock, the meat of thousands of head has been banned from sale because of concentrations of cesium. The EEC still cheeks imports from Eastern Europe for radiation exceeding its limits of 370 Becquerels of radiation for milk and baby food, and 600 for other foods. The Becquerel has become the most commonly used measure of radiation in Europe.

West Germany, which went to great lengths to protect its citizens, was embarrassed in February by disclosures that businessmen were trying to arrange the shipment of Chernobyl-contaminated milk powder products to Egypt. The 4,800 tons of whey powder were rejected by the Egyptians. Many West Germans apparently feel the Chernobyl after-effects still pose a threat. In Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, concerned parents run their own radioactivity-measuring station. In the town of Emmering, 16 miles from Munich, See 'A page 4C By Kevin CostelloeMp FRANKFURT.

West Germany -Europeans, a year after Chernobyl, are still dealing with the troubling legacy of the radioactive clouds that suddenly swept over them. The nuclear accident has had repercussions across the continent: In Switzerland and Italy, voters are scheduled to decide in referendums whether to curb nuclear power. In Poland, Yugoslavia and East Germany, anti-nuclear movements have grown in strength. In Greece, doctors, lawyers and scientists have formed a private group to measure radiation in food, claiming the Athens government has not fully informed citizens of Chernobyl's long-term effects. In Britain, the National Radiological Protection Board estimated 1,000 people in the 12 nations of the European Economic Community will die from cancer over the next 50 years as a result of the Chernobyl accident, which has already killed at least 31 people in the Soviet Union.

"Chernobyl has caused a shock which will never subside," says Lucas Reijnders, spokesman for the Nature and Environment Foundation in the Netherlands. Shortly after the nuclear power plant accident began spewing clouds of radioactive cesium-137, iodine-131 and strontium into the atmosphere, West European governments quickly imposed restrictions on certain foodstuffs. Most of the blanket bans have been lifted, but some restrictions continue. Fishing is banned in Switzerland's Lake Lugano, for example, a prohibition that plunged local fishermen into an economic crisis. In northwestern England's Cumbria, 30,000 sheep are Renewed demands for safety reverberate throughout U.S.

111 "iiiwiim t--'' cause disaster anytime, anywhere," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. Many people disagree with such assessments, arguing instead that the inferiority of the Soviet nuclear program was to blame for the accident that killed at least 31 and poisoned thousands of others. And certainly, American commercial nuclear plants have far greater safeguards than do Soviet plants. But Kennedy's statement, made at a Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing in February, illustrates what Chernobyl has fomented politically for Americans.

NEW YORK (AP) A Chernobyl nuclear disaster resonates in America one year later in the voices of anti-nuclear activists, in new complexities for emergency planners and in broad changes for the country's military reactors. Americans did not have to confront the levels of nuclear fallout that Europeans faced in the weeks following the April 26 accident. There were no deaths here, no poisoned crops and food. It is a different kind of fallout that has been felt deeply in the United States. It is fallout of a political, technological and philosophical nature.

"The ultimate lesson of Chernobyl is that human and technological error can Associated Press CHERNOBYL: A photo of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant released by the Soviet news agency, Tass. GotOP Turf-conscious agencies band together for Planet Earth over 'blue radio' By David MarzlaleQannett News Service WASHINGTON Filth and off-color language on the radio once again appear to be on a collision course with the right of free speech as a result of the Federal Communication Commission's recent widening of its definition of indecency, according to broadcast and constitutional lawyers. "This puts the FCC back into the briar patch of regulating content," said Bruce Sanford, attorney for Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists. "Whenever the government has gotten into that thorny briar patch, constitutional problems have cropped up all over." Sanford's assessment reflected the sentiments of several attorneys surveyed recently on the FCC's April 16 "blue radio" decision. The commission's former standard of indecency was a 1978 U.S.

Supreme Court ruling involving See 'BLUE page 4C This can't be done, Eddy says, unless the world's scientists, and the nations which support them, breach traditional barriers and cooperate in ways they never have before. A National Academy of Sciences report explains that it requires "a global view and a new effort to study the Earth and its living inhabitants as a tightly connected system of interacting parts An effort so defined has no real precedent, for it would require not only the cooperation of nations but an intercourse and sharing between fields of study that are often isolated and territorial." The International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) the premier world science organization is organizing this effort as the International Geos-phereBiosphere Program (IGBP). Eddy, who chairs the IGBP committee in the U.S., notes that in the past, ICSU scientists have stuck to their specialties. Meteorologists studied the atmosphere. Biologists dealt with life forms.

Oceanog-raphers looked to the sea. Now specialists must learn each other's disciplines well enough, and work together closely enough, to find the underlying unity. In the past, nations supporting ICSU programs contributed specific projects for By Robert C. CowenChristian Science Monitor To hardened Washington observers, it seems a minor miracle when three turf-conscious federal agencies unite behind an effort that makes significant claims on their budgets. But the "Mission to Planet Earth," as NASA calls this common cause, transcends parochial concerns.

Indeed, the cause that unites NASA with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States also inspires nations around the world. They feel impelled to join a common effort to understand our planet and what human activity is doing to it. It is an immense challenge. The aim, says geophysicist John A. Eddy of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is to build a data base so that, 20 years from now, we can detect significant global change.

"When somebody looks back and tries to answer questions about how is (Earth) responding to the increased C02 or is the ozone really being depleted, these baselines of measurements will be in place," he explains. "So I think out of it will come a new monitoring of the Earth, a new tak-ir? the pulse of the Earth." relatively limited periods. Now they're being asked to commit themselves to a world effort that will probably continue into the next century. That means shaping national research programs in ways that make a contribution to this common purpose. IGBP proponents don't think it will be easy to transcend the old limitations.

Yet, when the project was presented to ICSU members last September, Eddy says, "It was almost like pushing on a door that you think is stuck and it just swings right open. "All I can say is that the spirit right now is so strong for it, I think there'll be ways of getting around the (barriers). Also, there's the feeling that you just have to do it for the Earth." Monitoring the health of Planet Earth requires extensive study of the oceans. That includes research within territorial waters and within the exclusive economic zones that extend 200 miles beyond national shores, as well as on the open seas. It involves extensive surveys and data-gathering on land.

And, what is most important, it requires an international network of Earth-observing satellites whose data are freely shared among all See PLANET, page 5C I. NASASpecial to the Gazette Journal BLUE PLANET: Earth, as seen from a satellite orbit..