Fallout by Fred Pearce

Author:Fred Pearce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2018-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

Whatever future emerges for the exclusion zone, there is still a stricken nuclear power plant to manage. In 2016, four thousand people worked in the exclusion zone commuting four days a week down a single railway track from Slavutych, a dormitory town created thirty-five miles away to house them after 1986. They were completing a giant arch to cover the reactor. It was slid into place at the end of the year. It will protect the wider environment while dismantling of the reactor’s heavily polluted remains takes place, a task that could take a hundred years.

Publicly, the idea of any future disaster during dismantling is discounted. Everything is being managed safely. But my hotel in Chernobyl thought differently. A notice in my room advised me where to find a gas mask and respirator in case of a radioactive release. It also told me the location of the nearest radiation shelter. Officialdom was plainly nervous too. At the Radioecology Center, they showed me the control room that would handle an emergency if radiation levels started to soar. Young men in fatigues sat at desks that flashed up data collected every hour from sixty-six radiation monitors across the exclusion zone. The daily graphs showed a lot of natural variability, depending on how winds distribute the radiation seeping from the soil and forests. “We have lower levels now due to snowfall covering the soil,” one of the operators told me. If the worst happened, computer models could calculate where the fallout would spread in the coming hours.

One thing did surprise me. Even though the power plant is within a few miles of the border with Belarus, where much of the fallout landed back in 1986, the emergency teams in Chernobyl had no instructions to tell their counterparts in Belarus if an accident happened and a radioactive cloud was once again heading north over the border. “We are not allowed to send information direct. We’d inform the government body responsible for collaboration with Belarus,” said Kireev. It would be up to the officials in Kiev to pass on the bad news to Minsk. Thirty years ago, when both countries were part of the Soviet Union, the message didn’t get through for many hours. I wondered if they would do any better next time.

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