April 13, 1996
Chernobyl, mon amour: Inside a toxic timebomb
Ten years after the world's worst nuclear accident, the first man to enter the devastated reactor is alive, well and in love with Chernobyl. ROBIN DIXON reports
Eduard Pazukhin is mesmerised by a dangerous, glittering beauty that makes his heart bump and jitter like a geiger counter. And he admits it with a crooked, self-deprecating smile. "My love is Chernobyl. My heart is here."
Chernobyl is the siren that calls him to the most contaminated place on earth, inside the sarcophagus built to confine the mess after plant's fourth nuclear reactor blew up 10 years ago.
He calls it a passion, like having a wife as beautiful as Sophia Loren. He snatches up a photograph of the crazy ruined interior of Chernobyl number four reactor and kisses it with spontaneous delight.
At Chernobyl they are known as the Stalkers. The job of Dr Pazukhin and a handful of other nuclear scientists is to keep an eye on what is happening inside the sarcophagus. Two months after the 1986 explosion Dr Pazukhin and a colleague were the first to enter the sarcophagus and take a radiation sample.
He had just 20 seconds. Before him lay the awesome tangled ruin, gigantic beams toppled drunkenly about, industrial pipes bent like wire, and the collapsed roof in the middle of the wreckage.
He went into the sarcophagus once or twice a day for several years after the explosion, protected by nothing more substantial than a white cotton gown, a cloth mask and surgical gloves, and now he goes in every few weeks.
The Stalkers have to crawl through narrow tunnels during their missions, to avoid the worst contamination.
"Of course it's not work for the faint-hearted," he says. "You get very tense, you get exhausted. When people say it's not frightening in there, it's not the truth." He and others discovered the black-and-brown streams of solidified lava, including the molten reactor core, which they named the "elephant's foot" for its shape.
"It is very black, like glittering coal," he says. "It's awfully beautiful, it shines like silver. You feel like you're on the moon but rationally you know the radiation is extremely high. It is an unforgettable experience."
Two years ago he was startled and delighted by the appearance of bright yellow and green crystals on the lava.
He is an arresting figure with his wild gestures, extravagant explanations and his snow-white spiky hair. His complexion is rosy and, at 59, Dr Pazukhin looks fit and energetic. But in recent weeks medical tests found a heart problem which may be related to his extraordinary exposure to radioactivity.
Scientists know a lot about the situation inside the sarcophagus, thanks to the Stalkers. But after 10 years, no-one has untangled Chernobyl's legacy, its panoply of health problems, environmental ruination, of heroism and blame.
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant brochures wax about learning the lessons of the disaster, but reactor number three which adjoins the ruined Chernobyl reactor is still operating. Western powers have been having difficulty convincing Ukraine to take the final decision to close the power station.
Three kilometres from the power station, the ghost-town of Pripyat is a monument to the catastrophe, frozen in Soviet time. The radiation blew straight over Pripyat, and the population of 50,000 was evacuated forever. Now the main square is busy with black crows. The "Sunrise" shop is closed. The gigantic "Energetika" Place of Culture is dilapidated, and inside the bright optimistic murals of red workers are collapsing while reels of old film litter the floors.
On the side of one apartment block, a huge slogan reads, "The Party of Lenin and the Power of the People are carrying the People to the Triumph of Communism!"
Mr Sasha Dzhum, 35, has not been home for 10 years. He steps cautiously along dark corridors with bubbling paint to apartment 402/1 at 15 Ulitsa Sportivnaya, Pripyat, a small room he shared with his wife and two small girls. A faded calendar with yellow roses flops on the door, a memorial to 1986. He picks up a notebook and finds his wife's handwriting, looks out the window and admits, "If I was a woman I'd cry."
He and his neighbours were given two days to get out, leaving all their contaminated belongings behind including his car. Later, all the furniture and belongings were collected and buried. The place became a haven for wild pigs and foxes.
The power plant supplies only 6 per cent of the country's energy, but most Ukrainians oppose its closure. There are severe doubts about the structural soundness of the sarcophagus, but even doctors, firemen and clean-up workers directly involved in the disaster say it should stay open. The accident changed many things in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, but it did not alter the mentality of the people.
That change might have to wait for the next generation, who are already inheriting Chernobyl's poisonous effects. The morning I met 13-year-old Lisa Yaromenko at Kiev Radiology Clinic, doctors had discovered a cancer on her thyroid gland.
From the small town of Putivil in north-eastern Ukraine, she has no mother and lived in an orphanage until she was moved to her grandmother's house a year ago. Sitting on her hospital bed she tells me in a low voice that she is frightened of the operation. She has no idea what caused the lump on her thyroid and has no way of paying the $US1,500 that may be needed for chemotherapy after the operation.
Since Chernobyl, more than 1,000 cases of the previously-rare thyroid cancer have occurred among children in Ukraine and Belarus. Cancers of the liver and kidney, once uncommon among children, are now being found in newborn babies and infants, according to Dr Alexander Urin, general director of the Hospital for the Protection of Child and Maternal Health in Kiev.
In severely contaminated parts of Belarus cancers among men are six times higher than before the accident and among women 73 times higher, says a recent report by the Belarus Academy of Sciences.
The 200,000 soldiers and others exposed to high radiation during the Chernobyl clean-up have spread over the former USSR, making it impossible to track how many people have died or sickened from the radiation. Dr Urin says the number is in the tens of thousands.
After the accident the British Atomic Energy Authority estimated that 20,000 to 40,000 deaths must be expected.
Fireman Mr Andrei Polovinkin, 32, who fought the 1986 Chernobyl blaze, says for some people the catastrophe and its aftermath was like a war. But for others it is like a mother, an industry, a living. He won a medal for his bravery at Chernobyl, but says the heroes of 1986 are today regarded as psychosomatics.
It was his first big fire after joining the Chernobyl fire-fighting squad only five weeks earlier. His fire shift was playing cards at 1.30am when they heard the two explosions. At the scene of the disaster, Mr Polovinkin did not understand the dangers until he saw his chief officer, Vladimir Pravik, descending a fire ladder from the roof of the reactor, stricken with radiation sickness.
"He looked almost drunk," he recalls. "He was staggering and vomiting. He just managed to say that the whole reactor was destroyed, people should be evacuated and radioactivity was very high." Pravik died several days later.
Mr Polovinkin took Pravik's place up on the roof of the block, at times walking across red hot metal to put out spots of fire and to stop the blaze from spreading to the adjoining reactor. He felt giddy and could taste metal in his mouth.
"The more I walked around the more I understood how dangerous it was," he recalls. "In a critical situation you act and feel like a robot. You understand the danger objectively but you don't respond to it normally."
Later in the shower he found he could not wash the radiation off. He began to vomit, collapsed and later came to in a hospital with the realisation of what dangers he had exposed himself to. Now he gets bad headaches and has extremely unstable blood pressure. Six weeks off sick in hospital recently cost him his job as a fire officer.
The Soviet authorities lied and concealed the dangers of the catastrophe, although the "glasnost" policy of openness brought in by Soviet leader Mr Mikhail Gorbachev was supposedly in full swing.
A doctor who treated victims, Professor Victor Klimenko, says after the disaster Chernobyl fireman played football in the clouds of radiation during rest breaks, people slept near the reactor, others dug their gardens, and tourists went to the reactor to gaze at the disaster. People were told that a good shot of vodka before exposure to radiation provided protection. Professor Klimenko still insists that studies have proven the benefits of vodka before exposure.
Dr Pazukhin says it is impossible to unravel the cause of the disaster but believes it was "a failure of mentality" caused both by faulty design and operator error.
Six safety systems were turned off at the time of the accident, and the operators were carrying out an experiment with the reactor. But there is little evidence of any change in the mentality that led to the accident.
Lenin's bust still stands at the main entrance. The walls are lined with photographs of merry Chernobyl children. Visitors get souvenir calendars of the nuclear power plant set in a field of gaudy red flowers and a lapel badge which reads "Safety culture, effectivness, social progress" - all eerily reminiscent of the optimistic slogans of Soviet Pripyat.
The deputy director of the Chernobyl reactor, Mr Vladislav Gavrilin, says his plant is among the safest 20 in the world.
There was a memorandum of agreement last year between Ukraine and the G7 industrialised nations to close Chernobyl in return for $2.4 billion in assistance - but Mr Gavrilin says eight announcements that the power station would close have come to nothing.
"There is no decision, no decree, no government statement and no resolution in the Supreme Council of Ukraine," he says, so he plans to keep on operating until someone orders him to stop. At the same press conference, Mr Artur Korneyev, deputy chief of the sarcophagus, says the main danger is the possible collapse of the structure, which would create a vast radioactive dustcloud.
British consulting structural engineer, Mr John Large, says: "It is inconceivable that you can run a nuclear reactor next to a building that has been blown to pieces. It's just a preposterous idea."
"The guys running these stations are still making decisions based on expediency - I've got to keep my job, got to keep running the power." The risks of such a strategy are not borne by this generation, but the next one.
Dr Pazukhin says he carries out his perilous missions inside the sarcophagus for the sake of the next generation. His life's work was building nuclear weapons, a business his children are now ashamed of.
"Now my children and grandchildren ask me, "What the hell did you do that for? You covered the whole of our country with shit'."
He hopes his exploration of the radioactive innards of the reactor will be more valuable. "I feel that I have to prove that I'm needed. I have to do something so that mankind will say, "Yes, Pazukhin, you can do it, only you,' instead of just telling me I contaminated the earth."
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