The author questions the environmental friendliness of nuclear power plants. Currently, she writes, influential politicians advocate a massive increase in the use of nuclear energy and see this as a way to combat climate change. But, according to the author, the Chernobyl disaster should remind of the danger of using nuclear energy.
Before we begin to expand the use of nuclear energy to combat climate change, we need to get answers to questions about the global health effects of radioactivity.
In 1986, the head of the Soviet State Committee for Hydrometeorology, Yuri Izrael, had a regrettable decision to make. Its task was to track the level of radiation emanating from the exploded reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the first hours after the accident that occurred on April 26. In addition, he had to say what to do in the current situation. 48 hours after the explosion, his assistant handed him a hastily made map. It showed an arrow pointing northeast of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and then this arrow expanded, turning into a stream of air masses 16 kilometers wide, moving through the territory of Belarus towards Russia. If these slowly moving air masses reached Moscow, where the spring atmospheric front was forming at that moment, then millions of people could be affected. Israel's decision was simple - let it rain.
Therefore, on that day, at one Moscow airfield, technicians were filling the artillery shells with silver iodide. The pilots of the Soviet air force got into the cockpit of their Tu-16 (Cyclone) bombers and made a seemingly ordinary hour-long flight in the direction of Chernobyl, where the nuclear reactor exploded. The pilots began to make circles over the nuclear power plant, focusing on the weather conditions. They retreated to a distance of 30, 70, 100 and 120 kilometers, pursuing darkish "waves" of radioactive waste. After approaching them, the pilots fired shells with silver iodide to cause precipitation in the form of rain.
In the sleepy cities of southern Belarus, local villagers watched planes leaving strange yellow and gray contrails in the sky. The next day - it was April 27 - a strong wind rose, cumulus clouds began to appear on the horizon, and then a real downpour began. Raindrops captured radioactive dust, located at an altitude of about 200 meters, and sent them to the ground. The pilots discovered a gaseous mass of nuclear waste beyond Gomel, moving towards the Mogilev region. In the places where the pilots sprayed silver iodide, it started to rain, and streams of water rushed to the ground along with a toxic mixture of a dozen radioactive elements.
If Operation Cyclone were not top-secret, then the newspapers might have such catchy headlines: "Scientists are using modern technology to save Russian cities from a technological disaster!" As the proverb says: what went up must fall down. Nobody told the Belarusians that the southern part of their republic was sacrificed to save Russian cities. Several hundred thousand Belarusians lived in those places where the artificially induced rain took place, who did not know anything about harmful substances that fell from the sky.
They often try to convince the public that the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which stretches for 30 kilometers from the exploded nuclear power plant, reliably stores radioactive elements inside. Tourists and journalists visiting this zone rarely know that there is a second Chernobyl zone in the southern part of Belarus. For 15 years there, people lived in the same pollution conditions as inside the official Chernobyl zone, and this continued until 1999, when all residents finally left it.
If we assume that the Chernobyl zone reliably protects against the consequences of the disaster, then we will fall into a trap of close distance, the meaning of which is formulated as follows: the closer a person is to the site of a nuclear explosion, the more he is exposed to radioactivity. However, radioactive gases move according to weather conditions, they spread around the globe and leave shadow areas of contamination on the ground in the form of tongues, a human kidney or sharp arrowheads.
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In England, for example, there was clear weather for a few days after the Chernobyl disaster, and it did not start raining until May 2, 1986, while in Cumbria it was downpouring - 20 millimeters of rain in 24 hours. The directional arrows of radiation detectors at the Sellafield (formerly Windscale) nuclear fuel reprocessing facility began to move alarmingly upward to levels that were 200 times higher than natural background radiation. From 5 becquerels per square meter, the level of radiation at the soil surface has increased to 4000 becquerels per square meter. Kenneth Baker, the then Environment Secretary, made a reassuring announcement that the radioactive isotopes would soon be washed away by rain.
However, two months later, radiation levels had risen to 10,000 becquerels per square meter in Cumbria and 20,000 becquerels per square meter in southeastern Scotland, 4,000 times higher than usual. Experts conducted a study of sheep and found that the level of cesium-137 was one thousand becquerels per kilogram - too much for use in the food industry. Amid widespread fear, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) has issued temporary restrictive measures on the sale of meat, affecting seven thousand farms.
Initial predictions that cesium would be washed off the soil surface were overly optimistic. Local plants, which had a great need for minerals, quickly absorbed all the radioactive isotopes. Tiny fungi raised cesium-137 from the roots to the top of them, which was eaten by the sheep in the pastures.
Experts have added first months and then years to their projections of how long radioactive cesium will remain in the environment. Ultimately, the restrictions on 334 farms in North Wales persisted for 26 years.
Experts monitoring the level of radiation in Chernobyl made an alarming discovery. Only half of the cesium-137 they discovered came from Chernobyl. The rest was already in the land of Cumbria, and radioactive substances got there as a result of nuclear tests, as well as after a fire in 1957 at the Windscale plutonium reprocessing plant. The same winds and rains as those that brought the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl have quietly done their job for decades and carried radioactive substances in the north of England and in Scotland. The fallout from atomic bomb tests during the Cold War was much larger in volume than the contamination caused by the Chernobyl disaster.
As a result of the explosion in Chernobyl, 45 million curies of radioactive iodine compounds were released into the atmosphere. Emissions from tests of Soviet and American bombs amounted to 20 billion curies of radioactive iodine compounds, that is, 500 times more. Radioactive iodine compounds - potent isotopes with a short life span - can cause thyroid disease, thyroid cancer, as well as hormonal imbalances, gastrointestinal problems, and autoimmune disorders.
After the engineers detonated 2000 atomic bombs in the atmosphere, specialists lost the opportunity to observe exactly where radioactive isotopes are deposited and where they come from, but they realized how easily radioactive particles move around our planet. In the 1950s, British officials discovered dangerous levels of cesium contamination in wheat imported from Minnesota. This wheat became radioactive as a result of atomic bomb tests conducted by the United States in Nevada, 2,500 kilometers from the wheat fields of Nevada. However, over the years, scientists have disagreed about how the global spread of radioactivity through food chains is affecting human health. After the Chernobyl disaster, radiation medicine experts called for a long-term study of those peoplewho received radiation as a result of the explosion of the reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. But this kind of research has never been done. After Fukushima, Japanese scientists, referring to Soviet specialists dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, announced that it would take 20 years to determine the health impact of an accident at a nuclear power plant.
Fortunately, medical data on the health of people affected by the Chernobyl disaster is publicly available. They show that people in areas of radioactive contamination suffer from cancer and respiratory diseases, as well as from anemia, autoimmune disorders, they have been found to have pathology during childbirth, fertility problems. All these diseases were observed in exposed people two or three times more often than before the disaster. In the very heavily polluted Belorussian village of Veprin, only 6 out of 70 children were found healthy in 1990. The rest were found to have some kind of chronic disease. On average, children in Veprina had 8496 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium in their bodies (20 becquerels per kilogram is considered a safe dose).
For decades, scientists have marveled at the increased incidence of thyroid cancer, leukemia and birth defects among residents of Cumbria County, in a place that, like southern Belarus, turned out to be an unnoticed center of radioactive contamination resulting from decades of atomic bomb production. as well as from accidents at nuclear power plants.
Powerful politicians are now advocating a massive increase in the use of nuclear energy and see this as a way to combat climate change. We have not yet entered the next atomic age, while declassified data on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster raise unanswered questions about the long-term effect of low doses of radiation on human health. At the same time, we already know that the fallout from nuclear bomb tests moved mainly to the northern hemisphere, where the number of thyroid cancers has increased exponentially. Previously, childhood leukemia was rare in medical practice in Europe and North America, but the number of such diseases has increased annually since 1950. Research carried out,which covered 43 thousand men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, indicates that the semen concentration rates decreased by 52% between 1973 and 2011.
These statistics confirm the existence of a correlation between radioactive contamination and health problems similar to those found in areas contaminated after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This kind of correlation is not evidence of causation. However, the statistical data presented, in fact, raise a large number of questions, those questions that scientists and interested members of the public should discuss before we enter the second atomic century.
Kate Brown