The Truth Uncovered – Chernobyl 20 Years Later

Alla Yaroshinskaya

Just after midnight on the 26 April 1986, a fatal accident occurred in unit four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) in the Ukraine. The RBMK-1000 reactor had been only working for three years, but the consequences of this accident will produce negative effects on the ecology of the planet for many hundreds of years to come.

Despite the fact that the capacities of their nuclear power plants were being increased year after year and that nuclear weapons tests were being actively conducted, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was the only nuclear country in the world without laws to regulate the safety and use of nuclear energy such as those adopted in other countries a long time ago – e.g. in France in 1945 and the USA and Great Britain in 1946. Now, all developed countries have passed nuclear legislation.

The project for developing this legislation in the USSR was drafted two years before the accident at Chernobyl, but was not implemented even after the accident had happened because of excessive bureaucracy. There was no legal basis to assist any claims from the dozens of military and civilian nuclear accidents that occurred every year, some causing human casualties (e.g. at the Leningradskaya’s NPP in 1979, or at the military nuclear plant Mayak in the Ural Mountains). There was never a response and the government did not let its own people or the world community know about such accidents.

It was no surprise that, after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, neither the USSR government nor the local authorities were ready to take legal action on the resulting ecological, social and other problems. It should be noted that this was in the time of Gorbachev’s “perestroika” and “glasnost.” The scale of the consequences of the accident and the changes that had taken place in society by this time made it impossible to keep the facts of the catastrophe hidden. People in the affected territories continually demanded that the government should settle their health problems, the ecological damage to the affected territories, and supply compensation for material losses on the basis of sound legislative processes.

In April 1990, the USSR Supreme Soviet reviewed the situation concerning “liquidation” of (removing) the Chernobyl accident consequences and noted: “The accident at the Chernobyl NPP is the biggest and most wide-spread disaster of the present time, affecting the destinies of millions of people residing in a vast territory. The ecological effects of the Chernobyl accident forced the country into facing the necessity of solving new, exceptionally complex, large-scale problems, affecting virtually all spheres of social life, many aspects of science and manufacturing, culture, ethical values and morality.”

First Nuclear Legislation of the USSR

The first attempts in the USSR to find a legal settlement of the ecological and other problems caused by Chernobyl were the bylaws adopted jointly by the CPSU (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of the USSR. A decree adopted twelve days after the accident (7 May 1986) On the terms of payment and material provision of employees of enterprises and organisations in the Chernobyl NPP zone has become the first document regulating the procedures between the government of the USSR and the Chernobyl NPP.

Also, as a consequence of the Chernobyl accident and several decades after the introduction of nuclear energy into the USSR, a Ministry of Nulcear Power was finally established. Alongside this a legal framework appeared which could bear the responsibility of regulating activities associated with the implementation of the “Atoms for Peace” programme. A number of other joint decrees by the CPSU Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted during 1987-1988 were aimed at solving various problems associated with the consequences of the terrible accident.

The first decree on Chernobyl was adopted directly by the legislative body of the country – Gorbachev’s Supreme Soviet of the USSR – four years after the catastrophe, on 25 April 1990. The decree On a comprehensive programme to clear up the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl NPP, and the situation relating to the accident also authorised the first State Union-Republican programme of immediate action in 1990-1992. The decree assigned a duty to the Council of Ministers of the USSR “to draft the Law on the Chernobyl Catastrophe and put it in to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the fourth quarter of 1990. To define in the Law the legal status of the victims of the catastrophe, the participants of the accident clear up process and persons involved in activities in the affected area, as well as those subject to involuntary resettlement; the legal regime of the disaster area; control of resident population and their activities; military service; and the formation and functioning of state administrative bodies and public organisations in the affected area.”

However, none of these measures were implemented in time. A year later, in the next decree by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 9 April 1991 On the progress of the implementation of the decree by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 25 April 1990, it was mentioned that “there it has not been possible yet to adopt the Law on the Chernobyl Catastrophe and the Law on Nuclear Energy Use and Nuclear Safety due to the delay in submitting drafts of these laws.”

It was not until 1991, five years after the accident at Chernobyl, that fully adequate legislative acts regulating the responsibility of the government for the damage inflicted on the citizens as a result of the activities of a nuclear enterprise were adopted in the USSR. These are:

  1. the Law of Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) On the Social Protection of Citizens Affected by the Catastrophe at the Chernobyl NPP, adopted 12 February 1991;
  2. the Law of the Ukrainian SSR On the Status and Social Protection of Citizens that Suffered as the Result of Chernobyl Disaster, adopted 28 February 1991;
  3. the Law of the Russian Federation On the Social Protection of Citizens Affected by Radiation in Consequence of the Accident at the Chernobyl NPP, adopted 15 May 1991; as well as
  4. the Federal Law On the Social Protection of Citizens Wo Suffered in Consequence of the Chernobyl Accident Catastrophe, adopted 12 May 1991.

As can be seen from their titles, these laws tackle the ecological problems only indirectly. However, they were a significant step forward when compared with the legal vacuum that existed during the five years immediately after Chernobyl. The scale of the Chernobyl catastrophe and the subsequent ecological damage were the initial motivation (particularly for scientists and lawyers) for the first laws to be adopted in Belarus, the Ukraine and Russia which allowed to attempt to solve the social and ecological problems. This was all the more important as nobody had ever faced these kind of problems before.

The other nuclear accidents reported in the United States of America (Three Mile Island), England (Windscale), and in other states could by no means be compared to the global consequences of the release at Chernobyl.

Criticism of the Chernobyl Legislation

Almost 20 years after the Chernobyl accident, as a result of many diverse investigations into the consequences of the catastrophe and compensation for the damage inflicted on the affected people, various scientists, specialists and ecologists began to question the “Chernobyl” laws of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine with regard to the social protection of the population. A number of studies exposed the current provision of social-economic and medical protection as too harsh and offered, in my opinion, reasonable criticism. The main problem is that of evaluation of the dose delivered to the population, according to which a decision on compensation and aid can be made. An analysis of the current Chernobyl legislation on social protection testifies to the fact that it does not take into consideration several crucial aspects of this fundamental problem. The particular problems here are the methods of how to evaluate the delivered dose and how to determine the consequences, by considering the individual peculiarities of release and migration of radionuclides, the duration of exposure, dose rate, etc.

According to Oksana Zitzer (one of the leading specialists of the State Committee on Environmental Problems of Russia), the estimates of dose delivered according to the existing legislation, are imperfect due to the following reasons:

  1. The risk of radiation exposure by the population may vary extensively.
  2. Evaluations of the average individual dose for a particular group of the population exhibit a high spread in the values obtained, indicating that the reliability is very low and that the number of inspections in each territory should be increased.
  3. Although long-term investigations have been carried out up to now by the Institute of Biophysics, the Institute of Radiation Hygiene and other establishments of the Ministry of Health Care of the former USSR and Russia, the scope of dosimetric and epidemiological data is totally insufficient to specify model parameters such as dose distribution in various regions and the parameters of social-related biological effects (e.g. mortality, differences in people’s sensitivity to radiation, etc).
  4. Finally, the differences in people’s sensitivity to radiation is a very important factor in influencing the total outcome of irradiation in the various regions as the radiation-sensitive part of the population shows an extremely high population mortality.

Taking these facts into account, the following conclusions can be made:

  1. The evaluation of territorial contamination according to the density of radionuclide deposition and correspondingly the evaluation of individual received dose – the so-called “zone” approach, which is currently used in the absence of any other method – is imperfect.
  2. Radionuclides migrate, are absorbed and transform in the environment, changing into both less and significantly more dangerous elements.

The Concept of Radiation, Medical and Social Protection of the Population Exposed to Radiation Effects was adopted by the Russian Commission on Radiation Protection and recommended by the Government of the Russian Federation for the revision and specification of the “Chernobyl law” provisions. In accordance with this concept, the “dose” approach is intended to replace the current “aerial” approach. But how can that be achieved in practice? The problem lies in the initial days and years after the Chernobyl catastrophe. It is the problem of the ‘big lie’ by the former Soviet authorities concerning people’s health after the explosion.

It is already well known that after the nuclear catastrophe, the USSR government immediately took measures to classify both the fact that the accident had occurred and its consequences on the population and the environment. The USSR government released instructions marked “top secret” in order to classify all data on the incident, especially that related to the health of the population which suffered as a consequence of the accident.

This was followed by instructions issued by the USSR Ministry of Health and the USSR Ministry of Defence to classify irradiation doses accumulated by the population, liquidators (people that were in charge of clearing up the consequences of the accident) and military personnel. These regulations demanded that medical staff should not enter a diagnosis of “acute radiation syndrome” in the files of the military-liquidators – instead, it should be replaced by something else.

The classified documents have not been accessible for many years. It was only in 1991, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, that I managed to obtain the secret protocols of the Operative Group of the Politic Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and other documents. These secret protocols stated that a number of persons were subjected to irradiation and were hospitalised during the first days after the Chernobyl accident.

The Secret Protocols of the Communist Party

The first description of the state of the population’s health appears in the protocol of 4 May 1986: “The report of Mr. Schtepin [First Deputy Minister of Health Care of the USSR] on the hospitalisation and medical treatment of the population subject to radiation effects: It is noted that by 4 May, a total of 1,882 persons have been hospitalised. The total number of persons examined have reached 38,000. 204 persons have been found suffering radiation syndrome of different levels of seriousness – among them 64 children. 18 persons are in a critical state.”

The protocol of 6 May 1986 states: “It is reported... by Mr. Schtepin that by 9:00 am on 6 May, the total number of hospitalised persons is 3,454. 2,609 of them are on stationary treatment, including 471 children. According to the updated information, the number of persons suffering acute radiation syndrome reached 367, including 19 children. 34 of them are in a critical state. In the 6th Moscow Hospital there are 179 persons on stationary treatment, including 2 children.”

The cynicism of the authorities shown in the document is striking: “The proposal of the Ministry of Health Care of the USSR to publish data on the number and state of persons hospitalised in the 6th Moscow Hospital should be accepted, bearing in mind that there are American specialists working in this hospital.” If Americans had not been working there, the world would never have learned about the number of people suffering from the Chernobyl accident and undergoing treatment in the 6th Moscow hospital.

In the protocol of the 12 May 1986: “It is reported... by Mr. Schtepin that in the course of the last day 2,703 more persons have been hospitalised, generally in Belorussia. 678 persons have been discharged from hospitals. 10,198 persons are undergoing treatment and medical examination in hospitals.” It is seen therefore that the number of ill people had been increasing every day, but from the 13 May 1986, the number of hospitalised persons in the reports of the Deputy Minister of Health Care of the USSR sharply decreased, while the number of discharged persons started to increase.

The protocol of the 13 May 1986 notes that “… in the course of the last day 443 persons have been hospitalised, 908 persons have been discharged from hospitals. 9,733 persons including 4,200 children are undergoing treatment and medical examination in hospitals. Diagnosis of radiation syndrome has been concluded in 299 cases including 37 children.” A question arises as to why the process of discharging people from hospitals became so rapid after the number of persons hospitalised for treatment had exceeded 10,000. The answer to this question can be found in the same secret documents.

Protocol No.9 on 8 May 1986: “... The Ministry of Health Care has confirmed the new norms of acceptable levels of the population irradiation – 10 times higher than the old norms. An increase of these norms to levels 50 times higher than the previous is possible in specific cases.” And further: “By these means the health and safety of the population of all ages is guaranteed, even in cases where the current radiation situation remains for 2.5 years.”

These norms were confirmed even for pregnant women and children. Such an action meant that, by applying the new norms (which exceeded the old ones by 10 to 50 times) more than 10,000 people, hospitalised for treatment due to irradiation by the accident, had suddenly been defined as healthy and were discharged. It also explains the sharp decrease in the number of people suffering from cute radiation syndrome. It goes without saying that the Soviet Party leadership increased the acceptable irradiation doses by 10 to 50 times in order to cover up the true number of the affected people. To a significant extent they succeeded. As the process of democratic transformation began in the USSR, however, the truth about the real scale of population irradiation due to the Chernobyl catastrophe gradually started to emerge.

In the parliamentary hearings in the USSR Supreme Council in 1990, Academician Ilyin (the director of the Institute of Biophysics and one of those covering up the truth about the health of people in the affected territories) had to admit under the pressure of the deputies’ inquiries and the facts presented on the affected territories (including mine) that “1.6 million children received worrying irradiation doses; decisions should be taken on how to act further.” He also admitted that “if the dose limits were lowered to 7 rem per 35 years [of life], we would have to increase the number of 166,000 people now planned to be relocated by approximately 10 times. Relocation of a total of 1.6 million people would have to be considered. Society must balance all the risks and profits of such an action.”

As one can see, neither the health of people nor the real state of things nor the legal situation were considered - only the economic side of the problem was taken into account. The USSR was not able to relocate such a large number of irradiated people. Thus, the officials were trying to cover up the truth about the health of the population from the people themselves.

Public Statements about the Risks of Irradiation by Soviet Medical Officials

The official medical documents from my own Chernobyl archive allow me to easily trace the dynamics of the changes in the position of the “fathers” of the notorious concept of the Soviet 35 rem safety levels for the population of the affected territories. (The fathers are academicians Illyn, Chazov and Gus’kova.) Briefly, the essence of this concept lies in a belief that a person may receive 35 rem over 70 years without health disorders. A month after the accident this “ceiling” was increased to 70 rem over 70 years, and several months later was decreased to 50 rem over 70 years, then back to 35 rem. It is interesting that the same official scientists - L.A. Ilyin, E.I. Chazov and A.K. Gus’kova - had stated in their book, written before the Chernobyl accident in 1982, that the threshold should be 25 rem over a lifetime. So, we see the “scientific” nature of the official concept of safe levels of exposure.

The first more or less open report of Radio-contamination Patterns and Possible Health Consequences of the Accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station (70 pages of typescript) was presented by Academician L.A. Ilyin at the General Session of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR in Moscow, which took place on the 21-23 March 1989. This document contained the 35-rem concept of the Ministry of Health of the USSR. It is of particular interest that for the population of the strict control zones (SCZ) “the estimates of late effects was based on the actual doses in the four years following the accident and on the projected doses until 2060, the latter having been calculated on the assumption that restrictions on the use of home-grown products would be lifted in the strict control zones.” The following simple questions arise: who had actually evaluated the doses received by the population in the first 2-3 months, and when had they done it? I know very well the efforts made by officials in the Narodichi district of the Zhitomir region to eliminate primary medical documents representing the actual doses. Instead, medical staff were ordered to register understated dose values. Are these “actual” dose estimates worthy of belief?

The official secret documents of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR from my archive are of a similar nature. According to these documents, autopsies of those who died after the accident, including children, have not been carried out in the strict control zone in the Zhitomir region. The conclusion drawn by the authors of this report on the prediction of the population’s future in the strict control zones is astonishing: “Despite a trend for an increase in spontaneous mortality and mortality of malignant neoplasm, which is registered in data from all over the USSR, values of these parameters are assumed to remain stable throughout the investigated 70 years period. Hence, ratios of an increase in the number of excess fatal tumours over their spontaneous level can only be corrected by a reduction.”

This idea is repeated in the general conclusion: “The data presented in this report provide evidence that the predicted levels of the radiogenic effects of the accident at the Chernobyl NPP, in the majority of cases including the population in the strict control zones, will likely be in a range of values less than a standard deviation from the spontaneous levels of the corresponding pathology.”

In other words, among the population residing in the strict control zones exposed to radiation every day since the catastrophe at the Chernobyl NPP, the authors say, there will be less fatal cases of induced cancers than among the population of all other territories! This is a remarkable Communist Party tale for the Soviet people.

One year later, in 1990, at a meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Chairman of the Government Commission on Liquidation of the Consequences of the Accident at the Chernobyl NPP, V.Ch. Doguzhiev said that “... the irradiation dose of 62% of the population who were subject to medical examination was found to be 1 to 5 rem. Out of the 1.5 million people residing in areas most contaminated with radioiodine, including 160,000 children, a thyroid irradiation dose of 87% of adults and 48% of children was at most 30 rem. For 17% of children the dose amounted to 100 rem.”

Health of the People 20 Years Later

The results of studies conducted by conscientious scientists about 20 years after the Chernobyl accident are striking. According to an estimate by the World Health Organisation, the number of people who took part in clearing up the consequences of the accident amounts to 800,000. (Russian scientists estimate this number to be approximately 600,000). Nobody knows the exact figure because, according to the documents, “Persons who had taken part in the clear up of the accident after the 1st January 1988 should not be included in the registry from 1989 - by order of the Ministry of Health Care of the Ukrainian SSR.”

The data of the Ukrainian officials shows that 148,000 people have died due to the consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe in the first ten years after the catastrophe. The Russian Committee of Liquidators announced that 100,000 liquidators died over almost 20 years and that their deaths were connected with their work at Chernobyl. According to the data of The Union of Chernobyl of Ukraine, 622,250 people have died over the 20 or so years since the catastrophe (the organsation has a special daily counter on their website). According to the reports of the Ministry of Health Care of Belarus, the total mortality in the most contaminated areas of the country increased by 51% compared with the period before the Chernobyl accident.

It is noted in the report of the specialists from the Ministry of Labour of Russia and the Ministry of the Environment of the Russian Federation (M.S. Malikov and O.Yu. Zitzer) that more than 500,000 children under 14 years of age are living in the Ukrainian territory affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The most alarming fact, as noted in the report, is that 150,000 inhabitants have received thyroid irradiation doses which are dozens or hundreds of times higher than the acceptable level.

The incidence of child thyroid cancer has significantly increased. Whereas only 2-3 cases of thyroid cancer were registered annually before 1986, 200 cases were registered in the Ukraine in 1989 alone. Dramatic increases, particularly in the number of thyroid cancers among children in the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus should be noted – with most of these cases being found in Belarus. Data from the European Association for the Study of the Thyroid Gland shows that this number is only the beginning of the outbreak, and in the next 30 years thousands of children will suffer from thyroid cancer. In April 2000, World Health Organisation researchers said that the Chernobyl disaster will cause 50,000 new cases of thyroid cancer among young people living in the worst-affected regions.

The report on the effects of Chernobyl predicted that the worst was still to come for more than seven million people affected by the disaster. “Chernobyl is a word we would all like to erase from our memory,” said the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, in a foreword to the report. But he added that “more than 7 millon of our fellow human beings do not have the luxury of forgetting. They are still suffering, every day, as a result of what happened.” Kofi Annan also noted that the exact number of Chernobyl victims may never be known, but that 3 million children require treatment and “many will die prematurely.”

Based on a comparison with the number of thyroid cases among British children, the researchers found a dramatic rise in cancers among infants living in Gomel at the time of the accident. Some time ago, the Swiss Medical Weekly published results from researches at the Clinical Institute of Radiation Medicine and Endocrinology Research, Minsk, Belarus, showing a 40% increase in cancer between 1990 and 2000. The researchers used data from the National Cancer Registry, established in 1973. They compared the post-Chernobyl period with rates before the accident on April 26, 1986. The figures they found all have high statistical significance and increases in the various regions are as follows:

Region Increase
Brest 33%
Vitebsk 38%
Gomel 52%
Grodno 44%
Minsk 49%
Mogilev 32%
Minsk city 18%
all Belarus 40%

Conclusion

The lessons of Chernobyl for our future are:

  1. The main and overriding lesson is to shut down all NPPs around the world and eliminate all nuclear weapons.
  2. Until this can be achieved, countries possessing NPPs must pass a special law on ‘glasnost’ for all nuclear accidents and the criminal liability of the officials on the concealment of nuclear incidents.
  3. The governmental machinery must be ready to adequately defend the population and the liquidators during and after NPP accidents.
  4. The national and international nuclear legislation must define the risk of NPPs for people and the responsibility of the nuclear countries for possible transboundary nuclear accidents and catastrophes and their consequences.
  5. Exremely important! A special chapter on the control and inspections of any NPPs by NGOs must be added to the current national nuclear laws in every country.
  6. The UN must revise the IAEA’s Statute in order to prevent the proliferation of nuclear facilities of dual use. (Countries with NPPs may also use them to produce the material for nuclear weapons.)
  7. All governments should generate and implement plans to replace NPPs with alternative sources of energy.