The Age of Radiance (58 page)

“In the darkness we made our way through piles of rubble and went up to the landing. Everything was in shambles, steam was coming out in bursts, and we were up to our ankles in water,” radiation monitor Nikolai Gorbachenko said.
“Suddenly we saw [a man] lying unconscious on his side, with bloody foam coming out of his mouth making bubbling sounds. We picked him up by the armpits and carried him down. At the spot on my back where his right hand rested I received a radiation burn. He died at 6:00 a.m. in the Chernobyl hospital, never having regained consciousness. The two guys who looked for him with me later died in a Moscow hospital.”

“There was a loud thud that made the windows rattle,” fireman Leonid Shavrej remembered. “I jumped up immediately. The emergency signal kicked in almost at the same moment. We jumped out on the street, ran toward our trucks, and heard the dispatcher yell that there was a fire at the atomic station. We looked up and saw a mushroom cloud; it also looked like the chimney above the Unit 4 reactor was half gone. We were never instructed on how to work in radioactive conditions—despite the fact that the fire station was attached to a nuclear power station.”

By 4:00 a.m., 186 firemen in eighty-one engines were fighting a fire that couldn’t be extinguished. In such a crisis, eyewitness memories often conflict.
“We didn’t know it was the reactor because no one told us. We thought it was just a normal fire,” one emergency worker insisted, but Anatoli Zakharov said, “I remember joking to the others, ‘There must be an incredible amount of radiation here. We’ll be lucky if we’re all still alive in the morning.’ Of course we knew! If we’d followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation—our duty. We were like kamikaze.” One described his experience of the radiation as “tasting like metal,” and feeling pins and needles all over his face. For ninety minutes they tried to control the flames, and one by one almost every man collapsed, vomited, and passed out. The nuclear fire that produced enough effluvia
cloud to cover a continent in toxic fallout would take two weeks to extinguish. Lyudmilla Ignatenko:

One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. Vasily saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”

At seven I was told he was in the hospital. I ran there, but the police had already encircled it, and they weren’t letting anyone through. Only ambulances. The policemen shouted: the ambulances are radioactive, stay away!

I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes. Many of the doctors and nurses in that hospital, and especially the orderlies, would get sick themselves and die. But we didn’t know that then.

The doctor came out and said, yes, they were flying to Moscow, but we needed to bring them their clothes. The clothes they’d worn at the station had been burned. The buses had stopped running already and we ran across the city. We came running back with their bags, but the plane was already gone. They tricked us. So that we wouldn’t be there yelling and crying.

There’s a fragment of some conversation, I’m remembering it. Someone is saying: “You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You’re not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself.” And I’m like someone who’s lost her mind: “But I love him! I love him!”

After fourteen days, Vasily died and, being so radiant, was buried in a series of
matryoshka
exequies, his body wrapped like a nesting doll in a cellophane bag, then settled within a wooden coffin, then covered in another heavy bag, then set inside a zinc coffin, and finally entombed in a concrete slab.

T
wo hours after the Lenin Atomic Station blew up, Moscow received a coded signal—“1, 2, 3, 4”—meaning the absolute highest state of emergency. Gorbachev called the Politburo into crisis session, and by Saturday noon a fact-finding team of doctors, physicists, and government officials were flying to Kiev and being ZIL-limousined to Pripyat. The group report mentions “a white pillar several hundred meters high” of fire and smoke marked
by “individual spots of deep crimson luminescence . . . of burning products constantly flying from the crater of the reactor” and local officials who had no idea what they were supposed to do in such a catastrophe, as “they had no guidelines written earlier and were incapable of making any decisions on the spot.”

By May 8, firemen’s pumps had drained 5 million gallons of radioactive water out of the reactor’s basement, but this exposed more graphite to air, which continuously ignited, and the nuclear fire continued. Finally it was understood that water alone could not extinguish this blaze, so the decision was made to try to smother it. At 11:00 p.m., the town organized 150 of its residents to go to a quarry by the river and fill bags with sand. But they forgot twine to close up the bags, so calico strips from holiday ornaments were used instead—a perfect counterpoint to the plant’s peppermint-candy-cane smokestacks. Soviet Mi-8 helicopter teams then hovered 110 meters (360 feet) above the fire, the crews leaning out their side hatches to dump those holiday bags of river sand—in ninety-three flights, they whelmed the atomic volcano with nearly one hundred thousand pounds. Until the end of June, helicopters blanketed the fire with 37 million more pounds of sand, clay, boron, and dolomite. Word passed among the pilots that if they ever wanted to have kids, they needed to shield their testicles with lead.
“By May 4 the pilots had buried the reactor core in sand despite conditions that were difficult and dangerous,” chemical defense chief Colonel Anatoli Kushnin said. “The dosimetric devices on these helicopters measured radiation levels of up to five hundred roentgens an hour.” A lethal dose of radiation is about a hundred roentgens per hour for five hours; some Chernobyl sections measured twenty thousand roentgens per hour. “We started out wearing protective suits in Chernobyl, but it made us move very slowly, because they’re so heavy,” American oncologist Robert Gale wrote. “So people ended up getting more radiation because they were wearing these heavy clothes. It was better to work very fast, without protection, than very slowly with protection. In the end, we didn’t wear any protective clothing.”

The graphite tamper, now enflamed at more than 1,200°C, began to burn through the reactor floor, mixing with concrete to meld into corium, a radioactive lava. Underneath the reactor itself were two floors of bubbler pools, reservoirs for the emergency cooling system, which could now at any minute boil away and explode into steam. Three men went into tunnels to open the pools’ sluice gates, but their sole lamp failed, and they had to find the valve by touching their way along a pipe, like three blind men. They returned to the control room and announced their success at finding and
opening the drain. In time, all three would contract acute radiation sickness, and all three would die.

Though the possibility of a basement steam explosion had been circumvented, the corium lava could still burn its way into the water table below the reactor and contaminate even more territory than had already been poisoned by atmospheric fallout—a real-life
China Syndrome
. As physicist Shan Nair explained,
“The water table will start leaching actinides and fission products from the melted glob of fuel into the environment. So you will end up with some radioactive contamination of water supplies and ultimately crops and other products. That’s a major problem because radioactive particles are much more dangerous when digested—they cause internal irradiation of organs with resulting increased cancer risks.”

To prevent this, a team began to daily inject fifty-five thousand pounds of liquid nitrogen to freeze the earth beneath the reactor to -100°C, stopping the lava flow and stabilizing the collapsing foundation. But eventually this proved unworkable, so the basement rooms were pumped full of concrete, with the liquid nitrogen used to quench the fire from beneath. Fifty-six miles of dams with polyethylene shields were then installed to keep rainwater from surging the contained waste into the water supply.

Six hundred thousand workers, called liquidators, arrived from across the empire to fight the crisis. Thirty-four hundred rushed in wearing protective suits to quiet the fire and excise the poisonous debris—for forty seconds at a time, absorbing a lifetime of dosage. They were called the bio-robots. Others removed miles of radioactive topsoil and then planted hundreds of thousands of trees to hold the earth and reduce the spread of toxic dust (their cars and trucks are still in the plant’s parking lot to this day, too radiant for human touch).

“It was a real war, an atomic war,” one liquidator said. “In those times the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We’ll never be Dutch or German. And we’ll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there’ll always be plenty of heroes.” The final tally: 206 days of cleanup, and three engineers getting ten-year prison sentences for criminal mismanagement. Of the 237 workers and firefighters who contracted ARS (acute radiation sickness), 31 died in the first three months.

Contaminated food and equipment was supposed to be buried, but much of it made its way to the black market and was sold, along with supplies sent in for the victims—oranges, coffee, buckwheat. Resident Anna Artyushenko: “There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. ‘Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that,
no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.’ ”

On April 27 at 2:00 p.m., over 336,000 people were told they would need to evacuate their homes for three days, and a ten-mile-long convoy—1,216 yellow school buses and 300 supply trucks—arrived in Pripyat from Kiev. Instead of three days, though, the residents were permanently exiled. The Nazis destroyed 619 Belarusian villages in World War II; Chernobyl emptied another 485 villages, with 70 having to be buried beneath the earth. Liquidator Arkady Filin: “One collective farm chairman would bring a case of vodka to the radiation specialist so they’d cross his village off the list for evacuation; another would bring the same case so they’d put his village on the list—he’d already been promised a three-room apartment in Minsk.” Not everyone agreed to evacuate. Resident Zinaida Kovalenko: “The soldiers knocked. ‘Ma’am, have you packed up?’ And I said: ‘Are you going to tie my hands and feet?’ Old women were crawling on their knees in front of the houses, begging. The soldiers picked them up under their arms and into the car. But I told them whoever touched me was going to get it.” Anna Artyushenko: “The police were yelling. They’d come in cars, and we’d run into the forest. Like we did from the Germans.” Zinaida Kovalenko: “Everyone up and left, but they left their dogs and cats. The first few days I went around pouring milk for all the cats, and I’d give the dogs a piece of bread. They were standing in their yards waiting for their masters. They waited for them a long time. The hungry cats ate cucumbers. They ate tomatoes.” Arkady Filin: “Gangs of men were sent to kill the household pets to keep epidemics of disease from springing up. It was very easy at first, since the dogs weren’t afraid; they ran towards the human voices, thinking they were going to be taken home. Then afterwards, they grew wary and ran into the forests at the sounds of people coming. And the cats learned how to hide.” The atomic no-man’s-land covered eleven hundred square miles, with a name translated three ways: the Zone of Exclusion. The Zone of Estrangement. The Zone of Alienation.

By May 12, 10,198 people in the region had been hospitalized, and that autumn, when the chestnuts shed their leaves, three hundred thousand tons of them were bagged and buried. By November, five hundred thousand cubic yards of rebar concrete covered the reactor, and though it continued to burn, it could no longer infect anything but itself . . . but the containment turned it into an oven, and the nuclear fire rose to 4,500°F. By December 1986 a $768 million battleship-gray concrete sarcophagus was set in place to keep the melted-down two hundred tons of atomic fuel and corium
lava from leaking out. Planned to last twenty years, it began disintegrating almost immediately, with cracks and holes letting in rain and snow. Most of the gaps have now been plugged, and the sarcophagus will supposedly be replaced in October 2015 by the New Safe Confinement (NSC), an $800 million steel arch that will be longer than a football field and taller than the Statue of Liberty and the largest movable structure ever made by human hands.

Still, a number of Belarusians and Ukrainians refuse to leave. Current resident Elena Shagovika: “They come around here and ask us why we never left. Where were we going to go? And what would we do there? When my old neighbors come back to see us, they just stand in the road and weep. We don’t belong anywhere else. We belong here.” Here means tilling your soil with potassium (to block the cesium-137 from infecting your crops) and lime (stopping the strontium-90). You can grow plenty if your soil is clay based (which soaks up most radionuclides), but only potatoes if it’s peat. Shagovika’s neighbor Anna Artyushenko: “If we kill a wild boar, we take it to the basement or bury it ourselves. Meat can last for three days underground. The vodka we make ourselves. I have two bags of salt. We’ll be all right without the government! Plenty of logs—there’s a whole forest around us. The house is warm. The lamp is burning. It’s nice! I have a goat, a kid, three pigs, fourteen chickens. Land—as much as I want; grass—as much as I want. There’s water in the well. And freedom! We’re happy.” Zinaida Kovalenko: “Sometimes it’s boring, and I cry. The whole village is empty. There’s all kinds of birds here. They fly around. And there’s elk here, all you want. [Starts crying.] . . . Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth. I worked hard and honestly my whole life. But I didn’t get any fairness. God was dividing things up somewhere, and by the time the line came to me there was nothing left.”