World affairs

The media interest that came with the Chernobyl disaster’s 20th anniversary a few years back missed something: there are still people living in the stricken area who refuse to let a cloud of nuclear funk drown out their chances of survival.

Instead they have opted for a life of sex, crime and heavy boozing. JOE visits a modern-day, radioactive Wild West.

By Nick Bradshaw

Great train journeys. On the face of it, the journey from the small Ukrainian town of Slavutych that trundles westwards for 50km is not one of them. This is no Trans-Siberian, no Orient Express. The regular commuters are uninterested in the view, but then again, the landscape – though green and pleasant – is pretty dull. The train does cross the international border with Belarus a couple of times, which is quite interesting, but you’d never know it – there are no obvious border markings, and certainly no customs or ticket checks.

It’s not what you can see that makes this journey noteworthy, it’s what you can’t. Something in the air. Until, that is, you go past a crumbling block of concrete upon which someone has daubed, in English, “Welcome to Hell”. Within a couple of minutes, the ventilation towers of a giant factory complex come into view. Seconds later, you see the hastily erected concrete sarcophagus that houses Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor No.4 – the one that, since the unexpected meltdown 20-odd years back, has been, not to put too fine a point on it, buggered.

Before the explosion, Chernobyl had been the flagship of the Soviet Union’s nuclear power industry. The lucky workers living 2km away in the gleaming modern plant-workers’ town of Pripyat – which Slavutych was built to replace – were among the best paid in the communist state. But at 1.23am on April 26, 1986, following a botched safety test, the first of a series of explosions blew the huge lid off Reactor 4 and sent a cloud of uranium fuel and radioactive graphite into the atmosphere.

“It’s not worth dwelling on the effect the accident had on us and may still be having on us,” says 24-year-old Andrei, one of the passengers on the train. He followed in his father’s footsteps to work at the plant and is exposed to 30 times the normal amount of background radiation on a daily basis. “Do that too much and you’ll probably torment yourself into an early grave. Besides, what’s the point worrying now about something that happened then? Worrying definitely won’t help you live longer. We don’t tend to dwell on the past. Or on the future, for that matter.”

Connected

Many of the Slavutych’s 25,000-strong population are survivors of the Chernobyl disaster. An estimated 8,000 are adults who were children living in the evacuated zone in 1986. At the turn of the century, around 9,000 Slavutychians worked at Chernobyl. There are now 4,000 people working directly in the plant, but pretty much everyone in Slavutych is in some way connected to it. For those who remain employed, pay levels are still good, but not what they were in the years when risks were generally much higher.

Looks ok for a train to hell

Slavutych was the last major undertaking of the mighty Soviet Union and, to be fair, it is a very pleasant place, with busy bars, cafés, restaurants and plenty of green space. Scratch the surface, though, and things start to stench. An influx of foreign engineers has created demand for the town’s first prostitutes, known as “screwdriver girls” (after their drink of choice).

As locals’ salaries have dropped, so has the spending on things like police; for the first time, this former utopia has noticeable crime. And it’s not as if it’s easy for the town to attract other companies to settle in the area. Chernobyl was built in the middle of nowhere and Slavutych, like Pripyat before it, is inextricably linked with the accident. Pleas for speculators to base their new ventures in a setting made famous by the world’s biggest-ever nuclear disaster don’t garner many positive responses.

Given this climate, many young adults in Slavutych have adopted a sometimes dangerously hedonistic approach to life. They drink through the night and smoke like chimneys, while unprotected sex is commonplace. Promiscuity is frowned upon in Ukrainian culture, but Slavutych is a world apart from the rest of the nation. In many ways it is a frontier town; behind the kempt façade, attitudes are akin to those in the Wild West. “Safe sex isn’t something I dwell on,” says Andrei. “I don’t know anyone who does. Maybe the radiation kills off any nasty diseases. If we have a higher-than-average chance of getting sick, then it’s our duty to get on with living life to the full while we can. Taking risks is something we do well around here.”

***

Figures pertaining to the accident are rendered useless by their vagueness. According to a 2005 report, backed by the World Health Organisation and the International Atomic Energy Authority, only 56 people have died as a provable, direct result of the Chernobyl explosion. The key words here, of course, are “provable” and “direct”.

If you are Valeri Khodemchuk, the poor unfortunate who had the job of inspecting the plant on the night of the accident, and who remains entombed behind a lead wall and tons of concrete, your place on the list of the Chernobyl fatalities is irrefutable. Ditto if you were one of the young conscripts who spent two minutes on the roof shovelling debris back into the smouldering reactor (they were told they’d be demobbed for providing this simple service).

But what about those who, within weeks, were undergoing autopsies that revealed blisters, not just all over their skin but on their hearts and other internal organs? Who can say whether the workers who died of lung cancer did so because of radiation or their nicotine addiction?

The 2005 report estimated that, of the 600,000 so-called liquidators involved in the clean-up, 4,000 would eventually die early as a result of their exposure. It went on to calculate that, of the 6.8 million former Soviets exposed to significant fallout, a further 5,000 will die as a result.

Greenpeace, on the other hand, expect 270,000 cancer cases to emerge as a result of Chernobyl. Greenpeace’s Blake Lee-Harwood anticipates that cancer will actually be responsible for less than half of all fatalities, with “intestinal problems, heart and circulation problems, respiratory problems, endocrine problems and particularly effects on the immune system” all being part of the Chernobyl legacy.

A particularly nasty downpour may be all it takes to get the reactor to kick up an irradiated stink. One small earthquake here could end up affecting large parts of the planet.

The last time Chernobyl made it onto the news radar was back in April 2006, the 20th anniversary of the accident. Dignitaries duly laid wreaths, sombre words were said, and that was pretty much it. With Iran and North Korea dabbling in all things nuclear, it’s easy to see why the world’s attention is elsewhere and why Chernobyl has been consigned to history. Standing outside Reactor No.4, however, where temporary buttresses are holding the sarcophagus in place, it is clear that the world should still be keeping a closer eye on Chernobyl.

When the sarcophagus was hastily erected, speedy containment rather than permanence was the order of the day. No rivets were used in its construction as nobody could get close enough to do the job (instead, it was formed by dropping large steel bars and liquid concrete onto the molten, mangled mess).

The foundations were shaky, to say the least, and the fact that Chernobyl was built on a fault-line doesn’t instil confidence. There are already around 100 square metres of cracks in the sarcophagus, making it a worryingly leaky, unstable structure. Truth is, a particularly nasty downpour may be all it takes to get the reactor to kick up an irradiated stink. One small earthquake here could end up affecting large parts of the planet.