Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster: Causes, Aftermath, and Lessons

Introduction

During the Cold War, it was understood by citizens of the world that the United States and the Soviet Union were competitors economically, politically, and militarily. Part of the economic health of both superpowers was their nuclear energy programs. Nuclear energy was perhaps even more vital to the frozen stretches of the Soviet Union, which during the Cold War years had yet to realize its own wealth in oil production. It is safe to say that most of the world's citizens, while they did not like the idea of nuclear power — because they associated it with dangers like fallout, and the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh reminders of the horrors of misused energy — nonetheless felt that there were few alternatives to nuclear power as a source of energy for heating homes and businesses. Most people were well aware of the dangers associated with nuclear power, but there was a prerequisite trust in the governments of the superpowers, who assured their citizens that nuclear energy was safe and that there was no viable alternative. Nuclear energy, the world would discover, was only as safe as the governments and businesses behind it were willing to invest in making it safe.

That trust was betrayed when, in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear disaster since Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred in the remote region of Chernobyl in the Soviet Union. It was the worst of fears coming to fruition. As news of the incident slowly spread around the world, there was a growing sense that the Soviet Union was minimizing the damage and the ongoing threat it posed to people in and around the plant. It raised a question in the minds of the public worldwide: what is a nuclear reactor accident?

Using the existing body of research and studies, this essay examines the question of what constitutes a nuclear reactor accident and what it means to the world at large. What is particularly striking about Chernobyl is that scholarly journal articles have appeared roughly every five years from the date of the accident, speaking to the changes and the side effects experienced by people in the area and by the surrounding environment. These articles inform this essay and are used for comparison across the progression of time.

Every effort is made here to understand how Chernobyl happened and what lessons were learned from that event. This paper looks at how those lessons are being applied to prevent future accidents. It also examines the current and continued use of nuclear energy as a viable energy source moving forward, and considers whether truly catastrophe-proof nuclear energy is achievable. All of this comes to light by examining the Chernobyl nuclear reactor incident, understanding how it came about, and reflecting on what it means for the world.

E. L. Quarantelli (1998) argued that to be concerned with what the term "disaster" means is to be concerned with the phenomenon itself, and to focus on it in a fundamental way that illuminates its defining characteristics. The premise upon which scholars and experts engage in this discussion is one that attempts to understand the consequences of disaster. One might add to Quarantelli's statements that understanding the consequences of a disaster leads naturally to efforts to circumvent or prevent that disaster from recurring. Perhaps Quarantelli stops short of saying this because it is presumed. However, when speaking of nuclear reactor disasters, this must be stated explicitly — because not to say it would be to leave the responsibility for preventing recurrence to a supposition that may or may not be made by government, scientists, and the public at large. Had this expectation been clearly articulated before April 26, 1986, perhaps Chernobyl would not have become the disaster that it was.

Quarantelli argues that the most efficient means of controlling complex systems is to manipulate their lodestar — the central governing principle of the system. He applies this concept to any complex system, whether religious, political, or scientific:

Before the Incident

"In religious systems, it might be the deity's will revealed by the priesthood. In feudal systems, it might be the fief, distributed by the nobility, and, in modern times, it might be the status based on the money that people have available. The advantage of controls by the top algorithm is the extreme efficiency: the alteration of one factor alters the whole system."

Quarantelli's point is that control over the lodestar confers total control of the system — and total control means no accidents. Accidents reflect an inability to manipulate the lodestar. He argues that a system in which the operators do not fully understand how it works represents exactly this failure of control, and that it is madness to intervene in a system without knowing how it and its human components will react. People are as much mechanisms within the system as the computers and programs that constitute it. Quarantelli identifies Chernobyl as a clear example of the failure to control a complex system, because those with the ability to manipulate it did not adequately understand it. Without examining who pressed which button, where, or when, Quarantelli's framework renders those details secondary. When a nuclear reactor is operated by individuals who lack a full understanding of the system — including knowledge of how its human components will behave — the system is, effectively, out of control. When that control is lost, disaster follows. This is how we define "disaster."

Eleven days after the Chernobyl incident, on May 6, 1986, radiation from the meltdown was detected on the west coast of the United States. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency reported that the levels were "way, way below" levels harmful to west coast residents. The White House backed this statement, and both the American and Soviet governments maintained that the meltdown posed no threat to Americans. The problem, of course, is that ordinary citizens have no independent way of verifying such claims. As Quarantelli observes, when a system fails, it signals a lack of control — and the general public has no control over the systems that govern their exposure to nuclear risk. Any contradictory information would likely be classified as a matter of national security, invisible to the public unless uncovered through, for example, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The radiation level reported in Washington State was 500 picocuries per liter of iodine-131. Federal guidelines set the danger threshold at 15,000 picocuries. For context, a reactor core the size of the one that melted down at Chernobyl contains more than a thousand times the radiation released on Japan at Hiroshima.

In downwind Europe — particularly in Poland and parts of West Germany, where readings in the days immediately after the accident were extremely high — the damage would prove horrifying. Most serious was the harm done to fetuses in utero, infants, and small children, with iodine-131 as the prime culprit. Iodine is naturally absorbed by the thyroid gland; radioactive iodine emits particles that damage or destroy that gland. Iodine-131 can cross the placenta of pregnant women and travel directly to the thyroids of their fetuses, causing severe problems including brain damage and respiratory difficulties at birth. This devastating process almost certainly caused the inordinate number of infant deaths in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area after the Three Mile Island accident, and may have been responsible for the abnormally high infant death rate in the United States following atmospheric nuclear testing in Nevada from 1951 to 1963.

Some experts contend that even 500 picocuries is harmful, particularly to developing fetuses. When conflicting information of this magnitude exists, determining the most reliable course of action becomes difficult. Erring on the side of caution, however, would logically be the appropriate response when facing potentially harmful radiation levels. Except for the cleanup at Chernobyl, little could be done about the accident itself. The question becomes: what kind of oversight ensured that the cleanup was actually carried out?

Chernobyl was not the world's first nuclear reactor accident. The first such incident in the United States occurred at Three Mile Island (TMI) in Pennsylvania in early 1979 — the worst known accident in American commercial nuclear history. That reactor remains closed to this day, and the site at Three Mile Island stands as a stark reminder of what happens when things go catastrophically wrong at a nuclear energy facility. As one 1980 report observed: "Like certain other functional structures on the modern American landscape — the bridge at Selma, Alabama; the Watergate complex; the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas — the towers at 'TMI' have slipped into an unprojected half-life as reminders of steep depressions in our national lifeline. Three Mile Island is a big deal; something important happened here."

The Aftermath of Chernobyl

Three Mile Island remains visible to the public. In its aftermath, there was an intense campaign to cover up the extent of the damage and the potential harm to the public. As one account noted: "In March 1979, Metropolitan Edison, the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, tried in every possible way to cover up the extent of TMI's radiation releases — so much so that seven years later Pennsylvania's Republican Governor, Richard Thornburgh, would compare their behavior to that of Mikhail Gorbachev during the Chernobyl crisis."

After TMI, there should have been a global conference of every reactor owner and operator to study what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. Nuclear reactor meltdown should have received the same intense attention, corrective action, and emergency rehearsal as any comparable industrial catastrophe. This is not what occurred — at least not in America, where the public was already deeply wary of nuclear energy. The downplaying of the harm caused by Chernobyl, and the harm that would befall the public and the planet for decades afterward, has never been extensively addressed. Nuclear energy was an energy source effectively imposed upon the world, and it stands as an ominous reminder of how vulnerable we are and of how consistently the public is misled by government and industry in the name of profit.

At the time of the TMI near-meltdown, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health, Gordon MacLeod, warned that pregnant women and small children should be immediately evacuated from the reactor area and that potassium iodide should be distributed to area residents. Governor Thornburgh, however, was unwilling to "create a panic" by ordering an immediate evacuation. It was not until two days after the accident that he acted — by which point it was too late to avoid the worst of the health hazards. MacLeod was subsequently fired for being an "alarmist." In the years following, the state's Department of Health dismissed studies indicating that the infant death rate in the Harrisburg area had tripled in the months after the accident. More recent research by Jane Lee has shown that the cancer rate in certain areas downwind of the site is five times what would have been expected had the accident not occurred. Such studies have also been given short shrift by state authorities.

What this suggests is that Chernobyl — declared by scientists to be a worse disaster than TMI — is probably more harmful to the planet and its inhabitants than anyone has been willing to acknowledge. Informing the public of the full scope of the disaster would, of course, serve little practical purpose in terms of removing radiation from the atmosphere. What it would do, however, is make the public more determined to oppose the construction of additional nuclear power plants.

Five years after Chernobyl, a thirty-kilometer zone around the plant remained forbidden to all access. Referred to as the "Forbidden Zone," it represents perhaps the closest thing to an official acknowledgment of the severity of the meltdown. Where once a forest stood at the perimeter of the facility, there is now empty space where radiation intensity remains so high that it prevents the growth of plants or any other life:

"In April 1986, the most intensely radioactive smoke and vapor cloud in history drifted over and into that forest, roasting it to death not with heat but with awesome amounts of nuclear radiation. Remote-controlled bulldozers and hundreds of thousands of young soldiers labored during the weeks and months following the disaster to do the only thing that could be done: every tree and every twig lies buried beneath the desolate surface of that plot of tortured land."

From the first leaks of news about the disaster, Soviet officials began downplaying its severity — more aggressively than the United States had done after TMI. It is ironic that a government would use the word "control" to describe the aftermath of an incident that was itself the product of a catastrophic loss of control. The Soviets claimed that radiation danger to cleanup workers was under control and that their risk was minimal. In reality:

"The radioactive plume rose an estimated eight kilometers, and the graphite core burned for days. Five thousand tons of quenching materials were dropped from helicopters, but this increased the temperature of the nuclear core and spread the radioactive cloud over an even vaster area. Eighteen days later, Gorbachev acknowledged the accident on Soviet television. Tens of thousands of people had by then been exposed to radioactive iodine-131, resulting in a massive incidence of thyroid cancers, many of which might have been avoided had iodine pills been distributed in the first week. In the years that followed, more than 600,000 military and civilian personnel were put at risk in the course of cleanup operations and the construction of a 'sarcophagus' to entomb the reactor, which is now surrounded by a 30-kilometer exclusion zone. Nearly nine percent of the territory of Ukraine — and 23 percent of neighboring Belarus — is considered contaminated; around five percent of Ukraine's population (3.5 million people) are classified as 'sufferers,' and more than half a million were resettled. Estimates put the death toll from Chernobyl-related illness between 1993 and 1996 at over 100,000."

Five years after Chernobyl, the poorly designed reactors used only in the Soviet Union continued to operate. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), established in 1955 with a mandate from the United Nations General Assembly to assess and report on the health effects of ionizing radiation, did not issue a report directly addressing Chernobyl until 2000. Before that time, the UN — like other governments and reporting bodies worldwide — was forced to accept official Soviet statements on the accident and its aftermath. In truth, it was never strictly necessary to rely on Soviet reporting, since every major power in Europe and North America had the technical capacity to monitor actual radiation and fallout data. When we say the Soviets covered up the truth, the rest of the world was complicit in that cover-up.

The decision to remain silent on Chernobyl amounted to an unspoken agreement to withhold from the public the information needed to pursue legal or political recourse. Even had affected civilians in the Soviet Union sought damages, such claims would have fallen on deaf ears — and would fare little better under the post-Soviet Russian government.

Of the 600 workers present on the site during the early morning of April 26, 1986, 134 received high doses and suffered from acute radiation sickness. Of these, 28 died within the first three months and 2 died shortly afterward. Approximately 200,000 recovery operation workers received doses between 0.01 and 0.5 Gray — a group at potential risk for long-term consequences such as cancer, whose health continues to be monitored.

Many of the recovery workers were poorly advised about the severity of what they were doing. Numerous workers did not use proper protective equipment; they were young, felt invincible, and did not fully understand the nature of the hazard they faced. The radionuclides responsible for the greatest radiation exposure were mainly iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137, each of which attacks the body differently. However, at the levels of exposure present during the cleanup, the distinctions between specific radionuclides mattered little to workers who ignored proper protection — their exposure would have been lethal regardless.

Belarus, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation were all severely impacted. Fifteen years after the incident, medical cases continued to be attributed to Chernobyl. By that point, 1,800 cases of thyroid cancer had been reported in the three most severely affected areas. Experts caution against attributing all cancers in the region to the incident, but carefully documented cases are invaluable: the affected populations have become involuntary subjects in the study of radiation contamination, helping scientists understand the body's response to radiation exposure across different doses and timescales. The conditions directly associated with Chernobyl exposure, as identified thirteen years after the event, include:

Spontaneous miscarriages resulting from developmental disturbances in fetuses; retarded mental development in children resulting from disturbances during fetal development of the central nervous system; damage to the immune system leading to higher susceptibility to infectious and non-infectious diseases in adults and children (loss of immunity in the contaminated areas has been called "Chernobyl AIDS"); disturbances to human endocrine systems; cancers that increase in incidence several years after the onset of radiation exposure; accelerated aging of individual organs as well as the entire human body; increases in cataracts, viral infections such as hepatitis, thyroid cancers, diseases of the blood, and diseases of the respiratory system including tuberculosis; and retarded sexual development and irregularities in the menstrual cycle.

Other conditions have also been directly associated with Chernobyl. Of the animal populations in the affected area, 14 to 20 percent of mammals were found to be unaffected by the radiation, while 10 to 20 percent had a hypersensitive reaction to exposure.

There remains the serious and unresolved problem of disposing of radioactive waste from Chernobyl and other reactor sites around the globe. Warnings about this problem were sounded long before it became acute, but warnings about future problems are seldom heeded by governments. Today, decades later, the problems associated with radioactive waste and cleanup are very real. Radioactive waste outlasts the generation that created it — it is an inherited burden that our grandchildren's children will still face, and perhaps their children as well. Chernobyl must be considered a nuclear wasteland, uninhabitable for the foreseeable future, but one that should continue to be studied.

Looking to lessons learned from Chernobyl, and even from TMI, international pacts against nuclear proliferation have been put into place that limit above-ground nuclear testing and prohibit the detonation of nuclear devices in space and in the oceans. The problem with the agreements hammered out in the post-TMI and post-Chernobyl era is that many of the nations that are today nuclear-capable were not participants in those agreements. Nations such as North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and India are all players in nuclear programs that have not yet experienced — at least not that we know of — nuclear disasters on the scale of those in the United States and Russia. One of the most important lessons from the world's nuclear disaster experiences is that we must bring these newer players into the broader framework of understanding: nuclear disasters and radioactive waste endure long after political disputes and even the people who caused them have passed.

Environmental justice is concerned first and foremost with the distribution of environmental risks and harms across individuals and social groups. As one analysis frames it:

"Normally the issue can be captured in spatial terms; somebody, somewhere is getting dumped on, and somebody, somewhere else is benefiting. That dumping may come in the form of toxic waste disposal, the siting of noxious facilities, destruction of local ecosystems through mining, logging, or intensive export-oriented agriculture, the expropriation of local biological knowledge, and so forth. The theory of democracy suggests that if the people being dumped on can achieve political equality with those who benefit from the harms inflicted upon them, then they are more able to take preventive action."

Conclusion

Just as the United States and other countries monitor the nuclear arms programs of foreign nations, we should be equally concerned about how those same countries build and operate their nuclear power plants. As Chernobyl has taught us, nuclear power accidents pose a threat as large as that of nuclear war. In the wake of Chernobyl, we continue to deal with the effects of what is essentially a form of nuclear warfare waged upon the environment. We must demand oversight and credible assurances that plants are safe.

While there is no way to force a conscience upon the nuclear industry, we can impose rules and regulations that the industry must meet or face closure. As more and more natural resources and alternative energies are discovered and developed, the hope is that one day we can safely shut down all nuclear energy plants and leave the legacy of Chernobyl as a final, cautionary chapter in the history of nuclear power.