- Title: UKRAINE / FILE: Chernobyl veteran recalls nuclear accident in Soviet Ukraine
- Date: 19th March 2011
- Summary: COMPUTER SCREEN
- Embargoed: 3rd April 2011 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Ukraine
- Country: Ukraine
- Topics: International Relations
- Reuters ID: LVARIBQDPFX4X1RN48T6LTH3TBE
- Story Text: If there is one person outside Japan who knows what the crisis workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant are going through now it is 64-year-old Andriy Chudinov.
Chudinov was one of the first Chernobyl trouble-shooters to get to the disaster site of the world's worst nuclear accident in 1986 and one of the few who survived. Chudinov looks back on those traumatic events with calmness, sadness and resignation.
"There was no fear. I think nobody was thinking about fear back then," Chudinov recalled. "People were working till the end. We were saving the station. If saying it in heroic language, frankly speaking we saved Europe too. Because nobody knew what could happen next, if we did not stop the first, the second and the third block," he told Reuters on Friday (March 18).
It remains to be seen whether the Japanese drama will take on the proportions of Chernobyl, when tonnes of nuclear material were spewed across Europe after an explosion and fire at the plant's No. 4 reactor.
The world was different then. It was the Cold War when Ukraine was part of the secretive Soviet Union and Moscow withheld the truth about the disaster for three days.
Chudinov was one of a huge army of workers -- many of them soldiers -- whom Soviet authorities sent in to tackle the Chernobyl disaster which resulted from a test of cooling systems at the plant.
The experiment, which involved demobilising safety systems, went horribly wrong and a series of explosions in the early hours of April 26, 1986, blew the concrete roof off the reactor and sent radioactivity billowing across Europe.
Those drafted in to handle the crisis at risk to their own lives became known as the "liquidators".
Chudinov was a senior operator at reactor No. 3 -- next to the stricken reactor -- at the plant at Prypyat on Ukraine's northern border with Belarus. His shift started the next day after the explosion, and when he was going to work that day, he already knew what had happened.
"I can not say I did not know (about the danger). I understood everything quite clearly. And other people understood everything too, the engineers, everybody knew. We were fulfilling our civic duty, there could be no other way. We needed to work and we worked," Chudinov said.
Back then, there was little protective clothing to hand to shield against radiation. People worked in regular clothes and respirators, exposed to enormous amounts of radiation, Chudinov remembered.
The official short-term death toll from the accident was 31 but many more people died of radiation-related sicknesses such as cancer. The total death toll and long-term health effects remain a subject of intense debate even 25 years after the disaster though a U.N. 2008 report concluded that only a few thousand people had died as a result.
Now Chudinov is on a pension and suffering from a blood condition which he attributes to radiation effects.
"Later many went away because of illnesses, lots of people. I will not tell you numbers, because it is not ethical to talk about numbers here, it is not ethical to count, but there was time when we buried our people almost every month," he said.
He applauded the workers who are fighting to bring Japan's quake-damaged nuclear reactors under control.
"One can only sympathise with people who suffered from this accident (at Fukushima). But they are professionals, and they are doing their job. They are great, they are heroes, this is the way to do it. Without people like that the state will not survive. They are doing everything they can to minimise the consequenses of this accident."
Chernobyl "liquidators" and their families have benefitted from tax breaks, cheap re-housing, enhanced pensions and other privileges over the years. However, the Japanese drama, evoking memories of 1986, brought complains from Chernobyl workers about government neglect. Some of them recently protested in the centre of the Ukrainian capital against cancellation of free medical treatment and medicine for the nuclear accident veterans. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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