UKRAINE: Twenty years on, the Chernobyl nuclear accident continues to pose long-term health risks to the people in the region

Record ID: 215970

  • Title: UKRAINE: Twenty years on, the Chernobyl nuclear accident continues to pose long-term health risks to the people in the region
  • Date: 21st April 2006
  • Summary: CLOSE-UP OF YOUNG BOY, SMILING AND THEN LYING DOWN IN HIS BED
  • Embargoed: 6th May 2006 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Ukraine
  • Country: Ukraine
  • Topics: Disasters / Accidents / Natural catastrophes
  • Reuters ID: LVA807133FJRWAAEQ3RSQ3YIDN5J
  • Story Text: On the face of it, Olga Rudchenko lives a typical pensioners' life in the Ukrainian countryside.
    The 71-year-old tries to be as self-sufficient as possible, keeping domestic birds and making ends meet by selling fresh milk from a cow she keeps, and eggs her chickens lay.
    "Nothing is going to happen to you if you drink this milk!," Rudchenko reassuringly tells a neighbour as she pours her a glass of milk.
    The sprightly pensioner lives in the town of Chernobyl, 15 km (9.3 miles) from the site of the world's worst nuclear accident.
    Rudchenko's family was among 200,000 residents evacuated after an explosion ripped through the Chernobyl nuclear power station on April 26, 1986.
    She and her husband, Andriy, defied a government ban and returned 12 years ago to live in the contaminated land.
    "I pray to God that you (the young generation) will not experience such a catastrophe; I wouldn't even wish it on my worst enemy," she said, recalling her memories of evacuation.
    But Rudchenko is happy to be back in Chernobyl town.
    A town of 9,000, it now boasts several offices, three shops, a bar and a Soviet-style canteen -- despite being in an exclusion zone where settlement is banned. It is surrounded by rich, green forests, teeming with wildlife.
    "Some people never left this place at all; they were hiding somewhere. I know others started coming back a year or two shortly after the accident, initially for work but then they settled back and now they don't want to leave this place at all," said Lydia Vedrnikova, who returned to Chernobyl almost nine years ago.
    Lydia's daughter Maria, now 7, was born at home, as Lydia and her husband feared authorities may bar them from going back to their home in Chernobyl with a newly-born child if she had given birth in a maternity hospital.
    "We hope more life will come back to this place; there is a church here now and healthy children are being born again," Lydia said at her home in Chernobyl.
    Despite the ban, several hundred people, some of them elderly, have returned to their homes in Chernobyl and nearby villages.
    And authorities have turned a blind eye, helping those who have returned with food and electricity.
    But for millions around the world, Chernobyl symbolises disaster and devastation, myth and controversy.
    On April 26, 1986, several explosions destroyed reactor No. 4 at the plant, turning it into a radioactive inferno that sent a lethal plume into the night sky.
    The Soviet government acknowledged the accident two days later -- after the fallout set off radiation alarms in Sweden.
    The blaze raged for 10 days. Radioactive material was deposited as far away as Japan and the United States.
    Two decades later, and 5 1/2 years after Chernobyl's last reactor was shut down, the area around the plant is alive with reminders of the disaster.
    The 30-km (19-mile) exclusion zone is patrolled by police and Ukraine's Emergencies Ministry. Counters show radiation in some areas far above the norm, while other villages display levels lower than in Kiev, 80 km (50 miles) to the south.
    The town of Pripyat, 2 km (1.24 miles) built to house plant workers, is still deserted -- the day after the accident, 50,000 residents were evacuated in just six hours.
    In empty apartments with gaping, glassless windows, clothes, shoes, dolls, books and family photos lie scattered.
    Debate still rages about the human cost of the accident.
    This week, environmental group Greenpeace said the eventual death toll could be far higher than official estimates with up to 93,000 cancer deaths attributable to the disaster.
    The World Health Organisation puts at 4,000 the number of extra deaths in the worst-hit areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, with 5,000 in less affected zones.
    Ukrainian doctors, who have observed patients exposed to radiation for 20 years, point to a dramatic rise in thyroid cancer among those who were children in 1986.
    Thyroid cancer can be treated if detected early. Mobile laboratories conduct checks in villages and towns near the exclusion zone.
    A Reuters team travelling in the Chernobyl region, came across one such mobile medical team at a clinic in the town of Ivankiv, on the edge of the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
    In Ivankiv, as in many other places in the area, unemployment is high and most residents worry more about making ends meet than about their health.
    Doctors fear for the future.
    "It has been 20 years since the Chernobyl accident but I think Ukraine will continue to suffer the consequences of the catastrophe for many more years," said doctor Grigory Klymniyuk, Chief of the paediatric department at Kiev's Cancer Research Clinic.
    "I believe that a new generation of children will continue to be at risk from serious illnesses, including cancers," added Klymniyuk.
    The government and Western donors have focused attention on securing the crumbling concrete and steel sarcophagus.
    The actual process of making the plant safe will take many years. Officials have said the last fuel rods will not be taken away until 2008 and it will be between 30 and 100 years before the station is completely decommissioned.
    Hundreds of staff toiled through the night after the blasts which struck just after one in the morning. Tens of thousands of soldiers, firefighters and engineers were dispatched and tonnes of material ferried in to build a shelter around the reactor.
    Many received huge radiation doses. Some died instantly. Others suffered agonising deaths in hospitals in Kiev or Moscow.
    There were no official records of the doses received by the hundreds of thousands of "liquidators" who buried contaminated machinery and cleaned up poisoned land, forests and rivers in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus.
    Their efforts to contain the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster will be remembered at ceremonies planned for next week in Chernobyl and Kiev.
    In Chernobyl town, municipal workers have been cleaning up a monument to the "liquidators", as preparations are made for the commemorative events on April 26. END
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