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MICHAEL BARNES QC, the inspector in charge of an inquiry in Britain
into whether to build a pressurised-water reactor at Hinkley Point in Somerset,
is visiting Chernobyl to learn at first hand how the Soviet authorities
are dealing with the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear accident. Barnes
was accompanied by expert assessors from the Hinkley hearing and representatives
of the main participants at the inquiry into the Central Electricity Generating
Board’s proposal to build a PWR.

Pressure is mounting in the Soviet Union for a national programme to
tackle the continuing problems caused by the accident at Chernobyl three
years ago. Despite spending 5 billion roubles (Pounds sterling 5 billion)
on cleanup operations and compensation, support for victims and monitoring
of radioactivity in the affected areas will be needed for decades.

There is also a growing crisis of confidence in officials who dismiss
reports of birth defects in farm animals and increased ill health in contaminated
areas as ‘radiophobia’. This fear has manifested itself partly in a huge
and unsatisfied demand for radiation counters.

A recent decision to evacuate a further 25 villages outside the original
exclusion zone, which had a radius of 30 kilometres around the stricken
nuclear reactor, has sent a wave of anxiety through nearby areas. Twenty
of the newly evacuated villages are in Byelorussia and five in Ukraine.

The decision was taken on the basis of a new standard adopted at the
end of last year which set 0.35 sieverts as the limit for the cumulative
radiation dose which any individual should receive in their lifetime.

The residents of many villages can stay within this limit only if they
reject locally-grown produce and eat uncontaminated food brought in from
outside. The villagers are given 25 per cent extra in their wages and receive
subsidies of 30 roubles a month to help them to pay for the food. They also
receive monthly medical checks.

More than 10 000 square kilometres are affected including 2000 square
kilometres in Russia and 1500 square kilometres in Ukraine (mainly the Narodichi
district). But most of the affected villages are in an area of Byelorussia
between Gomel and Mogilev, which supports 103 000 people.

It was almost a year after the accident when Soviet officials first
revealed that Byelorussia to the north of Chernobyl had borne the brunt
of the radioactive fallout. Some 18 per cent of the republic’s territory,
with a population of 500 000, is contaminated, including a fifth of its
agricultural land.

The task facing the republic in the wake of the accident was enormous.
The 92 000 people evacuated from the exclusion zone needed new homes and
a massive decontamination operation was essential to make other areas relatively
safe.

A great deal has been done in the past three years to limit dangers
posed by the radiation. The stricken reactor is now encased in a concrete
sarcophagus and huge underground concrete ‘walls’ that prevent radioactivity
from seeping into the nearby River Pripyat.

The state has built some 21 000 new houses and 15 000 new flats for
the evacuees, and paid them more than 900 million roubles in compensation
for belongings left behind. It has constructed a complete new town called
Slavutich, some 50 kilometres from Chernobyl, to house those involved in
the decontamination programme and in operating the remaining reactors.

Some 36 hectares of land around the stricken reactor is paved to prevent
radioactive dust underneath from blowing away across the countryside, and
1 million cubic metres of contaminated topsoil has been removed and buried.
Engineers have planted vegetation elsewhere to anchor soils and they have
cut down and replanted contaminated forests.

Medical services have set up clinics in Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia
and established a new All-Union Radiological Medical Research Centre at
Kiev, the nearest major city. More than 5 million people receive regular
checks and a special data bank contains files on the 600 000 who were evacuated
or who still live in contaminated areas. They receive checks twice a year
for abnormalities in their chromosomes and lymphocytes (white blood cells).

While some officials and experts offer reassurance that everything is
under control, the media have unearthed evidence that the help reaching
the affected areas is both inadequate and misdirected. Pravda, the newspaper
of the Communist Party, first called attention to the problem over a year
ago. Certain leaders, especially those far away from the scene of the accident,
were taking ‘a false view of the situation, believing that the worst is
over’, it said. Then an article in Moscow News last February described congenital
abnormalities among farm animals in the contaminated Narodichi district
of the Ukraine and increasing health problems in the area.

In April, Nikolai Loshilov, the director of the Ukrainian Branch of
the All Union Institute of Agricultural Radiology, said that the abnormalities
were not caused by radiation. A special commission had concluded that background
radiation and contamination of feed was well below the danger level, he
said.

In May, Moscow News published a letter signed by Konstantin Gordeyev,
deputy director of the USSR Ministry of Public Health’s Institute of Biophysics,
and others, who accused the paper of being ‘sensationalist’ and again insisted
that levels of radiation at the affected farms were too low to cause problems.
There were no ‘documentary data’ on the 64 deformed animals described in
the article and ‘no objective reason to fear for people’s health’.

It attributed general increases in ill health to better diagnosis and
to ageing of the population. It blamed thyroid problems among children in
certain districts on a lack of iodine in soils and water, and said that
a twofold increase in cancers of the lip and mouth was ‘within the limits
of possible fluctuations’.

In an editorial comment, Moscow News pointed out that while the letter
by Gordeyev was being prepared for publication, officials decided to evacuate
three villages in the affected district of Narodichi. It asked: ‘If there
is no danger, why are they being evacuated?’

The newspaper said that it had obtained written testimony from one farm
where a third of the animals had been born with deformities. It noted that
doctors from Kiev were not as well qualified to comment on the increased
sickness rate as local physicians: ‘Who should know better the difference
between past and present conditions if not those who have lived here for
years?’ it said.

A letter signed by 135 people on behalf of eight villages in the Narodichi
district and sent to the paper said that children’s health had deteriorated.
They ‘often feel low and indisposed’ and ‘experience headaches and deteriorating
eyesight’. There have also been ‘instances of loss of consciousness and
more frequent cases of bone fractures’. School attendance has been badly
affected. The residents said that ‘knowing it should not be done, we feed
our children with products from out kitchen gardens because . . . there
is a shortage of clean products in the shops’.

Stepan Vasilyuk, chief agronomist of the local Luginsky district agro-industrial
association, says that only 10 of the 50 settlements have been transferred
to the ‘strict regime’ where uncontaminated products are brought in several
times a month. Even in these villages, ‘shipments are not enough and this
is why we have to use local contaminated products’.

Vasilyuk points out that local people have no means to check radiation
levels themselves. ‘The competent specialists who come to us as members
of commissions recommend – confidentially of course – that we leave the
zone if possible.’

One problem noted by residents has been the hurried departure of doctors
from contaminated areas. According to Nikolai Panchik at the Bragin central
hospital, 34 specialists left in the first two years after the accident.
‘Half of them simply ran away.’

Regular medical checks provide little comfort for villagers because
they never receive the results. Moscow News says that its correspondent,
Vladimir Kolinko, who wrote the story about Narodichi, ‘has repeatedly undergone
medical treatment at the radiation medicine centre but has been unable to
obtain any data about himself’.

Kolinko’s original article provoked letters from other contaminated
regions. One, signed by more than 500 people from Gomel in Byelorussia,
complained about the shortage of ‘clean’ products, the lack of individual
dosimeters and the inadequacy of medical equipment.

Mikhail Kolesev, Chairman of Byelorussia’s Council of Ministers, is
concerned about the safety of farm workers in contaminated fields. The government
has failed to meet demand for the special hermetically-sealed tractor cabins
equipped with instruments and chemicals to monitor and neutralise contamination,
he says.

Despite official assurances that there is no serious health hazard and
that no more than 1000 extra deaths from cancer are to be expected as a
result of the Chernobyl accident, some officials now admit that there may
be cause for greater concern.

The Ukrainian Health Ministry admitted in March that the incidence of
sickness among children had risen sharply and the rate of abortions had
increased. And Pravda reported on 29 May that levels of radioactive contamination
in Kiev, Zhitomir, Gomel, Mogilev and Bryansk were presenting medical and
other services with ‘difficult safety problems’.

At the beginning of June, a group of people’s deputies from Byelorussia
sent a letter to Boris Shcherbina, deputy chairman of the government’s commission
for mitigating the effects of the Chernobyl accident, demanding action.
They said radioactive contamination in Gomel and Mogilev was ‘critical’
and that the lack of action was having ‘an extremely negative and demoralising
psychological impact on the population.’