Reactors 1, 2, and 3 are still operating. The wires above us chatter with electricity-part of the electrical power that still flows from the nation`s 56 reactors. But work has permanently stopped on Reactors 5 and 6, under construction here when the accident occurred. Their cooling towers, partly finished, stand like abandoned volcanoes. Nearby, 12 construction cranes puncture the skyline, too hot to use.
But the focus of vision here is the No. 4 reactor. In the months following the blast, the Soviets built three cement plants nearby. Then, boxing the damaged reactor inside high concrete walls, they pumped 2,000 tons of concrete a day over the top until the box was full. The cement trucks themselves, drawing up close to the box, could work only a month before becoming so radioactive that they had to be buried. The box, now covered with a gambrel roof of black metal, is aptly called ”the sarcophagus.”
Trees turned red
Stretching westward from the sarcophagus for about a mile, where the wind was blowing that April night three years ago, is a vast expanse of open land, sparsely planted with a low, weedy ground cover. The thick forest of pines that once stood here, says Golubyov, turned red and died. They were cut down and buried, along with the remains of some 40 maintenance buildings. All that`s left on this dusty plain is a tiny flag-decked graveyard with two dead pines. One has an unusually fat limb thrusting out horizontally about 10 feet above the ground, used by the Nazis during World War II to hang members of the Ukrainian resistance. It was left standing when the forest was cut as a wartime monument.
Back in the van, we cross a bridge into Pripyat, once home to more than 30,000 workers associated with the power plant. Like military bases everywhere, it is laid out in a neat grid. Along them, dozens of five-story apartment blocks stand peeling and empty, the porch of each unit painted a different pastel shade. We pass a corner store, behind whose grimy plate-glass windows stand heaps of abandoned television sets. Except for some crows circling the pines at the end of the street, our van is the only moving thing in sight.
Until, that is, we round a corner and approach a large apartment block obviously still in use. This, Golubyov explains, houses some of the 850-member Spetsatom force. Working 15-day shifts at Chernobyl, they then retreat out of the zone for 15 days, usually to Kiev or Moscow. Joining them in the zone on similar shifts are the 2,500 workers at the power plant, the 4,000 employees of Kombinat (the industrial consortium charged with cleaning up the area), and some 3,000 military personnel.
`Soviet Green Berets`
Before entering the building, we rinse our shoes in a shallow pan by the door. Then we follow Golubyov through a maze of drab stairways and corridors to a suite of rooms that stands in almost surreal contrast to the world outside: rich paneling, red cloth wall covering, a large portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev above the desk, and a long polished table set about with bottles of mineral water, orange soda and the ever-present Pepsi-Cola.
This is the office of Yuri Samoilenko, head of Spetsatom, Golubyov`s boss. A pleasant-faced, middle-aged man with a wife and son in Kiev, he too was at Chernobyl when it blew. He had spoken with us two days earlier in Kiev, so today`s briefing is short. A flip chart shows some of the 54 different robotic vehicles now being designed by Spetsatom, vehicles he now knows they needed to manage the emergency in 1986.
”We`re very young, we have many problems,” he explains. ”We need American experience.” There is a feeling of urgency-of working against time, economics and international mistrust-to prepare his country to cope more adroitly with such an accident, should it happen again.
And could it happen again? Grigory Nadjarnich, the tall, youthful radiochemist who directs scientific research at Spetsatom, points out that in the 30 years that nuclear reactors have been in operation throughout the world, there have been 155 accidents. Most have been minor, and most have been contained. ”Will there be another Chernobyl-size accident?” he is asked.
”The probability is one every 10 years,” he replies. He says it with a slight shrug, as though to indicate that math, not human opinion, is talking. That`s why he works here, he says: What he does matters in ways that mere laboratory work never could. ”This is not academy,” he says in slightly broken English. ”We have a living job here.”
It`s a job that demands, and rewards, an entrepreneurial spirit. As a result, the zone is a kind of free space, carved out of the heart of a nation renowned for its red tape. In ways almost unknown in Soviet society, Samoilenko and Golubyov and their colleagues are laws unto themselves. Well-educated men, combinations of astronaut and cowboy, they are the Green Berets, the Delta Force, the Special Operations Team of the Soviet Union.
”Bureaucracy,” says Golubyov with a slight smile, ”doesn`t get in the way here.” Case in point: our visit.
On a Sunday night, after watching a videotape of the cleanup operation at Samoilenko`s apartment in Kiev, we had asked to visit Chernobyl: eight American nonspecialists, only the introduction of close mutual friends for entree. Samoilenko agreed. Wheels began to turn. By Tuesday morning, the Ministry of Nuclear Energy in Moscow had flashed its green light. That afternoon we were at Chernobyl.
Why the quick agreement? Because one thing is clear above all: The Soviets want their story told. They want the world to know about the cleanup, the heroism, the tragedy, the regret at their three-day silence when it happened, and their newfound determination to share more information.
Chernobyl has changed, probably forever, the face of nuclear power in the Soviet Union. Before the reactor blew, there were robust plans for an expansion of nuclear power: up from the current 11.5 percent of the nation`s electricity production to 21 percent by the end of the present five-year plan in 1990. (Comparable figures are 19.6 percent for the United States, almost 30 percent for Japan, and more than 70 percent for France.)
Before it blew, too, there was only a fledgling environmental movement in the Soviet Union. That movement has steadily strengthened. It has already mustered enough public opinion to force the abandonment of partly constructed reactors at Chigirin, in the Ukraine, and in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar. Last September, too, some 20,000 Lithuanian protesters held hands in a circle around the half-built Ignalina nuclear power plant at Drukshay Lake, eventually forcing authorities to end construction. Samoilenko himself has close friends among the anti-nuclear crowd.
Still, his mission is to ponder nuclear energy constantly. Chernobyl was the worst radiation disaster in history. It far exceeded the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, which occurred within a containment dome. And while the atom bomb at Hiroshima did far more explosive damage, it released only a fraction of the radiation that escaped at Chernobyl.
A flip chart in Samoilenko`s office shows drawings of 54 robots, from small humanlike objects to huge remote-operated cranes, dump trucks and amphibious dredges.
These, plus a fleet of conventional vehicles and airplanes already in place, will eventually constitute the Spetsatom hardware. It will be operated by a team of 1,500 people: radiation chemists, robotics engineers, nuclear physicists, ecologists, computer technicians, drivers and mechanics. Of these, 830 are already at work, the balance to be added by the end of the year. This elite force is designed to reach any disaster in this sprawling nation within 24 hours.
In the future, Spetsatom officials hope to sell its services to other nations. Contacts have already been made with Italy and France, Golubyov says. ”Our service, when developed properly, will help (in the aftermath of) all accidents abroad,” he says.
Spetsatom is budgeting 4 million rubles ($6.7 million) in design costs for each of the 54 robots, and is lining up Soviet industries to help construct them. So far, however, most of the robots are still in the planning stages. The reason: The best robotic technology is in the West.
”To do what they`re up to, they need a technology that`s beyond them,”
says William (Red) Whittaker, a leading U.S. robotics engineer who designed robotic equipment for Three Mile Island and visited the Spetsatom team at Chernobyl. He praises Spetsatom personnel, however, for their ”sincerity, drive, commitment,” and notes that the United States has nothing comparable to the highly centralized emergency response team envisioned for Spetsatom.
For the battered Soviet economy, turning that vision into reality is not easy. ”We have no convertible currency to buy robotic equipment,” Samoilenko says.
In addition, he notes, some of the most needed equipment is embargoed by the West because it has military applications. Whittaker, director of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, notes that because nuclear warfare still a threat, ”electronics and computing ideas that survive radiation exposure have got to be very high on anyone`s list.”
”Exactly what you need to survive day-in, day-out work in a setting like the sarcophagus is maybe what you need to survive in a post-attack scenario,” he says.
There are 14 other reactors of the RBMK (water-cooled, graphite-moderated) design used at Chernobyl: 12 in the USSR, and one each in Britain and Japan. ”To my mind,” says Samoilenko, ”that type of reactor is dangerous, and I think it was a big mistake to construct them.”
Back on the road to Chernobyl, wolves are more common now that the land is empty. So are fish. Golubyov, slipping into Spanish (he once spent three years in Cuba in the military), talks about fishing in the nearby woodland streams. A rare grin lights his face as he holds up his hands to describe a two-foot-long fish.
Can you eat them? someone asks. ”Si, si!” he replies, explaining that the moving water flushes the radiation out of the streams. The only problem is getting to the fishing holes through the still-hot forests. No one asks whether Golubyov worries about taking the extra doses of radiation involved in a woodland trek. No one has to.
