The clean-up of Chernobyl

[Music] Hello and welcome to Witness History from the BBC World Service with me Tim Elkhalahan. If you're already a regular listener you can skip ahead of it to get to today's story. But if you're new here, welcome along. We're the Daily Podcast that takes you back to a moment from history with the people who are there. Episodes are just nine minutes long, so if that sounds like something that should be part of your daily listening, then make sure you subscribe and turn on your push notifications for wherever you get your BBC podcasts, so you never miss an episode. [Music] It's the early hours of the 26th of April 1986, and a disaster is unfolding that will impact hundreds of thousands of people. A test simulating a blackout at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant about 130 km north of Kiev in the Soviet Union causes an explosion in reactor four. The 1,000 ton steel roof has been blown off the reactor, which is now throwing clouds of radioactive material over the nearby area. You may remember that it was Friday night when the disaster happened, and on the following Sunday, it was Easter Sunday, and people were celebrating. It was very sort of cheerful atmosphere, and I only found out and heard about the disaster on the morning of the Monday. Yuri Skeletsky is a military radiological officer in the Soviet Union Navy based in the city of Abinsk, just over a thousand kilometers from Chernobyl. The city contains a number of major nuclear centers. Our radiological department was monitoring the radioactivity of the outside environment. This gentleman who was working under me, he was a chemical engineer, and he told me that in the latest samples that they got and measured via the gamma spectrometer, they noticed higher levels of radiation. Initially, the Soviet Union tries to cover up what's happening in Chernobyl, but on the 28th of April an official announcement is made on state television, and it begins to make headlines around the world. The Soviet Union said today that an accident has damaged an atomic reactor at a power plant near Kiev. The admission came after complaints from Scandinavian countries of a dramatic increase in radioactivity. Meanwhile, the Soviet authorities are evacuating the town, which housed the families of workers at the power plant, Pripyat. Loudspeakers call out for people's attention and inform them that some form of accident occurred at the power station, and nearly 50,000 people rushed to pat what they can and make their way out on buses, thinking they'll be gone from their homes for just a few weeks. As their leaving, thousands of soldiers, workers from the power plant and others are going in the opposite direction, heading into the contaminated zone to clean up. They are known as the liquidators. The first time I was tasked to go to the Chernobyl power plant itself was at the start of August 1986, and my task during this work trip was to check the medical state of the military who were involved in the liquidation and the cleanup. You know what? It was incredibly sad because the town had only just been abandoned by its population. The nuclear power plant was surrounded by this wonderful town that had wonderful nature and also a wonderful forest, and all of that was having a devastating effect on you. Around 40,000 liquidators are cleaning the roofs of houses, streets and wells, but Yuri believes that too many of them were sent there too soon. In my opinion, this wasn't right because this spillage was continuing at that time. By spillage Yuri means that the exposed reactor in the power plant isn't fully covered up, so radioactive material is still escaping. We had not established this scale of the deactivation works and the technology of this deactivation, such a big group of people were already relocated there before we established all of those and were already exposed to the radiation without being given concrete work. When reactor 4 exploded on the 26th of April, the debris from the core scattered around the power plant, the majority of it is still on the roofs of reactor 4 and the neighboring reactor 3. This needs to be cleared in order to construct a sarcophagus, basically a huge steel and concrete structure over the building to contain the radioactive material that's still escaping. Initially, the liquidators tried to use robots to clear the debris, but the intense gamma radiation causes them to break down, so bio robots are used instead, or as they're more commonly known. Humans. The level of radioactivity was so great that each man would be allowed to work for a single two-minute period. They'd have to rush in and rush out. Up on the reactor roof, they had to clear the highly radioactive debris blown out of the core. Amazingly, the process of cleaning the roof of the reactors is filmed, and in 1996, Valery Stardomov, who led the operation, spoke to a BBC documentary about what the liquidators had to do. All this rubble on the ground is left over from the explosion of the reactor's graphite core. The soldiers are having to walk over the radioactive. It's clear it was everyone's duties to reduce the dangers after the explosion. I'm the father of two, and I knew that the accident was particularly risky for our children because of the long-term consequences. Along the way we left it to deal with this time bomb, the more unpredictable those consequences are going to be. Yuri's job is to check that soldiers aren't being overexposed to radiation. The level in the atmosphere on the roof is around 1000 ronskins, which is an extremely dangerous amount to be exposed to. But it isn't putting off anyone who's asked to go up there. There was virtually zero rejection rate from the military who were tasked to do this. The ones who were involved in this were receiving a salary that was five times more than normal, and that was financial reward for being involved in it. The men wear carcagrean boiler suits with hoods and pieces of leather attached to various parts of their bodies. Led foil, which would be worn at the front and back, improvised lead pans like underwear, insoles that were put in the shoes that were also made of lead and glasses. The men also wear hard hats and respiratory masks. It's all improvised kits, the Soviet Union don't have proper radiation suits to protect the soldiers. Despite the level of radiation the men are being exposed to on the roof, and the makeshift protective gear that they're wearing, Yuri and his team don't find any evidence of overexposure during their medical observations of the liquidators when they return from their shift on the reactor roof. However, as the years go by, health conditions start to arise amongst the people involved in the cleanup of the Chernobyl site. We had a National Science Center of Radiation Medicine set up in Kiev, which was specifically created for investigating the medical biological problems of the consequences of the disaster. And we registered spikes in malignant diseases of blood in the liquidators, or the people involved in the cleanup who were working there in years 86, 87. And we also registered and it is still observing spikes in occurrences of thyroid cancer, in those who were under 18 at the time of the disaster. The total number of deaths amongst the liquidators who died as a result of their efforts to clean the environment around Chernobyl is debated with estimates ranging from 4,000 to more than 100,000. Around 600,000 people were given liquidator status, entitling them to benefits such as extra healthcare and pay from former countries of the Soviet Union. Yuri Skeletsky was speaking to me Timokhalahann for witness history. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode interesting, there are some others in our archive that you might enjoy listening to, including the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, more background on how the disaster unfolded, and also the rock concert for Chernobyl, which raised money for victims. You can find those episodes and more in the witness history feed, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. to write a story about how we came up with the idea for the red and yellow cards. I got to go. We cried a bit. We laughed a bit. It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carry your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Supporting Witness, subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.