This week marked the anniversary of a very dark chapter in the region’s history. The meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in April 1986 was for decades considered the worst disaster of its kind, until it was matched in 2011 by a similar accident in Fukushima, Japan.
The Chernobyl disaster released at least 100 times more radiation than BOTH the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The real effect of the Chernobyl tragedy is still, thirty years later, a mystery to many environmental, medical and industrial experts in this part of Europe.
I have interviewed a number of my colleagues here at Radio Poland, who told me what it was like in the aftermath of the disaster.
Let me start with the recollections of a fellow journalist from the Ukrainian section of this team, who remembers that on that fateful day, his engineer father was alerted by friends in the industry that “something very serious had happened at a nuclear power plant”. His father, unsurprisingly took the news to heart, and ordered his son (my colleague) to stay home that day and not play in the yard.
They turned on the television and waited. At first the screen showed cartoon after cartoon to while the time away, and by the time it got dark there had been no mention of anything amiss at any nuclear power plant in Ukraine. It turned out later that the Soviet Union bigwigs had at first tried to bury the story. Still, despite any news the family did not let the issue pass.
The next day the father managed to get his hands on a Geiger counter – you must remember he was an engineer in the energy industry, and my friend, who must have been six or seven at the time, played with the device, testing apples and sofas, and televisions, waiting for the familiar ticking sound of radiation. He clearly remembers his father telling him that “radiation cannot be seen or felt, but it can be heard.” After a thorough combing of their modest apartment, with no sign of radiation contamination, the family were able to let out a sigh of relief. Perhaps the rumours were wrong after all.
However, the father went to meet some friends to compare notes, and when he came back, his son decided to take the Geiger counter out of its bespoke leather case, but on the headphones and give it one last try before his dad had to give it back the next day.
After all, when would he ever get to play with such an awesome toy again?! Upon swishing the probe next to the shoes his father had worn for his outing that day, the headphones started emitting a maddening chatter of beeps. The counter was alive, and the reading was off the charts.
Similar stories were provided by my other colleagues who were raised in Poland, in some cases some 643 km away as the crow flies from the site of the disaster. Many Poles queued for a drink of Lugol's Solution, a solution of iodine, which was meant to stop the body from absorbing radioactive iodine from contaminated water, for example. Today, three decades after the fact, many of the people I spoke to remember the acrid taste of that brown liquid, “which tasted very much like ammonia”.
To make matters worse, a westerly wind in late April 1986 had brought much of the radioactive elements from the blast over Poland, and some cities were worse affected than others. Despite the long waiting lines outside hospitals for a sip of the iodine, which was given to young and old alike, including pregnant women, no one is even sure it had any positive effect.
A recent New York Times report says that a hospital in Olsztyn, northern Poland, now almost exclusively deals with thyroid complications, almost certainly due to the Chernobyl disaster thirty years ago.
What happened to Chernobyl since then? Not much. Radiation levels there are still so high that nobody will be able to live in the area for the next one to two hundred years.