Chernobyl: The Ongoing Story of the World's Deadliest Nuclear Disaster

Rating:
Summary: This attempts to understand the radioactive aftermath
Review: The reactor at Chernobyl was too large and too well engineered to produce the kind of explosion that is considered typical for weapons, but it was capable of reaching temperatures that were much higher than mere fireman could cool by spraying water on the blaze.

For most of the people involved in fighting the fire, the temperature was a minor problem compared to the radioactive storm of particles and rays released in the reaction. The operators in the control room thought they had some control over the reaction long after two explosions had flipped the concrete lid over the reactor and blew the roof off a large building. Everyone who was not vaporized immediately knew that the reactor core had not exploded in the typical mushroom cloud catastrophe which is so familiar from hundreds of weapons tests. Due to a fire, they did not have access to equipment which could have told them how high the level of radiation being released from the core had grown, but that level was so high, it could have produced panic, so large numbers of people would never be told. Medical science is not really up to date on what people who are subject to such a subatomic particle ambush can expect for the rest of their lifespan, and all the doctors in the Soviet Union worked for the government, which never planned to tell the people much about anything.

The book, CHERNOBYL THE ONGOING STORY OF THE WORLD'S DEADLIEST NUCLEAR DISASTER by Glenn Alan Cheney, makes an honest effort to look at everything that people might learn from studying all the forms of subatomic particle ambushes that took place as a result of the Chernobyl secret circus stunt. The sense of condemnation which drives this book is fought by those who had avoided for so long the question: Who is Oedipus here, and who the Sphinx? The science found itself starting off on a strange foot:

"The victims suffered from radiation and heat burns. Their skin was browned like toasted marshmallow. In some places it was black like burned marshmallow. Their skin cracked, blistered, peeled, hung in strips. . . . Their hair fell out." (p. 43).

"The world outside the Soviet Union knew more about what was happening than the victims it was happening to. On April 28 Sweden registered the first signs of a radioactive mishap. A monitoring station noticed rising levels of radioactivity. Further analysis revealed a bizarre array of rare isotopes, a combination not normally produced by an atomic explosion or a nuclear reactor leak. One of the isotopes was ruthenium, which melts only at 4,050 degrees F (2,250 degrees C)--a temperature found only on the sun, in a melting nuclear reactor, or, for an instant, in a nuclear bomb. An assessment of atmospheric conditions pointed at the Soviet Union. Sweden announced the discovery and made diplomatic inquiries to Moscow. At first Moscow admitted to nothing but later conceded a trifling accident, a quick and minor release of radioactivity." (p. 83).

This book ought to be praised most highly for its attempt to picture what happens when subatomic particles ambush people in a way which the reader can understand. Ruthenium is not a particularly exotic chemical element, with an atomic number of 44 and an atomic weight of 101.07, it appears in the middle of the periodic table of elements in the transition elements, and as a metal it is useful in alloys for electrical contacts that don't wear or corrode. It can be great stuff, if you know how to use it. It was not the first thing that was noticed in Kiev at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine on Monday morning, April 28, 1986:

"That Monday, officials were surprised to find radiation coming into the building. It was on people's clothes. These weren't people from Chernobyl or Pripyat. They were people who had just ridden city buses to work, as they had every other morning. But this morning, April 28, the buses were radioactive. They'd been to Pripyat to pick up the evacuees. The evacuees had left so much radiation on the buses that people who sat in the seats the next morning were wearing clothes that would qualify as hazardous materials. Dosimeters showed that clothing had radiation levels five times higher than that allowed on equipment used to handle radioactive material, and thousands of times higher than that allowed to come in contact with people." (p. 85).

"The train station was probably the worst place to be. As empty trains came into the city they pulled in clouds of radioactive dust. The trains themselves were radioactive. The crowd at the station was radioactive, with everybody radiating everybody else." (pp. 89-90).

Local effects in the United States varied. "Levels of iodine 131 were lowest in the region around Texas, where the least rain had fallen, and the death rate there remained unchanged from the year before." (p. 102).

"According to information in DEADLY DECEIT, infant mortality also soared in Germany. In the most heavily contaminated regions it rose 68 percent." (p. 104).

Before the incident at Chernobyl, Lyme disease, "caused by a bacteria that was harmless to humans before 1975 . . . first appeared around Lyme, Connecticut, a few miles from the Millstone nuclear power plant. Millstone has leaked more radiation than any other U.S. nuclear power plant besides Three Mile Island, and in 1975 alone released some three million curies." (p. 106).