Chernobyl+20

Twenty years ago reactor number four at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station issued the Soviet Union’s death rattle. After the strained union of republics collapsed, Ukraine inherited the power station, officially deemed the world’s most unsafe reactor, and the Soviet Union’s problem.

Two agencies, the Chernobyl Forum (associated with the United Nations) and Greenpeace (a non-governmental environmental organization) recently released reports on the long-term consequences of Chernobyl’s radioactive emission that began at 01:23, April 26, 1986, and worsened until the first responders, know as liquidators, finally plugged the hole in the reactor May 10. The radioactive cloud passed over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, and left its traces as far away as the Lake District and Scotland in the northern reaches of the United Kingdom.

The Greenpeace report paints the effects of the world’s worst industrial accident in stark terms, assigning responsibility for thousands of excess deaths (a term demographers use to distinguish between people who would have died anyway and those whose lives might have lasted longer if some catastrophic event had never happened) to the radioactive material expelled from the reactor and the contamination that remains in the soil in large areas of Ukraine and Belarus. Greenpeace estimates 200,000 excess deaths resulting from the accident in the period from 1990-2004 alone. The report estimates that 60,000 extra people will develop thyroid cancer, a cancer that was virtually unknown in this area before the accident at Chernobyl.

The Chernobyl Forum, however, recently reported that the effects of the accident really weren’t as bad as the alarmists say. According to the keynote address at a conference on the issue, this report states that the reactor catastrophe is responsible for no more than 4,000 excess deaths, and only nine of these resulted from thyroid cancer. In its defense of nuclear power, this commission instead blames the dislocation, disease and death that Greenpeace ascribes to the nuclear accident on poverty and stress resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the report implicates agencies and organizations that have tried to help Chernobyl’s victims for inculcating a feeling of dependency in the people who are forced to live with the contamination, particularly in Ukraine and Belarus.

The discrepancy in these interpretations was the subject of the keynote address at the symposium, “Chernobyl, Twenty Years Later: Health, Environment, and the Sociology of a Disaster Zone,” hosted by the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center of the University of Illinois Saturday. David Marples, a history professor at the University of Alberta, Canada, has devoted his professional life to the study of Chernobyl. He first published on nuclear power in the Soviet Union in 1987 and has traveled to the reactor and the surrounding regions many times. Marples said he has few friends among supporters of the Chernobyl Forum report, and that most reputable scientists have disavowed its assessment of the situation.

As a colleague who was not able to attend the symposium asked, “What about the thousands of children with thyroid cancer and the birth defects?”

Indeed, what about them. Anyone who has followed the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident knows about cesium 137 contamination and the effects of iodine 131 on thousands of children in Ukraine and Belarus.

If you are not familiar with the effects of these, and other, radioactive compounds that inhabit the dust of the streets in Pripyat, Chernobyl, Gomel, and other villages and cities of the affected region, find an opportunity to see “Chernobyl Heart,” a short (39 minutes, 2003) documentary about the health of children born just before and after the accident. Children who look perfectly healthy set off alarms in regular radiation checks they undergo at school. Children are born with two holes in their heart (a condition linked to the accident). The image of a little girl who was born with her brain outside her skull in a separate sack haunts me, as do the views of the homes for abandoned babies and the mental hospitals where the children born with any genetic defects end up living for their entire lives.

I have trouble seeing the people who come from around the world to try to bring some joy to these children or to restore them to health as part of the problem (a la the Chernobyl Forum report).

That officials of the government of the Soviet Union and its successor states have mishandled this accident and the people, animals and land affected by it is, however, not a stretch to accept.

For example, Marples pointed to the officials of Belarus as a particularly problematic lot. In Belarus President Lukashenko’s government has declared the Chernobyl problem is officially over. The government does not want to deal with people who do not agree with this position and arrests even those who are conducting scientific research on the consequences of the accident. One scholar, Marples said, was arrested because, “He was very critical of the distribution of radioactive vegetables after the accident.”

Marples found disturbing evidence of widespread distribution of contaminated food in his research in official government documents on the accident. “Food was exported,” he said. “And it was a deliberate policy.”

Marples said one official wrote, “If you mix the contaminated food with clean food, everybody’s going to get a little, but nobody’s going to get a lot.”

Lucky for everyone, this has never been a major food-exporting region.

Nevertheless, the Soviet government did not serve its people or the world well by trying to hide the problem. When I went to Leningrad (which the radioactive cloud had traversed as it moved with the winds) two weeks after the accident came to light, the local people had not been advised to avoid dairy products. When people in our group suggested to mothers that they shouldn’t let their children eat ice cream just now, they were accused of spreading Western, anti-Soviet propaganda.

Several years later, after the Soviet propaganda machine began to collapse, an environmental organization scoured the city with Geiger counters and compiled a map of its contaminated zones. I have a copy of this map stashed in a box of papers I collected in numerous trips to the Soviet Union and Russia.

How, then, should we understand the discrepancy in the conclusions of the two reports? Marples said simply, “The main agencies investigating Chernobyl have their own agendas.”

Gym Source

Marriage more likely than terrorism after all

Twenty years ago my husband anonymously sent the news that white, college-educated, single women of 35 were more likely to be attacked by a terrorist than to get married to one of my grad-school friends who was white, college-educated, single and 25.

He thought this was funny.

I reported to him her distress about the anonymous harassment that had come by campus mail. He ‘fessed up and apologized.

She explained to him that being condemned to a lonely life by a person who was afraid to reveal his identity was far from humorous. He never truly understood her fear, but he realized that he had hurt her deeply and did all that he could to make amends. Some years later, he even helped her learn to drive, riding with her for hours after she bought her first car. (She was the daughter of a big city who maintained a drivers’ license but hadn’t used the privilege much.)

Last week, Newsweek magazine recanted the prediction. Demographic research now shows that the vast majority of women born in the early 1960s will, in fact, marry, just not in the same patterns as our foremothers and aunts. One study suggests that 97 percent of us will marry, as will most people of any generation currently living in the United States who really want to.

The new research also shows that educated, professional women aren’t forced to choose between professional and personal success. Jessica Yellin used her interview with Liz Tuccillo, one of the authors of He’s Just Not That Into You, for a New York Times Week in Review piece (Single, Female an Desperate No More) to reveal just how deeply some professional women believed that society would be unwilling to provide its traditional comforts to them. According to the Times reporter, Tuccillo took a few moments to absorb the new findings before saying, “I had no idea how much that old statistic was living in me until you gave me the new one.”

Although my husband died some years ago, the “wisdom” he passed on to my grad-school friend outlived him in my unconscious. Of course, having married once already, I am already part of the 97 percent of my age cohort who will make it down the aisle.

Having married for the first time at 24, I actually was one of the earliest in my age group to tie the knot (in spite of my grandmother, aunts and cousins who thought I was a late bloomer because I finished college before taking a mate). Although the latest Newsweek articles don’t deal with marriages that end in widowhood, the current studies do find that early marriages end in divorce more often than the marriages people enter into later in life.

Before I took up life in small-town Texas, I didn’t think much about my prospects for (re)marriage. In fact, I believed that I had educated myself out of love and didn’t much worry about it. I was leading a rewarding life and besides, experience had taught me that banking on independence was a smarter move than banking on a man. I got a rash the day I married, and look how it all turned out anyway.

In cities, no one asked me why I wasn’t married, but in Seguin, I found myself answering that question frequently and hearing well meaning people say it was great to have me around and now we just had to find me a great guy. One of my colleagues told me that my acceptance of the idea that educated women were unlikely to find mates amounted to making myself into a victim.

I couldn’t understand why it bothered him so much that I was comfortable being single. I guess he couldn’t believe that I was, truly, comfortable being single (he had contributed a number of marriages to the statistical profile of Baby Boomers).

The single life appeals to me much more than the frantic search for a partner that I have watched in some single people I know. Dancing, writing, taking pictures, traveling and any of the other things I do with my time interest me far more than joining in the panic that leads some people to use the Internet to dig up a new prospect every week.

Maybe the women who have devoted their lives to the search will be able to relax in light of the new studies that show Americans have become far more flexible in their marital behavior. Older women marry younger men. Men marry women who are as accomplished as they are or even more.

Given all that I think about myself and the circumstances of my own life, I’m amazed how different the world feels to me now that I know Newsweek was wrong.

Gym Source