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In the months ahead the Soviet officials responsible for mishandling the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident are to stand trial. The charge sheet could be lengthy. People in the path of the fallout were not warned to take emergency measures. On the day of the accident – 26 April 1986 – children in the town of Prypiat, 3 kilometres from the plant, took part in outdoor gymnastics. Prypiat was evacuated 60 hours after the explosion and areas within a 30-kilometre radius a week or more later.

By that time Europe was gripped by eager speculation over the scale and consequences of the accident – details which are only now becoming clear. Millions of people in the USSR and on the northern fringes of Europe are still living with contamination. And across the continent, the shock of Chernobyl among ordinary people changed fundamentally the prospects for the nuclear industry.

For nearly three years after the accident, the Soviet system paid little attention to people living outside the 30-kilometre ‘exclusion zone’. Reports of increased incidence of leukaemia and congenital abnormalities outside this region were officially explained as statistically insignificant, and the result of the new psychological disorder – ‘radiophobia’.

After February 1989, when the first maps of caesium contamination were made public, official measures were taken when it was realised that areas outside the exclusion zone were as badly contaminated as land inside the zone itself.

All those living where the lifetime dose was likely to exceed 35 rem (350 millisieverts) – a dose considered by some to yield the same increased cancer risk as smoking one cigarette a day – were evacuated. In many cases this meant re-evacuating people who had already been moved from inside the exclusion zone. The houses which had been specially built for them were left abandoned. All people living in contaminated areas were ordered to be given compensation of 30 roubles (£30) a month, and an appeal was made to charities and emigre communities in the West to send medical relief.

But Western efforts to deal directly with hospitals in affected areas have led to uneven distribution of supplies. The West began targeting shipments because of the chaotic state of Soviet distribution systems which left relief supplies missing, bottlenecked or diverted to the black market. And despite the setting up of new bodies to coordinate efforts, Soviet relief workers argue that Moscow is still failing to cope with the enormity of the situation.

Latest estimates suggest that some 4 million people are living in territories where fallout makes normal life impossible. In these areas, for example, children are forbidden to play outside except in decontaminated areas, and food grown on local farms is destroyed. In particular, the Byelorussian republic, which received some 70 per cent of the total fallout, has lost more than 20 per cent of its cultivable land, and has had more than half its territory contaminated to some degree.

In addition to radiation-induced diseases such as leukaemia, congenital defects and thyroid abnormalities, there is widespread incidence of what is locally called ‘Chernobyl AIDS’ – depression of the immune system as a result of exposure to radiation. It has increased the death toll. Yet the mortality and morbidity figures for the area are still subject to the official secrecy imposed in the summer of 1986.

Throughout the Soviet Union, citizens’ groups campaigned against local threats to the environment, and critics of the regime homed in on ecology to express their discontent. As a result, several nuclear power stations have been forced to close, while others never made it off the drawing board, or were converted to conventional fuels. Plans for 10 nuclear-powered district heating stations in major cities were cancelled.

In the Ukraine and Byelorussia, the burgeoning nationalist movements, opposed to the Communist Party, called for help for Chernobyl victims and the indictment of those responsible for mishandling the disaster.

In July last year the Byelorussian Supreme Soviet declared sovereignty. It called on central authorities in Moscow to compensate the republic for damage inflicted by the accident. Gorbachev’s pledge, last month, of more central money for relief and clean up operations in Byelorussia seemed intended to defuse the compensation claims.

The Chernobyl explosion also provoked nationalist and anti-Communist feelings among the Soviet Union’s allies. Following the explosion, the Soviet government gave no information about the accident to what was then the Eastern bloc, prior to an announcement on Soviet television on the evening of 28 April. By that time, monitoring equipment in Poland was already registering high fallout levels.

In 1986, Poland had only recently emerged from martial law and many people had lost faith in information emanating from state and party. Accordingly, doctors and scientists sympathetic to Solidarity carried out their own checks on fallout. They found for example that iodine-131 had been monitored using an outdated procedure which gave readings of only 25 per cent of the true value. Also milk impounded for drying and storage until the short-lived iodine-131 had decayed was issued by mistake only six weeks after the accident. Such mistakes boosted the fortunes both of Solidarity and of the growing antinuclear movement.

Elsewhere in the bloc, fallout was fairly light. For the hard-line governments of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria a principal focus of anger was a Western embargo on agricultural products from the East, which they condemned as unjustified. But dissidents and disaffected citizens grew increasingly critical of the delay of the Soviet Union in warning its allies.

In Bulgaria the new regime has filed charges against the former leadership for failing to issue the appropriate warnings and denying there was any risk at all.

For most of Western Europe, long-term physical effects from the Chernobyl fallout were few. The exceptions are in Scandinavia and Britain. In the northern parts, particularly of Norway and Sweden, lichens retained much of the radio-caesium contamination washed out of the clouds by rain. The lichens are the staple diet of reindeer herds tended by the Lapp people. In 1986 in Sweden around 80 per cent of slaughtered reindeer were thrown away because of excessive caesium levels.

With the entire Lapp way of life threatened, the governments began compensation schemes. In Norway this involves payments for Lapp families to allow them to keep reindeer for food. The animals are fed on clean fodder to keep contamination down. Knud Hove at the Agricultural University of Norway says the effect on the Lapps has not been as bad as was forecast in 1986.

But the Scandinavians still have big problems. In Norway upwards of 10 000 reindeer and 120 000 sheep still graze contaminated areas. The acid soil of the region has retained 90 per cent of caesium in the top 2 centimetres and Hove estimates the ecological half-life at 20 years.

The cost to these countries already, through lost sales of meat and fish from contaminated lakes and through a fall-off in tourism, has been considerable.

In Britain, rain brought down heavy depositions of radioactive caesium in a band across Cumbria in northern England, Wales, Scotland and northern Ireland. The government’s response was slow and reassuring. Only six weeks after the radioactive dust had settled did the tone change. A temporary ban was imposed on movement and slaughter of sheep in upland areas, followed by more lengthy embargoes on more than a million sheep. As in Scandinavia, caesium stays chemically mobile in the acid soils of the affected areas, making it available to plants. In mid-January this year, more than half a million sheep on over 600 holdings were still subject to restrictions.

The way compensation was organised and the patronising attitude of government officials left many farmers in Cumbria bitter, says Brian Wynne, director of the Centre for Science Studies and Science Policy at the University of Lancaster.

In the rest of Britain since 1986, the accident’s impact on the farming communities has been largely forgotten. ‘When I give a talk about Cumbria, people are really quite shocked that farmers still have sheep which are restricted as a result of Chernobyl,’ says Wynne.

Across Western Europe, whether contamination was short-term or chronic, few health effects of the Chernobyl accident have been detected. This is no surprise, says Mary Morrey of Britain’s National Radiological Protection Board. She participated in a 1987 study of radiation dosages and their possible health effects in the European Community. The study predicted an extra 1000 deaths, chiefly from cancer, as a result of the accident. Morrey says this would be too few to detect against a background of 30 million ‘natural’ cancer deaths in the EC over the next 50 years.

The only measurable medical consequences so far have come from choices taken in response to the accident. At a meeting in Stockholm in January, Angela Spinelli, of Italy’s state health research institute, reported an increase of about 10 per cent over the expected number of legal abortions in Italy in the five months following the accident.

Lisbeth Knudsen of the Danish health ministry also reported a small increase in legal abortions in Denmark, chiefly in South Jutland where fallout was highest.

Across most of Europe the prospects for the nuclear power industry went into decline following Chernobyl and led to fierce debate. That its future is bleak is not in doubt; but argument rages over how much of the effect is due to Chernobyl.

In parts of Eastern Europe the impact is clear. At the time of the accident, Poland had one nuclear power station under construction at Zarnowiec on the Baltic. In the wake of Chernobyl, the site was renamed by locals ‘Zarnobyl’. Public protests forced the site to close and stopped two other projects.

In Yugoslavia, where there was already a strong antinuclear movement, the federal government announced a moratorium on all future nuclear power stations. The existing one at Krsko, on the border between Slovenia and Croatia, is still operating.

In Western Europe, advocates of nuclear power deny that Chernobyl had any direct lessons for Western nuclear operators. ‘In some countries, the accident did not give rise to any really serious doubts as to the safety of Western nuclear plants. What was thrown into doubt was the confidence people could have in the information sparingly and incompletely meted out by official sources,’ says Don McPherson, head of the nuclear safety department at the Nuclear Energy Agency, based at the OECD in Paris.

Critics of the nuclear industry disagree with this emphasis. ‘Chernobyl was seen as a nuclear accident rather than a Soviet accident,’ says John Willis of Greenpeace International. He admits that exposure of the industry’s questionable economic benefits was a prime factor for loss of political support, but argues that Chernobyl acted as a focus for all the problems of the nuclear industry.

One of the swiftest responses to Chernobyl came from Sweden. The country was already committed to phasing out nuclear power by 2010 but, after Chernobyl, brought forward the date for the start of the run-down to 1995. However, earlier this year, the government announced the plan would go ahead only when alternative energy supplies were available.

As a result of a referendum in November 1987, the Italians placed a five-year moratorium on building nuclear plants and shut down its existing nuclear generators. Similar moves were made in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Belgium and Britain have effectively imposed moratoriums on new plants and are reconsidering their positions on nuclear power.

In what was formerly West Germany the industry was embattled before 1986. After Chernobyl, the public led by the Greens, forced the nuclear industry into reverse. No further plants are planned for a decade. But like London, Brussels and Paris, Bonn remains wedded to the nuclear option.

The one country where Chernobyl did little direct damage to the nuclear industry was France. When radioactive clouds from the explosion crossed France, no information was released to the public at all. On 2 May, with alarm increasing over radiation readings in Germany, the head of the Central Service for Protection against Ionising Radiation, Pierre Pellerin, went on TV to reassure the public that there was no danger in France and no need for protective health measures. When Pellerin finally released the figures on radioactivity, on 9 May, the Green Party called for his resignation. By the autumn, public opinion had swung dramatically against nuclear power.

French officials told a meeting on information and nuclear energy last year that after Chernobyl the government lost the unquestioning trust of the public. They said the state could no longer say: ‘Trust us, we are in control of the situation.’

Despite this loss of confidence, the French did not question whether a Chernobyl-type accident could happen in their country. Public opinion appeared to accept that there was no technological similarity. With 70 per cent of electricity provided by nuclear plant, even the Greens accepted that nuclear energy was there to stay and focused on safety and information.

Despite the gloom currently hanging over the industry, European proponents of nuclear power are pushing hard to boost its fortunes. One way of doing this, in light of the extent of the Chernobyl disaster, is to be seen to be internationally responsible.

Since 1989, the International Atomic Energy Agency has stepped up its programme to review the safety of members’ nuclear power plants, and has been active in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. It has also passed conventions to assure early notification in the event of an accident and that prompt assistance is available on an international scale. However, countries such as Belgium and Sweden do not appear on the lists of those bound by these conventions.

Last week at the IAEA in Vienna, delegates gathered in a confidential meeting to thrash out liability in the event of a future Chernobyl-type accident. Australia put forward proposals for governments to pay financial claims from other countries affected by fallout.

Australia – backed by Canada, Ireland, Italy and Greenpeace, among others – wants compensation to be unlimited and to cover environmental damage.

These proposals came in for fierce opposition. While accepting the principle of state liability, countries such as Britain, America and Belgium argue that unlimited liability would ‘remove the incentive to develop the nuclear industry’, said a source close to the meeting.

Last month Britain, France, Germany and Belgium issued a declaration stating that they will try to agree common safety standards for nuclear reactors. The declaration was aimed at boosting public confidence in nuclear power and stressed its advantages for slowing down global warming.

Whatever the benefits, the costs are known even to the industry. At an international conference on nuclear safety in Brussels last month it was suggested that a worldwide nuclear programme could help to solve the problems of global warming and growing Third World energy demands. John Wright, director of health and safety at Britain’s state-owned nuclear power company, Nuclear Electric, said: ‘We can’t exclude another ‘Chernobyl’ killing ten thousand people with that sort of large nuclear programme.’ The question for government advocates of the nuclear option is whether this cost is politically acceptable.

Additional reporting by Debora MacKenzie in Brussels, Sylvia Hughes in Paris and Roger Milne.

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When the lid blew off Pandora’s box

It about 0123 hours on 26 April 1986, the power output from unit four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant rose to 100 times normal – in 4 seconds. An explosion following the surge blew the top clean away from the core. Hot metal was flung into the air, the graphite core burned and radioactive smoke and steam spewed out.

This was the climax of the world’s worst nuclear accident. It began while operators were testing a turbine, during a scheduled shutdown of the RMBK unit. Safety procedures were not, however, followed. Most of the neutron-absorbing control rods had been withdrawn and a chain reaction – as in a nuclear bomb – was narrowly avoided.

The release of radioactive material lasted for 10 days. Initially, winds from the southeast blew it over the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Latvia and Lithuania. It crossed the border into Poland, southern Finland and across Norway and Sweden. The winds then changed leaving fallout over most of Europe.

The extent of contamination was largely governed by whether rain washed the poisonous dust from the clouds. Among other places, hot spots appeared across the Soviet republics, Scandinavia and Britain, Southern Germany and Greece.

Initial concern focused on iodine-131 which was taken up by grazing cows and expressed in their milk. Leafy vegetables and fruit grown outside were also contaminated and had to be thrown away. But iodine-131 has a half-life of only 8 days and attention soon switched to the potential hazard of caesium-134 and 137. Caesium-137 has a half-life of more than 30 years.

Caesium contaminated meat. Special measures were introduced in Scandinavia and Britain to restrict the movement and slaughter of livestock. Fission products such as tellurium-132, ruthenium-103 and 106 were also released but were less dangerous at the levels released.

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WHO short of funds for radiation study

This may the World ÎçÒ¹¸£Àû1000¼¯ºÏ Organization will finally launch a full epidemiological study in the Soviet Union of the victims of Chernobyl. WHO staff say research must begin now, or the full toll of Chernobyl will never be known. But the organisation has less than half the money it needs for the study.

Wilfried Kreisel, head of environmental medicine at the WHO, says he has received a firm pledge only from Japan, of $20 million. The complete programme would cost $50 million to start, and $5 to $10 million per year to run for 10 years. Without more money the WHO will not be able to study cancers apart from leukaemia, or the immunological, psychosocial or psychosomatic effects of the accident.

The International Atomic Energy Agency and the WHO last year conducted a study on people in an area – outside the 30-kilometre exclusion zone – contaminated with more than 15 curies (550 billion bequerels) of fallout per square kilometre. The results will be published in May.

Yuri Ryabukhin of the WHO, who took part in the study, says it showed ‘what one would expect’; no obvious increases in cancer or other diseases. But he stressed his observations were not quantitative. ‘If there is extra leukaemia, or mental retardation, we would expect to see it now, while other cancers take even longer. But we must begin to look now, or a unique opportunity will be lost,’ says Ryabukhin.

He says data collected previously in the region are unreliable, ‘partly through a lack of glasnost’, partly through a lack of good statisticians. ÎçÒ¹¸£Àû1000¼¯ºÏ records before the accident are too poor to be a good baseline for comparison, he claims.

There are reports of major increases in some diseases, says Ryabukhin, but this could be because detection has improved dramatically or because of factors other than radiation. The only way out of the mess, he says, is to try and correlate radiation dose with disease incidence.

To do this the WHO intends to set up a registry to chart leukaemia and thyroid disorders, and to measure radiation dose by measuring residual radiation effects in teeth or blood cells.

Ryabukhin says the IAEA/WHO team saw many disorders attributable to the restrictions in force. People suffer from being ‘isolated in ghetto conditions’. Many women in the area have had unnecessary abortions. Evacuees from areas with high-levels of radiation suffer stress from being considered ‘lepers’ by their new neighbours, while those people left in the region ‘feel they have no future’, says Ryabukhin.