Too early to be complacent

The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine recently passed a law that will punish people who try to cash in on smuggling scrap metal, wood, mushrooms, berries, and other things from the Chornobyl zone. Offenders will be prosecuted and subject to a prison term of three to five years. In the view of those who work in the so-called Zone of Alienation, this law is just a fraction of the care and assistance that employees of the Chornobyl Power Plant and nine local businesses need. Power engineering specialists say that the zone is in the grip of a systemic crisis — financial, industrial, and environmental — which poses a threat not only to employees in the zone but also to residents of Kyiv.

According to Mykola Teterin, chief of the Chornobyl Territorial Branch of the Nuclear Energy Employees Trade Union, who has worked in the Zone of Alienation for 19 years, the 260,000-sq. km. of ground are still heavily contaminated, especially the top 50-cm layer. Freshets occur here, washing strontium and cesium into the Prypiat River.

“We have already been offered some of this land for farming and hunting purposes,” Teterin says, “but how can we do this if our tests show that the amount of radioactive nuclides in vegetables grown by the squatters is twice the average norm. Sometimes dosimetrists have confiscated mushrooms that old women were bringing from the zone to Kyiv, classifying them as ‘radioactive waste.’

“Mushrooms are not the only things that show an extremely high level of radiation. Fish caught in the Prypiat show a level of radionuclides that are six times higher than the norm. It is especially dangerous to eat the meat of wild animals: the level of radionuclides in elk meat exceeds the norm by 2 to 14 times and in boar meat, by 36 times. Berries are also affected: our dosimetrists have sometimes found a radiation level 100 times higher than normal in bilberries. Wood from the Chornobyl forests is also contaminated, so I wouldn’t advise anyone to use it.”

Food products are not the only problem. According to employees of a Chornobyl zone power-generation unit, three nuclear waste burial grounds pose a direct threat to Kyiv. Two of them are on the shores of the Prypiat River and the third one, which contains 18,000 metal containers, is a little farther away. Experts claim that they are constantly being flooded. In other words, from time to time the wastes are washed right into the Prypiat. Experts note that apart from the pollution of surface waters, there is also the very grave risk of groundwater contamination from inadequately buried radioactive wastes and thousands of uncovered holes in the zone, which are also heavily polluted.

Nuclear energy trade unionists lay the blame for the situation on government officials, who cut the funding by one-third. An average of 30 million hryvnias is not enough. Employees say they cannot fully function because of the shortage of transport, equipment, special clothing for drivers who ship radioactive wastes, and even food. Employees in the zone also complain about the cancellation of fringe benefits and bonuses. “Radioactive ‘scrap iron’ was, is, and will be smuggled out of the zone as long as police sergeants earn only 700 hryvnias a month,” the Chornobyl trade union leader says.

Since complaints to the labor and emergency ministries have not brought any results, employees in the zone intend to resort to the most popular way of drawing attention in Ukraine — by holding a protest in front of the Cabinet of Ministers and the Verkhovna Rada. Their protest action is scheduled for late March.