The Economic and Political Weekly
May 6, 2006

TWENTY YEARS AFTER CHERNOBYL
Debates and Lessons

A vast amount of literature has been generated on
the Chernobyl accident in April 1986. What
lessons can we draw from the causes and sequences
of the accident, the health and environmental
consequences and what implications does the
accident have for nuclear reactor safety and the
future of atomic energy?

by M V Ramana


Alina, aged fifteen, had been diagnosed with
thyroid cancer in 1992, and her thyroid gland had
been completely removed. She had just undergone a
second surgery to remove knots that had spread to
her trachea. Alina wobbled her head, straining to
find ways of resisting the surgical painŠ "I have
to liveŠI was afraid of this second operation.
The nodules can still spread into the lungs and
to the brains. If they go into the brains it will
be too late; it will be almost impossible to save
me. But if the nodules spread into the lungs,
they can still save me." She wanted to be saved.
"But everything is normal right now", she
reassures herself. "I have to drink iodine and
take daily doses of thyroxine. If I don't have
that hormone I'll be faint, and I won't be as
lucky."
- Chernobyl 'Survivor' [Petryna 2002:80]

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor on
April 26, 1986 remains the most destructive
industrial accident to date. An enormous amount
of literature has emerged analysing the causes of
the accident, the sequence of events on that
fateful night, the amount of radioactive material
released into the environment, the health and
environmental consequences of the accident, and
the implications of the accident for nuclear
reactor safety and the future of atomic energy.
We outline the debates on some of these areas and
explore in brief the underlying political and
organisational dimensions of these debates as
well as some of their implications.

April 26 and Immediate Aftermath

The Chernobyl power complex is 130 kms north of
Kiev, Ukraine, and about 20 kms south of the
border with Belarus. The unit 4 reactor at the
complex was to be shutdown for routine
maintenance on April 25, 1986. Reactor operators
decided to take advantage of this shutdown to run
a test to determine whether, in the event of a
loss of station power, the emergency equipment
could be operated until the diesel emergency
power supply became operative [NEA 2002]. As part
of the experiment, a number of safety features
were disabled.

The Chernobyl reactor was of the so-called RBMK
design, which has some undesirable
characteristics with negative implications for
safety.1 Important among these is the positive
void coefficient.2 This means that if there is
increased steam production in the fuel channels,
either because of a power increase or a decrease
in the flow of water used to transport the heat
generated, there would be an increased rate of
nuclear fission reactions. Under some conditions,
particularly at low power levels, this would
produce a positive feedback loop that makes the
reactor prone to abrupt power surges. Early on
April 26, during the experiment conducted by the
operators, the reactor was operating in this
domain and produced an overwhelming power surge.

The exact physical sequence of events remains a
matter of debate. But it is fairly certain that
the sudden increase in heat production ruptured
part of the fuel, which reacted with water and
caused a steam explosion. A few seconds later
there was another explosion. The nature of the
second explosion is unresolved; different people
have argued that it was a steam explosion, a
hydrogen explosion, and a nuclear explosion,
respectively. But clearly an immense amount of
energy was released; estimates are in the range
of 100-250 tonnes of TNT [Kiselev and Checherov
2001; Martinez-Val et al 1990].3 Though the RBMK
design is often faulted for not having a
structure to contain radioactive releases in the
event of an accident, these calculated energy
releases are so high that it is quite unlikely
that any containment structure would have
withstood such an explosion.4

The debate about the actual sequence of events
results from two factors. First, there is
incomplete information about the accident during
the initial period, both because of the secrecy
imposed by authorities, and because the data
relevant for a detailed analysis could not be
recorded. The second factor is the sheer
complexity of the various processes underway
during the course of the accident. Nuclear
reactors are complex entities and their
behaviour, even under slightly abnormal
conditions, can defy precise understanding.5
Understanding the course of a major accident like
Chernobyl involves very detailed modelling of
nuclear reactions, thermodynamic and hydraulic
changes, the fragmentation of fuel, and
complicated interactions between these different
processes under inhomogeneous and rapidly
evolving conditions. Thus, it is not surprising
that different studies come to very different
conclusions.

Whatever their nature, the two explosions sent
radioactive fuel, reactor core components, and
structural items into the air, producing a shower
of hot and highly radioactive debris and exposing
the damaged core to the atmosphere. The plume
rose about one kilometre up in the air. Fires
started in what remained of the unit 4 building
and in adjacent buildings. Finally, the graphite
that is used to slow down (moderate) neutrons in
the reactor also caught fire. Efforts to put out
the last fire proved ineffective and it burned
for 10 days. The long duration had important
health consequences. For example, only 40 per
cent of the total release of iodine-131, a
radioactive isotope of iodine that accumulates in
the thyroid gland and can be responsible for
thyroid tumours and cancers, occurred on the
first day [UNSCEAR 2000:520].

The cloud from the burning reactor spread
numerous types of radioactive materials,
especially iodine and caesium radionuclides, over
much of Europe. Iodine-131 has a short half-life
(eight days) and largely disintegrated within the
first few weeks of the accident. However,
radioactive caesium-137, which contributes to
both external and internal radiation doses, has a
half-life of 30 years and has contaminated more
than 2,00,000 square kilometres of Europe.6 Over
70 per cent of this area was in the three most
affected countries, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine,
home to about five million people. But even
people in regions further away were affected,
some considerably so.

Multiple Repercussions

Though clearly having immense consequences, it is
difficult to quantify the impacts of the
accident, either in terms of public health or in
terms of economic and social costs. There have
also been other, less direct, consequences
ranging from the widespread loss of faith in the
safety of nuclear reactors and the honesty of
officials in charge of nuclear installations, to
the formation of political parties like the Green
Party in Ukraine and the Popular Front party in
Belarus.

Among the worst affected by the accident were the
"liquidators" - those involved in emergency
actions on the site during the accident and the
subsequent clean up operations, and who were
exposed to high radiation doses. It is estimated
that up to about 6,00,000 people were involved in
such activities [NEA 2002:13]. Also subjected to
significant radiation doses were the over
1,00,000 people, mostly from within a radius of
30 kms around Chernobyl, who were evacuated
during the first few weeks following the
accident. Finally, about 2,70,000 people
continued to live in contaminated areas of the
former Soviet Union, with high levels of caesium
and requiring protection measures. All three
population groups have undergone great suffering
in terms of health, social conditions, and
economic opportunity.

The extent of health consequences, usually
measured in numbers of deaths, resulting from the
accident and consequent radiation exposure, has
been subject to wide debate.7 Such estimates
range from a few tens (31 was the official Soviet
figure for some years after the accident) to
hundreds of thousands [Vidal 2006]. "Reality", to
use a cliché, is likely to be somewhere in
between. The use of the quote marks around the
term reality is because much depends on what
criteria are used to attribute deaths to
radiation. This is for at least two important
reasons.

First, it is intrinsically difficult to
unambiguously calculate the number of cancers and
other health effects induced by radiation
exposure. There are two kinds of effects due to
radiation exposure: deterministic and stochastic.
Deterministic effects occur only at high
radiation doses. Only the firemen and the
personnel of the power station on the night of
the accident were exposed to such high radiation
doses. Of these, at least 134 were clinically
diagnosed with "acute radiation sickness".

At lower radiation doses, the health impacts take
time to develop and are not uniform; in other
words, not all people exposed to the same level
of radiation will exhibit the same effects.
However, exposure to radiation does result in a
statistically increased number of health effects
of various kinds, particularly cancers [UNSCEAR
2000; National Research Council 2006]. But the
increase would be against a much larger number of
cancers induced by both natural and anthropogenic
(other than radiation from Chernobyl) causes. It
is often difficult to determine if the excess of
cancers is merely a statistical fluctuation of
the background or if it is caused by radiation
exposure due to the accident.

The second reason is that the figures for
casualties are the site of intense political
battles. On the one hand, there has been a
sustained effort, mostly by or at the instigation
of institutions and people connected to the
nuclear industry, to diminish the magnitude of
the numbers of deaths attributed to the accident.
This is understandable - they can then argue that
if even the worst nuclear disaster has resulted
in only a relatively small number of deaths, then
nuclear power is safe. On the other hand, there
are vested interests on the side of institutions
and individuals, especially in the affected
areas, that drive them to exaggerate the extent
of deaths and other health consequences.

Estimates of the number of thyroid cancers
resulting from the accident offer a good example
of this political contest. Thyroid cancer was one
of the health impacts expected to manifest itself
quickly; early estimates suggested that there
would be "thousands to tens of thousands ofŠ
thyroid tumours over the next few decades" [Von
Hippel and Cochran 1986]. In 1991, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose
primary mandate is to promote the use of nuclear
energy, concluded that "there is no clear
pathologically documented evidence of an increase
in thyroid cancer of the types known to be
radiation related" [International Chernobyl
Project and International Atomic Energy Agency
1991]. This was despite the reports that had been
submitted to the IAEA by 1990 that "unusually
numbers of thyroid cancer cases in children" had
been noted in Belarus and Ukraine [Williams
2002]. But the IAEA underplayed them.

As time proceeded, the increase in thyroid
cancers could scarcely be denied. In 2000, the
United Nations Scientific Committee on the
Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), recorded
that there were an "unusually high numbers of
thyroid cancers observed in the contaminated
areas during the past 14 years" and went on to
observe that "the number of thyroid cancers
(about 1,800) in individuals exposed in
childhood, in particular in the severely
contaminated areas of the three affected
countries, is considerably greater than expected
based on previous knowledge. The high incidence
and the short induction period are unusualŠ If
the current trend continues, additional thyroid
cancers can be expected to occur, especially in
those who were exposed at young ages" [UNSCEAR
2000]. These "form the largest number of cancers
of one type, caused by a single event on one
date, ever recorded" [Williams 2002].

More recently, the IAEA has convened the
Chernobyl Forum in 2003 to "generate
'authoritative consensual statements' on the
environmental consequences and health effects
attributable to radiation exposure arising from
the accident as well as to provide advice on
environmental remediation and special healthcare
programmes, and to suggest areas where further
research is required" [Forum 2005]. In September
2005, the IAEA put out a press release announcing
that the Forum had determined that only up to
4,000 people could eventually die as a result of
radiation exposure from the accident. This was
hailed by officials from the nuclear
establishment as having settled the debate on
"how many deaths and how much disease really
resulted from the accident" [Parthasarathy 2005].
But this was widely criticised by civil society
groups, especially those in the affected
countries. Many have produced counter-reports
suggesting that the number of deaths would be in
the range of 30,000-60,000 [Fairlie and Sumner
2006], to about 93,000 [Greenpeace 2006].

There are several problems with the Forum's
report. One is their focus on just the most
heavily exposed areas, and ignoring the much
larger populations in the affected countries
themselves and the rest of the world, who have
been exposed to lower levels of radiation from
Chernobyl. There is general scientific consensus
that no matter how small, radiation exposure
always increases the risk of cancer [National
Research Council 2006]. Further, there is also
considerable theoretical and empirical support
for the assumption that the biological risk is a
linear function of radiation dose at low doses.
Then, if a given dose is shared among N people,
the risk of cancer death per person is reduced to
1/N, but since each of N people now suffers this
risk, the total probable number of cancer deaths
remains the same. Thus, the combined effect of a
low level of radiation exposure to large
populations could be sizeable.

The estimated collective radiation dose to the
entire world from Chernobyl is 6,00,000 person-Sv
[UNSCEAR 1993:23].8 The most recent estimate of
risk from radiation exposure is 0.057 cancer
deaths per Sv [National Research Council 2006].
Therefore, the collective radiation dose
mentioned above would result in roughly 34,000
deaths over a long period of time, much higher
than the misleading figure of 4,000 from the
IAEA.9

The Chernobyl Forum's estimates also suggest a
systematic pattern of avoiding attribution of
various other health impacts by arguing that
increases in these do not correlate adequately
with estimated radiation doses. As a leading
expert on thyroid cancers argued: "the degree of
proof needed to accept a causal link is strongly
correlated with the vested interest of the
individual or organisation in the outcome"
[Williams 2001].

Consider the case of leukaemia in children who
were exposed to radiation doses while still in
the uterus. Past studies have established that
such children are at increased risk of cancer
[Stewart et al 1956]. Similar increases were
found in the case of some regions subject to
radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. The number of
excess deaths due to leukaemia in infants, for
example in Chernobyl [Noshchenko et al 2001],
falls well within the range of standard estimates
of leukaemia mortality from radiation exposure.10
All published studies reviewed by the Forum found
excesses, albeit of varying magnitudes. And yet
the Forum dismissed them as "not entirely
convincing" and concluded that "there is neither
strong evidence for or against an association
between in utero exposure to Chernobyl fallout
and an increased risk of leukaemia" [Chernobyl
Forum 2005].

Despite such efforts at minimising the impact of
Chernobyl, the Forum was forced to admit to some
concrete and unexpected, at least in magnitude,
effects. One unanticipated consequence is the
"mental health impact of Chernobyl", which
according to the Forum, "is the largest public
health problem caused by the accident to date".
This may seem trivialising the other impacts.
Nevertheless, it is testimony to the "complex web
of events and long-term difficulties, such as
massive relocation, loss of economic stability,
and long-term threats to health in current and,
possibly, future generations", unleashed by
Chernobyl "that resulted in an increased sense of
anomie and diminished sense of physical and
emotional balance".

These, of course, are only illustrative of the
health effects of Chernobyl. More such impacts
will likely manifest themselves over the coming
years [Williams and Baverstock 2006].

Some Lessons

Despite the nuclear industry's efforts to play
down the significance of the Chernobyl disaster,
there are important lessons to be drawn from the
accident and subsequent events. Writing in the
Bulletin of the International Atomic Energy
Agency in June 1983, the head of IAEA's safety
division claimed: "The design feature of having
more than 1,000 individual primary circuits
increases the safety of the reactor system - a
serious loss of coolant accident is practically
impossibleŠthe safety of nuclear power plants in
the Soviet Union is assured by a very wide
spectrum of measuresŠ" But, on April 26, 1986 a
serious accident did occur. The first lesson,
therefore, is that such assurances from those who
have a vested interest in the continued operation
and expansion of nuclear power cannot be trusted.
Despite increased attention to safety since
Chernobyl, such massive accidents cannot be ruled
out even today. Indeed, some have argued that
such accidents will occur despite the best of
intentions, and so should be considered "normal"
[Perrow 1984].

The second lesson is that safety evaluations
should not be performed by organisations that
operate the facility, but be left to independent
agencies. Organisations that operate nuclear
reactors have other pressures and requirements,
most importantly the cost and ease of
operation.11 In India, the Atomic Energy
Regulatory Board (AERB), which is supposed to
oversee the safe operation of all civilian
nuclear facilities, is not independent of the
Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) because it
answers to the Atomic Energy Commission, which is
headed by the secretary of the DAE. Further, as a
former chairman of the AERB has observed, "the
AERB has very few qualified staff of its own, and
about 95 per cent of the technical personnel in
AERB safety committees are officials of the DAE
whose services are made available on a
case-to-case basis for conducting the reviews of
their own installations. The perception is that
such dependency could be easily exploited by the
DAE management to influence the AERB's
evaluations and decisions" [Gopalakrishnan 2002].

Third, the contested nature of the Chernobyl
impacts means that the evaluation of health
impacts of accidents, real or hypothetical, as
well as routine releases of radiation from
operating nuclear fuel chain facilities should be
performed by individuals and organisations
independent of nuclear utilities in a transparent
manner.

A fourth lesson is that when accidents occur at
nuclear facilities, details about the accident
and its potential (even if considered low
probability) impacts must be made public as soon
as reasonably possible. In contrast, the first
reaction to the accident by Soviet authorities
was to impose enormous secrecy on the event
itself and its fallout [Medvedev and Sakharov
1991].12 This resulted in thousands of
unnecessary deaths and victims of cancer and
other serious illnesses. This secrecy cannot be
attributed entirely to the Soviet system of
government; even in India, the nuclear
establishment operates largely in secret
[Subbarao 1998; Ramana 2005].

Fifth, Chernobyl shows that nuclear accidents
could have transboundary, potentially global,
impacts; what happens in one country cannot be
considered just its own sovereign matter. Thus,
for example, the concern among some in Sri Lanka,
that the construction and operation of the
Russian designed Koodankulam reactors might pose
a potential threat to their health in the event
of an accident, should not be dismissed out of
hand.

Finally, one is left with the all important
question - what lesson does Chernobyl offer for
the continued use of and further expansion of
nuclear power worldwide. Deciding on the future
of nuclear power depends on many considerations:
environmental sustainability, economics, ethics,
international security, and safety, to name some.
These are all contentious and will remain so. If
there is one normative consideration that can be
advanced into this debate, it should be that of
democratising the decision-making. Chernobyl
demonstrates beyond doubt that nuclear technology
poses a risk to all people, and that their
consent, based on a sound understanding of the
issues involved, is a prerequisite for making any
decisions about nuclear power or other hazardous
technologies.

Email: ramana@...

Notes

1 Soviet safety philosophy focused on active
safety systems, which would shutdown the reactor
in cases of mishaps, but largely ignored basic
design safeguards or passive safety features in
order to improve performance or save costs [Dodd
1994:85].
2 The design of the prototype fast breeder
reactor being constructed in Kalpakkam also has
this unsafe feature.
3 In comparison to nuclear weapon explosions
these are small yields; the atomic bomb that
destroyed Hiroshima produced about 13,000 tonnes
of TNT equivalent.
4 This is not to say that a containment
structure is not desirable. It is certainly an
additional level of safety. Yet, it should not be
used to reassure the public that they would be
completely safe even in the event of a nuclear
reactor accident. A containment structure, of
course, increases the construction cost of the
reactor, thereby making nuclear energy even more
expensive. The construction cost of the reactor
is already the largest component of the cost of
generating nuclear electricity [Ramana et al
2005].
5 The events at the Kakrapar Atomic Power
Station (KAPS) in March 2004 provides an example
of the difficulties in understanding even under
slightly abnormal conditions. According to the
Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, there were
failures of the automatic reactor power control
system and the automatic liquid poison addition
system of Unit-1 of KAPS on March 10, 2004, and
the reactor power rose gradually [AERB 2004].
Investigations by KAPS and the Nuclear Power
Corporation of India (NPCIL) lasting over a month
could not identify the causes of the power
increase and the unit had to be shutdown.
6 This is the region where the caesium-137 level
would have sufficed to cause an estimated
radiation dose of about 1 mSv during the first
month. The typical annual limit for radiation
dose to members of the general public from
anthropogenic activities is 1 mS/y.
7 The number of deaths should not be considered
the only marker of importance. Each cancer
patient and their families underwent immense
amounts of suffering that cannot be captured
through merely counting cancer deaths and
incidences. The epigraph is an illustration of
the suffering undergone by a survivor.
8 More recent UNSCEAR volumes, including the
2000 volume which focused on the Chernobyl
accident, have not revisited this estimate.
[UNSCEAR 2000] estimates that the lifetime
collective dose to the inhabitants of
contaminated regions of Belarus, Russian
Foundation, and Ukraine to be about 60,000
man-Sv, about a tenth of the estimated global
dose.
9 For the same institutional and political
reasons as there are underestimates of the number
of deaths, the collective radiation dose estimate
itself could be a deflated one. Verifying this
estimate, however, requires enormous technical
and financial resources, which is well beyond the
abilities of independent scientists and civil
society groups.
10 While there is clear evidence of elevated
leukaemia risk from in utero radiation exposure,
there is some uncertainty over its magnitude.
However, it is likely to be at least in the range
of lifetime risk of leukaemia mortality from
radiation exposure for all ages, which is roughly
0.04 for an exposure of 0.1 Sv [UNSCEAR
2000:427]. The average radiation dose to the
children studied by [Noshchenko et al 2001] is
4.5 mSv. This translates to over 40 deaths over a
70-year period, roughly three times the excess
observed in the study. Since [Noshchenko et al
2001] only studies children up to age 10, this is
not inconsistent.
11 The design of the Chernobyl reactor is
testimony to this. As recounted by Valery
Legasov, who was closely involved in the planning
and design of RBMK reactors of the type installed
in Chernobyl, "reactor specialists considered
that this was a bad one. Bad not because of
safety considerations but because of economic
reasons: high consumption of fuel and high
capital expenditure" [Mould 2000:297-98].
12 Decree U-2617 C of the Soviet health ministry,
issued June 27, 1986, states: "Secrecy is imposed
upon any data concerning the accident. Secrecy is
imposed upon the results of treatments for
sicknesses. Secrecy is imposed upon the data
about the extent of radioactive contamination of
personnel who took part in the liquidation of the
accident at the Chernobyl atomic power plant"
[Watermann 2006].

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