[cdn-nucl-l] Reality check - radiation risk

["Jim Muckerheide" <jmuckerheide@cnts.wpi.edu>]

Friends,

Imagine living through this.

Regards, Jim Muckerheide 
=========================

New Scientist: Cheating Chernobyl

 
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24611 

Photo: Josh Ward 		   	 	 

Alexander Yuvchenko was on duty at Chernobyl's reactor number 4 
the night it exploded on 26 April 1986. He is one of the few 
working there that night to have survived. He suffered serious 
burns and went through many operations to save his life, and he 
is still ill from the radiation. He recently broke his silence 
for a documentary to be shown on the Discovery Channel. Here he 
speaks to Michael Bond about what happened that night                    

How did you end up working at Chernobyl? 

I chose it. It was one of the best stations in the Soviet Union, 
it was a good town to live in, and I had been there for practical 
work as part of my studies. And it was a good wage. Being a 
nuclear engineer was a prestigious career - in those days. 
Nowadays people in Russia prefer to be businessmen and lawyers. 

What were you doing the night the reactor exploded? 

I was on the night shift. When I turned up I found out that the 
safety test that had been planned for the day had been put off 
until the evening. The reactor had already been powered down and 
so we would just be overseeing its cooling, which is a very easy 
job. I was thinking that I wouldn't have much to do that night. 

What were you doing when you heard the explosion? 

I was in my office, talking to a colleague who had come in to ask 
for some paint, and reading some documents. 

What happened? 

The first thing I heard wasn't an explosion, it was a thud, a 
shaking. Then two or three seconds later came the explosion. The 
doors of my office were blown out. It was like when an old 
building is demolished, with clouds of dust, but combined with 
lots of steam. It was a very damp, dusty, powerful movement of 
air. There was a lot of shaking, a lot of things were falling. 
The lights went off. Our first thought was to find somewhere we 
could safely hide. We headed towards the transport corridor, 
where there was a small passage with a low ceiling. We were 
standing there and everything was falling around us. 

What did you think it was? 

When I heard the thud I thought it was something very heavy that 
had fallen. After that I didn't know. I thought that maybe war 
had begun. 

Did you imagine that it might be the reactor? 

I couldn't imagine it was something to do with the reactor. 
Before it happened there were no vibrations, no sounds, nothing 
to indicate there was something wrong. We were trained for 
various emergency situations. We were engineers, and we were 
trained in what the reactors could or could not do and what could 
go wrong. We were prepared for fire and other things, but we were 
not trained for this. We all thought the safety measures were 
reliable, that if you pressed the emergency stop button to lower 
the control rods into the reactor - which is what my friend 
Leonid Toptunov in the control room did that night - that it 
would stop the power as it was supposed to. But it didn't. People 
make mistakes, but we thought the safety measures would 
compensate for that. We believed what we were told in the work 
manual. 

What did you do after the explosion? 

I went back to my office and tried to ring the control room for 
reactor number 4 to find out what had happened, but there was no 
line. Suddenly the phone from control room number 3 rang. I got a 
command to bring stretchers. I grabbed the stretchers and ran. 
Outside the control room I met a friend who had been close to the 
centre of the explosion. I didn't recognise him. His clothes were 
black and his face was disfigured because he had been covered in 
scalding water. I only recognised him by his voice. He told me to 
go to the site of the explosion because there were others 
injured. This friend was being tended by others, so I got a torch 
and ran to find the other operator who had been near the huge 
coolant tanks. 

What did you find? 

I got to where I expected to find this person but I couldn't find 
anything, there was a huge mess. I found him on the other side, 
he had managed to crawl away. It was the same picture: he was 
wet, dirty, with serious scalding burns. He was standing up but 
was in an extremely shocked state, shaking. He told me I had to 
go to where the main blast happened, which was where my friend 
Valera Khodemchuk was. This guy couldn't see it, but there was 
nothing there in that direction, it was just empty space. 

What happened then? 

At this point I saw Yuri Tregub, who had been sent from control 
room number 4 by Anayoly Deatlov, Chernobyl's deputy chief 
engineer, to manually turn on the emergency high-pressure coolant 
water to flood the area. Realising that he wouldn't be able to do 
this on his own, I told my friend where to go to get help and I 
went with Tregub to turn on the water. 

Did you succeed? 

We weren't able to get to the taps. The coolant tanks were in a 
hall close to the reactor. There were two doors in. We couldn't 
get in the first because the walls had collapsed, so we went down 
a couple of floors to the other door. We were in water up to our 
knees. We couldn't open the door but we could see a little 
through it, and all we could see were ruins. The huge water 
containers had been blown apart. There was just a wall and a door 
left. We were looking into open space. 

Literally? 

To get a clearer idea of what had happened we walked outside. 
What we saw was terrifying. Everything that could be destroyed 
had been. The entire water coolant system was gone. The 
right-hand side of the reactor hall had been completely 
destroyed, and on the left the pipes were just hanging. That was 
when I realised that Khodemchuk was definitely dead. The place 
where I was told he'd been standing was in ruins. The huge 
turbines were still standing, but everything around them was 
rubble. He must have been buried under that. From where I stood I 
could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into 
infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by 
the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very 
beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. If I'd stood there 
for just a few minutes I would probably have died on the spot 
because of gamma rays and neutrons and everything else that was 
spewing out. But Tregub yanked me around the corner to get me out 
the way. He was older and more experienced. 

What did you do then? 

We started to make our way to control room number 4, but on the 
way we met three workers who had been ordered by Deatlov to go to 
the reactor hall and lower the control rods manually. Tregub ran 
back to the control room to report what we'd seen, and I went 
with these three to help them. I told them that the order they 
had been given was senseless because there was no reactor hall 
anymore and it was highly unlikely there were any control rods. 
But they said I had only seen it from the lower level and they 
had to see it for themselves from the upper level. 

Did you realise how dangerous that was? 

Yes, we did. 

What happened when you got back to the reactor hall? 

We climbed up to a ledge but there was very little room. Because 
I had come up the stairs last I stayed behind propping open the 
door. They took the torch from me and went in. I stood there 
listening to their reaction to what they saw, which looked like a 
volcano crater. They said there was nothing they could do, they 
had to get out. 

What happened to those three? 

All three of them died very soon afterwards. That wall and the 
door basically saved my life. I received quite a high dose 
propping open the door. We had done everything we could. That was 
the worst feeling: that there was nothing else we could do. 

At what point did you start to feel ill? 

About 3 am, one-and-a-half hours after the explosion. 

How did you feel? 

I began to feel sick. I knew one of the first symptoms of 
radiation illness was vomiting, but I was thinking, have I eaten 
something? I was trying to keep the worst thoughts at bay. Half 
an hour after the explosion I had met a man with a dosimeter, he 
was fully covered so I don't know who it was, and I asked him 
what the reading was. He showed me the counter, which was off the 
scale. That was a frightening moment. It was impossible to say 
how much radiation we were taking in, but I knew it was a large 
dose. I was taken to the local hospital at about 5 am because I 
was too weak to walk. I was taken to Moscow that evening. 

Did you think you would die? 

The most frightening thing was to lie there and hear how one 
after another the others were dying. I was thinking, when will it 
be my turn? I'm not a religious believer and I don't know any 
prayers, but I did pray every evening that I would wake up the 
next morning. 

How did they treat you? 

It was a very intensive and demanding treatment and you had to be 
very strong to withstand it. I had continuous blood and plasma 
transfusions. For a few months I lived on other people's blood. 
Then the ulcers from the radiation burns started to appear. I had 
a lot of burns. Only after a couple of months did it become clear 
that there was a chance I might live. At that point my body 
started to work on its own again. I didn't need transfusions. But 
I was on a continuous morphine drip. My wife Natasha says I had 
lost a lot of weight and looked like a dying man. She says I 
spoke very slowly and quietly, but that I always retained a 
clarity of mind. I understood what was going on. 

What kept you going? 

I was treated properly. And I was naturally strong and healthy - 
I was young, 24 at the time. 

Are you still suffering physically? 

I have to have skin grafts constantly. I still get ulcers. 
Without the burns it wouldn't be so bad. 

How do people in Russia treat you? 

I try not to talk about it. I don't want people to know about it. 
I have been given two medals, an order of honour for my actions 
that night and a medal 10 years afterwards, but everybody got one 
of those. I try to get on with my everyday life. My neighbours 
don't know who I am. There is a stigma attached to it. 

Have you been back to Chernobyl? 

Once, when they shut it down in December 2000. I was invited as a 
special guest. I wandered around the third reactor block, which 
is an exact copy of the one that blew up. I didn't feel too good. 
My knees were wobbling when I stood on top of the reactor. 

What do you think about nuclear power? 

I'm fine about it, as long as safety is put head and shoulders 
above any other concern, financial or whatever. If you keep 
safety as your number one priority at all stages of planning and 
running a plant, it should be OK. 

Alexander Yuvchenko will appear in Disaster at Chernobyl on 
Discovery Channel in Europe at 10pm (UK time) on 29 August               
		      	 	 
[http://archive.newscientist.com]