I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about Chornobyl. Also I’ve been talking about it a lot with some friends who are living and working temporarily in Kyiv, all of whom are very interested to know more about Chornobyl. One friend, Michael, is “working on a documentary photo project on people affected by radiation in the former Soviet Union.” He and I have talked a lot about Chornobyl, swapped resources and contacts, and he will travel with me next week on some site visits to interview and photograph resettled people from the Exclusion Zone.
Something I have noticed is that in all the books and reports I have read, there is never a consistent story of what actually happened, or even of how many people died. One book will say one person died in the initial explosion, another will say three. If a fact as simple as how many people died in the first few minutes can’t be confirmed, how can you believe anything else that is reported about the accident, much less the lasting consequences?
As luck would have it, Andriy Arkhipov stopped by our office today. Andriy is the scientist who guided us through the Exclusion Zone last year. I trust him, and I thought he might be able to provide me with some straight answers, or at least some better insight.
“Why,” I asked him, “do the reports differ all the time about the facts of the accident? How many people actually died in the explosion?”
“The only people who know exactly what happened that night are the people who were there,” he said to me. “No one else knows for sure. What I can tell you is that definitely one man died in the explosion, and he was trapped under rubble and his body was never recovered.” (This fact is consistently reported in everything I’ve read, so I already knew that this was at least true.)
“We also know,” he continued, “that 28 firemen died in the immediate aftermath as a result of extreme radiation exposure (in the first week, two weeks, month).” This was a figure I hadn’t heard before, although I’ve read numerous accounts of the first responders’ heroic efforts and horrific deaths.
All this “activity” lately in my own life about Chornobyl has gotten me thinking about my own safety and how I might be able to take more control of the situation, have more first-hand knowledge about the levels of radiation I may be exposed to. I decided to find out about dosimeters. I found some websites selling dosimeters and other radiation-detection equipment, but quickly realized I have no idea what exactly I’d need. I again took advantage of the chance meeting with Andriy today to ask his advice. I told him I want to be able to measure radiation in foodstuffs at the market. “Impossible,” he said. You need very specific, very advanced, and very big equipment to be able to do that. In other words, not portable, and way out of my price range. He did offer, though, that I could buy a radiation detector device for use at home; it’s about the size of a desktop laser printer, with a hole in the front where you insert the food item in question. Andriy made a quick call, and before I knew it, we had a fax with a price list of radiometers and dosimeters, the least expensive being 897 hrivna (a little under $200) – yikes! And here I’d been thinking I could get something small to carry around with me, thinking to spend something like 50 bucks. Think again!
“So how can people protect themselves? How can we know what’s safe and what’s not?”
“Everything sold in the markets is supposed to be checked by the official radiation detection control point. In theory. In practice, well, not everyone does it.”
So, again, I ask, how are we supposed to protect ourselves? No wonder the general population long ago stopped actively worrying about radiation in their food – whether it’s there or not, you basically have no way of finding out.
Anka in Kyiv 