Chernobyl: the end of an extraordinary three decades of experience

"I was only 25 when I started my job here as a liquidator.Now, I'm almost 60 years old."

There were thousands of liquidators, workers who came here as part of the gigantic clean-up operation after the 1986 blast. It's the worst nuclear accident in history.

Gennady shows me a platform the size of a coffee table, installed here to collect dust. The bed of this tank dried up when the pumps that took the water from the nearby river finally came out in 2014; 14 years after the closure of the remaining three reactors.

Dust badysis for radioactive contamination is only a small part of the study, which lasts several decades, of this vast, abandoned area. The accident transformed this landscape into a giant, polluted laboratory, where hundreds of scientists worked to discover how an environment was recovering from a nuclear disaster.

The experience that has become a global disaster

On April 26, 1986, at 1:23 am, the engineers cut off power to some of the systems at the Chernobyl No. 4 reactor. In a test, it was essential to understand what would happen during a power outage. What the engineers did not know was that the reactor was already unstable.

The cut reduced the speed of the turbines that carried the cooling water into the reactor. As less water became more steam, the pressure on the inside increased. When the operators understood what was going on and tried to shut down the reactor, it was too late.

A breath of steam blew the top of the reactor, exposing the heart to the atmosphere. Two people in the factory died and, while the air was fueling a fire that burned for 10 days, the wind carried a cloud of radioactive smoke and dust around Europe.

The first rescuers rushed as a deadly smoke escaped. Of the 134 people diagnosed with acute radiopathy, 28 died in a few months. At least 19 have died since.

Gennady, an environmental scientist, began working in the area just three months after the evacuation. "We used to fly everyday by helicopter from Kiev," he explains, "to collect water and soil samples."

"The important thing was to understand the extent of contamination, to draw the first maps of the exclusion zone."

Today, this area covers Ukraine and Belarus. It covers more than 4,000 square kilometers, more than double that of London. All villages within 30 km of the plant were evacuated and abandoned; no one was allowed to return to live there.

In an external and forgotten part of the exclusion zone, people were allowed to return home a few months after the disaster.

Unlike the "30-kilometer zone", no checkpoint prevents entry into this semi-abandoned area. Narodichi, a town of more than 2,500 inhabitants, is located in this more remote area. Strict rules govern this officially contaminated district; in the exclusion zone should not be grown to produce food and can not grow.

However, today this part of Ukraine can not be easily divided into two categories: contaminated or clean. Research has shown that the consequences of Chernobyl are more complex and the landscape here is much stranger and more interesting than what would seem to indicate the strict rules of "non-contact" Narodichi.

The fear of radiation could actually hurt the inhabitants of Narodichi much more than the radiation itself.

"We receive less radiation here than in the plane"

On Gennady's shoulder, I can see the nuclear power plant, less than one kilometer from the tank where we are standing. The new sarcophagus of Chernobyl, which now buries unit 4, shines in the sun. He slipped on the epicenter of the accident in 2016. Below, robotic cranes dismantle radioactive remains of 33 years. .

Professor Jim Smith of the University of Portsmouth, UK, colleague of Gennady, is a scientist who studies the consequences of the disaster since 1990. He shows me here, at one of his many Search trips to the area, a dosimeter, a black plastic device the size of a phone that he wears during the visit.

It measures the external dose of radiation that it receives from the environment. The atoms of the nuclear fuel powder that were scattered here by the 1986 blast are being destroyed spontaneously. They emit high-energy rays and Jim's dosimeter detects the dose we receive every hour.

The readings are in units (called microsieverts) which seem to me useful only in the context of other relative "radioactive activities". At one point in the middle of the flight to Kiev, for example, his dosimeter indicated 1.8 microsieverts per hour.

"He's currently 0.6," Jim said. "It's pretty much [un tercio] from what we had on the flight ".

With the infamous central visible in the background, I am incredulous. But, Jim explains, we live on a radioactive planet: natural radioactivity surrounds us. "It comes from the sun's rays, from the food we eat, from the Earth," he says.

This is why, at 12,000 meters altitude in a pbadenger plane, with less protection of the Earth's atmosphere, we receive a higher dose.

"Yes, the exclusion zone is contaminated," he told me, "but if we registered it on a radiation dose map around the world, only small centers would stand out."

"The natural radioactivity surrounds us: it varies from one country to another, from one place to another." Most of the exclusion zone generates lower levels of radiation than many natural radioactivity zones around the world.

"You must not be in hot spots for a long time"

Although the boundary of the exclusion zone has not changed, the landscape has made it almost unrecognizable. Where people have been expelled, nature has taken its place. The wilderness, combined with abandoned buildings, farms and villages, gives a post-apocalyptic sense.

Jim and his colleagues spend their days here collecting samples and placing cameras and audio recorders, which silently collect information about wildlife life in this post-human place and how radiation affects them.

The second day of our trip to the area, I am the team in the red forest. This is a hot spot in the exclusion zone which, because of the direction of the winds in 1986, was the hardest hit by the fallout of radioactive material.

We put on protective clothing to avoid polluting our clothes.

In the forest, Jim's dosimeter reads 35, nearly 60 times the external dose received in the cooling pond.

"We should not stay here long," says Jim. He and his team quickly take soil samples, take pictures and get back to the car.

In the abandoned village of Burayakovka, just over 10 kilometers from the power plant, the approach is very different. Jim and the team take their time to explore the area. The dosimeter indicates 1.0, always less than on the flight.

In a small wooden house, demolished but still colorful, you can appreciate the sad truth of what people have lost here so suddenly. A coat that is still hanging from the arm of a chair is covered by three decades of dust.

But what people have left behind, through agriculture and gardening, has become a strangely rich habitat for wild animals. Long-term studies have shown that there are more wild animals in abandoned villages than anywhere else in the region. Here you can see brown bears, lynxes and wild boars.

Dr. Maryna Shkvyria, a researcher at the Kiev Zoo, has spent years researching and studying the largest mammals that have been displaced here after people leave.

Studies suggest that birds in the most polluted areas show signs of DNA damage, but Maryna's work is added to a catalog of research suggesting that wildlife is flourishing in most of the area. # 39; exclusion.

The Chernobyl wolves, she says, are a particularly striking example.

"After 15 years of study, we have a lot of information about their behavior," says Maryna. "And the Chernobyl Wolf is one of the most natural wolves in Ukraine."

800,000 – 16,000,000 μSv Radiation dose of the first who witnessed the Chernobyl emergency.

7,000,000 – 10,000,000 μSv Instantaneous radiation dose: vomiting, internal bleeding, death in 2 weeks

3,500,000 – 5,000,000 μSv 50% chance of dying in the next 60 days if left untreated

680,000 μSv The highest dose received by a worker during the Fukushima disaster in 2011

350 000 uSv Approximate total external dose rate if you lived in the Chernobyl "Red Forest" region for one year

Annual radiation dose limit of 20 000 μSv for nuclear workers in Europe

10,000 μSv instantaneous radiation on whole body computer tomography

3.100 μSv Annual background radiation from natural sources in the United States.

1,000 μSv Approximate annual dose above the natural background for people living in the least polluted parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone

60 μSv Radiation dose from a London-Los Angeles flight.

By "natural", it means that there is very little "human food" in the wolf diet. "Usually, wolves are around human settlements," says Maryna. "They can eat cattle, harvest crops and waste food, even pets." But not here, where wolves hunt wild prey.

Chernobyl wolves feed on deer and even catch fish. Some images, captured by camera traps, reveal milder eating habits. We saw wolves eating fruit around trees that were once part of people's gardens.

There is a group of animals that has a home in the area and, strictly speaking, should not be here.

In 1998, Ukrainian zoologists released a herd of 30 Przewalski horses in danger of extinction. The goal was that the horses graze in the lush vegetation and reduce the risk of forest fire. Today, about 60 of them live in scattered herds in Ukraine and Belarus.

They are native to the open plains of Mongolia, so forests scattered with abandoned buildings should not be an ideal habitat. "But they really use forests," explains Maryna. "We even installed capture cameras in old stables and buildings and use them to [refugiarse] against mosquitoes and heat.

"They even lie down and sleep indoors, they adapt to the area."

"You can have cherry vodka, I've done it"

Wildlife can make the most of what has gradually become a post-human natural reserve, but not all villages have been abandoned so that animals can take possession of them. Some people still live here, deep in the 30-kilometer zone.

On the fourth day we visited Maria's house. She is out in her garden when we come to the door and, while I try to introduce myself with a few words in Ukrainian, she interrupts me and takes me in a warm embrace and kisses me on the cheek.

Today is his 78th birthday. He is waiting for us and has prepared a festive breakfast.

Maria accompanies me, Jim, his colleague Mike and our interpreter Denis to a wooden table under a fruit tree.

It's a wonderfully sunny and pleasantly warm day even at 9 o'clock. Maria starts bringing food: pork fat, whole fish, sliced ​​sausages and steamed potatoes. There are two bottles of what appears to be alcoholic beverages: a colorless, dark red.

"If you do not like this vodka, you can take the cherry, I made it," he says.

María and her neighbors form a small community of only 15 people. Each of these "self-colonists", as they are called, pbaded through a border of exclusion zone little controlled and claimed his home in 1986.

Almost all families forced to leave here have received an apartment in a nearby town or village. For Maria and her mother, however, this country house surrounded by a garden was her home. They refused to give it up.

"We were not allowed to go back, but I followed my mother," Maria recalls. "She was 88 years old at the time and she would not stop saying:" I'll go, I'll go. "I just followed her. . "

About 200 autonomous settlers live in the area and, for this aging population isolated from the rest of the country, life is not easy, according to María.

"We are all very old," he told me. "And we take each day as it comes."

"I feel full of life when my children visit me in Kiev, otherwise it's not so interesting to live here, but you know, it's our land, our homeland, it's irreplaceable."

Maria's cell phone rings and I am surprised at the incongruity of our little host grandma, standing in her garden inside the exclusion zone, apparently trying to end the family. call from his daughter. She is busy with her BBC visitors!

So far apart as it is, it's an intimate community. While we sit in the garden (drinking cherry vodka on the insistence of Mary), her neighbor arrives with a birthday present. He sits on the bench near the garden gate; He can not walk too far.

However, self-colonists are a small minority. Most people who have lost their homes here have no hope of coming back.

Most of them lived in Pripyat, a Soviet dream town, designed specifically for power plant workers. A few kilometers from the factory, this city of 50,000 inhabitants is emptied overnight. Nobody was allowed to come back. now it is the archetype of a twentieth century ghost town.

However, it was recently considered that Pripyat was sure to visit for short periods and had become one of the most fashionable tourist attractions in Ukraine. Last year, about 60,000 people visited the exclusion zone, wishing to witness its dramatic decline.

His dark notoriety has been the subject of a dark exposure in social networks. Search #chernobyl on Instagram and you'll find, among interesting landscapes and tourist photos, images of disguised and anonymous characters, who sometimes wear gas masks or hold dolls in search of spooky goosebumps .

"Tell people that Chernobyl is not such a horrible place"

The city of Chernobyl, which is further away from the power plant than Pripyat, is confusing, it is located in a less polluted area. It has become a relatively populated center. Here, workers who dismantle the plant, scientists and tourists sleep.

Gennady, Jim, the rest of the research team and I stayed in one of their small hotels: a Soviet-style building surrounded by a garden of incomparable beauty and well maintained. This vegetation is taken care of by Irina, who manages the hotel. She stays here three months at a time before a colleague replaces her. Only people allowed to live in the city for a limited period.

With a cup of tea on our second night at the hotel, Gennady translates when Irina tells us her memories of the accident. She lived in Pripyat at that time with her grandmother.

On April 27, the day after the explosion, the city was evacuated. People were ordered to leave immediately. They lined up to board the buses that would drive them away from the city and from the factory. Irina was on the way back to her grandmother's house at that time.

"A friend of my grandmother was driving a cattle car carrying her cattle," he recalls. "My grandmother asked if he would take me with him, so I climbed into the cattle car."

"I did not know what was happening."

But Irina also felt the need to return to the area. However, she never returned to Pripyat; It would be too much to see her now. But he is proud to take care of the flowers around his hotel in Chernobyl.

"I like to make it as beautiful as possible for visitors," he tells me. "So, maybe you can tell people in your country that Chernobyl is not such a horrible place."

"We forgot we are Chernobyl people"

Gennady's 33 years of work in the exclusion zone may have led to a meeting at the end of this week. It takes place in a school in Narodichi, the city in the outer zone.

Scientists, community members, medical experts and officials from the state agency responsible for managing the exclusion zone meet to discuss a change that could transform the future of this district.

For the first time since the drawing of the border, the area will change. Three decades of research have concluded that much of the material is safe for food to be grown and for land to grow. Narodichi is one of its least polluted places.

Jim and Gennady present their findings at the meeting. Before I started, I organized a visit to the city's kindergarten, where children play outside in the sun.

A rainbow-painted picket fence at the edge of the playground contrasts in an almost ridiculous way with blocks of half-built gray towers next to it.

There were 360 ​​children here before the accident. Tatiana Kravchenko, a woman with a perpetual smile and a thick pink shiny coat, is responsible for the nursery. She remembers the evacuation.

"The children were evacuated with the teachers to" clean up areas, "he recalls." In three months they returned us and we had only 25 children. Finally, people have returned, new children are born and little by little, kindergarten has begun to fill, we now have 130 children. "

Most of the time, Tatiana explains, she does not think her community is in the exclusion zone.

"We forget that we are Chernobyl people, we have other problems to solve," he said. "It's no secret that half of the parents [de estos niños] They are unemployed because there is nowhere to work. I wish we could build something here, that our community can begin to flourish. "

"Maybe it's time to redraw the map"

Back at the meeting, Gennady looks over red-rimmed glbades and listens carefully to what is being said. Discussions take longer than expected. Much of the community's contributions seem to reflect Tatiana's thoughts: it is time for the restrictions to be lifted here.

But there is a lot at stake.

Those affected by the accident receive financial compensation from the government. Here, in a city with a high unemployment rate, in a country where the average wage is less than $ 400 a month, this income is important.

And many still fear Chernobyl radiation and its effects on their health and that of their children. After many years of research, understanding and explaining the long-term health legacy of the accident has been revealed to be extremely complicated.

It is telling that about 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer, most of which were treated and cured, were caused by contamination. The authorities have not prevented the sale of contaminated milk; Many children at that time drank it when they received high doses of radioactive iodine. It was one of the expelled pollutants from the reactor.

Many suspect that radiation has caused or will cause other cancer cases, but the evidence is at best dispersed.

Professor Richard Wakeford of the Center for Occupational Health and Environment at the University of Manchester points out that health studies are looking for a "signal" of a specific effect on health related to Chernobyl .

Its purpose is to capture this signal over the "background noise" of other causes. This was incredibly difficult, mainly because of the huge background noise caused by the almost simultaneous turmoil of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"It is presumed that there will be some accident-related cancers in addition to thyroid cancers, but its detection amidst this socio-economic chaos, which has had its own impacts on people's health." , was almost impossible, "says Professor Wakeford. . Cancer also affects between a third and half of Europeans. It is therefore probable that any sign of Chernobyl is imperceptibly small.

Of the other reported health problems, including conbad anomalies, it is not yet clear whether one can be attributed to radiation.

Professor Geraldine Thomas, of Imperial College London, explains: "Another confounding variable in this part of the world is related to iodine deficiency."

In its non-radioactive form, iodine is found in milk, green leafy vegetables and algae. The lack of this in the diet is a known cause of problems in the early development of the brain and spinal cord. "Therefore, a possible cause of conbad malformations is the lack of iodine in the environment," says the professor.

All of this means that estimates of cancer cases remain highly controversial.

In its 2006 semi-annual report on the long-term consequences of the accident, the World Health Organization concluded that many people's mental health had been damaged, for fear of radiation and serious disruption to their health. life. .

As a scientist who has spent years badyzing the truth about pollution in the region, Gennady admits that he did not expect the people of Narodichi to fear radiation.

"It's a very important factor that affects their lives even more than 30 years after the accident." It's really something that has surprised me, "he says.

This fear can be harmful, both physically and mentally.

It is thought that a feeling of fatalism and despair badociated with this hypothesis of being condemned by radiation contributes to raising smoking and alcoholism rates in this region, which is definitely bad for the health of people.

"It's a terrible thing that happened here," says Jim. "But it tends to dominate people's lives.

"In a way, and it's very, very difficult, we have to evolve into a situation where people can relive their lives without this fear, this curse of radiation."

We are not going anywhere

Gennady emerges from the meeting with a slightly tired look, but is optimistic with caution. The map was not officially reshaped today, but most people in the room agreed that a change was needed.

"The community wants to bring more life here," said Gennady. "And we scientists know that many places here can easily be excluded from this ban, so I think it was a very positive moment."

In kindergarten, Tatiana invited the youngest children to take a nap.

There are rows of adorable little beds in a new wing of the kindergarten that was built with money from a Japanese charity.

The close relationship between Japan and Ukraine has been forged by being the first to understand the impact of its own nuclear disaster on the Fukushima plant.

From the virgin building of the new nursery school to the nearby abandoned block, she says she would support the removal of the city from the exclusion zone.

"These houses could be rebuilt and filled with people, we dream.

"We live here, we are not going anywhere else, our children live here."

Victoria Gill, BBC Science Correspondent. Photographs of Jemma Cox. Graphics by Lilly Huynh and Sana Jasemi.