May 18, 2000
Ukraine received an ugly reminder of the world’s worst nuclear accident last weekend when a rumor started spreading that there had been another accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Fortunately, the rumor turned out to be false. While there apparently was plenty of activity up in the exclusion zone – in the form of fires – there was no accident. Although there exists a possibility that those fires, which continue to rage, present some form of contamination risk, it appears the risk is minor.
While the Ukrainian people can breathe a collective sigh of relief about that, the Ukrainian government cannot afford to do the same. On the contrary, the Ukrainian government should shut the plant down immediately in the wake of last weekend’s scare. For those of us who were not around for the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, it is impossible to understand how people subjected to the accident might have felt once they discovered they had been breathing contaminated air for a week. Violated; abused; sickened; petrified; confused: Those are just some of the adjectives people use to describe their emotions at the time. Last weekend’s rumors, to those who were subjected to them, certainly touched off similar feelings. For life-long Kyivans, such rumors must have brought back memories of the worst kind.
For those of us who were nowhere near Chernobyl in 1986, the rumors offered at least a slight idea of how people might have felt in the days after the accident. There was nothing in the environment that bespoke of a catastrophe last weekend – the sky was clear, the air cool and crisp. But radiation doesn’t announce itself; rather, it lurks like an imposter, invisible and unwanted. Impossible to combat or comprehend, it silently wreaks destruction.
While Kyiv was spared silent destruction last weekend, the accident rumor served as a bellwether of the Ukrainian peoples’ faith in their government. As is widely known, when the original Chernobyl accident occurred in 1986, the Soviet authorities for close to a week denied that anything had happened. When they finally admitted there had been an accident, they played down its severity. Do Ukrainians today think their government has risen above such base Soviet standards? The answer, based on the events of last weekend, is no. Even as Ukrainian government officials publicly stated that there had not been an accident, few Ukrainians were ready to take those words at face value, as evidenced by the fact that the rumor spread even after the government’s public announcement.
Meanwhile, the casual approach the Ukrainian government took to making that announcement did little to convince us that today’s authorities would handle a second accident any better than their Soviet predecessors handled the first. The government’s efforts to assuage the fears of the public amounted to a press conference by the Emergency Situations Ministry, where we were told that fires, not a nuclear accident, were at the root of the suspicious smoke billowing down from the north – the smoke that sparked the rumors in the first place.
Given the country’s insecurities about Chernobyl, the situation warranted a bit more action than that, in our view. It would have been more appropriate had a top government official, or even the president himself, appeared publicly and explained exactly what was going on. He could have used the opportunity to denounce the Soviets for their cover-up in 1986 and insist that his government would never let something like that happen.
Of course, there’s one other announcement the president could have made, and he can still make it: ordering Chernobyl shut for good. We have long railed against the government for playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette by leaving one reactor running at the aging plant. The events of last weekend only serve to prove how real that game is. Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko pledged to close Chernobyl by the end of the year during his trip to the United States earlier this month. There is absolutely no reason to delay any longer. For the sake of its people, its pride and its reputation in the West, Ukraine should do the right thing: Close Chernobyl today.
– Greg Bloom
