- CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- When
the nightmare finally ended for Maria Dikha, she wanted nothing more than
to go home.
-
- Eighteen years ago, Ms. Dikha was a security guard at
Unit No.-4 at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant when its reactor exploded,
spewing thousands of tonnes of radioactive dust into the sky in what remains
the world's worst nuclear accident.
-
- She heard the blast at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, and
remembers seeing what she describes as "a flash of fire," but
was forced to remain at her post inside a fiery building spewing radiation
into the atmosphere for another 51/2 hours until she was released from
duty and taken by plane to a clinic in Moscow.
-
- When she left hospital three months later, she headed
right back to the Chernobyl region, although most others had fled. She
had the opportunity to move to an apartment in another part of Ukraine,
but she couldn't imagine living anywhere else.
-
- "I was born here. I spent all my life here. I began
my career here," said the stocky 42-year-old, who manages an apartment
block on the main street in Chernobyl, the tiny town that exists in the
shadow of the world's most infamous nuclear plant. "Those are my very
simple reasons for coming back."
-
- Although she has been hospitalized once more since the
blast because she felt pain "everywhere," she says she has had
no long-term health problems. "I'm not afraid [to live here]. The
radiation has gotten adjusted to us local people."
-
- Chernobyl sits inside a 30-kilometre "exclusion
zone" around the plant, and you need special permission to get through
the heavily guarded checkpoints that block the road into the area, but
life in the town has slowly recovered a modicum of normality. There's a
grocery store, and buses that ferry people to and from the outside world.
-
- The town now has 400 residents, many of them shift workers
who stay for a few weeks at a time. Surprisingly, others ó including
refugees from Chechnya, Central Asia and other parts of the former Soviet
Union ó are clamouring to get in. Some have applied with the Ukrainian
government for permission to move into the abandoned apartment blocks that
were once posh by Soviet standards.
-
- At the town's heart are residents such as Ms. Dikha,
who came back and say they're home for good.
-
- "The air is clean, the forest is lovely. I plant
my own potatoes and tomatoes. I breathe easier here," said 64-year-old
Tatiana Khrushch, who was moved by the government to a city in western
Ukraine but gave up her free apartment there and returned to Chernobyl
18 months later.
-
- She has to collect used bottles to supplement her $50-a-month
pension, but says she never liked living away from her home. "What
is there to be scared of? This is a fine place."
-
- But there is still reason to be afraid in Chernobyl.
The nearby town of Prypyat, just north of the plant and hardest hit by
the disaster, stands as a testimonial to the horror of the nuclear explosion.
-
- Once a thriving city of 47,000, it's a ghost town today,
with radiation levels so high that no one can stay for more than a few
hours at a time.
-
- Blocks of apartments in Prypyat's main square stand silent,
still filled with furniture and household goods, evidence of how hastily
the town was evacuated once the radioactive cloud started blowing north.
In a nearby fairground, a Ferris wheel rusts from disuse near scattered
bumper cars. Posters celebrating the glories of the Soviet Union, prepared
for a May Day parade that was never held, lie unused in the town hall.
-
- Radiation in the region remains extraordinarily high,
with readings taken this week as high as 200 micro roentgens an hour in
Prypyat, compared with a more normal 12 in central Kiev, about 100 kilometres
to the south. Health risks to residents in the area remain significant
and the incidence rate of thyroid cancer is still rising.
-
- In the village of Laski, beyond the exclusion zone but
in the wider fallout area, doctors have found that those born just after
the disaster are only now seeing its effects.
-
- Outside a mobile Red Cross clinic that visited Laski
this week, a half-dozen teenagers gathered on the dirt road to discuss
their results. Of the six, two had just found out they have thyroid conditions
that required further testing. The tests could mark the beginning of a
lifelong battle with cancer.
-
- "I'm convinced that people have to leave here,"
said Olga Davidenko, a visibly shaken 16-year-old who learned minutes before
that she had goitre, an inflammation of the thyroid gland that can develop
into lymphoma with exposure to radiation. "I plan to go to university
in Kiev and never come back."
-
- Vladimir Sert, director of the mobile Red Cross lab,
said that in the first decade after the explosion doctors detected 20 or
30 new incidences of thyroid cancer a year among young people in the region
around Laski. Last year they found 68, and the number is expected to keep
rising before levelling off in 2006, 20 years after the disaster. The medical
estimates are based on data gathered by Japanese doctors in the years after
the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
-
- "No one knows how high the peak will be," Dr.
Sert said. "In terms of dose, Chernobyl was 10 times Hiroshima."
-
- Though the last of Chernobyl's four reactors stopped
producing power in 2000, a plant spokesman said the overall shutdown process
will continue for decades. So the risks are also high for the 4,000 people
who work at the plant.
-
- They are ferried to and from the site by a special train
that runs to the satellite town of Slavutich, deliberately built outside
the fallout zone. But the workers spend their days on a site that in some
spots sees radiation readings as high as 1,600 micro roentgens an hour.
-
- Reactor No..4, meanwhile, poses a continuing threat to
Ukraine and its neighbours. The dilapidated concrete-and-metal sarcophagus
built around the reactor after the explosion has 100 square metres worth
of cracks and openings that let radiation seep out and precipitation in,
dangerously destabilizing the 200 tonnes of nuclear-fuel-laced materials
inside. The western side of the structure is supported by a lopsided column
that is slowly falling over, a few millimetres a year.
-
- Emergency stabilization work, costing $768-million and
aided by 28 donor countries, is to begin later this year. Construction
of a new shell to surround the leaking sarcophagus is to start in 2006.
-
- "The [sarcophagus] was and is radioactively dangerous,"
said Yulia Mavusich, a spokeswoman for the Chernobyl plant. "There
is a real possibility it could collapse at any moment."
-
- In Laski, no one can even contemplate the possibility
of another disaster. Most residents are too poor to move and simply try
to get on with their lives, resigned to the fact that they live beside
a not-yet-dormant man-made volcano.
-
- Waiting in line with her husband and 21/2-year-old son
for checkups at the mobile Red Cross clinic, Alla Stepanchuk acknowledged
she is nervous about little Artyom growing up in the shadow of Chernobyl.
-
- He was born closer to Kiev, but the couple couldn't find
work there, so they moved back to Laski, their hometown.
-
- "Of course we are afraid, but we just have no other
choice but to live here," Ms. Stepanchuk said, keeping a close eye
on Artyom as he played outside the clinic.
-
- "This is our home."
-
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