Saturday, April 26, 1986. Moscow time 01.26.
The RBMK-1000 reactor with number 4 in Soviet Union Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plantexplodes after a failed test on one of the two turbines it was powering.
In a few hours, Mr Valery Alexeyevich Legasova leading Soviet inorganic chemist and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences was already in town at the behest of the newly elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
It is the time of “blackout” (acceleration) and “glasnost” (transparency) for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Except that in this case absolutely nothing had been made known to the rest of the planet.
Two days later, while the evacuation has already begun in neighboring Pripyat, the alarm goes off at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, an imposing concrete block an hour from Stockholm.
Forsmark was the second largest nuclear power plant in those years, having been built only 6 years earlier, in 1980.
One of the employees was returning from the restroom and passed, as security rules tightened, the radiation monitoring device. The machine started rattling like crazy.
When experts discovered that the radiation was coming from the lost employee’s shoes, they feared that an accident had occurred at the production plant. It was the first time the sirens sounded.
It was still early in the morning of April 28 and it was not entirely clear where the leak was coming from, although
u o Class Goran Runermarkthen responsible for the operation of the factory, had given the order to thoroughly check everything.
The Swedes went up and down with the radiation detectors all day and found nothing. The image and the execution are absolutely in line with the Scandinavian phlegm: despite the irritating sound of the alarm, everyone in the unit remains cool and formal in their work.
The first analyzes show radioactive particles in the grass. Throughout the weekend in the south-east of Sweden the wind had fallen, in the north it had rained, events leading to the reduction of radioactive radiation in the region. “What if the leak isn’t ours?”
This naïve question, this externalization of a thought out loud to the hostage, led to the logical sequence of linking the leak and radiation findings to the nearby Soviet Union station.
The source of the radiation had come from 1,100 km away, from Ivankiv Rayon in the north of Kyiv Oblast, near Ukraine’s border with Belarus. From Chernobyl.
Caution. There have been years when information was very difficult to transmit, communications were at levels far removed from what we are used to in recent decades. That’s why all possibilities were considered, that’s why long shot scenarios weren’t rejected.
Telephones, faxes, telexes, whatever means were available were employed to disseminate and investigate the information.
The Swedish authorities are informed by the scientists, and late that evening, two full twenty-four hours after the disaster, the Soviet Union declares to the Swedes that “a minor accident” has occurred.
The Swedish government, dutifully, in turn informs the world about the radioactive contamination caused by the accident in the Soviet Union, and the tangle begins to unravel.
In Greece it is Holy Week. Correspondingly for us, the explosion happened on Lazarus Saturday, the Swedes got the news on Holy Monday, as did the Greek government and on Holy Tuesday the country was gripped by panic.
Holy Wednesday of 1986 the NEWS was already broadcasting SOS. It is the first “out of context” Easter that I remember, even crazier than the “desert” Easter of the time of the pandemic and confinement.
Panic in supermarkets. Vaporet was the toilet paper of the era, with images of infinite beauty unfurling at the tills. In the lay schools they were reassured with “certificates” like the one you see in the photo, in Democritus they ate strawberries, in jobs and offices a mixture of “fun” and terror.
It is the last times of the Cold War, times when TASS brought as a counterweight the accident to Three Mile Island and assured that on USA similar accidents happen. “Political capitalization”, spreading false and half-truth news, false reassurances, “lines” and other complicity.
The only sources of information at that time were the state-run ERT, the newspapers and the radio. Cafes take action, “information”, like the social media of the time. Tragelafos.
The effects in most European countries were noticed many years later, when the new generations probably did not even know what Chernobyl is and what associations a middle-aged person makes when hearing the word.
The fact is, the world community realized its extent only when it became known that the Soviets evacuated the area and more than 100 thousand people left their land and their lives to save themselves.
Most people either remembered or learned about Chernobyl a few years ago, in 2019, on the occasion of the very good series of the same name co-produced by HBO and Sky UK, which was based on the excellent book by the award-winning Belarusian author, Svetlana Alexievich.
It’s worth your time. Despite the drama and several transcendental references for the sake of fiction, the series transports through space and time and perfectly captures the climate of the era.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, Aleksievich has been a reporter and journalist for many years and, apart from Chernobyl, she has dramatically documented the aftermath of World War II, the War in Afghanistan, the fall of the Soviet Union and most historical events. in the history of the USSR. Perhaps she is one of the best in the art of documentary prose.
Incalculable consequences, open interpretations to this day, 38 years later. Without the appropriate scientific training and the necessary knowledge, it is unlikely to document the harmful consequences that the accident had in Greece.
For years we heard and read about cancers affecting fellow human beings, about relatives who left because of Chernobyl, about anomalies in the food chain, about many things.
It is not safe to take a position and it is not right to position ourselves in the public sphere on issues related to personal data.
What we do know for sure though, is that according to the EU Report in 2014, the most harmful substances have already decayed, and only some harmful materials, such as cesium and plutonium, have remained in the environment for a long time. In low percentages, but they will remain there for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years.
In our country, where the most affected Northern Greece and the Thessaly, measurements from 1996, showed cesium emissions of 65 kilobecquerel per square meter. (the risk limit is at 5 kilobecquerel), but according to official statistics no increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer and leukemia was observed.
From a debatable research of the Hellenic Psychiatric Association it follows that the In 1986, about two and a half thousand (!) abortions were performed, by parents who feared possible effects of radioactivity on the fetus.
The “documentation” on the parents’ motives, however, is not convincing. In general, I think that we should be very cautious with interpretations of statistics and always look for sources and motivations. That’s another discussion, maybe we’ll delve into it in the future.
The point is that the Chernobyl disaster proved that environmental pollution has no borders, is not ideological, is not just for historians or conspiracy theorists.
The human factor, no matter how digitized our lives are, no matter how much we move into the age of AI and technological assistance, remains steadfastly the generative cause of accidents and “accidents”. And unpredictability will always be the X factor in our life equation.
