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Author Topic:   Chernobyl
Yin
Knowflake

Posts: 600
From:
Registered: May 2004

posted November 22, 2004 12:34 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
quote:
In Chernobyl, fallout lingers for villages
Radioactive areas persist as farms struggle
By Anna Dolgov, Globe Correspondent | November 21, 2004

KULSHICHI, Belarus -- No one lives here anymore.

Only radiation-danger signs stick up from the ground in this village contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl accident, and abandoned buildings gape silently, their windows broken.

Less than a half-mile away, where a country road winds into fields, herds of black-and-white cows graze, absorbing radioactive elements in the grass and transmitting them in concentrated form to milk that will be sold in stores around the country.

Belarusian maps of radioactive pollution color the area around Kulshichi deep red for the highest level of cesium-137 contamination, which in 2001 measurements, exceeded 100 curies per square mile. Even by 2046, the maps indicate, the radiation in this part of Belarus will remain more than 40 curies per square mile, far above the European average of 1 curie per square mile.

Following food shortages that rattled the Soviet-style, state-controlled economy of Belarus a few years ago, state-run farms gradually have resumed working lands polluted by the Chernobyl accident. The government assures people that it is safe to eat the food grown there, but health specialists and critics of the government's policies disagree, saying known methods for producing safer food in radioactive areas are not used, and contaminated food is reaching Belarusians' tables.

People who pasture the cows or grow oats and potatoes in the fields around Kulshichi usually do not read the radioactivity maps. They follow instructions from the management of state-run collective farms.

''They said the village has been rehabilitated, and that now the fields can be planted over again," said Fyodor Danilenko, a 40-year-old tractor driver from the Urechye farm, east of Kulshichi.

The Belarusian economy does not yield enough revenues to pay for massive food imports, and the government is unwilling to abandon vast expanses of contaminated farmland and see empty grocery-store shelves and long lines for staple foods.

''We are once again getting a lot of 'dirty' foods distributed to the country's stores," said Ivan Nikitchenko, a leading specialist on radiation control from the Belarusian Academy of Sciences.

Viktor Ivanov, deputy director of the research Institute of Medical Radiology, outside Moscow, said health damage from living in polluted areas is difficult to gauge because it depends greatly on the amount of radiation a person gets from food.

''Any dose of radiation, however small, creates a risk, however small," he said. ''If they eat locally grown food, they are certain to cross the danger threshold."

About a quarter of the agricultural land in Belarus was polluted when Chernobyl's No. 4 reactor exploded, and winds carried radiation across the country. According to various estimates, Belarus received as much as 70 percent of the fallout, followed by Ukraine and some parts of Russia.

According to UN figures, radiation-linked thyroid cancer among children in some areas of Belarus has increased more than a hundredfold since the accident.

Scientists say most of the health damage comes not from exposure to background radiation but from people eating or drinking contaminated food, especially milk. At farms such as those around Kulshichi, radiation is mostly in the soil but comes into ground water, cow fodder, and farm plants.

''Milk is the main source of cesium-137 that people are receiving," said Rudolf Alexakhin, director of Russia's Institute of Agriculture Radiology, the main research center into the subject in the former Soviet Union.

''Cesium-137 travels the chain of soil-grass cows and is concentrated in milk," he said.

Since the accident, some residents of polluted villages have returned, deciding that the trouble of resettling outweighed the dangers of radiation. They have been planting vegetables in their yards and raising cows and chickens for food. Now, President Alexander Lukashenko's government has taken farming to a national policy level and has ordered state-run farms to sow and harvest in polluted areas to feed the nation.

Lukashenko, a former collective-farm boss, has generally urged agricultural development. He has declared that ''without reviving the village, we won't revive the country." The quote is displayed as a motto on the presidential website.

''Lately, Lukashenko has been pushing through a new idea -- developing agriculture on those lands," said Ales Belyatsky, head of the Vesna human-rights group that was banned a year ago after criticizing the government for a various alleged rights violations.

''Ten years ago, these lands were off-limits for farmers, and now they are again being turned into fields that grow bread," he said.

Government critics say that over the last five years, Belarus has declared hundreds of population centers no longer dangerous to inhabit and has boosted regional farm production by 30 percent, the Associated Press has reported. The critics say statistics of rising death and cancer rates have been censored.

Public protests are unlikely. Lukashenko's government has closed newspapers that criticize his regime, banned most rights groups, and sent police to brutally disperse participants in opposition rallies. Belarusian scientist Yuri Bondazhevsky, who objected to plans for farming polluted lands, has been convicted of taking bribes and jailed, in a case widely seen as a ploy to silence him.

''Now people are quiet because they are afraid," said Belyatsky, whose group has been following the farming issue.

After the Chernobyl accident, Soviet authorities sealed off an 18-mile ''exclusion zone" around the Ukrainian nuclear power plant. Many sites around Belarus, where radiation fell with rains after the accident, are as badly polluted as the zone, according to analysts and maps. Most of these lands are again producing food.

Kulshichi is one of those places. Located 140 miles north of Chernobyl, it has received some of the highest levels of cesium-137. So have a half-dozen other villages in the area, and many more scattered in patches around the country.

For days after the Chernobyl disaster, while Soviet authorities refused to tell people what happened and did not begin evacuation, radioactive fallout around Kulshichi ''made the fields look white, as if lots of hail fell there," said Nadezhda Balabanova, from the nearby Khachinka village.

Lukashenko insists that farms cleanse products grown on such fields from radiation and accuses critics of trying to use the contamination issue to oust him. ''We will support technologies for producing clean products on contaminated lands and will invest in them," he said in April without specifying the measures.

Reducing radioactive contamination is possible, specialists say, mostly through fertilizing the land and turning over the top layers of soil to bury radioactive isotopes too deep for plant roots to reach.

Specialists say lowering contamination can also be done by polishing off the grain skin, where radioactive elements accumulate; skimming fat off the milk to make cream or butter; and discarding milk proteins, where radiation concentrates.

But ''none of this is done," Nikitchenko said.

Instead of developing measures to combat the effects of radiation, authorities closed the Research Institute of Endocrinology and Radiology in Belarus last year and ''are doing everything to destroy radiation control," Nikitchenko said.

Tamara Belookaya, who headed a laboratory at the closed research institute and now leads the Children of Chernobyl watchdog group, said fields around Kulshichi are ''too polluted, and nothing should be grown there, and no cows should be pastured."

''But during the past decade, all radiation-safety measures have been gradually abandoned," she said.

People living on farms around Kulshichi recall no attempts to turn over the soil.

Chernobyl cleanup workers ''have removed top layers of soil in schoolyards and at kindergartens around here, where there are children -- but how could they turn over layers of soil on a whole field?" said Ivan Gerashchenko, a retired schoolteacher who has resided all his life in the village of Zemnitsa, near Kulshichi. ''Of course nobody has done that."

The government has an explanation for why that has not been done. ''They told us that all the radiation has evaporated," said Lyuba Zyuzina, a dairy farm worker. ''They said so on television."

Radiation maps show that away from Kulshichi, ground levels of cesium-137 drop to 13 to 40 curies per square mile, and villages there have never been evacuated. Instead, newly built brick and wood houses have risen on the outskirts recently, as the government seems eager to ensure that the land will have enough farmers to work it.

''The government has built four or five new houses in every village around here over the past year, to attract people here," said Nina Martsenko from Urechye, east of Kulshichi.

''Our farm didn't grow anything for a while, and now we have started to plant again."


I was 9 years old when Chernobyl's reactor exploded. The contaminating clouds were blown over my country and our government took their sweet a$$ time to warn us about the risks. While the top dogs in Bulgaria were getting food sealed in metal containers and shipped from Western Europe, we the kids were eating and drinking products exposed to the radiation.

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Harpyr
Moderator

Posts: 1744
From: sleepy Rocky Mountain village
Registered: Dec 2002

posted November 22, 2004 03:02 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Harpyr     Edit/Delete Message
.. oh Yin, I had no idea you were near this..

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Aen
Knowflake

Posts: 299
From:
Registered: Nov 2002

posted November 23, 2004 05:18 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Aen     Edit/Delete Message
Hi Yin,

I'm from Estonia, so I know what you are talking about way too well. I know men who were in the SU army at the time and were sent there to aid/work/wahtever without much (or any) protection or warning what damage it will make to their health. If to think of Russians' nuclear weapons testing policy in the 50's, it was hardly surprising policy.

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Yin
Knowflake

Posts: 600
From:
Registered: May 2004

posted November 23, 2004 09:22 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message

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scorpbaby
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Posts: 285
From: Ny, USA
Registered: Jun 2004

posted November 23, 2004 10:49 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for scorpbaby     Edit/Delete Message
Hi Yin, I'm sorry to hear that you were so close to the Chernobyl disater. I recently saw an HBO documetary called "Children of Chernobyl". It showed how greatly the radiation still affects people near the area. It showed all the children born with defects from exposure to radiation while in the Womb. It was so heartbreaking to see all the thousands of children suffering from deformities and painful tumors. Oh I must have cried through the whole thing. I really hope more will be done to clean up the mess

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LibraSparkle
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From: Vancouver USA
Registered: May 2004

posted November 23, 2004 10:51 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for LibraSparkle     Edit/Delete Message

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Nephthys
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Posts: 1561
From: California
Registered: Oct 2001

posted November 25, 2004 04:51 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Nephthys     Edit/Delete Message
One day while at the Long's Drug Store, I noticed the checkout girl's eye. The white part of her eye, had a red blotch, it looked like fresh, bright red blood. I asked her about it and she said it is from the radiation from Chernobyl. WOW!

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Randall
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From: Columbus, GA USA
Registered: Nov 2000

posted November 26, 2004 01:17 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Randall     Edit/Delete Message

------------------
"Never mentally imagine for another that which you would not want to experience for yourself, since the mental image you send out inevitably comes back to you." Rebecca Clark

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maklhouf
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Posts: 281
From:
Registered: Nov 2003

posted November 26, 2004 01:27 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for maklhouf     Edit/Delete Message
Parts of the UK also are still seeing the effects of the fallout.

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