Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

"No," said Zakharin. "We demand that something be done. The town must be evacuated! The danger is very great to all of us. Comrade Kalychenko here is an expert on such matters. He will explain it to you."

But Comrade Kalychenko did not, because when Zakharin looked around for backing from his technical expert, Bohdan Kalychenko was nowhere to be seen.

Sunday, April 27

There is no "core meltdown" at the Chernobyl Power Station. At least that particular disaster was impossible, for uranium dioxide does not melt until it reaches a temperature of 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even burning graphite never gets much hotter than half that. When the graphite burned, it was, after all, only a simple chemical matter of carbon combusting in the presence of oxygen, not basically different from the blazing logs in the fireplace of a split-level ranch house. Although it was a real nuclear explosion that started the disaster, the nuclear reaction blew itself out in the first fraction of a second after the initial blast. So there is no longer any real danger of that famous nuclear nightmare, a core meltdown, but another danger is most ominously present. In a way it has become even worse.

As the carbon in the graphite reacts with the oxygen in the air in that fire, the smoke rises. It has no chimney, as the fireplace logs would, but it doesn't need one. At such temperatures the fire creates its own chimney, as the column of hot smoke and gases thrusts upward through the atmosphere. The column carries other gases and tiny bits of solid matter along with it. That is where the real, and most terrible danger lies. That smoke contains deadly poisons. It is not just the uranium in the core that is radioactively poisonous now. The reactor has created its own new poisons, some of which are far more worrisome than uranium. It is inevitable that it should. Even if a nuclear reactor could start with pure, and nearly harmless materials, its purity would not last. Its own radiation corrupts it. Some atoms are broken into fragments, and each fragment is a new chemical element. Nuclei gain particles or lose them. Elements which do not exist in nature-the "transuranic" ones-are created. Many of the new elements are fiercely radioactive. This is the unique danger of nuclear accidents.

Without exception, all radioactive elements are harmful to living things-every living thing, from fungi to human beings. High doses of radiation kill quickly. Lower doses take more time. At the lowest possible concentration-a single particle striking a single cell-there may be no detectable damage at all, because the rest of the body may be able to repair or replace the cell. Or it may not; in which case the damage may not show up for decades, appearing only late in life as cancer.

Say what you would about the men from the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, Smin thought wearily, you at least had to admit they got things done. He had lost count of the number of experts-specialist doctors, engineers, construction people- who had poured into Chernobyl in the last dozen hours. Of course Chief Engineer Varazin's dacha was far too small to hold all the meetings and individuals concerned in the effort to control the damage to Reactor No. 4. Perhaps, Smin thought, it was also a bit too close to the naked core for the comfort of the experts; at any rate, a new command post had been established thirty kilometers away, in the regional Party headquarters of a collective farm village.

It was not just men the people from the Ministry had conjured up, it was materiel. A steady flow of heavy machines lumbered through the checkpoint on their way to the plant. Trucks had arrived all through the night, bearing all sorts of things that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had never had before. Everyone now carried a little aluminum pen-shaped dosimeter. Everyone, even at the checkpoint, wore coveralls, caps that came down over the neck and ears, even cloth masks to put over the mouth and nose, though at the checkpoint all of those hung loose around the wearers' throats. You could not tell a general from a laborer. In white or green, they were all covered from head to toe. It made them look like robots.

But if they had been robots, there would not now be the steady stream of casualties coming from the plant.

Almost all of the wounded now were firemen. Many suffered severe burns, but most of them also had worse than burns. Already a few of the victims had suppurating cold-sore blisters on their faces and mouths, and those were not just burns; those were the first signs of radiation sickness, and the fact that the black herpes blisters had popped up so rapidly was certain indication that the exposure had been very great.

But Rasputin, the specialist in the biological effects of radiation, had instituted tight procedures for dealing with them. Each man was carefully undressed by white-robed, white-gloved, white-hooded orderlies as he lay on his stretcher in the open air. His clothing, every scrap, went into a bin to be buried in the open field, where a bulldozer was excavating a deep trench. Then the doctors took over, first carefully washing every inch of exposed skin, checking with radiation monitors; then they redressed him in a hospital gown and poulticed the burns. A separate set of ambulances waited at the control point; when they were full, they roared away. Some ferried the patients with the worst radiation damage to the airstrip in Chernobyl town, for the plane that would take them to the special hospital in Moscow. The others were put into other ambulances to start the two-hour trip to Hospital No. 18 in Kiev.

The highway crossed a little stream at the collective farm village-it was why that spot had been chosen for the checkpoint. One fire truck was permanently posted there, its pumps constandy going to suck water from the stream. With that water each ambulance was hosed down before it went back to the plant for more of the endless supply of wounded. The ambulances from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station never passed beyond the checkpoint to the outside world. They never would.

Returning to the command post for another installment of the endless meetings, Simyon Smin saw a little two-man helicopter sitting on the ground just off the roadway. Its rotor was turning slowly, and the pilot was leaning back in his seat, gazing at the distant smoke plume from the power station. Smin ducked under the rotor and banged on the door. "Pilot! Who are you?"

The pilot blinked at him. "Lieutenant of Militia Kutsenko, at your service. Pilot to Major General Varansky."

"Of course," barked Smin, just as though he had known who General Varansky had been all along. "I have the general's orders. Take me up. I want to survey the site." And, as Lieutenant Kutsenko opened his mouth for a question, Smin snapped: "At once! Do you not understand that this accident endangers the entire country?"

Smin had never been in such a small helicopter. It bounced and swooped staggeringly, far worse than the one he had borrowed the day before, but his mind wasn't on the ride. It wasn't even on his fatigue, or the facts that his scars itched, his eyes ached, and the corners of his mouth were sore. What he was thinking about was what he had come to see.

When they were only five or six kilometers away, the plant began to come into view. The great drift of black smoke snaking into the sky seemed far thicker than the day before, even though most of the fires were long since out; it was, Smin knew, the smoldering embers that produced the pall. As they approached over the towers of Pripyat, Smin could see that the streets were full of people. Their white faces stood out sharply as they gazed up at the helicopter. "Fools," muttered Smin.

TTie pilot craned toward him. "What?" he yelled. "Did you speak?"

Smin shook his head; the people of Pripyat had to be gotten out of that area, there was no question about that, but there was nothing the pilot could do. "Up higher, if you can," he urged. "But stay out of the plume!"