Frederik Pohl: Chernobyl

Much of the debris has been bulldozed away. The great hole where Reactor No. 5 was meant to go is half filled with radioactive wreckage and excavated soil. Earthen ramps have been thrown up to let heavy machinery into the interior of the plant, the turbine room, and everywhere else they are needed. It is an incredible effort. All the resources of the USSR have been thrown into Chernobyl. Fleets of trucks, trains, and planes are bringing supplies-pipes, drilling equipment, repair and construction materials, etc.-from all over the country; at least forty-five hundred trucks and eight hundred buses are in use.

The working areas of the three surviving reactors are now completely air-conditioned, with triple filters (which are checked for radioactive dust and replaced every two hours). Every exposed surface has been repainted with thick radiation-proof lead paint. The workers come in (on short shifts) in armored cars. Most of the plant is still off limits, except for the antiradiation crews. Water for the generators still comes from the cooling pond, but that water is radioactive now. There is an independent supply of water for toilets and drinking. It is piped in from new wells that have been dug three kilometers away, and there isn't much of it. The plant needs workers even more than it needs water, and they, too, have been provided from sources far away; the nearest place for most of them to live is now the town of Chernobyl.

When Sheranchuk reported for his first day's duty back at the plant, he had to ride the thirty kilometers from town to plant, and the vehicle he rode in was an armored personnel carrier.

Sheranchuk had never been in an armored vehicle before. Nor had he ever met the dozen other workers who shared it with him on the long ride to the power station. Inside the armored carrier they had not bothered with their face masks, but none of the faces meant anything to him. They all seemed to know one another, for they chatted in the manner of people who had worked together for a long time, though Sheranchuk was sure not one of them had been employed by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in that long-ago time-

He stopped himself. Long ago? But it was only, he counted, twenty-seven days since the explosion! Not quite that, actually; Saturday morning at 1:23 would be exactly four weeks. It seemed half a lifetime, at least.

"Masks on, if you please," the driver of the APC called. Grinning, everyone pulled up the masks as the personnel carrier bumped through the entrance to the plant and stopped. Sheranchuk rose with the others, but the driver put out a polite hand to stop him. "Not you, Comrade Sheranchuk," he said. "Your appointment is with the Personnel Section and they're in the command post twelve kilometers further." "But I wanted to see the plant!"

The driver hesitated. "Come up and sit beside me," he offered. "It's lead glass in the windscreen; you can see out. Here, I'll take a little run around the plant first so you can get a look; I've got to pick up some others for the command post anyway."

Nobody really "ran" around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station anymore. There were too many busy earthmoving machines to avoid, too many areas roped off with signs warning of radiation, too many places in what was left of the roadways, where backhoes and bulldozers had scraped away tainted paving, leaving huge potholes. As the APC bumped and twisted along its obstacle course, Sheranchuk's spirits sank. It didn't look better than the last time he had seen it. It looked far worse. No one had got around to repairing anything yet, it seemed; all the effort was still in demolition. But, of course, Sheranchuk told himself, first the decay had to be cut away before the rebuilding could begin…

And then the armored vehicle turned the corner, and he saw the remains of the ruined reactor itself.

A huge, jointed crane towered over what was left of Reactor No. 4. The remains of its walls had somehow become a blotchy, unhealthy-looking pink-as though it were blushing in shame, Sheranchuk thought wryly. A huge windowless vehicle on caterpillar tracks sat motionless on an earthen ramp, while smaller machines dodged around it. The going was, if anything, worse there than in the relatively undamaged parts of the plant they had just come through, but grimly the driver stepped on the accelerator. They lurched wildly as he sped past the scene, and he seemed to relax when they had the windowless office building between them and the wreck.

"That's all there is to see," he told Sheranchuk. "Now we'll just pick up the next lot, and then we're on our way to the command post."

He blew his horn in front of a sort of canopy of canvas that flapped in the warm afternoon breeze. A moment later six or eight men, unrecognizable in their white or green suits and masks, came hurrying out to board the APC. Sheranchuk looked at them hopefully as the driver closed the door and they began to pull down their masks, but none of these faces were familiar, either.

When they introduced themselves around, shouting over the noise of the armored vehicle, Sheranchuk was surprised to find that the man next to him was an Army general, the one across the aisle one of the trouble-shooters from the Ministry of Nuclear Energy. In the green or white coveralls they all looked alike. The man from the Ministry was quite surprised to find out that Sheranchuk was a senior administrator from pre-explosion times. "Really?" he said. "But I thought they were all-gone," he finished, having rejected either dead or in jail.

"Some of us remain," Sheranchuk said dryly. "Tell me how things are at the plant."

So for the dozen kilometers he was told. Of the seventy tons of lead shot that had been helicopter-dropped to melt a film over the top of the deadly core ("But still there is so much radiation that the cleanup workers on the roofs nearby can stay there only one minute at a time"). Of the great concrete slabs that were being cast to hoist into place, to make new walls around the core. Of the huge steel tanks that had been assembled to catch the wastewater from the cleanup, so that it would not further pollute the already damaged ground waters around the plant. Of the steel doors that were being welded into all the passageways near the exposed core, never to be opened, part of the "sarcophagus" in which the core would ultimately be entombed forever.

"Forever?" Sheranchuk repeated. "What do you mean 'forever'?"

The man from the Ministry said firmly, "What 'forever' means is forever. Through all the rest of your lifetime, and your children's, and your children's children's, for perhaps hundreds of years. Long after the rest of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is decommissioned and torn down and carted away, that sarcophagus will remain."

"And when the other reactors are back in service again, people will be working next to that-sarcophagus?"

"Every day. And watching the instruments inside to make sure that nothing is going wrong. Always. Forever."

The control center had come to a more or less permanent resting place at a Komsomol summer camp. Sheranchuk got out with the others, got the driver's directions, and walked briskly along the graveled paths to what had once been the camp's administration building. He hardly noticed the handsome trees that shaded the barracks and dining halls. He was trying to come to terms with the meaning of the word "forever."

He had not really thought out what was going to be done with the ruined core-dismantled and buried, he had supposed, if he had supposed anything at all. He simply had not realized that it would stay there-still hot, still deadly-forever.

The Personnel and Security offices were on the second floor of the rustic, well constructed building. Double doors and double windows had been added to the original plan, and every other window had a bulky air conditioner with triple filters attached; hot as it was outside, it was perfect within. When Sheranchuk got there, the first person he saw, standing at a window, gazing out at the pretty wooded camp, was the runaway operator-what was his name? Kalychenko? The man was standing with his hands clasped behind his back. When he turned and looked at Sheranchuk there was recognition in his gaze, and a certain defensive hostility.