INTRODUCTION

The destroyed reactor Source: Chernobyl Forum The Chernobyl nuclear facility is located in Ukraine about 20 km south of the border with Belarus. At the time of the accident, the plant had four working reactors. The accident occurred in the very early morning of 26 April 1986 when operators ran a test on an electric control system of unit 4. The accident happened because of a combination of basic engineering deficiencies in the reactor and faulty actions of the operators. The safety systems had been switched off, and the reactor was being operated under improper, unstable conditions, a situation which allowed an uncontrollable power surge to occur. This power surge caused the nuclear fuel to overheat and led to a series of steam explosions that severely damaged the reactor building and completely destroyed the unit 4 reactor. The explosions started numerous fires on the roofs of the reactor building and the machine hall, which were extinguished by fire fighters after a few hours. Approximately 20 hours after the explosions, a large fire started as the material in the reactor set fire to combustible gases. The large fire burned during 10 days. Helicopters repeatedly dumped neutron-absorbing compounds and fire-control materials into the crater formed by the destruction of the reactor and later the reactor structure was cooled with liquid nitrogen using pipelines originating from another reactor unit.

The radioactive materials from the damaged reactor were mainly released over a 10day period. An initial high release rate on the first day resulted from the explosions in the reactor. There followed a five-day period of declining releases associated with the hot air and fumes from the burning graphite core material. In the next few days, the release rate increased until day 10, when the releases dropped abruptly, thus ending the period of intense release. The radioactive materials released by the accident deposited with greatest density in the regions surrounding the reactor in the European part of the former Soviet Union.

CONCLUSIONS The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 was a tragic event for its victims, and those most affected suffered major hardship. Some of the people who dealt with the emergency lost their lives. Although those exposed as children and the emergency and recovery workers are at increased risk of radiation-induced effects, the vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences due to the radiation from the Chernobyl accident. For the most part, they were exposed to radiation levels comparable to or a few times higher than annual levels of natural background, and future exposures continue to slowly diminish as the radionuclides decay. Lives have been seriously disrupted by the Chernobyl accident, but from the radiological point of view, generally positive prospects for the future health of most individuals should prevail. It is apparent that the various "actors" involved in civilian nuclear accidents act in a remarkably consistent fashion when confronted with a crisis. Those responsible attempt, as far as possible, to conceal the extent of the accident and to promulgate an optimistic view of the situation. Such a reaction, therefore, was not unique to the Soviet government after Chernobyl. This author has stated elsewhere that, as a test of glasnost in the USSR, Chernobyl was a failure.42 However, the reaction of the Soviet authorities - silence until confronted with incontrovertible proof that radiation had spread beyond the borders of the USSR - was not dissimilar to that of Metropolitan Edison in the case of TMI, or of the UKAEA after the fire at Windscale/Sellafield (President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island 1979). This does not mean that any of these organizations were overtly callous or reckless. The individuals involved most probably believed that the consequences of the respective accidents could be contained in secret, free from the attentions of troublesome and irresponsible media. In all three cases cited, the evident secrecy surrounding the accidents served to decrease public trust of the industry and to inflame the media and other interest groups. The media reacted to the lack of information in two different ways. First, reporters began to speculate what might have happened. Such speculations included two reactor explosions at Chernobyl, mass graves for thousands of victims, a nuclear meltdown, and similar stories. Apart from the differing scale of events, this

development paralleled what had happened after TMI seven years earlier. There, an unrelated fire that broke out the day after the accident was quickly reported as a reactor fuel fire. Metropolitan Edison was also reported to be burning radioactive material at night, out of the public eye. Both of these reports were false, but they were partly a result of failure to provide timely and accurate information. Why did the authorities react in such a fashion? There are several possible reasons. The one that is most often cited (and it was referred to with regularity after Chernobyl) is that they wished to avoid panic among the population.43 Ivan Yemelyanov, one of the designers of the Chernobyl plant and a deputy director of the USSR Institute of Energy Technology, informed the Italian Communist Party newspaper, Unita, that selective information had been released about the accident in order to forestall panic (Marples 1986: 170). (Literature on human responses to disaster would suggest that generally confusion, shock, and trauma are more likely than outright panic, and the majority of the population in Pripyat appears to have conformed to this norm.) The most charitable explanation for holding May Day parades in Kiev and Minsk, only five days after the accident, is that the Ukrainian and Belarusian governments were anxious to portray life as "normal." A second possibility is that such accidents trigger an inherent "self-protection" mechanism in an offending industry. Invidious comparisons with competing industries are often made. Thus, it was pointed out by nuclear advocates that human casualties in coal and oil production industries are consistently high. Four deaths per 1,000 tons of coal extracted is a often-cited toll for Soviet and post-Soviet coal industries (Marples 1991, ch. 7). In the same way, sympathizers of the nuclear industry also cite the damage caused to the environment by coal-fired power stations and note the comparative rarity of accidents in nuclear plants. The IAEA has been similarly protective, issuing a much-vaunted study of communities in Belarus and Ukraine in the summer of 1991 without examining the two most severely contaminated groups - clean-up crews and evacuees. Perhaps it is believed that accurate accounts would create a sensation in the media and that competing industries would escape similar scrutiny. Third, there is the question of culpability. Few official spokespersons are willing to attribute a catastrophe to failed technology, because the public cannot be left with

the perception that such sophisticated machines are fallible. Further, there is an understandable reluctance on the part of operators to take the blame for an accident. The greater the accident, the more likely it will result in dismissals, official inquiries, and shut-downs. If the accident, on the other hand, can be contained within a short period of time, with relatively few casualties, then the industry can still be considered competent and worthy of support. The culpability issue is one reason why the number of officially reported Chernobyl casualties remained at 31 long after even the most hardboiled officials acknowledged that the real figure was in the thousands.44 The reliance of Soviet authorities upon nuclear energy for future energy needs also depended on avoidance of culpability. Given the problems already being encountered in other energy resource industries, it was felt that the future of nuclear energy could not be compromised by providing a full account of what was then known about the Chernobyl accident. Yet it should be reiterated that patterns of response are similar among all energy industries. Public affairs spokespersons are selected to provide assurances that the effects of an accident are limited and being eliminated. Radio and television reports from such people project an image of calm confidence. In this way the industry protects itself, like a mother sheltering her young. At Chernobyl, these various defence mechanisms were to be put to their severest test. Various stages of crisis management are dependent on the specific nature of the accident. The essential variable is not, however, the magnitude of the crisis but the nature of "responsible" organizations involved. The management of a crisis that involves corporate responsibility will be essentially legal in nature, assuming that the corporate entity does not enjoy political (i.e. governmental) support. If, however, the "responsible" party is a government-controlled body, then the management of the crisis will be primarily, though not exclusively, political in nature. In simple terms, it is relatively easy to litigate against a corporate entity but far more difficult to sue a government. Surprisingly, the character of the extant political system (e.g. democratic, totalitarian) probably has little impact on crisis management. The fact that the Chernobyl disaster occurred in the Soviet Union, a quasi-totalitarian state with a lengthy record of abuse of human rights, may not have been especially significant. The democratic

government of the United States has proved notoriously capricious in similar cases, and the results of the Windscale disaster in Britain were classified for 30 years by order of the British government on the pretext that revelations about the accident might prejudice the US-UK alliance. It is also extremely difficult to achieve a legal settlement that pins blame on a government. The political and legal responses of governments faced with crises like Chernobyl are remarkably similar. Typically, they deny the magnitude of the crisis and attempt to conceal or classify pertinent data, particularly that which relates to the short- and long-term health effects of that crisis. Governments do not willingly accept either legal or operational culpability for a disaster. In the case of Chernobyl, it is only within the past few years that the governments of Belarus and Ukraine have issued legal documents about compensation for residents of contaminated communities. The Soviet government never accepted full responsibility for the consequences of Chernobyl, especially its international aspects, which included a radioactive cloud that crossed Europe and caused extensive harm to communities in northern Scandinavia, southern Germany, and the uplands of Britain. In refusing to take the blame, the Soviet regime was following a path trodden by previous national governments. Victims also have a role to play in crisis management. "Victim action" is a recurrent theme here, in both political and legal terms. Victim action can involve everything from a single individual all the way up to large-scale non-governmental organizations such as the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) or IAEA. But the same dynamic of interest groups and action is at work here also. In the case of Chernobyl, it is hardly surprising that the Ukrainian Green World environmental association took a far dimmer view of the accident than did the IAEA, whose mandate includes not only the international regulation of the nuclear power and nuclear weapons industries, but also the promotion of nuclear power. In the same way, the response of the Ukrainian government to Chernobyl is best explained by political motives, or else by response to the existing political realities. Although the ramifications of Chernobyl were felt first in Ukraine, rather than in distant Moscow, the "victim" government chose not only to side with the responsible government (USSR), which ran the ministries responsible for construction of nuclear

plants and nuclear energy production, but declined to take any significant form of independent action, including the prompt evacuation of villages and settlements near the damaged reactor. Perception plays a crucial role in the management of a crisis by victims as well as perpetrators. Though not truly independent, the mass media comprise another important factor in crisis management. Despite suggestions to the contrary (e.g. the film The China Syndrome), the media rarely uncover a large-scale industrial accident. The media are mainly a reactive force, obliged to depend - often heavily - on information supplied by sources closely associated with the accident. As these situations are fast moving and rapidly changing, the media often report information which, under normal circumstances, they would reject as unsound or uncorroborated. During a rapidly unfolding crisis in which official information is severely restricted, the media may abdicate the editorial duties of weighing and assessing the value of information gained, preferring to resort to inflammatory headlines. So, we know that, chernobyl power plan has causes damages and loss of human life because only the negligence of human. From this accident we suggest to all industry to take serious about safety in work.