The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl

"This is an interesting book. Olga Kuchinskaya is a sociologist who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book tracks the attention and lack of attention given to Chernobyl issues over the years following the accident. She finds that, of course, at first there were silences enforced by censorship in the years following the accident. Soviet officials did not want anyone talking about radioactivity, radiation-related illnesses, or levels of radiation. They didn’t publish a map until 1989 showing where radioactive fallout had landed and where the radioactive hotspots were. Then she discusses how the topic blew up around about 1989 in local and national press, and eventually became an international story. That story really focuses on wide-scale public health problems that regional and local officials were reporting in the years after the accident—especially the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. “Soviet officials did not want anyone talking about radioactivity, radiation-related illnesses, or levels of radiation” They went off somewhat independently and quietly set up their own interesting case control studies. They chose children from the contaminated areas and compared them with control areas far away in clean areas of Belarus. They were reporting these unusually high rates of leukaemia, kids with severe anaemia, and women with birth problems. The Belarusian scientists in the Academy of Science—not in the Ministry of Health—were really doing good work. As censorship fell away, by 1990 they were able to show their work to the public and talk about it. That really got people alarmed. Kuchinskaya talks about how officials and politicians in Belarus used and instrumentalised Chernobyl as a way of making an argument for national sovereignty: ‘Look what Moscow did to us. We need to therefore have our own sovereign state.’ Kuchinskaya focuses on Belarus, and is originally from Belarus herself, but similar processes were happening in Ukraine as well. Politicians were saying that Chernobyl was our national cross to bear; showing you why the Communist party, or Moscow, or Russia, were to blame for the problem; and why we needed to have independence. But then in the 1990s with independence, these countries become very poor and really struggled to manage the aftereffects of the disaster. The Soviet Union dissolved, so they don’t have Soviet budgets any more. Belarus especially was in economic straits. And so, the new emergent leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power about 25 years, starts to repress this interest in Chernobyl as a public health problem. He actually had one of the leading scientists, Yury Bandazhevsky, thrown in jail on trumped up charges of embezzlement. Another guy, Nikolai Nesterenko, was also harassed by Belarussian authorities. Kuchinskaya talks about how Chernobyl disappears from the public eye, became a dangerous topic or one to bring up each year only at the anniversary. She writes about how this new invisibility turns to ignorance, and how the consequences of Chernobyl have become an area of non-knowledge. The radiation effects dissolved into health problems of non-specific origins. That makes the problem become invisible again. Looking at this HBO series now, it’s interesting to think about Kuchinskaya’s theory of these waves of visibility and invisibility as we cycle through them. Now, of course, we’re in a period of intense visibility. Young people who didn’t know about Chernobyl are saying, ‘Why didn’t we know about this? Why weren’t we taught this at school?’ And many older people didn’t know about the details and nuances of the disaster. I think that part of the reason we’re having this new period of intense focus on Chernobyl is because many countries are thinking about what to do with climate change. How do we reduce the use of fossil fuels? One solution, of course, is nuclear power. “Part of the reason we’re having this new period of intense focus on Chernobyl is because many countries are thinking about what to do with climate change” Some people say that nuclear power is safe: ‘Look at Chernobyl, only 35 people died.’ Other people say—using the same accident—that nuclear power is scary and is not safe: ‘Look at Chernobyl, ninety-three thousand people possibly died.’ At the end of the Chernobyl series, it gives this number: between 4,000 and 93,000 dead. There’s a big envelope of uncertainty between those two figures. But they are scary nonetheless. Her book makes for interesting reading right now, especially during this new period of visibility. I went to the Ukrainian archives to see if they had anything in the Ministry of Health files about Chernobyl medical consequences. The archivist said, “I don’t think you’ll find anything—that was a banned topic during the Soviet period.” But I looked and found almost immediately whole multi-volume collections, titled in Ukrainian “The Medical Consequences of the Chernobyl Disaster.” When I found that in 2014, I realised that I would be at this project for years, because of this Klondike of records. They had been declassified for a while but the archivist didn’t know they were there because I was often the first person to ask for many of these files. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The only other researcher that had done a lot of archival work on Chernobyl was a really amazing Ukrainian historian by the name of Natalia Baranovska. I describe her story in the book. When Ukraine was in political and economic distress, nobody had the time to deal with Chernobyl anymore. But Natalia realised that these documents were perhaps getting lost or destroyed, so she went around searching everywhere: Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, the Chernobyl site itself. She worked on and off at the Chernobyl site for many years until she got thyroid cancer herself. She published document collections and a few books that were a really helpful start for me. Her documents led me to other places. I hired two research assistants and we worked through the archives in Belarus, in Minsk down to the province level, down to the county hospital records. We went to Moscow; we looked at the federal level; we looked at the Ministry of Agriculture level and looked at the reports of food saturation with radioactive contaminants. What we found were two really important things. One is the dynamic qualities of radioactive isotopes mean that they move really quickly through the environment and migrate through food supplies. Within a couple of months, Soviet agronomists and radiation monitors were reporting high levels of radioactivity in the food sources that people really relied on: milk, dairy, grains, berries, mushrooms, and meat. I found a certificate saying that there were 300 liquidators at a wool factory in Chernihiv. Liquidators were clean-up workers who had documented exposure from dealing directly with the radioactive accident. But Chernihiv didn’t get a lot of Chernobyl radiation; it was about 50 miles from the Chernobyl site. So I was confused by that. I drove up there with my research assistant and we looked around and interviewed people. We found that these wool workers, who were mostly women, had been cleaning and picking up bales of wool that measured 30 millisievert per hour (mSv/hr). To translate, that’s like picking up an X-ray machine when it’s turned on, many times a day. “There’s a lot of focus on the Chernobyl zone—but the real drama of the accident played out in the rural hinterlands about 50 to 100 km from the site” What I found was that this radioactivity affected people at great distances from the accident site itself. There’s a lot of focus on the Chernobyl zone—that’s where tourists and journalists like to go—but the real drama of the accident played out in the rural hinterlands about 50 to 100 km from the site. From the medical records, we found that doctors and public health officials sent in the reports they were supposed to send in. The Soviets did a really good job of sending out doctors and medical staff to look at people they suspected had been exposed, and tracked what was happening with them medically. What they show are rising frequencies of a whole bouquet of illnesses—mostly having to do with the thyroid, cardiac system, digestive tract, autoimmune system—and problems with fertility and reproduction. Then, cancers kicked in after about eighteen months to three years. So, I was curious why we didn’t know this story. As Kuchinskaya showed, it appeared in the press in the 1990s and then went away. So, then I went to the international agencies that took over managing the disaster as the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. I’m not talking about an UN-wide conspiracy, but I found that a few key actors in the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation worked to help Soviet leaders minimise the account of the effects of the disaster. They did that by gathering evidence of health effects. They found evidence of a childhood epidemic of cancer; they took those biopsies back to the United States, but then they didn’t include reports of childhood thyroid cancer in their reports. In fact, they said the reports of thyroid cancers were “rumours” and “anecdotal in nature.” But they had evidence of what became a big epidemic of thyroid cancer among children. A scientist at the WHO, Keith Baverstock, tried to spread the alarm about the growing number of children with cancer in Belarus—the number was 102 cases by 1991 against a background rate of one in a million. He had a mission backed with funding from the WHO to go to Minsk and bring world specialists in thyroid cancer with him. That was cancelled at the last minute. He sourced some money and went anyway and his bosses tried to fired him, pressured by an administrator at the IAEA. We find that three key officials in the UN family of nations went around to other UN organisations and said whatever you do, don’t fund Chernobyl relief programmes for Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. You can give them funding for economic relief, but not for Chernobyl because it wasn’t needed. They kept saying that the doses were too low. They said we saw a lot of medical problems when we did a study there but they’re not caused by Chernobyl because, extrapolating from Hiroshima, the doses are too low to cause any problems. So, I report that in my book, that there’s this politicised science coming out. And I wondered why. Why would they do that? I then realised that at the end of the Cold War, the big nuclear powers (especially the US) were facing billions of dollars of lawsuits from people they had exposed in the production and testing of nuclear weapons. These were marshal islanders, downwinders in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and people living near bomb production sites. In 1987, a group of health physicists met for an industry conference in suburban DC and they were addressed by a layer from the Department of Energy who told them that the biggest new threat to the nuclear industry is lawsuits. The lawyer told the scientists that they needed to be trained to serve as expert witnesses on behalf of the government. Then, a Department of Justice lawyer led workshops at that conference, training health physicists to become expert witnesses to deflect lawsuits. That game plan worked really well. So, the narrative can be: ‘Look at Chernobyl—the world’s worst nuclear accident, and only 54 people died. And that’s not a problem.’ That means that all the other people who are claiming damage around other nuclear sites are just wrong. There is no damage. That game plan worked. The lawsuits failed for the most part—they failed also in the UK, they failed in France, they failed in Australia and New Zealand, and they failed in Russia. There’s only been a few cases of nuclear downwinders who have won compensation. That was the threat that people in the nuclear industry saw and that was the threat that Chernobyl presented. If these cases of large-scale health problems from low-doses were to be true, then the liabilities would be astronomical. That’s the amazing thing. We know a lot about acute radiation exposure. You see that in the HBO special, with the graphic depictions of what happens to a body with acute exposure. Yet, over and over again, scientists have been saying for decades that we don’t know much about low-dose exposure. Right after Chernobyl blew, scientists at the UN said that we have to use this as an opportunity to run a large-scale experiment on low dose exposures; that we needed to do a long term wide-scale study of Chernobyl health effects on par with the atomic bomb survivor study which, at that point, had been going on for several decades. But that study never got funded because these critical officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency kept saying over and over again that they didn’t see any signs of Chernobyl-related health problems and didn’t expect to in the future because, extrapolating from Hiroshima, the doses were too low. At the time, another branch of the UN was planning a big fund-drive to raise about a billion dollars, in today’s money, to do two things: move people from those contaminated second Chernobyl zones, and fund a big long-term study. That pledge drive failed spectacularly after the International Atomic Energy Agency published the document I referred to above in 1991, saying said that they didn’t find any Chernobyl-related health problems—at a time when they had in-hand evidence in the form of biopsies of an emergent paediatric cancer epidemic. That was a really costly mistruth for the legacy of the history of nuclear health. Because we don’t have those studies. To this day, scientists say that we don’t know much about low-dose radiation, but we know that it causes some problems and we need to find out more. I’m not against nuclear power. Like most people, I’m concerned about climate change and alternatives to fossil fuel. But I would like to know more. I would like there to be more transparency, and I would like there to be more good science in the sphere of low dose studies. If we’re going to have a new nuclear renaissance, I think we need to know a little bit more first."