While Japan is struggling to avoid the release of large doses of radioactive material from the failing reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant after the earthquake and tsunami, Chernobyl has taken a step back into the limelight. It is a typical journalistic ritual to revisit disasters after any round number of years. Think one hundred years after New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (coming soon), sixty-five years after WWII, or ten years after 9/11. Currently, while witnessing Japan’s nuclear malfunctions, we are remembering the world’s worst nuclear disaster 25 years ago. The question is what the repeated and repackaged story of Chernobyl adds to our dealings with current and future failures at nuclear power plants.

Today, a trip to Ukrainian Ground Zero is accessible to all. Journalists can simply accompany tourists on special Chernobyl tours to venture into the thirty kilometer exclusion zone (19 miles) around the former nuclear plant. The tour operators’ program describes a trip to the plant, a stop at a cooling channel to feed the fish (!), and after some sightseeing in the spooky town of Pripyat, a return to Chernobyl itself for lunch. Visitors will return home with the images of the deserted apartment buildings, the unused Ferris wheel at the moss overgrown fairground, and of course photos of the sarcophagus and the remains of the reactor complex itself. So, what have we learned?

The eerie devastation that humans caused in and around Chernobyl is hard to describe. But it is much easier to retell the unearthly story than to analyze and act upon it. I still have fresh memories of my own visit to the site – as a journalist – in December 2000. Almost fifteen years after the explosion in reactor number four on April 26, 1986, I was there to attend the final closing of the nuclear complex. Up until then, the remaining reactors had been operating to some degree, providing electricity to the area and necessary jobs for the people. In exchange for a compensation package from the West, former Ukrainian president Kuchma had agreed to a ‘premature stoppage,’ and the loss of thousands of jobs as a result.

© Justin Stahlman | Wikimedia Commons

Armed with Geiger counters and cameras, our crew visited all the usual spots in and around the former plant. We witnessed and recorded the abnormal and the absurd. We climbed to the top of one of the highest buildings in the town of Pripyat for a panoramic view of the remains of this former settlement of some 50,000 workers and their families. We saw the schools, the apartments, and the stores of the community that was. Everything bore the sinister signs of damage by years of free play of the elements, of being left in a hurry (after the Soviet authorities had belatedly organized an evacuation), and of being ransacked, probably multiple times. We talked to some surviving engineers and rescue workers. We also visited the little villages within the forbidden zone where the old people have returned to spend the remainder of their lives. During their forced year long evacuation, they felt they couldn’t live anywhere else but on the land they had spent their entire lives. They went back because radioactivity couldn’t break their bond with their native land. On our way home, we visited the Chernobyl ward in a children’s hospital in Kiev. Scientists are still researching the specific effects of radiation. The sick patients and grieving parents were very real.

Chernobyl is not just the only level-7 (the highest) accident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. It is also the mother of all monsters that humans can create when they lose control. It’s true. There was another major disaster in the Soviet Union in the Chelyabinsk province. But information and images are absent of the serious level-6 disaster in 1957 in that closed military town. The level-5 accident at Three Mile Island that is often mentioned nowadays gives the American audience something to relate to. But then again, thirty two years after the fact, the images of Dauphin Country, PA pale in comparison to the otherworldly, bone chilling reality of Chernobyl.

Fukushima is no Chernobyl. The trouble in Japan is the result of nature’s violent outbursts, not of human error. Or is it? Should the reactors have been built on a site where earthquakes occur? The safety measures that are in place in the Japanese plants are a vast improvement over those in the Soviet plant. But are the reactors safe enough to allow humans to live in the vicinity of plants? Stories about poor maintenance of the Japanese plants have started to pop up. The main question should be if the use of nuclear technology to satisfy our energy needs is worth the risks that major malfunctions carry for humans, animal life, and nature. Are there realistic alternatives given energy consumption levels around the world? What alternatives might technology offer 25 or 50 years down the road? One of the troubles of radiation is that humans can’t see, hear, feel, or smell it. And even when we see what it did to Chernobyl, we are numbed.

When I first read Elzbieta Matynia’s response to the massive earthquake in Japan, I respected the sincerity of her judgment, but thought that it was a bit much. It seemed to me that actually the news reports I was reading suggested a much more positive story than the one she seemed to be reading. The earthquake was the most severe in recorded Japanese history, much more powerful than the devastating ones in Haiti and Chile. Yet the death toll seemed to be quite modest, a little more than one hundred people. This suggested to me the wonders of modern technology. As the father of an architect, I was proud of what humans can do when they put their minds to it.

Then the reports began to come in about the tsunami, reminding me, reminding us, the limits of human power in the face of a massive natural force. My decision to introduce Elzbieta’s reflections with the suggestion that perhaps thousands have been killed, even though at the time the estimate was still between one and two hundred, were sadly justified. Now in the video reports we tremble in fear at the power the devastation reveals. This clearly puts us in our place.

But it is the third dimension of the disaster, human and not natural, that is the most humbling. While the wonders of technology are revealed in minimizing the effects of the earthquake, the dangers of our technology are revealed in the still escalating nuclear disaster. It reminds us that we are capable of destroying our world, demonstrating the deadly potential of atoms for peace, along with atoms for war.

Indian Point Energy Center © Daniel Case | Wikimedia Commons

I feel compassion, perhaps pity, for the victims in Japan, something that we will return to tomorrow in a post on distant suffering. But given the powers of modern media and given that I write these reflections a few miles downstream from the Indian Point (Nuclear) Energy Center, the suffering doesn’t seem that distant.

As I suggested earlier, this requires political action, preceded by deliberation. Wise folk tell us that given global warming, we must use nuclear energy, such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu, but others warn that this is a power that ultimately can’t be tamed, more like a tsunami than an earthquake. Now is the time for informed deliberate debate.