Let’s hope that education in UWCs helps prevent tragedies like Chernobyl

Sunday, 24 April 2011

At 1:23 am on 26th April, 1986, the Number 4 Reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. This coming Tuesday will be the 25th anniversary of what most people now recognise as one of the world’s worst human-induced environmental disasters.

The name “Chernobyl” remains a household word 25 years after the explosion, and indeed the recent problems in Fukushima (Japan) have revived memories of the immeasurably worse (so far!) tragedy of Chernobyl.

Back in 1986, Chernobyl was part of the USSR. More specifically, it was situated in the far north of what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, just 16 kilometres south of the border with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Belarus). Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the city has been officially known by its Ukrainian name of Chornobyl (Чорнобиль).

Stories of the history, the heroism and the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster will no doubt be repeated at length during the coming week, and my aim in discussing Chernobyl here is not to repeat the far more encyclopedic information that can be found elsewhere.

I remember the day when the Chernobyl explosion first occurred. I heard about it in the form of news reports on my car radio saying that Swedish scientists had detected unusual amounts of atmospheric radiation heading towards Sweden from the south. Given the wind direction at the time, they suspected that the radiation was indicative of some form of radiation leak in the Soviet Union.

At first, Soviet officials denied the accusations, and as “evidence” that everything was fine, the

annual May Day parade went ahead as usual in the streets of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev (now Kyiv), just 130 kilometres to the south. We now know that radiation levels in Kiev’s atmosphere posed a significant threat to the health of everyone involved, and all newsreel footage of the 1986 parade in Kiev has vanished from the State Archives. Finally, on 2nd May, the scale of the disaster was acknowledged and the Chernobyl area was evacuated.

It is likely that thousands of people suffered unnecessarily as a result of the Party’s cover-up. In a recent television interview, Mikhail Gorbachev (then General Secretary of the Communist Party) revealed that the seriousness of the disaster had even been kept from him for a week after the explosion; he was learning about what had happened through the foreign media! Gorbachev used this tragic incident to add impetus to his programs of ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (restructuring) in the face of the considerable opposition he faced at the time – perhaps one of the few positive outcomes of the Chernobyl disaster, although even that was too little, too late.

The nuclear power plant was named ‘Chernobyl’ because that was then the district’s name where the plant was located. In fact, Chernobyl was at that time just a small town with approximately 15,000 people located about 18 kilometres south of the power plant. The precise location of the plant was Pripyat, a relatively new “atomgrad” (nuclear city) of

50,000 people built just a couple of kilometres from the power plant specifically to provide labour for it.

Last Sunday, I visited Chernobyl and Pripyat.

It was not an easy exercise. I needed to clear several security posts with my passport to enter, and I was tested for radiation contamination upon leaving.

I had spent all the previous day, Saturday, flying to Kyiv via Moscow in order to assist the UWC National Committee in Ukraine with its selection of students. The visit was at the request of the UWC International Office, and as LPCUWC is the only the College to have offered Ukraine a place for 2011 entry, it was really impossible for me to refuse the request for help.

I arrived in Kyiv at a little after midnight on Sunday morning. The selection interviews were due to begin first thing on Monday morning, so I had allowed Sunday to rest after the long flight in order to be fresh for the interviews. That plan changed when I discovered that I could have the opportunity to see Chernobyl for myself, and the only possible day I could visit Chernobyl was that same Sunday because the site was due to be closed for the coming two weeks to accommodate an array of official visitors for the 25th anniversary.

So Sunday – my ‘day of rest’ – was spent from 8 am to 8 pm travelling to and from Chernobyl in a bus and exploring the 30 kilometre diameter ‘exclusion zone’ around the nuclear power plant. The exclusion zone is said to contain the most contaminated land on the planet that will take thousands of years to become healthy again.

It is hard to describe the sickly emotions I felt when I saw the iconic Number 4 reactor, now partly covered in a heavy (though deteriorating) sarcophagus to contain the radiation. Similarly, it was an eerie feeling to drive through a section of forest to the immediate west that had been destroyed by the initial blast of radiation and hear Geiger counters going crazy because of the high levels of radiation still in the trees, the grass and the soil of the area.

However, what made the most impact on me was the sight of the nearby towns and cities that had been abandoned.

Pripyat, once a lively city populated with young families, is now a city of deserted shells of buildings with decaying walls and broken glass where nature is rapidly reclaiming the land. Houses and paths are disappearing as the forest takes over. Even in the town’s main public square, trees sprout through the cracks in the concrete, surrounded by moss that is perhaps the area’s greatest hazard as it holds the highest concentrations of radiation. And with no people, the wildlife is also returning, including a nest of tens of fairly rapid snakes right in the middle of the main public square. It was like standing in the film set for a post-apocalyptic movie, except that this apocalypse was real!

In the abandoned school, many books are still on the shelves where they were left in the hurried evacuation of 1986 (although many others have been strewn across the floors by 25 years of summer winds and winter blizzards. The floor of the school canteen is strewn with gas masks and radiation overalls. In the store-room of the city’s theatre, Soviet-era propaganda posters, flags and portraits lie ready for the next political event that will never come. The indoor pool is empty and filling with wind-blown dirt, and the dodgem cars lie rusting away in the fun park where they were abandoned by children as they left to escape the radiation, 25 years ago.

Perhaps the most poignant sight for me was at an abandoned kindergarten at Kopachi, a small abandoned town two kilometres south of the nuclear power plant. Many of the houses in Kopachi were bulldozed and buried to stop the radiation escaping into the atmosphere, although geographers now warn that this poses a radiation hazard for the area’s groundwater supplies that feed the nearby river. However, the kindergarten remains standing, and as I entered the grounds,

past the yellow and red radiation warning sign, I looked down at the pile of accumulated leaves. I could make out the rusting remains of some metal toy trucks, and I instantly imagined the laughter that they once brought to the little children in the kindergarten who were, at that time in 1986, exactly the same ages as some of my own children. And then, as I looked more closely, I could see, looking back up at me, the face of a little girl’s abandoned doll - a speechless, , contaminated, radioactive witness to 25 years of loneliness.

They were just a few remnants of life “BC” – Before Chernobyl - and you can see what I saw in the photo at the top of the blog.

As you might imagine, I slept very well on that Sunday night following the long and tiring flight from Hong Kong and my intense, almost overwhelming ‘day-of-rest’ at Chernobyl. I was thus genuinely bright and ready for the start of the UWC selection process on Monday morning, conducted under the enthusiastic leadership of Olena Yanchuk and her team of volunteers in the Caves Monastery Museum.

The students I helped to interview were, of course, not born when the Chernobyl NPP exploded. They were not even born when the Soviet Union collapsed. Their modes of thinking are clearly post-Soviet – global, idealistic, curious, articulate and enquiring – just like young people in most parts of the world today. As I always find when I speak to young people, whatever their home country, simply meeting them was energising and inspiring - a tonic of optimism for the future of our planet!

And, perhaps most importantly of all, after an exhaustive selection process, the Selection Committee unanimously agreed on an outstanding student who will receive a full scholarship to study in Li Po Chun United World College from September this year. As the first Ukrainian to attend LPCUWC in Hong Kong, I have no doubt that our pioneer student from Ukraine will be a brilliant ambassador.

Chernobyl contains many lessons for those with the ears to listen – lessons about unfounded faith in human technology, lessons about the need for true openness (‘glasnost’), lessons about the environmental consequences of human actions, lessons about the need for humility in the face of arrogance, and so on.

Twenty-five years after Chernobyl, people in many parts of the world still suffer because of the impact of twisted versions of reality that are the products of state media. As an article in last Friday’s New York Times commented, “Dictators make controlling the news media a priority for a reason. For most authoritarian states, state news media, especially television, have helped leaders stay in power by creating a parallel reality for their populations and depriving dissenters of a wider audience. Tunisia’s news media environment was routinely ranked among the world’s most stifling in Freedom House’s annual assessment of press freedom before this year’s revolution. In Egypt, state television stood steadfastly behind President Hosni Mubarak, deceptively playing old video of an empty Tahrir Square rather than broadcasting images of the millions protesting there. Autocratic governments spare no effort to ensure that their state news media provide their audiences a steady diet of regime-friendly news and information.”

With their emphasis on education for peace and sustainability, I sincerely hope that our United World Colleges are doing their share, and more, in educating young people for a different world - one that is capable of preventing future tragedies such as the horror of Chernobyl.

N.B. As usual, all 29 images in this blog can be enlarged by clicking on them.

next >

< previous