In recent times, not many drama series caught the imagination of men and women of science as HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl did, and I was no exception. Unlike many others I enjoyed the privilege to discuss the series with an expert on the subject matter: Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy.
Kamil Ahmed: What were the technical reasons behind Chernobyl blast at the RMBK Reactor Unit 4?
Pervez Hoodbhoy: Basically, the operators in the reactor’s control room messed up badly. They were testing the reactor against a possible problem (loss of cooling water), and in doing so created an actual problem. In just one minute the reactor overheated and then exploded. They paid for it with their lives, of course, but they caused the biggest nuclear disaster in history so far. The number of immediate casualties from the explosion was small, just 30-40. The real catastrophe was the spread of radioactivity leading to tens of thousands of additional cancer deaths, all the way from Ukraine to Europe that happened over months and years. Nobody’s investigated the impact on South Asia so far as I know, but many people now dead would be alive had it not happened.
Kamil Ahmed: Shed some light on the economic impact of the disaster.
Pervez Hoodbhoy: So much money was required to control the consequencesthat Ukraine and Belarus, and then the states of the Soviet Union nearly went bankrupt. Estimates of the money spenton disaster control range from $150-300 billion in present day US dollars. To fully deal with the disaster will take a century or more, and there’s constant research being carried out on the safety of the remaining stuff that’s (so far) inside the reactor’s sarcophagus. In the days after the explosion, northern England received a heavy dose of the kind of radioactivity that sheep readily absorb, and so millions of them had to be moved to safer places. Dairy products had to be abandoned and destroyed in many countries because of high levels of harmful radioactivity. Europeans were terrified of a similar accident happening closer to home, and so many countries decided to phase out nuclear power. Perhaps there’s a silver lining: Germany decided to go for alternative energy; today it provides a wonderful example of how nuclear power can be phased out and solar/wind phased in.
What we don’t seem to get is that nuclear power is not safe or cheap, and also that we can continue to build bombs to our heart’s content even without power reactors
Kamil Ahmed: What were the political implications of the accident?
Pervez Hoodbhoy: I think this 1986 accident played a major role in causing the Soviet Union to fall apart in 1991. We in Pakistan like to imagine the Afghan invasion as the only factor, but the truth is that Chernobyl was enormously important in reducing trust in the Soviet authorities and their ability to control the impact of a major disaster. In failing to inform people in time, people across the USSR started to disbelieve Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) policy, his competence, and even his sincerity. Western propaganda against the USSR-fully justified in the context of this episode-weakened the regime at its roots.
Kamil Ahmed: What was the impact of Chernobyl on global safety matters?
Pervez Hoodbhoy: Some, like India and Pakistan, shrugged it off just as they shrugged off Fukushima much later in 2011. They kept building and using nuclear reactors. What we don’t seem to get is that nuclear power is not safe or cheap, and also that we can continue to build bombs to our heart’s content even without power reactors. Today we have two Chinese built reactors on the shores of Karachi that are nearing completion. Chernobyl could be evacuated, Karachi cannot. But European countries, with the exception of France, took nuclear safety very seriously. One key lesson learned was that all new reactors must have secondary containment. This and other added safety features make today’s nuclear reactors safer. But has it made them safe enough?
The writer is a Lahore-based political activist and a research analyst