SUMMARY: It will be 33 years this week that the former Soviet Union experienced a devastating nuclear disaster in what is now a part of Chernobyl, Ukraine, killing 29 people and causing permanent evacuations for miles. For more on the aftermath of the accident, Hari Sreenivasan is joined by Adam Higginbotham, author of “Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster.”
IVETTE FELICIANO (NewsHour):The disaster forced tens of thousands of residents around Chernobyl to flee and never some back.
But many other people remained in a zone that was considered safe enough distance to stay.
In the village of Zalyshany, about 32 miles southwest of Chernobyl, 8-year-0ld Bogdan Vetrov suffers from an enlarged thyroid gland.
His mother, Viktoria, believes it is due to radiation found in their food, but she says her family’s options are, eat food that may be contaminated or starve.
VIKTORIA VETROVA: We are aware of the dangers, but what can we do? There is no other way to survive here. Especially in this region we just cannot survive.
IVETTE FELICIANO:Vetrov and his siblings are among 350,000 children living in areas where monitoring radiation in the soil ended four years ago.
Greenpeace, the European Union and the World Health Organization have found links between contaminated produce and milk and increased levels of thyroid cancer.
One EU study tracked 4,000 children for three years and found more than 80 percent of them had cardiovascular issues.
Doctors who perform annual checks on children here have seen that first-hand.
YURY BANDAZHEVSKY, PEDIATRICIAN:There are very serious pathological processes, which definitely will unfortunately have negative consequences on the development of these children.
SUMMARY: Five years ago, an epic tsunami off the coast of Japan triggered a triple-reactor nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Ever since then, 7,000 workers have been laboring round-the-clock on a massive, and unprecedented, cleanup effort. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien takes an exclusive look at ground zero of the greatest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour):Fukushima Daiichi was one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. Today, it is a busy, crowded, dangerous deconstruction site.
My invitation to see it up close was unique.
What next? Does three have a lot to…
But even with special permission, getting inside is not easy by design. Radioactive contamination levels have gone down, but not nearly enough to dispense with the Tyvek suits, three layers of socks and gloves and full face respirators.
It’s like being an astronaut on a space walk. Here, 7,000 workers are doing a job for which there is no playbook.
NAOHIRO MASUDA, TEPCO (through interpreter): What makes this so difficult is the lack of experience. Nobody in the world has done this before.
MILES O’BRIEN: Naohiro Masuda is the chief decommissioning officer for the Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO.
NAOHIRO MASUDA (through interpreter):We still need to decide what we’re even going to do. For that, we need to rely on the knowledge of people all around the world.
MILES O’BRIEN: He relies heavily on this man.
LAKE BARRETT, TEPCO Advisor:For them to come out and to publicly say “We need help” is different for them.
MILES O’BRIEN: Lake Barrett is one of a very select group who has some experience with a job like this. He was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission manager in charge of the decommissioning of Three Mile Island Unit 2 near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It melted down in 1979.
LAKE BARRETT (adviser): Fukushima is much more complex. The damage is much greater. There’s three melted cores. But the fundamentals of how you address this and how you recover are similar.
MILES O’BRIEN: The daily details of this 40-year job are managed here in a radiation-shielded, earthquake-proof emergency operations center.
The superintendent is another TEPCO veteran, Akira Ono, on duty here since June of 2013.
AKIRA ONO, TEPCO (through interpreter): Ever since the disaster, we have been working here 24 hours a day 365 days a year. We’re ready to respond to anything that happens.
MILES O’BRIEN (Newshour): As brisk winter mornings go, this was a fine one to go fishing. We steamed out of the port of Kashima, Japan, on the good ship Inari Maru. Our captain was Kimio Sato, a fourth-generation fisherman. His son, Kosi, was at the helm.
Their predecessors in the family business never went on an expedition like this one.
“We cannot eat the fish we catch,” he told me. “All fish must be released. We are allowed to fish only the amount necessary for inspection.”
The Inari Maru was plying troubled waters, fishing for data. It’s part of a long-term effort to figure out when, if ever, fish caught near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant will be safe to eat.
Really reeled in nets filled with flounder, but threw most of them back into the Pacific. In the end, their haul was just one small bucket, about 12 pounds of fish, headed to a lab to be tested for radionuclide.
In Japan, the radiation safety standard for fish is 100 Becquerels per kilogram, the most stringent in the world.
“We occasionally catch fish exceeding that safety standard,” says Kimio. “I don’t think there are many, though, but because we’re in the 20-kilometer zone, I think we should be cautious.”
KEN BUESSELER, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: The Fukushima reactor in the background.
MILES O’BRIEN: Scientists who have studied these waters wouldn’t disagree. Ken Buesseler is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. He was part of the team 12 weeks after the meltdowns on a research expedition financed by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, also a NewsHour funder.
Buesseler cut his scientific teeth studying the impact of the Chernobyl meltdown on the Black Sea.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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