Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The briefing continued down the side wall of the room, from one diagram to the next.
There were a pair of maps showing the distribution of contamination by radioactive iso-
topes of cesium and strontium in the zone. The contamination is wildly uneven, depend-
ing on where the radioactive debris fell immediately after the explosion, and on the wind
and rain in the days and weeks that followed, when the open reactor core was spewing a
steady stream of radioactive smoke and particles into the air. The weather of those follow-
ing weeks is inscribed on the ground, in contamination. The maps showed the distribution,
color-coded in shades of red and brown, a misshapen starfish with its heart anchored over
the reactor.
The radiation level at any given spot also varies over time, although based on what, I'm
not quite sure. So there are limits set for what is considered normal, just as there are in any
city. Dennis told me that the standard in the town of Chernobyl was 80 microroentgens per
hour. In Kiev, it was 50. (It's about the same in New York, where background radiation
alone gets you about 40 micros per hour.)
“In the last month, I measured 75 micros at different places in the town,” he said.
Chernobyl was pushing the limit. But I was unclear what the standards for radiation levels
really meant. In Kiev, for example, what difference did it make that the standard was 50
micros instead of 80, or 100?
“It means,” said Dennis, “there would be panic in Kiev if the reading was 51.” He
thought people in Kiev were a little paranoid about contamination. “Just yesterday, some
journalists called, saying they had heard there was a release of radioactive dust at the react-
or,” he said. “I told them I had just been down to the reactor, and there was no problem.”
We had come to the end of the briefing. Dennis paused in front of the last photograph,
which showed a large outdoor sculpture. Two angular gray columns held a slender crucifix
aloft, like a pair of gigantic tweezers holding a diamond up for inspection. Below them,
half a dozen life-size figures lugged fire hoses and Geiger counters toward a replica of the
reactor's cooling tower.
It was the firemen's memorial. In the hours immediately following the explosion, the
firemen of Pripyat had responded to the fire that still burned in the reactor building, and
had kept it from spreading to the adjacent reactor. Unaware at first that the core had even
been breached, they received appalling doses of radiation and began dying within days.
Dennis turned to me, expressionless behind his shades. The giant pointer tapped gently
on the photo of the memorial. “If not for those firemen,” he said, “we would have an eight-
hundred-kilometer zone, instead of thirty.”
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