PEOPLE
Sara C. Medina
Immediately after the Chernobyl nuclear accident last April, the Soviets spurned U.S. offers of aid. But they did allow Millionaire Industrialist Armand Hammer to dispatch his friend Bone Marrow Specialist Dr. Robert Gale to help. Two weeks ago Hammer became the first known nonmedical Westerner to meet with those hospitalized by the disaster. Accompanied by Gale, Hammer visited Kiev's Hospital 14, where 259 Chernobyl victims have been treated, and talked with two heroes, S.T. Milgevsky and N.E. Fedorenko, bus drivers who ferried firemen and workers to and from the reactor area after the explosion. Why did they do it? Hammer asked. ''Someone had to,'' they replied. Would they do it again? ''Sure.'' Hammer also met V.D. Dznenko, who had been visiting her daughter in the area at the time of the accident. Afterward Hammer and Gale took a low-altitude flight over the damaged reactor and nearby deserted villages. ''It was an eerie sight,'' Hammer said. ''I wish that anyone who . thinks that a nuclear war can be won could see what I've seen.''
World Notes
SOVIET UNION The Men Who Caused a Cloud
The Soviets last week disclosed three names that may soon become widely known: Plant Director Viktor Bryukhanov, Chief Engineer N. Fomin and a deputy chief engineer identified only as Dyatlov. The names were virtually unaccompanied by biography except for the charge against them: ''criminal negligence'' in connection with the explosion last year that ripped apart Reactor No. 4 near the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl. Maximum penalty: 15 years in jail.
In the 14 months since the world's worst civilian nuclear accident, Moscow has been slowly fixing blame for the disaster, which killed 31 people, hospitalized hundreds and caused severe environmental damage. Until last week no one had been charged with a crime. The trial starts next month in the building that was Chernobyl's cultural center before the town was evacuated.
World Notes
SOVIET UNION Trials and Errors
Youth, courage and a winning smile made Mathias Rust a folk hero in May, when he buzzed the Kremlin in his single-engine Cessna. But those qualities may not be enough to keep the 19-year-old West German from spending as much as ten years in a labor camp. Soviet authorities last week charged him with a packet of serious crimes, including ''malicious hooliganism,'' and announced that he will go on trial within a month.
In another legal case, Viktor Bryukhanov, 51, the official in charge of the Chernobyl nuclear power station during last year's disaster that took 31 lives, was found guilty of gross violation of safety regulations and was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp. Two of his deputies also drew ten-year terms, while three others received shorter sentences.
World Notes
SOVIET UNION Pulling the Plug On a Nuke
In the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the Kremlin insisted it would not back away from its ambitious plan to quintuple nuclear power output by the year 2000. But officials underestimated the fears created by the accident. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist Party youth newspaper, disclosed last week that the government had made an unprecedented decision to scrap construction of an atomic power plant in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar (cost so far: $43 million) simply because residents were adamantly against it. Krasnodar is not alone. The article said residents of some two dozen localities are ''fiercely'' protesting atomic energy stations operating or being built in their areas.
World Notes
SOVIET UNION More Heat At Chernobyl
Two years after Reactor No. 4 spewed fatal clouds of radiation from the Chernobyl power station, the Soviet public was jolted last week by another blast. The Communist Party daily Pravda charged that sloppy workmanship, mismanagement and lax safety standards -- the very conditions blamed for causing the accident that claimed 31 lives -- continue to plague the Chernobyl complex. Fumed the newspaper: ''It is as though there hasn't been an accident.''
Pravda's vitriol was aimed at Kombinat, the organization that oversees cleanup and safety maintenance at Chernobyl. Workers were scolded for drunkenness, thievery and inadequate discipline, while Kombinat officials were criticized for nepotism and negligence. The newspaper said that Kombinat Director Yevgeni Ignatenko had been reprimanded and had left his post.
World Notes
SOVIET UNION Dealing with The Fallout
Nearly three years after the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster, Mikhail Gorbachev made his first visit to Chernobyl last week. The Soviet leader seemed intent on cleaning up the continuing environmental and political fallout from the accident. Soviet newspapers in recent weeks have reported the births of deformed farm animals and widespread radioactive contamination of land and food. Local workers surrounded Gorbachev to tell him of their worry about the health consequences.
Clad in a white coat and cap, a sympathetic Gorbachev and his wife Raisa inspected the reopened facility, in the shadow of the entombed reactor No. 4, and stopped to ask the plant's staff about new safety measures. Gorbachev called the Chernobyl accident ''very serious for the whole world,'' adding, ''Through science and technology, we need to give energy to the nation, but safety remains the most important thing.'' Forty-eight hours later, the first ! unit of a twelve-year-old nuclear-power plant in Armenia was shut down. Under public pressure, authorities conceded that the operation was too risky in the earthquake zone.
World Notes
SOVIET UNION A Dose of Nuclear Fallout
When the nuclear-power plant at Chernobyl blew, lethal contamination forced the evacuation of 100,000 citizens. But 600 residents told Izvestiya last week that they had not been moved until a week after the accident, after even the livestock had been led to safety. Now, three years later, the supreme soviet of the Byelorussian Republic has suggested that an additional 106,000 people be relocated. If approved by Moscow, this evacuation would confirm suspicions that Soviet officials downplayed the severity of the mishap and grossly underestimated the risk it posed to human life.
Residents of the accident zone have grown increasingly concerned about the health of their children, who are developing respiratory infections and vision problems. They say their children have been eating contaminated food from local stores and contend that government limits for radiation are too high. In an article titled ''Mysterious Medicine: People with Chernobyl Experience Have No Faith in Doctors' Diagnoses,'' Moscow News reported that Soviet doctors refuse to attribute any health problem in the region to radiation. Dependent on Moscow for funding, local officials hope some support will come from Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, who has reportedly ''listened attentively'' to their complaints.
World Notes
SOVIET UNION Risking Radiation
Soviet enterprise has taken a macabre turn: vacation trips to the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl. Kievturist, a Ukrainian tour operator, is organizing excursions to the forbidden zone surrounding the entombed remains of the world's worst nuclear accident. Truly adventurous visitors can tour the massive concrete mound where the wreckage of the reactor is buried, a town built for the workers who cleaned up after the accident and a nuclear-waste dump.
''We want to show people what can happen if they are not careful about the ecology,'' says Gennadi Blinov, Kievturist's director general. The $4-a-day price tag includes optional radiation scans for tourists who are worried. Income from the tours will be used to help victims of the April 1986 disaster.
Soviet scientists are conducting tests to be sure visitors will not suffer any ill effects. Thousands of residents are still being moved out of contaminated zones nearby. The tours will begin in about a month, after the area has been declared safe for travel. But some former residents are apparently not waiting for the government's verdict. Tired of their cramped existence as refugees in Kiev, farm folk have been seen trickling back to reclaim their homesteads, despite the risk of radiation.
THE WEEK: HEALTH & SCIENCE
Grim Fallout from Chernobyl Sooner than expected, cancer begins to hit children who were downwind
One of the most disturbing predictions following the near meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, was that cancer cases would eventually begin to rise in areas affected by fallout from the accident. What no one suspected was that it would happen so soon, or that many of the first victims would be children. Two reports in Nature, one by the World Health Organization and one by health officials in Belarus, the ex-Soviet republic that was immediately downwind from Chernobyl on that fateful day, indicate that childhood thyroid cancer has skyrocketed from an average of four cases a year to about 60. Most severely affected was the Gomel region, hit first by the radiation: the thyroid cancer rate there is now about 80 times the world average. ''The only reasonable explanation,'' write the Belarus officials, ''is that it is a direct consequence of the accident at Chernobyl.''
In retrospect, the phenomenon makes sense: the thyroid gland tends to concentrate iodine ingested by the body, and radioactive iodine was released in bulk during the accident. Moreover, radiation is known to cause thyroid cancer, and children are especially susceptible. But previous studies of nuclear accidents in Britain and the U.S. and studies of nuclear-weapons testing in Japan and the South Pacific have failed to prove a fallout-cancer correlation conclusively. The probable difference this time: the radiation was more highly concentrated and hit a heavily populated area.
THE WEEK: HEALTH & SCIENCE
Money for Red Nukes Former enemies start a fund to make old power plants safer
The Soviet Bloc is dead, but its nuclear menace lives on -- not so much now in missiles as in about 60 unsafe power plants. Officials of the Group of Seven major industrial countries -- all cold war enemies of the ex-communists -- have agreed in principle to set up a fund that would lend money to nations of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to fix up their nuclear dinosaurs. The U.S. and Japan overcame their skepticism about multilateral rather than bilateral funding, and will make small initial contributions. Though the fund is eventually supposed to total $700 million, it will start with $75 million, all but $14 million put up by Germany and France -- the G-7 nations most likely to breathe fallout borne by the winds from a reactor accident in Eastern Europe. One problem: what to do with 19 Chernobyl-style reactors that cannot be made safe and should be shut down altogether -- which would deprive their surrounding areas of needed electricity.
THE WEEK: WORLD
Chernobyl to Keep Operating
Ukraine's parliament voted 221 to 38 to reverse its earlier decision to close the Chernobyl nuclear power station by the end of 1993. Chernobyl was the site in 1986 of the world's worst civilian nuclear accident. The energy-strapped country, which spends more than 10% of its national budget on cleaning up Chernobyl, also lifted a moratorium on building more nuclear plants.
MILESTONES
DIED. ANATOLI ALEXANDROV, 90, the Soviet scientist who led the effort to develop Chernobyl-type, graphite-moderated nuclear reactors; in Moscow.
THE WEEK: WORLD
A G-7 Setback for U.S.
The economic portion of the G-7 summit ended Saturday with the rebuffing of a U.S.-backed trade proposal. The U.S. had hoped to launch a new round of trade talks with the proposal, attacking barriers in such sectors as telecommunications and financial services. French President Francois Mitterrand objected strongly, arguing that the nations should win approval for last year's gatt agreement before starting new trade talks. In other developments, the G-7 leaders pledged $4 billion in financial assistance to Ukraine and $200 million to begin closing down the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
Copyright 1996 Time Inc. All rights reserved.