Safe contaminated zone, or how much land really has been degraded after Chernobyl explosion

Highly contaminated area in the NPP vicinity measures only a half of a square kilometer! Such is the conclusion from the maps included in UNSCEAR report. On the other hand, most of the territory surrounding the plant poses no risk to human health. Why then is there a 30-km uninhabited safety zone? Why the inhabitants of the town Prypiat have been resettled? Why does this town stay closed until this very day?

The resettlement has been implemented swiftly and on a large scale. Within 11 days (from 27 April until 7 May 1986) 116 000 people were forced to change their place of residence. - "The decision on resettlement has been taken with no notice of the opinion of Russian scientists, who suggested that the majority of people living in the NPP neighborhood should be left alone" - says Michael Walig�rski, the head of the Health Physics Department in Oncology Center in Cracow. - "Resettled people did not die from lethal radiation doses, but from high stress. We observed similar reactions to stress also in Poland, during the flood of 1997. Many people died then not from drowning but e.g. from heart attack." - adds Walig�rski.

The town Prypiat and a large part of the closed 30-km zone are in fact habitable! Radiological measurements conducted by international teams clearly show that the radiation level in this area is not harmful for humans. The average dose for the contaminated area is only 8 mSv per year, and in locations most contaminated with radioactive material - from 30 to 80 mSv. During 1999 each Pole absorbed a mean radiation dose of 3.3 mSv. Forty percent of this dose comes from radon, a noble gas released from radium contained in earth crust and in construction materials. All artificial radioactive isotopes produced in nuclear weapons tests, from nuclear power and from Chernobyl accident etc., account for the radiation exposure of Poles equal to 0.036 mSv annually.

How the Chernobyl lie came into being

While Ukrainian authorities were solemnly shutting off the last reactors of Chernobyl nuclear power plant in late 2000, the press, radio and TV networks worldwide were still spreading the apocalyptic visions of the disaster. In Polish Press Agency dispatches one could read the following: "In Ukraine the number of nuclear explosion victims exceeded 4 thousand and 3.5 million people suffer in various degree from radioactive contamination. (...) To this day there is no data on the number of lives taken by the disaster, which by various sources is estimated to be 15-30 thousand. (...)" TV reports again showed the deserted town of Prypiat located a dozen kilometers from the power plant and the children who have been born hideously deformed, recounted the stories of the tragedy of those resettled from "the 30-km death zone", quoted those, who found themselves among "3.5 million people afflicted by the accident consequences" and: "How long shall I live, perhaps in a year, or in a week I shall learn from the doctor that I got leukemia?"

From the very beginning the media were promoting a tragic and exaggerated picture of the disaster. In May 1986 the American press reported that the reactor explosion killed 80 people immediately, that further 2 thousand died on the way to hospitals and their bodies are buried not on the cemeteries but in a place called Pirogovo, where a nuclear waste disposal site is located. The enormous headline in New York Post threatened: "Mass grave - in Kiev 15 thousand human bodies pushed down by bulldozers into the waste pits", while National Enquirer described a mutant chicken 2 m high, caught by the hunters in the forests close to Chernobyl.

The interesting point is that equally absurd stories appeared in the press not only in the times when Soviet authorities prevented gathering of reliable information on the disaster, but also afterwards. In 1990 the major Norwegian daily newspaper Aftenposten published a large article entitled "Chernobyl - an everlasting nightmare." This article has been illustrated with the pictures made by a Polish photographer Wojciech Laski, showing two children with serious congenital defects (one of them one-armed), supposedly caused by radiation. Five years later, 13 October 1995, Reuters dispatch reported that 800 thousand children have been affected by the consequences of Chernobyl accident, which was "as terrible as a nuclear attack."