Highly radioactive materials were spewed from Chernobyl reactor No. 4 for weeks when it was torn apart by explosions and fires that sent radioactive cesium, strontium, iodine and other isotopes -- falling in rain -- across the entire Northern Hemisphere.

While most are now out, dozens of the 29,509 fires that were reported spreading across Russia and the former Soviet Union as of Aug. 13 reportedly re-suspended some of the highly radioactive materials that for nearly 25 years have been a part of the region’s plants, soils and trees.

On August 12, the AP and France’s AFP reported that the Russian Emergency Situations Agency admitted at least six wildfires were extinguished “this week” in the Bryansk region, which was heavily contaminated when Chernobyl exploded and burned.

The London Daily Mail reported August 14, that “In Russia, experts insisted the radiation levels were normal despite fires in several regions badly contaminated with radiation.” Yet, Bellona, the Italian news service, reported August 16 that Russian leaders had taken down maps of likely radiation-contaminated fires from web sites maintained by the government forestry agency.

Russian authorities in 1986 likewise worked hard producing mis- and dis-information about the original disaster. Then they sent tens of thousands of “liquidators” to their deaths ordering them to work to extinguish the burning uranium fire and to bury hotly radioactive rubble and machinery.

Last January The Guardian reported “the Belarus national academy of sciences estimates 93,000 deaths so far and 270,000 cancers, and the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far.”

At the Nukewatch office near Luck Wisconsin, we regularly check “background” radiation levels which rarely go above 11 clicks-per-minute on our $250.00 “RadAlert” meter which measures alpha, beta, gamma and X radiation in the air.

The last couple of days the machine’s been reading 19, 20 and on August 16 even 22 clicks-per-minute.

To the unfamiliar, it seems preposterous to suspect that heavy radioactive particles suspended in the smoke spreading from Russia could migrate this far on the wind and then be deposited here via rainfall.

But the history of nuclear power disasters is stark and ominous. They can poison the globe. Consider the news from the original disaster.

Only 19 days after the April 26, 1986 start of Chernobyl’s fires, these facts were reported:

1) “An invisible cloud of radioactivity spewed over the western Soviet Union and Europe, and has worked its way gradually around the world.” – St. Paul Pioneer Press, May 14, 1986

2) “Airborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States, the EPA said.” -- Associated Press, May 15, 1986

3) “State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time being.” -- Associated Press, May 15, 1986

4) “Since radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear accident began floating over Minnesota last week, low levels of radiation have been discovered in the raw milk from a Minnesota dairy.” --Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 17, 1986

Some of the Chernobyl-borne isotopes -- cesium-137 and strontium-90 -- persist in the environment for hundreds of years and will continue to be spread by wildfires.

In 2009, the American Geophysical Union reported that the radioactive cesium-137 dispersed by Chernobyl is not decaying as quickly as predicted, and the scientists estimated the cesium wouldn’t disappear from the local environment through decay for up to 320 years.

You could say nuclear power is just as green as hell.


-- LaForge is on the staff of the nuclear power and weapons watchdog group Nukewatch and edits its Quarterly. This article appeared in Duluth, Minn.'s Reader Weekly, Aug. 26.

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