BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

18/11/2008

Gomel: Debate still rages over Chernobyl fallout

By Geoff Smith

The Belarusian government estimates the cost of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster to its economy at $235bn over a 30-year period. But no single figure can reliably value the output lost to illness, to stress-related disorders, to the closure of mines and factories, and the loss of more than 200,000 hectares of agricultural land and 1,900 sq kilometres of forestry to commercial use.

The costs were easier to measure in the 1990s. Over 22 per cent of public spending in Belarus' first year of independence went on recovering from the disaster, mainly on building houses for the 135,000 people that were resettled away from contaminated areas. By 1996, resettlement was finished, but 10.9 per cent of budget spending was still Chernobyl-related - mainly on health care. Today, depending on whose figures you use, the figure is between 4 per cent and 6 per cent.

Statistics alone cannot say much more than that with any certainty, owing to the impossibility of knowing what is, and what is not, attributable to radiation. Some measures point to relative degrees of success in general public health, whatever the specific problems bequeathed by Chernobyl: UN data show that overall life expectancy has fallen less in Belarus than in Russia and Ukraine over the past 12 years, despite receiving 80 per cent of the fall-out.

Moreover, the debate is now compromised by the politicisation of the issue between supporters and opponents of nuclear power, both in Belarus and in Europe as a whole.

The government is anxious to reclaim areas too contaminated for economic development. It also wants to build a nuclear power plant to redress its chronic dependence on Russian energy, subsidies for which are fast running out. That requires convincing a population that has tended to see radiation to blame for all of its medical problems over the last 22 years.

"For the last three years, our state has been preparing people for the need to build a nuclear power station," says Gennady Grushevoy, head of the Children of Chernobyl charity. "In this context, any information that would unsettle the population ... and remind people of the consequences of Chernobyl is very unwelcome."

At the very least, the government has subsumed Chernobyl-specific indicators and items into broader ones. National statistics make no effort to break out radiation-related illness in its data series on mortality - a huge question mark hangs over a threefold rise in the number of disabled children since 1990.

Moreover, those who try to establish links between such phenomena and Chernobyl have encountered serious trouble. Professor Yuri Bandazhevsky, director of the Gomel State Institute for Medicine, was imprisoned for six years on what he insists were fabricated bribery charges, after suggesting that the real legacy effects were much higher than government data said. Bandazhevsky, who is now preparing to head a new EU-funded research centre in Vilnius, argues that low dosages of radiation, damaging to the immune system, are entering the food chain today and causing a generalised decline in public health. Alexander Rozhko, director of a smart new hospital for radioactivity-related medicine in Gomel, says the social and psychological effects of the disaster, notably from resettlement, are as big a factor in public health today as the direct pathological effect of radiation.

Even so, Grushevoy infers from national data that "the overall number of fully healthy people in the country is falling consistently".

Occasionally, government officials make slips that feed suspicions that they are jeopardising safety for the sake of growth. Andrey Savinykh, a senior Belarusian representative to the UN, told the assembly last September that "the economic rehabilitation of the contaminated territories has become the number one priority".

Savinykh made his remarks in an address outlining plans to "bio-clean" some of the contaminated areas over a 30-40 year period, cultivating biomass and biofuel feedstocks to remove radioactive isotopes from the soil without bringing them into the food chain.

Belarus is now actively farming more than 14,000 ha of land it originally thought contaminated. Vladimir Tsalkov, Deputy Minister for Emergency Situations, says that the area represents one-seventh of the total area surveyed for rehabilitation, and that there are no quantitative targets or deadlines for rehabilitating land.

Mr Grushevoy says: "How safe this land is, and to what degree it has been cleaned up, we only know that from the government. Independent experts do not get access to this data."

Source:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4baf7bd8-b431-11dd-8e35-0000779fd18c.html

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