Nuclear Time Bombs

By JAMES O. JACKSON CHERNOBYL

Few environmental nightmares strike a more frightening chord than Chernobyl. It is not merely the radioactive mess left by the 1986 meltdown. Six years later, 19 similar graphite-moderated nuclear time bombs are still ticking away, alarming relics of a badly designed, haplessly run nuclear-power program that none of the independent republics of the former Soviet Union can afford to shut down. The potential killers bring light, heat and power to parts of Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania, where their immediate decommissioning would create unacceptable economic disruption and even civil unrest.

The handling of Chernobyl is hardly reassuring. When workers finished the huge steel-and-concrete shell that entombs the intensely radioactive mass of the shattered No. 4 reactor in late 1986, Soviet officials declared the site safe for at least 30 years. Yet today the sarcophagus is cracked, crumbling and in peril of a disastrous collapse. The melted-down fuel is turning to unstable dust. Contaminated objects are being smuggled out of the poorly guarded 1,092-sq.-mi. exclusion zone. Birds fly into the sarcophagus through holes as big as a garage door; rats breed in the ruin. The structure is so unsteady that a strong windstorm could smash it, sending a plume of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. "Nothing is being done to clean it up," says Alex Sich, an American engineer who has studied the Chernobyl site.

Nor has anything been done about the threat of nuclear contamination in the oceans. Over the years four Soviet submarines, their reactors full of nuclear fuel, sank accidentally. The most dangerous, the world was reminded last week, may be the Komsomolets, which caught fire in April 1989 and went down in more than 4,500 ft. of water 310 miles off the coast of Norway. The wreck is already leaking cesium-137, a carcinogenic isotope. So far the leakage is considered too small to affect marine life or human health.

But the Komsomolets also carried two nuclear torpedoes containing 28 lbs. of plutonium with a half-life of 24,000 years and toxicity so high that a speck can kill. Russian experts warned that the plutonium could spill into the water and contaminate vast reaches of ocean as early as 1994.

At Chernobyl the concern is even more immediate. There is ever-present danger in the operation of reactor No. 3 too. Despite a government plan to shut down the entire plant, No. 3 was reactivated after officials pleaded that its energy was essential for the coming winter. Like its ruined twin, No. 3 is ; considered fundamentally unsafe by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It may be even more so now: many Russian operators have returned home, leaving a reactor run by Ukrainians who are ill-trained, badly paid and demoralized.

Little progress has been made on cleaning up the surrounding region. There is no equipment to decontaminate topsoil, and contaminated groundwater is backing up behind a concrete barrier near the reservoir that supplies water to the 2.6 million residents of Kiev. More than 700 peasants evacuated in 1986 have quietly moved back to their farm plots, where they consume contaminated animals and produce. "They would rather die here than live somewhere else," says Alexander Borovoi, a Russian nuclear physicist in charge of the sarcophagus. Some returned to find their homes pillaged of religious art. Although contaminated with cesium 137 and strontium 90, some of the icons have probably entered the world art market.

Hot spots abound in the buildings and equipment around Chernobyl. A disabled bulldozer sets off alarms on hand-held radiometers, showing 10 times the internationally accepted exposure level for nuclear-power workers. The big Mi- 8 helicopters that were used to drop sand into the blazing reactor in 1986 -- collecting such heavy radiation that some pilots died -- rest in a field along with hundreds of contaminated trucks and armored personnel carriers, many stripped of engines and electronic gear. The radiation is not enough to cause immediate illness, but looters are taking long-term risks. Health officials estimate that 10,000 deaths will result from fallout-induced cancers.

Chernobyl is only one of many examples of nuclear contamination and carelessness throughout the former Soviet Union. A devastating 1957 nuclear- waste explosion and subsequent dumping of contaminants near Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of Moscow, is now thought to have released pollution totaling 1.2 billion curies, a unit measure of contamination. That compares with about 3 million curies from the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Says Murray Feshbach, co-author of Ecocide in the USSR: "The new evidence of widespread nuclear pollution is so incredible, it's hard to believe."

For more than 30 years the Soviets intentionally dumped enormous quantities of radioactive rubbish into the environment. Russian authorities have pinpointed a series of such sites along the country's Arctic coast, where currents can carry contaminants to Alaska and the north coast of Canada.

< The worst of the poisoned sites is Novaya Zemlya, two Arctic islands used as a nuclear-weapons test range. Already contaminated by bomb fallout, the islands were turned into a nuclear garbage bin. The Russians admit they dropped as many as 17,000 barrels of radioactive waste into the surrounding seas since 1964. Sailors reportedly shot holes in some of the barrels when they failed to sink.

At least eight marine reactors, three from the nuclear icebreaker Lenin and the others from decommissioned submarines, have been scuttled in Novaya Zemlya's shallow bays. The dead reactors are encased in layers of steel and may be harmless for many years. But inside, their cores contain dangerous isotopes.

The West has been highly critical of the Soviet nuclear legacy but has done little to alleviate the danger. Foreigners come mainly to gather data on the effects -- medical, industrial and political -- of accidents, and then disappear. "Sometimes we feel like rabbits in a laboratory," says Viktor Ribachuk, Ukraine's deputy environment minister. Ukraine officials argue that they cannot do without nuclear power for the next five or six years, and many contend they will need it permanently.

So no one expects to see the end of these nuclear time bombs anytime soon. There are plans afoot to extend the life of some old reactors and to lift a post-Chernobyl moratorium on completing others. Dangerous reactors will be running into the 21st century. The crumbling sarcophagus over Chernobyl's devastated No. 4 may still be there too -- if it has not collapsed by then.

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/Washington