My guide, when I went
to visit Chernobyl
on the 25th anniversary of the accident,
was a Greenpeace campaigner from Germany
named Tobias Muenchmeyer. Tobias is the
deputy head of our political unit in Berlin
and also happens to know a great deal about
nuclear power. But what really registered
with me as we traveled together was the
fact that Tobias has a personal tie to Chernobyl.
His wife Katya was a 16-year-old schoolgirl
in Kiev in 1986.
Katya was actually incredibly
lucky, all things considered. Five days
after the accident, which at that point
was still a state secret, her mother was
told about it by a someone in the know.
Katya’s parents scrambled to send their
daughter away to friends in Moscow, and
she was saved further exposure to the radiation
that caused tens of thousands of deaths.
Thirteen days on General Secretary of the
Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev,
finally admitted the magnitude of the disaster.
Later on the Soviet government established
mandatory resettlement for all people living
in an area with exposure to radiation of
5 millisieverts (mSv) per year. (During
the first days after the accident Kiev was
already measuring 8 microsieverts per hour,
which means a dose of 5mSv would be reached
after approx. 25 days.)
Tragedy is often more
easily apprehended when seen through a survivor’s
story, and I couldn’t help but think of
Katya and her parents as we drove north
from Kiev, backwards in time, past stretches
of abandoned land that reminded me of parts
of underdeveloped Africa, to the site of
the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
The reason for our
trip to Chernobyl that starless night was
to “bear witness” to the anniversary as
part of Greenpeace’s decades-long campaign
to stop nuclear energy. After three hours,
we passed a sign that read “Dityatki 30
Kilometers Checkpoint“ and we were officially
in the “Zone.” Crossing a long bridge we
turned left and drove the length of the
empty nuclear plant, past Reactor No. 1
(shut down in 1996), Reactor No. 2 (shut
down in 1991 after a fire), Reactor No.
3 (closed under international pressure in
2000) and finally the remains of Reactor
No. 4, now covered by the infamous “sarcophagus“
hastily constructed in 1986.
