Oh, what a charming topic to bring up, eh whot?
Content Warning: Gunna talk about disasters, suicide, death and disease.
If you’re not familiar and to pad out the article, when we refer to ‘Chernobyl’ we’re generally referring to the Chernobyl Disaster (April 26th, 1986 — Present). In this incident, the No 4. Reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which was powering Pripyat in the Ukranian territory of what we generally simplify as ‘The USSR’, blew the shit up. The reasons for doing so are very complicated and since the miniseries, there’s been a whole host of wonderful video and podcast explaininers finding the best way to describe and approach this specific incident in terms of what made it happen.
Sometimes the question is one about the mechanics of a nuclear power plant, and why a machine like that is capable of blowing up, when it does not feature as it were, explosive material but is really more of a very complicated teakettle (not even joking). Sometimes the question is about how did this teakettle get to be designed this way, and was it in fact, the socialism that made it bad? Sometimes the question is about how the system for designing the teakettles had worked and concealed information in the name of meeting goals and wasn’t that actually more of a capitalist teakettle. Sometimes, the question is about the mind of one guy running the plant who was, by all historical information, a complete arse, and then how tragic and brave it was that he made everyone else’s lives suck for however much of it they had left.
Chernobyl happened thirty-seven years ago, and for me it was one of a small number of incidents that I remembered as being ‘important’ that I couldn’t put in a meaningful timeline. When I remembered the coverage of it years later, and went back to find the old videos I realised that this had been information I had somehow absorbed when I was barely three years old – the day before my birthday. It has been, as long as I’ve been aware of being alive, one of the things in the world, one of the great, cursed, dreadful events in our history.
How many people then, the inquisitive mind goes, died at this terrible event?
Two.
That is to say, in the estimation of the Soviet Union at first, the death toll of the Chernobyl incident, at first, was two people who died in the initial eplosion. Later estimates by the end of the year added 28 plant workers and first responders to the death toll.
This seems odd, doesn’t it?
It seems odd because Chernobyl was and remains one of the greatest nuclear disasters in human history, and its problem compares to the radiation and fallout of a nuclear weapon. The cleanup and associated program of containment was the kind of thing that required new developments in technology just to maintain. The building that houses Chernobyl is the largest man-made mobile structure ever made, and it’s just step two of many on the long, endless task of supporting this problem.
How then did only thirty people die in the process?
Part of the problem is that we just flat out don’t have good information about what happened. There were plenty of reports, but also we know that more than a few of them were from liars. We also know that the actual experience of being evacuated out of your hometown like Pripyat was could be incredibly traumatising and the ensuing mental health harm could have an impact people didn’t really consider. Especially when it came to clearly and honestly accounting for lives and deaths.
One of the investigators of Chernobyl, Valery Legasov, who was played in the miniseries by Permanently Wet Boy Jared Harris, killed himself, after preparing the release of his findings. One of the reasons why was probably the enormous radiation dose he had in his system, which he would be seeing affect him. Was that a death due to Chernobyl? He killed himself, but he did so to avoid the ‘actual’ death the reactor prepared for him.
Chernobyl is a hard type of injury to examine. The report about its impact is honestly quite harrowing to read – I’ve only read a summary and it includes things I never would have considered. Chernobyl is probably responsible for a distinct uptick in abortion rates for a year, where parents were afraid of giving birth to terminally ill, permanently injured children due to their exposure to Chernobyl, for example, a situation I never had to consider. The Liquidators who helped to remove nuclear material from the zone were exposed to radiation, and many of them died of radiation-related diseases, though as many examples as can be compelling did not. Is killing a person the same as reducing six hundred thousand people’s lives by half? What is the difference and how do you measure it?
Chernobyl was not a knife wound that left a corpse, a neatly codified grouping of people harmed by its impact who could then be tallied up so it could be put in a list. Instead, it has to be seen as a long, slow bleed, where instead of cutting a number of people short, we are left thinking about it in terms of where that cut comes. In insurance, there’s this idea of ‘years of lost life’ to value a life insurance policy. If a person was in their 90s, and they die from something, well, that probably only represents a loss of about two years of life. If they die at twenty, they could expect to have another sixty years ahead of that.
Years of lost life are a system that tries to systemitise these losses, and it’s a full blown table system, with different countries and influences and details, all measuring things out, as best we can, based on precedent. We are not good at handling numbers of things that happen slowly over time, even if the result is still dead people.
Worldwide, as I write this, about three hundred people die of COVID-19 every day.