Could Chernobyl be the next Chernobyl?

THE nuclear power establishment feels unloved, misunderstood. It runs guided tours through its facilities, employs pleasant, fast thinking PR people and publishes 16 page, well designed newspaper pull outs to persuade us of the righteousness of its cause. And it has found a cause - several of them, in fact.

One is that nuclear energy does not contribute to global warming, an issue which undoubtedly keep some people awake at night. A second is that only Western nuclear expertise can now save from Eastern bungling and an other half dozen Chernobyls, third is that nuclear power is "cheap" form of energy.

Our problem, of course, is the complexities of nuclear science and "safe" radiation doses pass way over our heads. Can you tell the difference between a neutron and an electron? Or explain to your child what a rad is - as opposed to a rem? Or know where "background" radiation comes from and how it differs from the stuff still spewing from the leaking sarcophagus of Chernobyl reactor No 4?

In a sense, our fear of nuclear energy could be said to be fear off the unknown, except that we have some notion of the incalculable cost if someone slips up. Some in - crucially - the pro nuclear lobby call this "radiophobia".

Their problem is that they seem shifty. To put it charitably, they can be slow to admit to mistakes. And the rules seem to change all the time, sometimes with break neck speed. Take milk, for example. During May 1986, after Chernobyl, the maximum allowable radiation dose for milk was set at 1,000 becquerels by the Irish authorities. The EC meanwhile had dropped its maximum to 500 - and even that was dropped again to 370 by the end of the month. Then, just to confuse matters further, the EU was insisting on a maximum of 100 becquerels in milk to be imported from within a 1,000 km radius of Chernobyl. Ten years later, the EU figure for milk remains at 370. But during the week ending May 11th, 1986, our Nuclear Energy Board (NEB) reported milk readings as high as 440.

Meanwhile, arguments raged as anxious callers jammed the lines to Gay Byrne's radio show during a question and answer session with a NEB spokesman; levels of radiation in Cork were said to be the same as Frankfurt's and Sainsburys London stores ran out of long life milk. But the Irish authorities insisted that no restrictions on milk consumption or anything else were necessary, and Irish CND and doctors like Sean and Mary Dunphy were being accused of alarmist tactics in advising that young children and pregnant women should cut out milk for a short while.

While all this was going on, a nervous looking public health nurse called to my door and quietly advised me to stop giving fresh milk to my 18 month old child. Yes, I admit it, I then became alarmed - doubly so, as I was five months pregnant at the time. Who was right? If, God forbid, either of my children get cancer in years to come, will it be down to nuclear fall out or plain bad luck? Will we ever know the truth?

From this point of view, the pro nuclear lobby is on a winner. Down the years, some eminent scientists have validated the concerns of ordinary people in laboriously researched studies. In 1983, the British Medical Journal published the Hillary/Sheehy report proposing lines between the births of Down's Syndrome babies to eight mothers who had been at school together in Dundalk in October 1957, and the Windscale (now Sellafield) fire. Last year, another study published by the British Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health also linked Down's Syndrome to fall out from nuclear tests and to the 1957 Windscale fire.

Also in 1983, a First Tuesday documentary revealed high levels of cancer in the vicinity of nuclear reactors and provoked serious concern in north Antrim that a cluster there was linked to discharges from Sellafield. They, and other studies like them drawing links between clusters and radiation, have all been dismissed as "unprovable". Only a few weeks ago, reports were coming out of the little island of Benbecula in the Scottish Outer Hebrides of an astonishing in tripling of cancer cases there the past 18 months.

The timing, the cancer types, and the location of the radioactive plume on May 3rd and 4th, 1986 (co inciding with heavy rainfall) all appear to point to Chernobyl. It may be just a statistical blip. Or maybe not.

A spokesman for Britain's National Radiological Protection Board - which was attacked for failing to correct misleading under measurement of fall out over Britain in its first Chernobyl report - said that radiation levels in the UK were never high enough to cause health problems by inhalation. But, he added, more detailed information was needed on the impact of the food chain.

Intriguingly, the continuing impact of the food chain is precisely what many scientists currently examining the catastrophic effects of Chernobyl on Belarus, in particular, are most concerned about. (Incidentally, it was revealed in 1993 that parts of the Republic of Ireland are still suffering from abnormally high levels of radiation caused by Chernobyl, mainly through fall out of caesium in mountainous regions where it rained following the accident. The Secretary of the Department of Transport, Energy and Communications insisted, however, that there was no danger for consumers of lamb or other food.) While to most ordinary people, the link may seem childishly obvious, the pro nuclear lobby continues to insist on conclusive scientific proof.

THIS is far more than just an interesting argument - especially for those countries devastated by Chernobyl. A recent UN report inambiguously blamed the reluctance of the international community to provide "decisive and meaningful assistance" on the fact that it was waiting for conclusive scientific proof that certain diseases on the rise since Chernobyl have been caused by radiation.

Will they wait until the people of Belarus become extinct before stepping in? From where or when, if ever, is this conclusive proof to come? Even now, after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl, scientists are unable to come up with conclusive scientific proof.

"We still don't have a broad theoretical framework to work within," says Dr Keith Baverstock, a radiation expert with the Health Organisation and one of the men who forced the West to wake up to the thyroid cancer epidemic among the children in Belarus. "Chernobyl is different to Japan there it was massive external doses. With Chernobyl, it was mainly internal."

The problem for many members of the "international community", of course, is that they themselves are nuclear power producers. If links are proven between radiation (especially of the blow dose variety) and certain diseases, it may well mean goodbye to their nuclear industries. Any sane nuclear state will want to ensure the safety of the population, of course, but in the years since Chernobyl, the signs are that the contradictory arguments and unprovable links have suited them well.

According to the science journalist Anthony Tucker, as the Chernobyl plume wove its way around Europe "the French were evasive, the Americans kept their heads down and the British government quietly delayed the go ahead for Sizewell B for a few months. Then it was back to business as usual". In the view of many commentators, the US Government had, and still has, powerful reasons for glossing over the revelations - especially those confirming the link between radio iodine and childhood thyroid cancer - coming out of Chernobyl. Its Department of Defence is said to be inundated by civil compensation actions from US citizens seeking damages for thyroid cancer and other health detriments claimed to result from exposure to radio iodine and other fall out around the Hanford reactors and from weapons test sites in Nevada and elsewhere.

Beyond US borders, thyroid cancer rises have also begun to emerge among Pacific Islanders affected by fall out from American nuclear tests. In 1991, the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) health report team, headed by an American scientist, Dr Fred Mettler, found that poor health was rife in Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia but found nothing, amazingly, to link it with Chernobyl. Only recently, Dr Mettler has admitted that he knew of 20 cases of the extremely rare childhood thyroid cancer in the areas but failed to mentions them in his report. The rise began 1990 and has continued.

And while in 1986, the Western world railed against the stultifying Soviet secrecy about Chernobyl and its aftermath, it seems now it varied only in degree from behaviour that similar - admittedly more minor - incidents have provoked in the West.

"Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev waited 19 days before issuing a statement about Chernobyl - a long time, to be sure, but a good deal shorter than the 37 years it took the US Department of Energy to come clean on the enormous releases of radioactive iodine ... from the infamous Hanford Nuclear Reservation (and then only in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act)", wrote Andre Carothers in Greenpeace magazine. "The reactor at Wind scale in Britain suffered a graphite fire like Chernobyl in 1957. But British authorities neglected to mention it for three days, drawing vigorous protests' from the Netherlands, where scientists had detected fall out the day after the accident. The full story about the Windscale accident did not come out until 1988..."

AND years after the near catastrophic accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, the plant's operators were forced to admit that they had "systematically destroyed, discarded and failed to maintain records" of radiation leaks and "concealed and covered up" data on the leaks from investigators sent by the Nuclear Investigatory Commission. The head of the IAEA was quoted at one point as saying that we could expect a Chernobyl every 10 years. He also supported a Soviet statement only a few years after Chernobyl that farmland in the affected areas in Kiev and Gomel provinces would soon be returned to cultivation. This was not the same IAEA official who, writing in a 1983 IAEA Bulletin, said of the Chernobyl type reactor: "A serious accident with a loss of cooling is practically impossible."

In fact, KGB archives examined by the Canadian Professor of Russian History, David Marples, reveal that throughout the 1970s: Soviet scientists were already concerned about flaws at Chernobyl, from the combustible bitumen the roof to serious faults in the control rods that had been manufactured with shortened tips. After the accident, Soviet scientists admitted that the Chernobyl type reactor, the RBMK, had at minimum 32 basic flaws.

Meanwhile, the thorny issue of disposing of Chernobyl's radioactive waste - much of it buried - deep in hundreds of dumps - has hardly been addressed. As well as that, many experts from the East and West believe that the sarcophagus entombing Chernobyl's No 4 reactor - thrown up in frantic haste after the accident - could collapse at any moment.

The condition of the machine building which links the sarcophagus to the functioning reactor 3 area, is also causing concern. Last year there were claims in the British media that the EC had suppressed a report from its own experts warning that the machine building could collapse at any moment. The worst case scenario envisaged wreckage crashing down on the sarcophagus and the still functioning reactor 3 with devastating results. If this is so then, as Adi Roche phrases it in her book, she next Chernobyl will be Chernobyl.