This is a large chunk of text and I was doing it quite quickly, so PeZook assisted with some proofreading. Feel free to share it anywhere anytime. The original text appeared in the "Polityka" (Politics) monthly magazine, IMHO the best magazine that comes out in Poland. It leans towards the left, and it always has this rational and logical (even academic at times) approach to any subject.
Anyways, credit goes to Marcin Rotkiewicz for the interview, translation to myself and proofreading to PeZook. If you notice any language problems then please send me a PM and I will gladly correct them.
The actual title is "Zabójczy mit Czernobyla" which translates exactly to "Deadly myth of Chernobyl". However, using my translator priviledges I found the "Killing the myth of Chernobyl" to be much more fitting, so what the hell.
Killing the myth of Chernobyl
Interview with prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski , a prominent specialist in the field of radioactive contamination
Marcin Rotkiewicz: - When was the first time you heard about the accident at Chernobyl?
Zbigniew Jaworowski: - April 28, 1986, late in the afternoon. I was in my office at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection (CLRP) in Warsaw listening to BBC radio. That's when the British gave information that there was a serious incident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant .
Until then, you did not know about the explosion?
I only knew that something very bad was happening behind our eastern border. When I came to the CLRP that morning, a nervous assistant was waiting for me out front. I will never forget her words: Listen, a telex came from the measuring station in Mikołajki. The radioactivity of air there is 550 thousand times higher than yesterday. Our parking lot is also heavily contaminated!
Your first thought?
Nuclear war.
You immediately assumed the worst?
Yes, immediately. I was prepared for that. For over 20 years I dealt extensively with implementing of the Polish civil protection system against the consequences of a nuclear attack.
What did you do?
We ordered the Service of Radioactive Contamination Measurement, which had 140 stations across the country, to send us reports every two hours. We quickly established that the wave of radiation moved from east to west. Something bad had to have happened in the Soviet Union.
You felt relieved?
Just a little. We did not know whether this was a serious reactor accident, a terrorist attack, or perhaps a demonstration by Soviet military officials readying for a coup.
The Russians never informed you about anything?
No! Even though we had signed proper agreements, they kept silent.
And the Polish authorities?
They did not know anything.
No way!
Let me tell you how our government learned about Chernobyl. About ten o'clock I grabbed the phone and phoned the office of the Director of the National Atomic Agency. I reached his secretary. The director is not here - I heard in the handset. Where is he then? - I don't know. I was able to locate him at a nuclear research center in Swierk. I got him to speak to me and said: Mr. President, we have a huge increase in air contamination. I have not seen anything like that in my life. This could be a nuclear war, a terrorist attack or an explosion of a nuclear reactor. We should know the source of the contamination within two hours, when we test the air samples. I think you should notify the prime minister.
Was he worried?
He asked me: alright, but you do not yet know what this is? Then keep me informed - and he ended the call. After about an hour I had the analysis reports. I called Swierk again, but the President was not there. His office in Warsaw was empty too. So I left everything and went to his house, which I found to be locked. Please remember that these were the times of the Polish Socialist Republic and I couldn't just organize a press conference or call the prime minister's office.
My wife came to my aid. She is a paleontology professor and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She knew the secretary of PAS, professor Zdzislaw Kaczmarek. At the time it was a government position, so he could get in touch directly with the prime minister. Kaczmarek only said: yes, I understand everything, I will notify the prime minister immediately. And he did.
How did the government react?
I found out about it when I came home after midnight. At about three in the morning a phone call woke me up: there is a government car waiting to take you to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. When I went there (there is a banking and financial center at that location now), there was a crowd of officials and generals. But the main meeting was held in the office of the Secretary of the Communist Party, Marian Woźniak.
Who did participate?
The members of the political cabinet of the Polish United Worker’s Party, government, Country Defence Committee and the President of the National Atomic Agency. Me and professor colonel Zenon Bałtrukiewicz from the Military Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology were the only experts there.
What did they ask you?
To assess the situation. I said, among other things, that we need not fear any radiation at the moment.
How so? After you noted a several hundred thousandfold increase in radiation at the CLRP?
This was merely the increase of the so called beta wave activity in the air, which is only an emergency indicator, which signals that there is something wrong to do with radioactivity. This cannot be directly related to the dose of radiation absorbed by the populace. For humans, radioactive cessium, iodine, and the gamma radiation of many other isotopes are the most dangerous. Its dose, as it turned out, only increased threefold, and did not constitute a health hazard. It is quite complicated and I can perfectly understand your confusion - I was also terrified at the 550 thousandfold increase in beta radiation, and I knew that it was not directly related to human safety.
So what caused your greatest concerns?
The radioactive iodine 131. It could get, above all, into milk, and thus to children's thyroids. The spring was in full swing, so the farmers were letting cows out to graze on the pastures contaminated with radioactive iodine from Chernobyl. That is why the most important message that I wanted to pass to the authorities was: we need to give stable iodine to children as soon as possible, to safeguard them from thyroid cancer. And I said something else, too: to take proper action we need information that we do not have.
What was the reaction to that?
Marian Woźniak spoke: I will call my "counterpart" is Moscow. I remember that exact statement, because he used the English word counterpart. And then he politely asked everyone to leave his office. After about 10 minutes Woźniak, looking very moved, came out to the gathered crowd. He said he does not know anything - said the Secretary in a grave voice.
Was the Russian lying?
I thought so at the time. Today, however, I am almost sure that that guy in Moscow wasn't lying. They really didn't know anything, because the KGB quickly severed phone connections to Chernobyl. The circle of the people in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who knew what really happened, was very limited. Their paranoia of secrecy had a very paralysing effect.
So you had to rely on your own information and speculation.
Yes. In this situation we were forced to assume the most pessimistic variant - that new waves of radioactive contaminants will reach us. We had to get the iodine to kids as soon as possible, in the form of Lugol's Solution. The authorities agreed. The decision to ban cow grazing was also made, and we recommended that the children drink only powdered or canned condensed milk.
At about six o'clock in the morning General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the first secretary of the Polish United Worker Party, appeared. I was under the impression that he was deeply moved by this whole situation. He informed us that in relation to the Chernobyl malfunction a Government Commission has been created, led by the deputy prime minister Zbigniew Szałajda.
Were you invited?
Yes, I became a member as the radioactive contamination expert.
The Government Commission has been repeatedly accused of lying and concealing information about the true extent of the contamination in Poland.
During the first two days the government's information policy was indeed scandalous. Together with docent Krzysztof Żarnowiecki from CLRP, also the commission's expert, we prepared a reliable document on the level of radioactive contamination in Poland. It was accepted as the first official communique from the Commission. Imagine my surprise when I read a completely revised text in the newspapers the next day, which contained complete nonsense. It turned that our message was "treated creatively", most probably in the Department of the Press. I was furious. On the 1st of May me and Żarnowiecki displayed our anger with the situation. I said that such behaviour was outrageous. I also declared that me and Żarnowiecki would not write any more messages. And added: if we don't provide reliable and meaningful information, we will lose the trust of the West, and our food exports are entirely dependant on that.
Did it work?
It worked brilliantly! After all, the Minister of Foreign Trade was a member of the Commission. The final decision was made by the Deputy Prime Minister Szałajda - that from now on all of the press releases will look exactly as agreed upon by the Commission. Thanks to that all lies about Chernobyl ended.
Recently, a well known of solidarity opposition activist Henryk Wujec accused CLRP in "Gazeta Wyborca" that the CLRP developed a secret report on Chernobyl and hid the real scale of the contamination. Wujec's friend and an employee of CLRP Zbigniew Wołoszyn wanted to give that data to the opposition in September 1986, but was supposedly murdered by the Security Bureau.
There was no secret report, and Zbigniew Wołoszyn's death was not related to Chernobyl. Twice, both before and after 1989 (the end of the communist government in Poland), this case was investigated by the prosecutor's office and none of the suspicions of Henryk Wujec were confirmed. It should be noted that the reports of CLRP and the Government's Commission were declared as "most transparent and useful" by the US Food and Drug Administration. After 1989, the president of the National Atomic Agency called a special team to assess the government's actions during the Chernobyl disaster. This resulted in a 50-page report, which concluded that the Government's Commission did a good job.
But still, professor Andrzej Friszke, a famous historian, said in an interview for the "Życie" daily newspaper, on the 15th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, that the communist authorities "completely ignored the threat, whose impact is felt to this day by many people, some of which died because of Chernobyl. No special safety precautions have been taken".
I am sorry to hear this... I have never been a fan of the communist regime, nor did I belong to the Communist Party. I had a critical attitude towards that reality. But the fact is that no other government in Europe acted as responsibly and efficiently as the Polish one. Instant action to administer iodine, which began on the 29th April in the afternoon, is set as a model of radiation protection measures. In the history of medicine, it was the single biggest preventative action performed in such a short time. In just three days 18,5 million people drank Lugol's Solution, as the action was not limited only to children. Do you know when they started administering iodine in the Soviet Union?
No.
A month after the reactor exploded. Even in the US the authorities were not able to act so fast. When in 1979 there was a serious malfunction of the Three Mile Island nuclear powerplant, Americans only mamaged to get iodine to the populace after eight days. I would also like to point out to professor Friszke, that such an action would be impossible today. We have no iodine stockpiles in pharmacies, the radioactive contamination monitoring network was left to dilapidate, while at the CLRP, due to budget cuts, some of the qualified workers were employed as security guards!
Many people still complain that the Government Commission did not cancel the 1st of May celebration marches. It was just three days after the Chernobyl disaster...
During the aforementioned meeting in the Central Committee I myself recommended the marches to be cancelled and that the streets to be sprayed with water to get rid of the dust, as well as forbidding the children to leave their homes. They did not agree, saying that such actions will lead to panic. And it was the correct decision to make. Anyway, on the 1st of May there was a sharp drop in air contaminstion in Poland. I can say with full responsibility: no one's health in our country was endangered on account of Chernobyl. Even more, if at the time I had today's knowledge about what happened at the Chernobyl powerplant, I wouldn't even recommend the Lugol's Solution to be administered.
So there really was no threat?
Totally none. The radiation dose which we received was minimal. No impact on health whatsoever.
So the iodine wasn't needed?
I think so now. However, we assumed the worst and acted according to the overly cautious international recommendations. Still, we managed to avoid the terrible mistakes made in the USSR, where 336 thousand people were needlessly displaced from the so called contaminated regions. If at the time soviet authorities didn't even lift a finger, did absolutely nothing to protect the people against the effects of Chernobyl, it would have been a much better decision than those made.
But the whole world is convinced that the radiation killed thousands of people there, while huge zones were contaminated for millennia. Even now there is a 30 kilometre exclusion zone around Chernobyl.
These are the myths that have been repeated over the years, which have nothing to do with the reality. The 30-kilometre zone was created, but I do not know why.
You must be joking...
I say this will full responsibility. There are not my inventions. Please refer to the report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) from the year 2000. In the area of radioactive contaminations and their effects on health this is the most reliable institution in the world, which gathers more than a hundred of the most prominent experts from 21 countries.
What, then, says UNSCEAR?
That only 134 plant workers were exposed to very high doses of radiation, which were followed by acute radiation sickness. Within a few months after the disaster 31 people died and these are the only casualties of Chernobyl.
And cancer?
UNSCEAR report clearly states that there is no scientific evidence that the population of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus suffered from an increased incidence of cancer or other diseases related to radiation. However, there was a huge increase in psychosomatic symptoms - disorders of the respiratory , digestive and nervous systems. What does it mean? That people were terribly afraid and still afraid of a threat that did not exist.
So what was the real scale of the contamination?
Near the power plant there is a less than a square mile of terrain so contaminated that the trees there died shortly after the outbreak. The rest of the so-called Zone is habitable, including the displaced and empty to this day town of Pripyat, located 3 kilometres from the Chernobyl Power Plant. The radiation levels there are the same as in Warsaw. In the most contaminated regions of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine the yearly doses of radiations, caused by the Chernobyl disaster, equal about 1 mSv (millisivierts). In comparison, there are regions in the world (France, Brasil and Iran for example) where yearly doses of natural radiation from the soil and rocks reach tens or even hundreds of millisivierts. People have lived there for centuries in good health. Nobody thinks about displacing them. I would like to add that in Poland, in the first year after the catastrophe, the yearly chernobyl-related dose of radiation was 0,3 mSv.
And the thyroid cancer in children?
UNSCEAR said that 6 years ago, in areas of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus around 1800 thyroid cancers were detected in children. Fortunately, these tumors are in 95 percent completely curable. Even this data raises a number of questions with the scholars. I will only mention one: it is very likely that the increase in thyroid cancer in the so called contaminated regions did not result from radiation, but from the careful surveys of the population, not performed before 1986. Many of the thyroid cancers are the so-called mute cancers, which do not give symptoms until natural death. Most people are completely oblivious to the fact that they have cancer. They only find they have cancer if they undergo specialized tests.
Is the UNSCEAR report the only one to expose the myths of Chernobyl?
No. In 2002 four UN agencies: WHO, UNDP, UNICEF and UN-OCHA created a document which said almost the same thing as UNSCEAR.
So where did the terrifying myth of Chernobyl came from?
The Chernobyl scare is not the only one, people panically fear radiation. This phenomennon has its own name: radiophobia. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki we were scared by nuclear war and the terrible effects of radiation. But the scientists are also very guilty, because, like a herd of sheep, accepted the so called LNT hypothesis as the basis for radiological protection measures.
What is it?
In the early 1950s, an American scholar and Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller conducted an experiment to check for genetic changes caused by radiation. He irradiated fruit flies with very strong doses of radiation and checked their DNA for damage. According to his research, there was a linear correlation - the stronger the radiation, the more mutations in the insects' genetic material appeared. So a conclusion was drawn that very small doses of radiation are also harmful - however, this was never experimentally investigated. The so called LNT hypothesis (linear non-threshold) was born, saying, that even a radiation dose close to zero may be harmful to health. LNT has been adopted as the basis for the very strict regulations in radiological protection.
Has the LNT proven to be untrue?
Completely. Even in the 60's I myself believed in it, but over time results of research on the health effects of low doses of radiation started cropping up. In the beginning of the 80's there were more than 2 thousand scientific papers on the subject. They showed that small doses of radiation are not only harmless, but can have quite a positive impact on our health.
How is that possible?
In the course of evolution, mammals have been equipped with very efficient mechanisms for repairing DNA damage caused by various factors, much more toxic than ionizing radiation. There are especially aggressive radicals produced by metabolising oxygen. In each second of our conversation, they cause 2,2 DNA errors in each of your and mine cells. These errors are immediately repaired. Average annual natural radiation dose (coming from space, soil and various isotopes present in the human body) results in 5 DNA errors per year.
You are talking about positive impact of small doses of radiation.
Yes, because they stimulate the mechanisms of defense and repair. Radiation forces an organism to respond effectively. This is the so called radiation hormesis hypothesis, which explains very well even such apparently paradoxical phenomenon, as the Chernobyl rescuers who have received relatively big, but harmless to their lives, doses of radiation, and are healthier than the rest of the population. The same has been observed amongst shipyard workers who repair nuclear powered submarines, and among physicians - radiologists.
Is the LNT still out there?
Yes, although it is scientifically dead already. But it will be a long time before the absurd administrative regulations for radiological protection are altered. The problem also lies in the interests of various groups - billions of dollars are spent all around the world on radiological protection. Someone is making money and has no business in losing such a valuable source of income.
Was the LNT a basis for the prognosed thousands of death caused by the Chernobyl disaster and for the decision of resettlement?
Yes. For example, in 1987, there was an american report forecasting 36 thousands of deaths in the so-called contaminated regions of the former USSR. Today the authors of this document are very ashamed of their forecasts.
And the crippled children, often showed as victims of Chernobyl?
That is pure manipulation. In the so-called contaminated regions no increase in heavily defected births was noted. In every population, from Warsaw to Hawaii, there are about 3 percent of such cases. You just need to go with a camera, film a child which was born armless and add a comment that this is a Chernobyl victim. Journalists have done so many times.
What was the reaction to the UNSCEAR report?
Russians are very rational in this matter, while it made Ukraine and Belarus angry. I do not blame them. These countries receive a steady stream of money from international aid. Ukraine itself, until the year 2000, spent alsmot 148 billion dollars on the "removal of the effects of the catastrophe". A large part of that sum was claimed by various reliefs, allowances and pensions for the so called victims of Chernobyl. In Russia, Belarus and Ukraine as many as 7 million people were allegedly injured by radiation. At the same time the four UN agencies have declared the authorities' actions as erroneous, the financial help assistance as wasted and recommended a complete change of social and health policies.
Will these recommendations be implemented?
Who will have the courage to take money and priviledges away from millions of people?
So what has Chernobyl taught us?
That nuclear power is the safest currently available energy source. Chernobyl was the worst disaster imaginable in a nuclear power plant. In addition, the power plant at Chernobyl defied all safety standards. This whole facility was a big scandal. But that is not all. After the reactor exploded, huge amounts of radioactive contaminants were released to the atmosphere, some of which even reached as far as Antarctica. And what happened? Nothing. 31 people died - less than in the Katowice Trade Hall roof collapse in 2006 (note from the translator: 65 people died and 170 were injured). Less than a square kilometre of land was dangerously contaminated. That's it!
Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski is a trained radiation oncologist. Since 1970, for 17 years he was the head of the Department of Radiation Hygiene of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection. Currently he is the chairman of the Scientific Council at CLRP. Since 1973 he represents Poland in the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) , which he has also presided over in 1980-1981. He is the author of a couple hundred of scientific papers. He also organized 10 expeditions to glaciers in almost every continent. The purpose of these expeditions, financed mainly by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was to examine the level of air pollution in the world over the last few hundred years.
