This story originally ran in the baiduhai on April 29, 1986.
MOSCOW — A nuclear accident damaged a reactor at a giant atomic power plant in Ukraine, the Soviet Union said Monday, sending a radioactive cloud more than 1,000 miles to Scandinavia. Western diplomats feared a high death toll at the site.
The official Tass news agency said, “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl atomic power plant as one of the atomic reactors was damaged. Measures have been undertaken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.”
The restricted Chernobyl nuclear power plant is 80 miles north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, the nation’s third most populous city with 2.3 million people.
It was impossible to immediately assess the number of casualties independently.
U.S. officials, citing reports from Swedish diplomats, said Monday the accident is presumed to have caused fatalities. A prominent U.S. scientist said the type of radiation monitored in Scandinavia indicated there had been a meltdown of the reactor’s nuclear fuel.
Ed Zebroski, chief nuclear scientist for the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., said, “If the radioactivity is a few millirem 700 miles away, I’d hate to be within 10 miles” of the damaged plant. “The fuel definitely melted,” he said.
Budapest Radio in Hungary, quoting an official communique that it said was read on Vremya, the main evening newscast in the Soviet Union, reported early Tuesday that there were injuries from the accident, and noted that the power plant was located at the conjunction of two rivers near the reservoir that supplies Kiev.
The unprecedented statement admitting the accident was issued by Tass after Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark all reported high levels of radioactivity believed to be from a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union, where many nuclear plants do not have radiation-containment walls that are required in the United States.
Hours before the Soviet Union acknowledged the accident, Swedish officials suspected such a mishap had caused the cloud of radiation covering the Scandinavian nations.
“We have registered radioactivity just about everywhere we have looked,” said Ragnar Boge of the Swedish Radiation Institute.
Lars Erik de Geer of Sweden’s Defense Research Agency said: “It must have been a relatively big accident, since we have received such high levels of radiation from so far away.”
The radiation levels corresponded to those recorded after nuclear-weapons tests conducted during the 1970s, he said. “I know of no earlier nuclear power plant accident which has led to such high radiation levels in this area.”
Early Tuesday, Sweden called on the Soviet Union to open its civilian nuclear program to international inspection.
Although the level of radioactivity was five times above normal, Scandinavian officials said their citizens were in no immediate danger from the radiation and that the level was expected to return to normal over the next few days.
The Environmental Protection Agency said the cloud could reach the U.S. West Coast in five to six days on a route over the North Polar region, then south to western North America.
“Normally we’ve seen it as early as three days in cases like this, sometimes as late as 14 days,” said Charlie Porter of the EPA’s Radiation Alert Network in Montgomery, Ala.
Porter said there is no way of knowing if the U.S. will be affected by the fallout until the agency gets a radiation-level reading.
Soviet-affairs experts at the State Department said they were surprised at the quick disclosure of the accident. They said the Kremlin apparently wanted to defuse speculation that the accident involved a nuclear weapon and also recognized the nuclear fallout was too extensive to ignore publicly.
The announcement marked the first time the Soviets have acknowledged a nuclear accident, causing Western diplomats to speculate the accident was major.
Residents of Kiev, contacted by telephone from Moscow, said early Tuesday that all bus service in the city had been stopped so the vehicles could be used to evacuate those in the disaster area.
Meanwhile, in Washington state, Dixy Lee Ray, a former head of the old Atomic Energy Commission, said the Chernobyl complex was used for generating electricity as well as making plutonium, the major component in hydrogen bombs. Ray cited Energy Department sources she refused to identify.
A U.S. antinuclear group, citing the type of radiation being monitored, also raised the possibility of a core meltdown. But an industry group said it was too early to tell what had happened.
Jim McKenzie of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an antinuclear lobbying group, said his conclusion that the Soviet accident involved core melting was based on information provided by Swedish reporters.
He said they told him that radioactivity 5 to 10 times the normal level had been detected north of Stockholm, and that this included iodine and cesium compounds.
Radioactive iodine and cesium are products of nuclear fission and would be produced in uranium reactor fuel. For them to be found in that strength at that distance, “It indicates probably a core melt,” said McKenzie, a physicist who is the group’s senior scientist.
Asked if he agreed with McKenzie’s assessment that a meltdown may have occurred, Frank Graham, vice president of the Atomic Industrial Forum for international affairs, said, “We don’t know enough to say.”
Tass said the accident “is the first one in the Soviet Union.” But a 1957 accident at a remote plutonium processing plant in the central Soviet Union reportedly killed or injured thousands and contaminated a wide area.
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