transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:09] This device is calling like a Geiger counter. The main mission of this device is to measure the radiation. So you see it's lower than the normal dose, so everything is okay. But for now, everything is okay.

Speaker 2:
[00:20] Let's go make it not open.

Speaker 3:
[00:23] That's Jason Palmer. Regular listeners of The Intelligence, The Economist, Daily Current Affairs Podcasts will recognize those mellifluous tones. Earlier this year, Jason went on a trip to Ukraine, to Chernobyl.

Speaker 4:
[00:38] 2,400. So as you can see, it's still radioactive. And of course, we will stay here for a short period of time.

Speaker 5:
[00:47] It was nice knowing you.

Speaker 4:
[00:49] I highly recommend you to drink a lot of alcohol today evening.

Speaker 2:
[00:52] Clean myself out. Alcohol definitely helps.

Speaker 3:
[00:59] This isn't the first time he's visited the site of the world's worst nuclear energy disaster. A couple of years ago, he was reporting on the impact of Russian attacks on the former power plant. While he was there, he got a little sidetracked when he met Olena Pareniuk.

Speaker 5:
[01:18] I'm a biologist, a radiation biologist, and I'm studying the bacterial communities in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Speaker 2:
[01:26] And stuff can live there?

Speaker 5:
[01:28] Yeah, of course. Yeah. We have the bacteria that can metabolize uranium, plutonium, americium, cesium, and they can live in the extreme environment. So basically, we just evidenced extremely fast evolution of the bacteria.

Speaker 2:
[01:44] That is amazing to me, first of all. But I suppose what we're really here to talk too much about is just out of curiosity.

Speaker 3:
[01:52] Something you should know about Jason Palmer is that, as well as being the voice of The Economist, he's also a physicist. He spent many years as a science correspondent here at the paper. So naturally, when the time was right, he wanted to learn more about those bugs living inside the highly radioactive reactor core. That's why he recently went back to Ukraine to meet with Olena and her scientific colleagues. Because for them, Chernobyl is a thriving laboratory. For the past four decades, this has been the best place on earth to study the long-term impacts of radiation on plants and animals. And this unique laboratory has lessons for our future relationship with nuclear power. I'm Alok Jha, and this is Babbage from The Economist. Today, what scientists have learned and are still learning from Chernobyl. Joining me for today's show is Jason Palmer. Jason, welcome to Babbage.

Speaker 2:
[02:59] Thank you very much. Always a pleasure.

Speaker 3:
[03:01] Now, you've been to Chernobyl recently, as we heard in the intro. What made you want to go? And what was it like?

Speaker 2:
[03:08] Well, one thing was to go back and speak to Olena again. We wanted to go back and gather a bunch of material before the 40th anniversary of Chernobyl, which is coming up on Sunday, the 26th. And I knew from our previous visit that there were quite a few scientists around, and I was sort of struck by how much ongoing science, new stuff learned about the accident and its aftermath was there for the plumbing. So I just really wanted to go back.

Speaker 3:
[03:32] The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was one of those events embossed very clearly on the recent history of Europe. But for those who may not know the details, could you just walk us through what actually happened in 1986?

Speaker 2:
[03:44] Well, very briefly, there was to be an overnight safety test that engineers were carrying out. And they disabled some safety systems and everything was going fine. But while they weren't paying attention, essentially the reactor became unstable. When they brought things back online towards the normal operation, they realized it was not where it should be. The thing that they did to bring it back into stability was actually completely opposite from what they should have done. And that caused the reactor to go gangbusters, essentially built up a great deal of steam, blew off the top of the reactor, that in turn blew off the top of the reactor building, and that scattered radioactive graphite everywhere, spewed out a zoo of more than 100 different kinds of radioactive particles, launched a cloud of radiation that eventually made its way all the way to Western Europe, and ultimately took quite a few lives. Two of the staff on the night, 28 or so people with acute radiation syndrome the next day, and essentially put the fear of nuclear into generation since.

Speaker 3:
[04:48] Yeah, I remember this happening when I was a young boy actually, and this cloud of radiation floating towards Britain. And remember playing outside of my bike and wondering if the rain was somehow radioactive. I mean, I hadn't done nuclear physics by then, by the way, so my knowledge was only what I heard on the news. But there were genuine concerns across all of Western Europe about radioactivity and the effects of it on people and plants and animals. Just what was it that the concern was about?

Speaker 2:
[05:19] Well, I mean, I think it's not so different from the kind of worries that people have today in that the average person doesn't know a whole lot about how radiation works, right? Imagine the periodic table, like a lot of those elements have radioactivity naturally, and some of them have radioactive versions of themselves. The radioactive variants of these things are called radionuclides, which are trying to become something a little more stable. So they're constantly radiating, if you like. And by radiation, I mean other fast moving particles essentially come out of these elements. And when those fast moving particles interact, for example, with your DNA, they can knock things out of whack. And in a more concrete case, that is the sort of thing that can cause, or at least start, cancer. That radiation happens over different speeds, right? So iodine, for example, has a half-life of eight days or so. That means that after eight days, half of the radioactive stuff will have gone away. Those numbers vary, like up to tens of years, tens of thousands of years, tens of millions of years in some cases. People don't know the ins and the outs of this. The thing about radiation is that it's invisible, and its effects aren't always immediate, aren't even often immediate, right? It raises your risk for a great many things that might not happen for decades. So people worried about the risk that was there, but perhaps they worried most of all of not knowing how much risk was there.

Speaker 3:
[06:37] So how dangerous did it turn out to be? I mean, how many people died eventually?

Speaker 2:
[06:41] That turns out to be an impossible thing to figure out. For partly bookkeeping reasons, this is the very late Soviet era and the death statistics are kind of no good. People moved away, of course, and that changed their kind of life situation. They would have been harder to track in the stats. And more to the point, there was no big bump in the data regionally, nationally, in the Union. It seems that whatever risk it presented, it wasn't massively larger than the sort of some total of lifetime risks that you get from other things, not least natural background radiation, or pollution, or chemical exposure, or what have you. So that is to say, if people died of cancer, say, in the years afterward, you couldn't draw a straight line between that and the accident. So you have to do this in a kind of aggregate population modeling way. And the best numbers are roughly that 15,000 excess deaths were caused by the accident.

Speaker 3:
[07:34] So 15,000 excess deaths at the population level, but it's not clear that you can pinpoint any specific death to Chernobyl. That's the overall population result.

Speaker 2:
[07:47] Yeah, I mean, I think it's settled that the excess radiation exposure will have cost lives. You can't pinpoint any one of them. You use data, for example, from what happened after the Second World War, the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. Some data came from that. You're just kind of putting a finger in the wind to say, if exposed to this much over this much time, how many people would die statistically rather than individually.

Speaker 3:
[08:10] So in the immediate aftermath of the disaster in 1986, people in the region around Chernobyl had to be evacuated, of course. There were exclusion zones being drawn up. When you got there four decades later, how much evidence was there of the disaster? What could you see that showed that this cataclysm had taken place?

Speaker 2:
[08:30] I think what would surprise a lot of people is that there's not much to see. Probably, you've seen pictures from Pripyat, which was essentially the company town where all the Chernobyl workers were housed. That was evacuated just after the disaster, and essentially people were told to grab three days' worth of stuff. They never came back, right? So you had this abandoned town. It's still there. You might have seen pictures of the Ferris wheel, for example. It is genuinely a haunting place. It's, you know, sort of stopped in time. But for the rest of it, I mean, it's worth remembering that Chernobyl was made up of four reactors, the one at the sort of the end. The fourth one is the one that blew up. The other three were, in the same year, put back online, right? And the plant actually kept producing power all the way up until 2000, is when the last reactor was turned off.

Speaker 3:
[09:16] Yeah, that really surprises me, that this is a place where you think nobody is and it's too dangerous to be, but actually it's still providing power.

Speaker 2:
[09:23] Well, and it's worth pointing out that there was a gargantuan cleanup effort that started right after the accident. Hundreds of thousands of mostly military personnel were brought in to do the cleanup with sort of ramshackle PPE and not a whole lot of knowledge as to what they were getting into, but the need to clean up the worst of it was clear. And so it was very quickly figured out which were the really dangerous bits and which were the passable bits and which were the bits where you could stick around for a little while but not too long, that kind of thing. And of course, in the exclusion zone in particular, people were gone. So what happens when people go, you get rewilding, you get plants where there used to be no plants and animals, where there used to be no animals and, you know, honestly, driving to the plant through the exclusion zone, must be said through a lot of security checkpoints because it's wartime, you just see untouched wilderness. And these Brasovsky's horses, for example, that were introduced because it was such a sort of safe environment.

Speaker 3:
[10:18] It might surprise people to know that you can just go to the site and visit. Assuming it's not super dangerous now, but what precautions did you have to take when you were there?

Speaker 2:
[10:28] Well, I mean, around in Pripyat, in Chernobyl town itself, confusingly, actually not the closest town to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. No protections at all. And in fact, there's no real danger to speak of. Inside the power plant, for actually moving around in the plant, you're given a number of layers of scratchy white cotton clothing, including a cap. And the idea there is that the biggest danger is just dust. It's just potentially radioactive dust around. It will settle on your clothes. If you dump the clothes at the end of your stay, then the greatest risk is sort of removed from you. And the level of radiation that you are being exposed to is constantly being measured. We had little dosimeters in our pockets. At quite a few stages along the way, we had to step into some fairly antiquated whole body radiation scanners that basically only let you pass if you're radiologically clean. There were little pans full of kind of a sodden rug to get any dust off of your shoes. It's all in the interests of making sure at every stage, you know how much you might have got and what you're going to get comes from dust.

Speaker 3:
[11:31] Okay, so you went to visit because Chernobyl is a lot more than simply an abandoned nuclear site. It's become something of a living laboratory. So just outline for me the kinds of scientific work happening there right now.

Speaker 2:
[11:43] Well, it's work that's happening in Chernobyl, in the nuclear power plant, but certainly in the surrounding region as well. And I really just scratched the surface of it. We heard from Olena earlier about her work with bacteria inside the reactor. A lot of work going on in terms of trying to understand where all those radionuclides have gone in the intervening decades, where they went early in the accident, how people were exposed, how much they were exposed by what means, by water waste, food, agriculture, everything.

Speaker 3:
[12:12] So let's start inside the reactor then. What is its state now, the one that exploded, and what are the scientists working on there?

Speaker 2:
[12:20] So to be fair, what's going on inside the reactor is not very much. It is still radiologically very, very hot indeed. Now, do they still have to take radiation measurements? This is not something that's sort of neatly declining over time. There are spikes. There are still risks essentially, even though this thing was buried under an enormous concrete structure. It was hastily built in 1986 called the sarcophagus, now covered by what's called the new safe confinement above that. It's all contained, but it's not all entirely stable, I suppose. And I wanted to speak to Olena Pareniuk because she's doing something that really is sort of brand new science about what's in there, when you think there really shouldn't be anything in there.

Speaker 3:
[12:59] Yeah. I mean, it's radiologically hot, as you say. Surely nothing's surviving in there.

Speaker 2:
[13:04] Well, I mean, you know about extremophiles. I've listened to this show before. You know about bugs that can live in space and all that. But this is really genuinely extreme, just not only in terms of the radiation, but there's nothing to eat in there. Water levels are extremely low. These are bugs that are hard, really hard. And maybe the most amazing thing about it is not only that there are bacteria, lots of different kinds of bacteria in there, but they are acting together in what's called kind of biocorrosion. And what they're helping to corrode is this unholy mixture of melted uranium fuel and concrete and metal. It's kind of all melted into a blob and sort of just oozed around the site. And it is like one of the nastiest substances in the world. And here are all these bacteria, essentially not eating it, I should say, just helping to break it down. So I asked Olena how she got into the work.

Speaker 5:
[13:53] It is quite obvious that radiation poses a great evolution pressure on bacteria, on fungi, on animals, on plants, whatever. So we understood that after the accident, the environment was sterile because it was very radioactive, it was very hot. And then the radioactivity decreased a little bit, the temperature decreased drastically. So right now it's about 40 degrees centigrade, which is a really good temperature for bacteria to thrive and to live. And huge radiation background. So in the sarcophagus, there are not that much nutrients for bacteria and not that much sources of light, of energy and so on. So bacteria needed to either evolve or perish because of no sources of nutrients and everything. We were thinking that they might evolve to be able to use ionizing radiation energy in their metabolisms. So it was something that we were looking for. So understanding that there is no other source of bacteria except for the environment, we were trying to look for the changes in the microbiome inside of the sarcophagus. And we managed to find that, for example, bacteria that live in sarcophagus, they can use uranium and americium in their metabolism. And I believe that it will be possible to use this knowledge for genetical engineering for altering bacteria that would like to survive in space or on Mars or in any other territories with high radiation pressure.

Speaker 2:
[15:39] Was it a surprise to find that they are making use in some way of these radionuclides?

Speaker 5:
[15:43] Well, no, it was anticipated, of course. I mean, bacteria is like a digestive system of the environment. So nature is using bacteria and fungi to deconstruct everything like organics, stones, I don't know, wood, everything. And it was quite obvious that nature would be able to evolve to create something to decompose this radioactive lava. What was very funny and very interesting is that this evolution occurred within only like 35 years, because my research was like 35 years after the accident. So only 35 years it took for nature to create organisms that can endure really high doses of radiation out of nothing. I mean, there are these type of bacteria that can accumulate in uranium mines, but they were there for millions of years. So we could anticipate this kind of evolution. But here, only within 35 years, it is interesting not only for radiation biologists and radiation ecologists, but it is also interesting as a factor of evolution, like to understand, for example, that if our oceans are contaminated with plastics, it means that nature is able to create the bacteria that would be able to dissolve or decompose plastics. And it means that whatever material human beings are creating, nature will find its path to decompose this material. I think that it is fascinating because we will not be able to destroy, hopefully, this planet.

Speaker 2:
[17:28] You say that sort of nature will find a way to destroy whatever nasty things we throw at it, but you also suggested that there's possibly good knowledge to be had about putting them to use in high-radiation environments.

Speaker 5:
[17:41] Yes, of course, because if we will be able to understand how is nature using this bacteria that can decompose radioactive lava and how is nature creating the protection for those kinds of bacteria, it means that we can use the same patterns and then use it wherever it is necessary for us. And with the modern level of genetic engineering, well, we can start from altering bacteria and then it depends on the biologists and genetical engineers how to use this knowledge on radiation protection wherever it will be needed.

Speaker 2:
[18:19] Sort of, I guess, maybe moving up through the animal kingdom. You've also studied the bacteria and the accumulation in soils and then how that accumulates into plants. We're kind of going up through the whole food web. What's the sort of emerging story from that?

Speaker 5:
[18:37] So if we will be able to find the bacteria that increases bioaccumulation of radionuclides by plants, it means that we can induce the roots of those plants with those bacteria and then plants are accumulating a lot of radionuclides, we are scraping those plants and here we are, we have a really clean soil. That research was a kind of success. We were able to find the bacteria that increases bioaccumulation on 3%, which is not good for industry yet. We just showed that it is possible to find this kind of species of bacteria.

Speaker 2:
[19:15] So the suggestion is that by refining or we're looking for different species of bacteria or selective breeding of bacteria, you might get to a species that grow this crop inoculated with these bacteria and will clean your field.

Speaker 5:
[19:30] Yeah, and also I'm using this kind of approach because Russians are using chemical weapon and it really contaminates our territory. And also the remains of the unexploded substances, they are really toxic. So if it will be possible to breed a kind of bacteria that can just destroy this kind of toxic substances, make them non-toxic, that would be fantastically useful. And we should identify this kind of toxic substance that is of the highest danger and then we will be able to breed this kind of bacteria.

Speaker 3:
[20:14] Jason, that's what's happening inside the reactor. And Olena just mentioned about how the bacteria could help to decontaminate soils and other things elsewhere. But what do we know about the fallout of the radiation beyond the core of the reactor?

Speaker 2:
[20:29] Well, basically we know that it was pretty uneven. If you look at where it was contaminated the most, it matched pretty neatly with wind patterns on the day. That's fairly easy to understand. But I think what's interesting is kind of what happens from there. You have this much or that much deposition of which kinds of radionuclides. Because remember, more than a hundred different kinds of radioactive things came out of the reactor, some of which have a half-life of like eight days, right? So within a few weeks or so, you're down to possibly safe levels. You got stuff in there that might last 200,000 years. So the story in any one place is not just how much radioactivity, but for how long is it going to be there? And then what's it going to do with life that's there?

Speaker 3:
[21:12] Can you be specific about the kinds of radioactive atoms that came out of the core and where they went?

Speaker 2:
[21:18] I mean, I don't have the full list of over 100 to hand. Some of the stuff again decays quite quickly. Grave danger in particular for kids from iodine 131, which has a half life of eight days. Early stage consumption of that really did lead to quite a lot of cases of thyroid cancer, particularly among young people. Thankfully, very treatable, so not so many deaths from that. There's one sort of straight line that you can draw from early exposure. But what people are really worried about now in particular are cesium and strontium, with half lives of tens of years basically, still around in considerable amounts. Those are the ones that are most tracking as they move around the environment.

Speaker 3:
[21:57] When these things land in the environment, they're decaying at different rates. But what kinds of impacts do they have there? I suppose it depends on what they land, right? If it lands in water, it's different to something that's landing on different types of soil.

Speaker 2:
[22:11] Yeah, and you can imagine that people in the region were most scared on that water point, right? That's the most basic thing. What's coming out of the tap is suddenly, potentially, quite dangerous. And I spent quite some time talking about that with Gennady Laptev and Oleg Futsikovich at the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute. And what they found was that actually food was a far bigger contributor than water. Probably something like one or two percent of people's total internal dose over the time since the accident came from water, and most of the rest from food. But really all of that is kind of looking back at what moved around in water and food shortly after the accident. And one thing that really struck me when I was in Chernobyl and Kiev is how much of that kind of work is still going on that is still urgent. Gennady and Oleg have been following the water movement underneath the cooling ponds of Chernobyl. And Gennady told me he was really surprised about what they found.

Speaker 1:
[23:00] When the decision to shut down the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was made in the year 1999, there was no any necessity to use the cooling ponds. But it took another 15 years to make a decision to shut down the pumps. And as a result, the water level in the cooling pond reduced to the natural level conditions. And as a result, we started to observe a rapid, a significant increase of level of radioactivity in some local small lakes. And for us, it's very interesting, like for scientists, because usually the models which describe the behavior of radionuclides in water object, they rely on so-called exponential decline because of the radioactive decay. But in the residual lakes of cooling pond, we observe the totally contrast picture. Now we see 100 times increase of radioactivity.

Speaker 2:
[24:00] So those cooling ponds that circulated water to cool the plant, were kept topped up with river water until 2014, but now they've been allowed to drain and something sort of funny happened, where the water underneath those ponds was actually acting as a natural barrier to stop the movement of more contaminated water much closer to the plant itself. So what happens is that these sort of long sequestered radionuclides are kind of now on the move in a new way. So watching this stuff, keeping track of this stuff, is in its way as urgent as it ever was.

Speaker 3:
[24:34] Okay, so an interesting picture is still emerging about the radioactivity contained in water, but you mentioned that food was a bigger contributor to doses of these radionuclides. Why is that?

Speaker 2:
[24:47] Different foods concentrate things from the soil differently, and one of the worst offenders is mushrooms, wild berries, the very sort of thing that you'll collect in quantity if you are way out in rural places and trying to make dinner from the land.

Speaker 3:
[25:00] So basically when these radioactive nuclei were landing on the soil, they'll end up there and then be taken up by different plants at different rates and concentrated in those plants at different rates. You mentioned the berries and all of that, which were particularly bad. Were there others that were less dangerous?

Speaker 2:
[25:18] Well, this has been a sort of life's work for one of the people I spoke to while I was there. And it varies, right? Wheat and potatoes, for example, bring up from the soil kind of a lot less of the radionuclides than, for example, peas or oats and so on. And there is, if you like, a kind of catalog, a grid of which plants, which foods preferentially bring up which kinds of radionuclides that's come out of this, which is a damned interesting data set to have.

Speaker 3:
[25:45] And what about animal products? And so we've talked about the plants taking up the radioactive nuclei from the soil, but obviously the farm animals in the same area would have been eating those plants, washing in the water.

Speaker 2:
[25:59] Yeah, it's a ride right up the food chain, right? The plants take up lots of the radionuclides in the soil, cows graze around and gather up a lot of those plants, the grasses, that ends up in milk. And so that is actually a pretty particular route for a lot of the early dose that people in the region got after the accident. And this is exactly what I heard about when I spoke with Valeriy Kashparov, who looked at that chain.

Speaker 4:
[26:21] The real influence of the Chernobyl for the population, the most important was the contamination of the milk with iodine. The concentration was very, very high, hundreds, thousands better per liter. It was important during the first two weeks, because the half-life of iodine was only for eight days. After eight days, you will have a decrease in two times, 16 days, four times, 24 days and eight times, and after one month, activity was less in comparison to the activity of the city. It was important information only during the first two weeks. But during these two weeks, the people had not any information about the real contamination of the milk and used this milk. Because the government also had not very good information about it. But it's possible. For example, for big milk farms, the monitoring of contamination is very, very simple. We use an dosimeter in plastic bags in the tank with milk, and from the dose, you can estimate the contamination of milk. If the contamination is higher, we can use this milk, for example, for the butter or for the cheese. After two months, we have clean product, no problems. But for the private farm, for the family, without the information, used this milk from the collective farm and obtained very high dose, and its problem consumption, you're done with the milk.

Speaker 3:
[28:07] Talking about the animals in the area, it's interesting to understand what happened to them. Humans obviously were evacuated from the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, but the wildlife and many other animals actually stayed. How have they coped living in that area that everyone else was terrified of?

Speaker 2:
[28:25] I think the broad decades long picture now is that they've done pretty well, and it is a standard story of rewilding, that when people move out, animals move in. What's interesting in the exclusion zone in particular is that some of the larger beasts of the four-footed kind did really, really well. Populations higher than before the accident, animals that had not been there came back like the lynx. It became sort of swiftly this textbook rewilding case, so much so that an endangered cute little horse called the Przostki's horse was brought there because it was just a safe place to come essentially.

Speaker 3:
[29:03] This despite the clear worries about the radiation in the soil and the water.

Speaker 2:
[29:07] It is surprising and it does turn actually quite a lot of animal populations though into their own kind of experiment that's being done here. What happens when you let them roam free in this environment, which we deem unsafe for humans, right? But not immediately deadly for everything. What happens after years and years and years of exposure? And I think the answer, and it's not without a few caveats, but broadly the answer is not a whole lot happens to the animals. There's not, you know, ponds full of three-eyed fish, right? There's not a tremendous amount of birth defects among all those lynx and deer and wolves and what have you. And this is something that Jim Smith of Portsmouth University has become an absolute expert on after starting as a physicist and kind of moving on to the broader wildlife question.

Speaker 6:
[29:52] What we've seen in the decades after Chernobyl is not just the recovery of the ecosystem from the effects of the accident, but the dramatic improvement in the ecosystem, which may seem counterintuitive. So we've seen fish populations, aquatic insect populations, even in the cooling pond. And we find a very diverse and abundant aquatic ecosystem. When it comes down to looking at more subtle damage on individual animals, it's more difficult. What it takes to really damage an animal population with radiation is that you really need very high doses. The sort of doses we saw in the most contaminated hot spots of the exclusion zone in the weeks after the accident, the sort of chronic doses that we saw after, let's say, a few months on from the accident. We don't expect to see major damage to animal populations, but we do expect to see subtle DNA effects because we know that radiation damages DNA. It's happening in our bodies right now because there's natural radiation affecting us. And so can we see those subtle effects? And I think the answer is probably, but the science has been really hard to prove. And what we've seen is lots of scientists go to the exclusion zone and they find a difference in, say, the expression of a particular gene or in the reproductive rate or something like that. And because it's Chernobyl, everybody assumes that the radiation is the cause of that difference. But really, it's much more complicated than that. Changes in diet, changes in habitat, changes in predators, all those things make it very difficult to distinguish specific radiation damage in the ecosystem, particularly in the lakes. We think we see some subtle effects of radiation on fish reproduction, for example, but we don't see a big effect on populations. And in fact, the populations of fish, aquatic insects, are thriving in the exclusion zone.

Speaker 2:
[31:53] So in thinking about the literature and how it informs how people think about things and all of the work that's been done around the Chernobyl site in the intervening decades, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was surprised by how many people in Chernobyl said that as soon as Fukushima happened, they either wanted to go or were called upon, to sort of be advisors because they are a storehouse of knowledge about what happens after an accident. Do you think that Chernobyl itself, or in combination with what we know from Fukushima and so on, that there is something more of a playbook for how to deal with accidents?

Speaker 6:
[32:24] I think the problem is that we have a sort of generation memory. And I think the reason that the Ukrainian scientists were so sought after when Fukushima happened, was that they'd been there, they'd had that experience. Similarly, before Chernobyl, there were still some scientists from the kind of nuclear weapons testing era who'd knew about radiation effects on ecosystems, transfer of radioactivity. But I think 25 years after, that gets lost. And I think now, even in Ukraine, there is a loss of knowledge because most of the scientists now working tend to be older. You know, I'm 60 now, and my colleagues are a bit older than me. And it's not that the science necessarily isn't there, but the people who know that science and who did that science and how to apply it aren't there anymore.

Speaker 3:
[33:28] Jason, hearing Jim talk about the sharing of knowledge there is interesting. Scientists have been taking what they've learned from Chernobyl to manage other nuclear accidents. For example, the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, where a major earthquake and a subsequent tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of the three Fukushima Daiichi reactors. That was one of the biggest nuclear accidents since Chernobyl. Can you just explain what the people at Fukushima might have learned from the decades of research at Chernobyl? Was it useful, that information?

Speaker 2:
[34:03] I mean, not in a sort of one-for-one sense. You might take from what we've said, that this kind of all adds up to a playbook. Here's what to do if you have a release of radionuclides in your populated area. It's not as simple as that, in that not all accidents are the same. The Fukushima accident, for example, only released a couple of the radionuclides that we've talked about, iodine in particular. And the landscape is very different. The level of trust in the government is a different thing in terms of a policy response. And the truth, of course, is that what your response is depends, in part, on how much money you've got. For example, a very good remediation method is just scrape off the top five centimeters of soil across vast tracts of land. That is as labor-intensive and as expensive as it sounds, but Japan had the money and the will, and so they did it. Something that Chernobyl and the surrounding region could never have done. So what you get from Chernobyl is, I think, a lot of expertise in measurement and a lot of experience in how people perceive these things. There was a lot of discussion, I know, about what would happen to the rice, the Fukushima area is prized for particular varieties of rice. But I wouldn't want to say that all of this just amounts to, don't worry, we've got the handbook now.

Speaker 3:
[35:14] Yeah. But I mean, some knowledge is better than nothing, right?

Speaker 2:
[35:16] Clearly. Absolutely, yes.

Speaker 3:
[35:17] It's not the case that there are many, many of these accidents and every piece of knowledge that you can gather is going to build up to something useful eventually.

Speaker 2:
[35:25] No, quite. And a lot of the Chernobyl researchers that I spoke to couldn't get on planes fast enough to head out there and do more studies rather than just share what they knew.

Speaker 3:
[35:33] So even today, it seems like the science and the monitoring work at Chernobyl is proving important. We've kind of skipped around one of the elephants in the room in this conversation and it'd be worth tackling it head on. How is the ongoing war with Russia affecting the work of the scientists on the site at the moment?

Speaker 2:
[35:51] Well, I mean, in a lot of ways. I think the most straightforward one is that a lot of people are on the front lines that would be in laboratories. I think a lot of money and attention that would be spent on science is not being spent on science because it's being spent on national defense. I think a lot of science that could get done under normal conditions is very hard to do and it's impossible to count on the provision of electricity or heating. So there's the really basic stuff. But another thing is that a lot of scientists are kind of being repurposed. Olena, for example, has stopped her work on Chernobyl bacteria and is now working on demining one of the many hats that she wears. Basically, a lot of talent is being diverted to the war efforts just like a lot of money is.

Speaker 3:
[36:34] But the war itself has had some very direct effects on the site. I mean, it was attacked by Russian drones, it was occupied for some time by Russian soldiers. That sounds like a level of stress on top of all of the other stress that's usually associated with being a scientist on that site, surely?

Speaker 2:
[36:50] No, like if it's not enough sense of danger working in a place like that, the idea that you might have a drone striking you is so much worse. And in truth, a lot of the science that was going on at Chernobyl has been delayed, has been fully stopped, because the Russian occupation wasn't just there to use it as a base, they ransacked the place on the way out. And as you say, a couple of years later, talking about danger stakes, this is really high now, a Russian drone poked a hole in that new safe confinement, the big newish arch that is on top of reactor number four. So it raises a lot of questions about what...

Speaker 3:
[37:23] That doesn't sound good.

Speaker 2:
[37:25] That is not good, but it's not as bad as it could have been, particularly where it hit saved it from being a worse accident. But nevertheless, that new safe confinement is kind of no longer fit for purpose and needs about a half a billion euros worth of repairs.

Speaker 3:
[37:41] So how do the scientists you spoke to think about working at Chernobyl these days? I mean, how do they feel about its future?

Speaker 2:
[37:46] I think even after all of these years, they understand the urgency, the primacy of some of the research that they're doing and have a sense that they are contributing to a big, useful global data set that like so many things you hope not to have to use. But that at the moment is really hard to disentangle from what the war is doing to individuals, to places and to the science. And it's something that Olena Pareniuk was quite poignant about.

Speaker 5:
[38:14] In Ukraine, we got used not to be afraid of almost anything. Like we have a lot of these jokes like in the evening, if I have hot water and electricity, I will go and wash my hair because today I have hair and water and electricity. And in the morning, I might lose my head with my hair. You know, there is no point of washing it. I mean, I don't want to have this experience on surviving in the capital during the war time. Like I would be okay living my normal calm life. Anyway, I have this experience and we have to benefit from it. The same goes with Chernobyl. Like I think all of us would be fine without having the exclusion zone. Like Pripyat River is very beautiful. I would love to take my son, my husband to go and swim in this Pripyat River, but it is contaminated. So, well, we should at least benefit from something that we have. For example, my research in microbiology, the evolution pressure that is delivered by radiation, we can use it as a sample of radiation pressure in space. So we can do space research inside Chernobyl sarcophagus, for example. And I'm pretty sure that this kind of environment can deliver us a lot of new knowledge and a lot of new approaches. And that's why we are creating the new laboratory in Chernobyl and it is co-funded by Ukraine and the European Union. And hopefully by 2030, it will be fully equipped and we will be welcoming researchers in Chernobyl to create future and not only learn the lessons from the past.

Speaker 2:
[39:54] What is that lab for?

Speaker 5:
[39:57] Trainings, nuclear radiation safety, all kinds of nuclear and radiation research. So we have the spent nuclear fuel sites and we have to learn a lot about the new safe confinement. So it's basically, you know, like a very specific lab for studying nuclear science and radiation science. And also what is really good is that people who will be working there, they have a ton of experience. For example, I have a very good colleague and I'm usually bringing him a sample of soil and he's like, its radioactivity is like 15 Bq per kilo. And I'm like, you don't know the radioactivity, you haven't measured it yet. He's like, well, I can see by its appearance. And he's usually right because he measured a huge amount of this soil sample, so he knows, you know, just the intuition. So basically, this type of experts who are measuring a lot of radioactive samples and who were inventing a lot of approaches to measuring huge samples, tiny samples, whatever samples you want. So hopefully, it would be interesting for international community because, I mean, science should be international. Radiation is international because it doesn't know anything about border.

Speaker 2:
[41:15] Universal even.

Speaker 5:
[41:16] Yeah. So I hope that after the end of the war, Ukraine will become a part of European research community, and we would be more than happy to host all international researchers in Chernobyl.

Speaker 2:
[41:29] Chernobyl still has lessons to give. Yes.

Speaker 3:
[41:43] So Jason, just to finish up, how did you feel when you left the site? What do you think is the thing you want people to know about this very special place?

Speaker 2:
[41:50] Well, first of all, as we said at the beginning, it's not a wasteland. It's a place where people work. It's a place where animals frolic, I guess you'd say. And it doesn't really bear the scars, apart from reactor number four, of what happened in 1986. It's become quite a mysterious thing, and not many people get to see the site and so on. It's not perhaps what you think. And also, quite a lot of people told me that perhaps the greatest damage that was done, loss of life notwithstanding, was radiophobia. The idea that the fear associated with Chernobyl far outweighs its actual effects, right? It's just so much nastier in the imagination. And that in turn has had lots of onward implications, not least for the nuclear energy industry itself. You saw just after the Fukushima accident that Germany, for example, one of the world's big nuclear energy powers, turn all of its reactors off. And one of the things that I kept hearing was about public awareness and understanding of radiation risk and demystifying radiation risk so that it didn't have this sort of bogeyman feel to it, this notion of some sort of incalculable, dark, mysterious danger. And when I was talking to Olena, she made clear that she really hopes some of the work that she's doing will dispel that, will be the kind of public awareness campaign that gets rid of the radiophobia.

Speaker 5:
[43:12] When I was a kid, I was really interested in radiation for some reason. And I always wanted to go there, because it felt to me that it is like a fantastic fairy forest and something very interesting is going on there.

Speaker 2:
[43:26] Why do you suppose you didn't have fear? Why didn't you have radiophobia?

Speaker 5:
[43:31] Well, because knowledge usually protects you from anything that you might be afraid of.

Speaker 3:
[43:45] Jason, that's been fascinating. Thank you very much for your time today.

Speaker 2:
[43:48] Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 3:
[43:50] And thanks to everyone who Jason spoke to in Ukraine for this episode. You can hear even more from his trip on an upcoming episode of The Intelligence, which will come out on Friday the 24th of April. I'm really looking forward to hearing it. Don't forget that if you listen to us on The Economist app, you can also send any episode to your friends by tapping the share button and selecting give as a gift. That's all from Babbage this week. Our editor is Jason Hoskin. He produced this episode with Hanna Fisher. Thanks also to Sarah Larniuk for Field Production. Mixing and Sound Design was by Nico Rofas, and the executive producer is Hanna Mourinho. I'm Alok Jha, and in London, this is The Economist.