Chernobyl liquidators

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Chernobyl liquidators were the civil and military personnel who were called upon to deal with the consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union on the site of the event. The liquidators are widely credited with limiting both the immediate and long-term damage from the disaster.

Surviving liquidators are qualified for significant social benefits due to their veteran status. Many liquidators were praised as heroes by the Soviet government and the press, while some struggled for years to have their participation officially recognized.

Name

The

• Operational personnel of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
• Firefighters who immediately responded to the reactor accident
• Civil defense troops of the Soviet Armed Forces who removed contaminated materials and the deactivation on the reactor and all affected territories
• Internal Troops and police who provided security, access control and population evacuation
• Military and civil medical and sanitation personnel, including:
  • Groups of female janitors tasked with the cleanup of food left inside abandoned homes to prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases
  • Special hunting squads assigned to exterminate domestic animals left in evacuated settlements
• Soviet Air Force and civil aviation units who fulfilled critical helicopter-assisted operations on the reactor building, air transportation and aerial radioactive contamination monitoring,^[1] including Mykola Melnyk, a civilian helicopter pilot who placed radiation sensors on the reactor^[2]
• Various civilian scientists, engineers, and workers involved in all stages of disaster management:
  • Transportation workers
  • A team of coal miners who built a large protective foundation to prevent radioactive material from entering the aquifer below the reactor
  • Construction professionals
• Media professionals who risked their lives to document the disaster on the ground, including photographers Igor Kostin and Volodymyr Shevchenko, who are credited with taking the most immediate and graphic pictures of the destroyed reactor, and liquidators conducting hazardous manual tasks

A small number of foreigners (mostly from the Western countries) volunteered to participate in international medicine- and science-related on-the-ground projects related to the relief operation. Technically, they may also qualify for liquidator status depending on their exact location and tasks at the time of participation.

Health effects

According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, the main organization of liquidators, "25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled", which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600,000 liquidators) and 165,000 disabled.[5] Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously: the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000:

A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded. As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.^[6]

Ivanov et al. (2001)

Rahu et al. (2006)

While there is rough agreement that a total of either 31 or 54 people died from blast trauma or acute radiation syndrome (ARS) as a direct result of the disaster,^[9][10][4] there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of deaths due to the disaster's long-term health effects, with estimates ranging from 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia), to no fewer than 93,000 (per the conflicting conclusions of various scientific, health, environmental, and survivors' organizations).^{[11][12][13][14][15]}

Legacy

The 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe in 2006 was marked by a series of events and developments.

The liquidators held a rally in Kyiv to complain about deteriorated compensation and medical support.^[16] Similar rallies were held in many other cities of the former Soviet Union.^[17]

More than 4,500 Estonian residents were sent to help in the liquidation.

A number of military liquidators residing in Khabarovsk (Russia) were denied a certain compensation for loss of health on grounds that they were not salaried workers, but rather under military order. They had to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.^[22] On 29 December 2004 and 21 March 2006 the Russian government adopted ECHR Rulings, according to which accommodation for Chernobyl victims and servicemen, including former servicemen, shall be granted either financial aid or state housing. However an interim ECHR Resolution in 2009 CM/ResDH(2009)43 indicated that the Russian government was failing to implement the policies^[23]

Public record

The National Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine keeps a "Remembrance Book" (Ukrainian: Книга пам'яті, Knyha Pamyati)  – an open to the public online database of liquidators featuring personal pages with photo and brief structured information on their input.^[24] Data fields include "Radiation damage suffered", "Field of liquidation activity" and "Subsequent fate". The project started in 1997, containing over 5,000 entries as of February, 2013.^[25] The database is currently available in the Ukrainian language only.

See also

• Chernobyl: Abyss, a 2021 Russian film about a fictionalized liquidator
• Fukushima 50, a similar group of workers from the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan
• Hibakusha, Japanese terms for a person who has been irradiated by a nuclear bomb
• Nuclear labor issues
• List of Chernobyl-related articles

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chernobyl liquidators.

• Pictures: "Liquidators" Endured Chernobyl 25 Years Ago - annotated set of Liquidators photos by
  National Geographic
• A Worker Recalls the Chernobyl Disaster 2006 article by The Washington Post