(applause)
>> Thank you, Erica.
Let's start out by saying,
I'm a traveler.
I'm neither academic
nor historian.
I've been in this room
before in those seats.
After I graduated
from Western,
on a whim, I decided I might
wanna become a diplomat
so I took the
foreign service exam,
and it happened
to be in this room.
(audience chuckling)
The fact that I've been in the
lumber business for 31 years
tells you how I
did on the exam.
(audience laughing)
So why Chernobyl?
Why would I go
to Chernobyl?
Last December, I was
in Europe on business,
it was at the end of the
week and as I plan my trip,
I thought, "Well, it's--
I'll wake up Friday morning
"and I can either
get on a plane
"and come back to Grand
Rapids for the weekend,"
or if you draw
a radius around Rome
which is where I ended up and
you look at all the cities
that are within a two-hour
plane ride of Rome,
there are some pretty
great places to go.
So, I had it
narrowed down--
I was gonna go either to Paris
and hangout in Montmartre
and drink some nice red wine
and have some bouillabaisse,
or I was maybe gonna go to
Amsterdam, see the canals
and all the wonderful museums,
or I could visit the site
of the greatest technological
disaster of the 20th century.
That was an easy
choice for me.
So, I headed up to
Kiev that weekend,
and I don't know why but it's
always been a dream of mine
to visit the Chernobyl because
I've always been very curious
about what
that's all about.
So, if you remember
Chernobyl like I do,
it was terrible
disaster.
The human toll was
unbelievably bad
but we didn't know then
what was recently revealed
about the seriousness of
what really did happen,
and I'm gonna reveal that
to you in a little bit.
So, where is
Chernobyl?
Chernobyl is a
small enough town
that it really doesn't
even hardly make the map.
That is a map of Ukraine and
then Belarus to the north,
and if you see if I had a laser
pointer here-- which I don't--
directly above Kiev, you
can barely read that--
there's a little lake
there and a river.
It is a little town of Pripyat,
and just south of Pripyat
by a little bit less than
2 miles is the town of Kiev,
is the town
of Chernobyl,
and that's where
the plant is.
Here's a little
bit bigger map.
As you recall, Ukraine and
Belarus were both satellites
of the Soviet Union
in '70s and '80s.
The plant was built
in the '70's
in order to supply
electricity to Ukraine.
It supplied 10% of
the electricity
which is pretty
impressive,
considering there
were 40 million people
in Ukraine
during that time.
The plant used four
RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors.
Now, why is
that important?
Reason that that
is important
is because they are
universally recognized
as being
inherently flawed.
And unfortunately, even as
they were installing them,
they knew that they
were inherently flawed.
The warnings had
gone out before.
In addition, the plant lacked
basic safety regulations,
and it was just-- you could--
the handwriting was on the wall,
it was going to be
a dangerous place.
On April 26, 1986, they decided
to test a self-fueling system
in order to
save energy.
At 1:23 in the morning, they
disabled the security systems,
including the
automatic shut down.
After they did that,
the experiment begun
and during that time, there
was a number of operations
in which they violated all their
standard operating procedures.
There was a
chain reaction
which caused the top of
the reactor to the blow up.
1,200-ton reactor
blasted away.
It released graphite and
uranium into the sky.
Almost immediately, there
was a second explosion--
3,000 feet up in the air
went all the nuclear material.
In the next few hours,
in very basic terms,
just about everything they
did to mitigate the disaster
only increased
its severity.
The first responding
firemen poured water on it
which did absolutely
nothing at all.
These men wore no
protective equipment at all
and were immediately
exposed to lethal radiation.
A senior operator
was to die
in the ruins of
the first explosion.
He would be
the first death.
That night, later on,
there was another death,
and over the next
couple of months,
28 more people
were going to die.
The immediate fallout from the
explosion, in radiation terms,
was about 100 times that of
Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.
At 5 o'clock that morning,
the Kremlin was notified.
Incidentally, this
explosion took place
about 1:30
in the morning.
At 5 AM, they
informed the Kremlin.
They said, "There's been
an accident, a fire,
"but no explosion,
everything is safe.
"We have everything
under control."
The Kremlin was kept in the
dark of the very basic nature
of this explosion, not only
for that day and the next day
but for several
weeks on.
The consequences
of such an omission
would prove to
be quite dramatic.
For residents of
the town of Pripyat
which was about
2 kilometers away,
it was a morning just
like another morning.
There would be no information
about the accident.
There were rumors
that there was a fire
since they could see
the plant from Pripyat,
and there was smoke
coming out of the reactor.
Interestingly, the
eyewitnesses from Pripyat
tell the story that the
smoke was not black,
the smoke was not
white or gray...
the smoke was blue.
And they also got no
information from the soldiers
that were running around the
streets with gas masks on.
What they did not want
to do is instill panic
on the population.
Pripyat was a model,
planned city.
It was the place to
live in Soviet Russia--
or actually, this
is in Ukraine.
It was the place to
live in the Soviet Union
because they heavily recruited
all the smartest kids
out of college,
all the scientists,
all the hardest
workers to work
on these
nuclear power plants.
There were five schools
and 15 kindergartens
because there were a
lot of children there.
They had a lot
of foreign goods.
The apartments were
more spacious.
The food was better.
And overall, there was
a perception of prestige
among the wider society in
the Soviet Union for Pripyat.
What I like about looking at
photos of the Soviet Union
and what they did was, this
is a playground in Pripyat
and they are equally adept--
the Soviets are--
at not just appropriating
American and Western trademarks
but making even playground
equipment look Stalin-esque
as you can see by
that elephant there.
The readings of the
radioactivity that afternoon
in Pripyat would be 15
times higher than usual.
By that night,
it would be 600 times.
During the first day,
inhabitants were to absorb
over 50 times what
was considered safe.
The next day, 1,000 buses
arrived in Pripyat,
soldiers empty out of the
buses, go door to door,
and they say,
"You have two hours.
"Gather your
important documents.
"Don't bring clothes,
you can't bring clothes,
"you can't bring
furniture."
They were told that this
would be a very short visit.
Maybe we'll go camping in
the woods for the weekend,
we'll be back
very shortly.
A few days turned
into a few weeks,
which turned into
a few months,
which turned into, well, the
more liberal estimates are,
they can return to
Pripyat in 3,000 years.
The more conservative
estimates are 20,000 years.
Now, there's
sort of a--
I've read, in doing my
research for this,
there are two schools
of thought on this.
Some people think that they
are allowed to come back
in a few months and
get a few things.
Other reports say
that they are not.
I'm not sure
who to believe.
Special teams came
in and emptied
the contents of
the apartments,
burned everything that was
in them and buried the ash.
For the next several months, the
only people living in Pripyat
would be soldiers and
scientists sent there
to work on
the problem,
a problem which they
underestimated greatly
from the very
beginning.
Within a couple of days,
the radioactive cloud
was to spread up north into
Belarus through the Baltics,
and into
Scandinavia.
Outside, a Swedish
nuclear power plant,
they had some unusually high
readings of radioactivity,
and so, they decided
to send a plane up
and check the atmosphere and
what they found was shocking.
They knew a major accident
must have occurred somewhere
but they couldn't
figure out where.
So, they called Hans Blix
down in the IAEA.
You may remember
Hans Blix
from the "weapons of
mass destruction" days.
And he was in-charge of
the IAEA then, and he said,
"No, I have no idea where
this is coming from."
Finally, some
American spy planes
were able to detect the wreckage
of the number four reactor,
and then, the news spread
fairly quickly after that.
Incidentally,
Mikhail Gorbachev found out
from the Swedes what
the problem was.
He did not find out
from his own people.
As of May 1st, there was
a tiny blurb in "Pravda,"
and it said, "There was
an accident at the plant,
"everything's fine,
everything is safe,"
and as you recall in Communist
countries, May 1 is Mayday,
which is a really
important date
and they always
have a big parade.
Once again, because they
didn't want a sew panic,
they didn't tell people not
to go out and celebrate Mayday,
so all over Western Russia
and Ukraine,
people went out for
their Mayday parades.
And in Kiev, today it's still
known that particular Mayday
as the
"Parade of Death."
And the Ukrainian archives
have been scrubbed
of all evidence of that
day, that Mayday parade,
all the photographs
and all the films
are missing from
the archives.
So, on the third day,
helicopters and pilots
from Moscow and Afghan
front were rushed in.
They dumped tons and
tons of sandbags
and boric acid to try
to quell the flames.
600 pilots would fly
hundreds of sorties,
and they all received at least
nine times a lethal dose.
They sent in another
battalion of firefighters,
now they dumped lead
into the breach
in an attempt to
lower the temperature.
What happened then
was the lead combusted,
it went up into
the atmosphere
and just adding to
the contamination.
So they scrambled
helicopters up
to spread a substance
which congealed
and brought all of the
lead down onto the ground,
and now, they had to
get the bulldozers out
and bury all
of that.
Yes, sir?
>> You said they poured a
substance that congealed.
What was it-- what
was its name?
>> The substance was
"I have no idea."
No, Jamie, I have no idea
what the substance was.
(chuckling)
Yeah, it's a good
question, though.
So after one week
having gone by,
the towns of Chernobyl
and Pripyat
have been completely
evacuated.
45,000 people from Pripyat
and all villages
within 20 kilometers
had been evacuated.
130,000 people, most of whom
were already contaminated.
So at this time, Europe was
at the mercy of the winds.
As you can see here,
the radiation spread
into Western Europe,
into France,
into the
United Kingdom,
and it was now contaminating
millions of acres of crops.
So the news
was spreading.
Now, these are just a few
days after the disaster
and the death claims are
terribly exaggerated in these.
Long-term, there would
be gross underestimations
of the amount of people
that did actually die.
Not revealed until
recently was...
there was a great fear
that there's a 50% chance
of a second explosion
occurring several days
after the first one.
There were 200 tons
of nuclear fuel
which was still burning and
the temperature was rising.
The scientists were
absolutely terrified
that the cement slab below
the reactor would collapse,
which would set off
the second explosion.
Had it happened, the force
would have been 10 times
that of the
Hiroshima bomb.
The city of Minsk
which is 150 miles
north and east of Chernobyl
would've been razed,
Kiev would have not
done much better,
and half of Europe would
have been made uninhabitable.
We didn't know that
at the time.
They sent 1,000
train cars into Minsk
to start an immediate evacuation
of 2 million people.
So, what they
could determine
was the magma was
starting to seep down,
there was a crack
already in this slab.
Below that was
an aquifer,
just underneath
where that slide is.
The aquifer supplied
water to most of Ukraine
and went directly
to the Black Sea.
So, it's time
to get serious.
They brought in 10,000
miners to dig underneath--
they wanted to dig a tunnel,
tunnel in through,
and get to right
underneath the reactor.
It's 150 meters
to get there.
It's 120 degrees in that
tunnel as they're going,
there's very
little oxygen,
and no, they were not wearing
protective equipment.
It took them one month
to go 150 meters.
It's estimated today that
a quarter of the guys
that were in there died before
they reached the age of 40.
On the top of the roof--
sorry about the quality
of these photos but you
can't find anything better.
On the top of the roof, it's
full of shards of graphite.
One shard of graphite can kill
a man in just a few minutes.
So, they had
to clear these.
What they did was
they sent in robots.
They had robots that
they were developing
for the space program,
to land on the moon,
you know, take care of Mars,
etcetera.
Within two days, the circuitry
in the robots went kablooey.
They couldn't operate in a
highly radioactive atmosphere.
So, they sent in what they
called-- and I'm not kidding--
"biorobots."
Those are biorobots.
They hand-sewed
their lead suits.
They made them sort
of from scratch
and they kinda made
their own covers
for the boots,
etcetera.
And you can see, those
are hand-made shovels.
And their job was-- and they're
given 45 seconds to do this--
they would run out,
they would shovel,
they would get a
shovel-load of graphite
run to the side of the roof...
(chuckling)
and pitch it over the side
of the roof in 45 seconds.
Now, naturally,
the amount of radiation
they were subjected to was
very much underestimated
by the people sending
them out to do that.
And incidentally, they had to
sign nondisclosure agreements
before they went out
and did that job.
(chuckling)
And I've read interviews
with the liquidators,
the guys that did
this and they said,
"You know, we were
in the reserves,
"it is our duty,
we had to do it."
So, the entire reactor now--
it's gotta be isolated somehow.
They gotta build
a sarcophagus.
They have to build
something to cover it up.
They've gotta build something
that's gotta be 550 feet long
and 200 feet high.
It's gotta be an utterly
original design,
designed from scratch.
It's gotta be made
in pieces and parts
from all over
the Soviet Union,
some of the parts coming
from thousands of miles away.
They've gotta truck it
all in and fit it together
in sort of a
jigsaw puzzle way.
So, how do you install
a massive structure
that no one's
ever made before?
When humans can only
safely work on it
for a few minutes
at a time?
You have to do it
very painstakingly
and it took them
seven months to do it.
There's a picture of it
once it was done, there.
And the before
and after.
So now, we've gotten
into the part
where it's 18 days
past the disaster,
and Mikhail Gorbachev finally
addresses the Soviet people,
the first time they had talked
about it in their country.
So, what does the immediate
disaster look like
in the surrounding area?
This is not a postcard
from Vermont in October.
This is called "The Red Forest,"
an immediate area around,
all the deciduous trees
went bright, bright red
from the radiation.
I'm not gonna show you
a lot of these
but you've probably heard
about what's happened,
what happened
to the wildlife,
the offspring of the
wildlife as you go through.
You can find many pictures
of what happened
to the humans there,
you can find pictures
of the birth defects,
what happened to the
next generation.
Decorum prevents me from
presenting those pictures
to you today,
though.
If you're gonna look
'em up, you can,
but I really wouldn't
recommend it.
In the first year, 100,000
reservists are called in.
They passed through Chernobyl
in one way or another.
They called them
"liquidators."
Their job basically was a
gigantic clean-up project.
Another 400,000
civilians are brought in,
they're hired to work
on the disaster,
24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
Liquidators are there
to knock down houses,
knock down buildings, take
out the contents, burn, bury.
There's over a million cubic
meters of earth was picked up,
put into larger holes,
and covered with cement.
The radiation victims
themselves,
the ones at least
that where symptomatic,
they were all sent to Moscow
Hospital Number 6.
This is a picture
from there,
where they had the-- I
don't know how much good
that plastic around
that guy is doing
but it specializes
in radiation exposure.
I could also describe
what happens
after they're exposed
to the doses they were,
but...
(sighing)
you probably wanna
look that up yourself.
So, what does it
look like today?
This is the entrance
to the exclusion zone.
It's a 30-kilometer circle--
not really a circle,
but sort of a
rectangle.
Around the plant itself
is a highly secured area.
I went with five
other people.
You have to do a whole
special visa requirement
before you go,
send them your passport,
get a bunch of
things stamped,
and when you show up,
everything's gotta be right.
It's a pretty
secure area.
This is a typical road leading
through one of the towns,
a typical house in
one of the towns,
it is really-- nature
really has taken over.
This is the inside
of a typical house,
one that hasn't been
completely emptied.
You'll see that it's
been kinda torn up.
One of the big problems
that they had was looters.
When the reservists
went in,
one of the reasons they
call it "War of Chernobyl"
was that they're were
at war with the reactor
but they're also
at war with looters.
People who'd thought
that they could go in
and just take TVs and stereos
and whatever they wanted.
I don't know if they knew
that they get a free case
of thyroid cancer
when they do that
but that was most
likely the case.
And there are stories
from the liquidators
of transactions
being made...
you know, look the other way
as the looters go in
if they bring in a case of
vodka for the reservists.
This was a grocery store in
one of the towns we're in.
The liquidators themselves
didn't really care much
about littering.
You know, the whole
place is a disaster,
so we found a lot of
canisters and gas masks.
This was interesting because
a lady lives there today.
This is well within
the exclusion zone,
and a woman in her
early 80s went back.
There are what they
call "self-settlers."
People that wanted
to go back.
They allowed some
people to go back.
She lives in this
little house.
You can see there's a
fairly new fence there.
They take her into Kiev
maybe once a month
for her to get
provisions.
We were unlucky
that day.
Oxana, our tour guide
said, once in a while,
she'll come out and greet
tourists and say "hello,"
but she said sometimes, she
doesn't like her picture taken
because even though
she's in her early 80s,
she's still a woman
and she's still vain,
and if she doesn't look
just right that day,
she doesn't want
her picture taken.
This is Oxana here.
She's explaining as we come
into the town of Chernobyl,
which is that sign
says "Chernobyl,"
what we're about to see.
If you'll notice the pipe--
it's above ground.
After the disaster, any HVAC,
any steam, electrical conduit,
water, etcetera, was
all built above ground
because they could not
put a spade in the earth
because of all the
contaminated soil.
So, everywhere
you'll see anything
meant to service the town,
it's above ground.
There are
monuments there.
There are sculptures there,
commemorating what happened.
This is an
interesting story.
This is a museum dedicated to
what happened to Chernobyl.
It was built several months
after the disaster.
You can see the storks
on the outside
which symbolize
rebirth and birth,
and right after
it was finished,
top officials from both
Ukraine and Russia went in
and inspected it and came out,
they locked the doors.
They never opened
it up again.
It's been sitting there
for 30 years untouched.
Oxana couldn't explain
why but, apparently,
there were things inside they
just didn't want people to see.
This concrete slab here is
full of these little pucks.
Inside each one is
a little light.
At night,
it lights up.
They represent the villages
that were destroyed.
As you take this
walk down here,
every one of these is
a village or a city
that's when the
exclusion zone.
They have the name
on one side,
and as you walk by
on the other side,
they're crossed out...
which, to me, it looks
like "do not enter" sign.
So that European "no"
which is-- I'm not sure--
it's a little insensitive
way to think about ex-towns.
I don't know-- it's a
strange memorial, though.
I thought while walking
through there,
"Okay, they're just
plain X'ed out."
It was kind of
an odd thing.
There was plenty of
great propaganda there.
A lot of the
neo-socialist art.
This is the kind of art that
you saw in the Soviet Union,
that you saw in China
in the '60s and '70s,
and that you see
in North Korea today.
It's still the same style--
it's all over the place.
Wonderful stuff,
actually.
Here's a big
surprise for me.
I didn't know we're
going to see this.
(coughing)
This is an entrance,
a big gate,
and why this guy
decided to have dolls
at the bottom of their
gate, I don't know why,
but this is the entrance
to the Duga-3 radar array.
Most of the West didn't
know that this existed
for many years.
This is an array that is
about a half-a-mile long
and 450 feet high.
It's Moscow's eye
on the West.
It is meant to detect
incoming U.S. missiles.
There's another one--
was another one
just like it in Southern Ukraine
that kept its eye on China.
There was another
one in Siberia.
It's almost a
half-a-mile long.
It was so big-- it was
so tall and so big,
it was kind
of a misty day,
that we could not
see the top of it.
There was a-- it was nicknamed
"The Russian Woodpecker"
because it was
a 10 megawatt--
it had 10 megawatts of power and
it would interrupt short waves
and other radio traffic
for thousands of miles.
(mimicking rapid
electrical ticking)
It did that 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
And so, it was known as
"The Russian Woodpecker."
And no one could
figure out what it was
or where it was
coming from.
Finally, after
several years,
they used the triangulation
that they use
and they finally found
out where it was.
And even as they
looked at it,
through satellite photos
and photos from the air,
they really couldn't
figure out what it did
because it was
unprecedented.
I found it endlessly
fascinating because, to me,
it was like a
giant sculpture.
I just couldn't stop
taking pictures of it.
It was an incredible,
incredible sight.
As you can see,
it was so tall,
it just disappeared
into the air.
There was speculation
that the Soviets
were using it
for mind control,
they were using it for
weather control, etcetera.
The Soviets listed it on maps
as a children summer camp.
(audience chuckling)
Sorta throw people
off the scent.
That's about as good as I
could get it, at showing scale,
but, you know,
like most things,
you just can't tell
until you get there.
There it is
from the air.
That gives you a little bit
better idea of the scale.
That's a modern picture,
obviously.
That's not my picture.
Next door is the control
center for the array.
That was pretty interesting,
also, to walk around outside.
This is where the
looters also struck.
I'm sure they've found
plenty of nice copper
and other metals to
take away and sell,
so that they can
have children
with birth defects
maybe someday.
And going inside,
which was not allowed,
but which was really fun
and interesting.
I went all the
way to the back
and I discovered
this great mural,
sort of the Soviet
space aspiration
for greatness
that they had.
More socialist
realist art.
This one in particular
was especially spooky,
sort of a metaphor for the
whole place, I suppose.
You may have heard of Chernobyl
and the surrounding area
being one of the world's
biggest wildlife refuges
and it is-- wildlife
actually is thriving there.
These are called
"Przewalski's horses."
I'm not sure I'm
pronouncing it right.
Nine pair were introduced
shortly after the disaster
to try to grow
the wildlife there,
and now, there's
over 100 there.
And fox, deer, all sorts of
animals are thriving there.
It's kinda like the
demilitarized zone
between North and
South Korea.
There's two kilometers on
both sides of the border,
no men,
no anything,
from one side of the
country to the other side,
and that's become also
a great wildlife refuge.
A lot of places
that we went,
Oxana would pull out her
dosimeter and warned us
that we could only stay
there for a few minutes.
This is outside a school,
and there she is,
she's telling us, "We must move
now, we must keep walking."
Outside the school-- this was a
fairly spooky place to visit.
You may have seen photographs
like this in other places
but it was really sad
because it's sorta--
you know, when you think
about kids and the tragedy,
and everything that
it went through.
It was just a very odd
feeling being in there.
Anyone know
Russian?
"We are proud to call
ourselves pioneers"
is what that says.
Very typical.
As we went past
the school,
we soon got to
where the plant is.
That's not an active
construction site.
That was a construction
site in 1986,
and after the disaster,
they just shut it down
and they left everything
exactly as it was.
There's so much metal there
that has been so contaminated,
they're not even going in
there to take it apart.
They're not even gonna
bother to liquidate the area.
And just beyond that is the
administration buildings
for the
Chernobyl plant.
Little bit beyond
that, as we go,
you can see the
over-ground pipes there,
is reactors number
1 and 2.
And now, we get to
the fourth reactor,
the one that blew up,
with the sarcophagus.
And you see on the right,
the new sarcophagus.
And there it is.
I wanted to get this photo
as the bus coming out
just to give you a scale
of how big that thing is.
This new sarcophagus
cost $2 billion.
They're not quite
finished with it yet.
It was due to be
in this year
because this is 30 years
since the disaster,
the sarcophagus has a
30-year serviceable life,
so it's expiring this
year-- it is ready?
No.
Ukraine kept running
out of money.
It cost $2 billion, so they
had to scrape their knees
with other countries
and ask for donations
in order to
finish this.
They think they're going
to able to slide that over
some time in 2017.
And there she is whipping out
the dosimeter again, saying,
"We gotta go."
I couldn't believe, actually,
how close they let us get
to the number 4
reactor that blew up
especially with the radiation
that's near there.
Now, it's really--
it's kinda hard to see
but if you see above this
fence, you keep going up,
you see the little
white dots up there
along that vertical area--
those are hard hats.
Those are the construction guys
that are on the site today,
getting it ready to slide
the new sarcophagus over.
They make-- the Ukrainians
make 11 euro per hour--
this is all from Oxana.
They make
11 euro per hour.
The guys from outside Ukraine
make way more than that.
Now, you're thinking
11 euro per hour--
by the way, euro now
is about $1.12.
11 euro-- that's
terrible wage.
In Ukraine, 11 euro an hour
is a really good wage.
Oxana is a teacher.
Her wage-- the average teacher
is 80 to 100 euro per month.
The average doctor
is slightly higher,
maybe 150 euro
per month.
So, 11 euro
an hour?
That's a good wage.
So, what's in there?
This is a rendering
what's in there today--
the wreckage
that remains.
There is still 20 tons
of nuclear fuel in there,
and no one really knows what
kind of shape it's in, either.
There's also
100 kilograms of plutonium.
One microgram of
plutonium can kill a man,
so there's enough
plutonium in there
to kill
100 million people.
Now, the math is easy
and it's a little glib
but it's still
a scary statistic.
You know what,
it's also the grave--
the permanent grave of
one Valery Khodemchuk
who was the nighttime
operator at the plant,
the first guy
to die there.
He is still in
there somewhere.
That's a little memorial right
outside the reactor number 4.
So, that was Pripyat
before the disaster.
Let's go back into Pripyat and
see what it looks like today.
That's the entrance.
That is the-- that was
the sort of the town hall
administration building,
the parking lot
in front of it.
This was interesting--
I asked Oxana,
since there's English letters
there that say "atom"
but there's Cyrillic
all around it,
and I asked her what
that said, and she said,
"Let the atom do the
fighting, not the soldier,"
which was...
which makes sense, but
then it's really scary
when you think about
what happened there.
(clearing throat)
This was the cultural
center of the town.
We went inside there.
By the way, I loved
our tour guide
because, in 2013,
tourists were banned
from going into any
buildings in Pripyat
because one of the
schools had collapsed,
and they were afraid that
other buildings would collapse,
but we only had
six people on our tour
and she said, "Ahh, if
you keep it to yourself."
So "Oxana" is a
codename, by the way.
I told her I wouldn't
tell anybody.
She said, "You keep
it to yourself,
"we can go into
some buildings."
So, we were really
happy about that.
So, we're able to go
in this building.
There was interesting trees
growing up inside it.
That was the
movie theater,
gymnasium,
more gymnasium.
This was right
outside of there.
It's very strange art--
I don't know if he
was playing badminton
or doing bubbles--
I don't know.
You know, these are some
of the iconic images
that are taken by me but there
a zillion of these taken.
You'll see 'em on the web
and other places
of the playground
in Pripyat.
What's interesting is the
playground never opened.
They built it and they were
gonna open it on Mayday.
Explosion happened on April 26,
so it never opened.
The kids never got
a chance to enjoy it.
That was a really
spooky place, too.
Oxana tested us and she said,
"What do you think this was?"
And we're looking
at it, we can't--
I have no idea
what that was.
Well, that was
a soccer pitch.
So, that shows you how
much nature has taken over
the entire town
of Pripyat.
And in front of the other
side of the soccer pitch
were the bleachers.
I thought that was
a little poignant
to show the little kids
crossing the street
where that was never
gonna happen again.
Inside another
school in Pripyat.
Different things
on the wall.
Everything is
still there.
Nice, it's-- actually,
it's a cool image,
nice stencil
of Lenin.
The looters were
there, obviously.
That's Kalinin, another
Marxist revolutionary
in the
Bolshevik days.
Cafeteria.
And obviously, the
liquidators where there.
I don't know why but
there was one room
that was just full of
gas masks in this school--
I'm not sure why.
Pool-- now, here's the
highlight of the day.
At the end of the
day, Oxana said,
"Okay, well, we
can go to the bus
"and we can drive
back to Kiev
"and you can get home and get
back in time for dinner...
"or would you like to go
to the top of an apartment
"and see the city?"
And we kinda,
"Oh, I guess so,"
and she said,
"It's 16 stories."
I'll go.
So, we went up to the
top of this apartment
and I wish the
lights were lower
because you're gonna lose a lot
of the effect of that slide
'cause it was really,
really spooky.
We're gonna turn
the light down.
Oh, I should've done
this from the beginning!
Oh, it's still
not very good.
Anyway, so--
>> Start over.
>> (laughing)
Yeah, let me start over!
That's a good idea.
(all laughing)
Oh, so, this was wonderful
'cause it was just spooky.
It was-- we're 16 stories up
and we get this view
of all Pripyat, which
is absolutely silent.
There's no light,
there is no sound,
and you see all
these empty boxes
for about as far
as you could see.
Absolutely fascinating-- it's
nothing like it anywhere.
It was dusk-- it was 4:30
in the afternoon,
and the sun was
already going down.
So, here's looking south
past the apartment
and some of the
other buildings
to what do you think that
might be on the horizon there?
That would be
Chernobyl plant,
where they work on it 24 hours
a day, seven days a week.
And you can just see the
shape of the new sarcophagus
that they're gonna
pull over that.
I did a little bit
of telephoto--
it just makes it
more grainy but...
it was really just probably
the highlight of the day
'cause it was
just so weird.
I've never experienced
anything like it--
absolute silence at the
top of that building.
So, as we go down, I went
through some of the hallways
and some of the apartments
and, you know,
see what the looters got
and what they didn't.
Some mailboxes.
As you leave the
exclusion zone--
as a matter of fact,
before we went to lunch
in this little building
and as we left,
we had to go through
these machines
to make sure that
you're not carrying
too much contamination
out with you.
Back to the
disaster.
That August, there was a
commission convened in Vienna
to review the disaster, in which
the Soviet participated fully.
You can see Hans Blix there,
in the middle there.
They were shocked
at the testimony
that were given by the
Soviets, especially by--
given by this man,
Valery Legasov.
He was the guy
who was the head
of the Soviet Commission
for this.
He told the truth.
He told everything
that he knew.
The commission
and the Soviets
tried to change
statistics,
they tried it tamp down a lot
of the really scary numbers,
but he was insistent
on telling the truth.
Two years to the day after
the disaster happened,
he took his own life.
So, he was-- a lot of
people consider him
sort of the hero
of Chernobyl.
He's not the
only one.
A lot of people who tried
to tell the truth, though,
eventually, they either
just disappeared
or they wound up in jail
during that time.
The Soviet Union--
it would never recover
from this disaster.
You could call Chernobyl
sort of a monument
to the extinction
of the Soviet Union.
The symbolism
is rife.
I mean, the whole metaphor
of decline, etcetera,
is very prominent
with this disaster.
Nuclear power for the Soviets
was much more than a utility.
It was the symbol of the
technological perfection
of the Soviet ideal, of the
other utopiate of communism.
This disaster cost them
initially $18 billion,
and if you think of what the
budget of the Soviet Union was
at the time-- sorry, rubles and
dollars were about at par then,
so $18 billion, which is a
sizable chunk of their budget.
Now, if you include later
months and years of reclamation
and resettlements, moving
of the people, etcetera,
some estimates
are $200 billion.
So, when we think about the
West winning the Cold War--
you know, how did
we win this Cold War?
Well, it's because of,
you know, Ronald Reagan.
"Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall."
John Paul II...
Pope John Paul II,
right?
These were kinda the
architects of this.
In later interviews
with Mikhail Gorbachev,
he lists Chernobyl as
one of the top reasons
for the dissolution
of the Soviet Union
because of what that cost them
not just in rubles and dollars
but in prestige, and it just
shocked the country to the core.
I've read the accounts
of a lot of liquidators.
It's interesting to hear what
they have to say about it.
A lot of them were veterans
of the war in Afghanistan,
and when they talk about
the war of Chernobyl--
when they talk about coming
home from Afghanistan,
they say, "If you came
home and you survived
"your tour of duty,
then you survived."
"When you did the
war on Chernobyl,
"when you came home,
you had no idea
"whether or not you
were going to survive."
And I thought that
was very poignant.
There was a lot of guys
said that same thing
and their remembrances.
Most of the liquidators
never did lead a normal life.
Most of them have what's
called "Chernobyl syndrome"
which is a whole
list of maladies
that I don't really
wanna get into
but they've had
tough lives.
Liquidators in their 50s look
like senior citizens today.
20,000 are have estimated
to have died,
20% of that number
through suicide.
And 200,000 are listed
as disabled today.
Today, the official
number of deaths-- 59.
Because there are no official
government statistics
that say exactly what
these things are.
They just have never
published this.
So, they rely
on statistics
from World Health Organization
and other people for that.
Ironically,
out of this
and out of Mikhail Gorbachev's
anger... came "glasnost."
He was so mad that he was
not informed of the details
of the disaster and the
gravity of the disaster
during the first
several days and weeks,
and then once Legasov
started spewing
what the real numbers
were at the commission,
he decided we've
gotta open up,
and, as you know, "glasnost"
means "openness," etcetera.
So, the twin pillars of
Gorbachev sort of revolution...
"revolution" maybe
being the wrong word
in the context
of Russian history.
(chuckling)
But his big, big change--
"perestroika" on one side
and "glasnost"
on the other.
Glasnost came-- pretty much
started from Chernobyl.
So, despite the
contamination of the site,
Chernobyl 1
and 2 reactors
continued to operate
for 14 more years.
They shut down the last
one in the year 2000.
Today, 8 million people live
in the contaminated areas
of Belarus
and Ukraine,
and they continue to eat food
from the contaminated farm land.
1,200 people were
allowed to move back.
There's probably
600 left.
These are called
the "resettlers."
Today, 4,000 people
live in Chernobyl town,
and they're there, dedicated
to keeping the place safe
and keeping the
place secure,
and putting that
new sarcophagus on.
Contrast that with
the old Pripyat--
there are no kids there,
there are no schools,
but there is the last
remaining statue of Lenin
in all of Ukraine is
in Chernobyl town.
Over 400 villages
and settlements
were wiped off the map,
either razed or buried.
And in 2011, Ukraine opened
up the exclusion zone
to add people like myself
for tourism to see what--
see firsthand what the
after-effects were.
Well, I'll leave ya, as far
as Chernobyl, with one quote.
There was a guy
named Georgi Kopchinsky
who is director of the
Soviet Central Committee
on Nuclear Energy,
and he said this,
"We knew this--
three years earlier,
"we'd sent out a
warning to all plants
"with the reactors
with these absorbers,
"warning of this problem but
no actions had been taken.
"This was our arrogance
at the time.
"We believed we were the masters
of the atomic reactions.
"It was a horrible
mistake."
So, what it looks
like today.
You've got Pripyat
up on the left,
which is pretty much
taken over by nature.
And then, directly
down from that,
you can see this
white area here.
That's the plant--
that's the sarcophagus.
So you can see how
close they were
but that's what it
looks like today.
So, how does
that compare?
How does that compare with
Three Mile Island and Fukushima?
It doesn't.
There's really no comparison
between those disasters.
I'll be quiet
for a minute.
I'm not gonna read
this slide to you--
you can read this slide,
it's pretty interesting.
When I read up on
the Fukushima one,
I, like I think
most people,
thought that a lot of people
died from radiation poisoning
and from the plant blowing
up, and they didn't.
Now, it depends
on what you read.
It depends on--
it gets political
when you talk
about this.
A lot of people believe
that there will be no deaths
from radiation,
the cloud went out,
it dissipated,
everything is safe.
One estimate that is by a pretty
well-respected organization
says they think
that there will be
between 300 and 600 cancer
deaths in the future.
And then, if you read
from other activists,
they say, you know, it's
a disaster yet to come.
I can't pick a side--
I don't know what to think
but I was kinda
shocked at the stats
that I did read
on that.
And Three Mile Island-- I mean,
that was a pretty scary thing
but epidemiological
studies still--
they have not found
a single cancer case
that they can trace directly
to Three Mile Island.
I'm sure you'll
read other things
that say something different,
but that's a comparison.
Now, I'd like to open up it up
to any questions and answers.
If it's about physics,
I'm not gonna answer it.
Yes, sir?
>> The radiation is
that's there now--
more than
(indistinct),
is the radiation just
contained in the soil?
Is there anything that's
going up into the atmosphere
through the rains and through
the sea, beach into the sea,
and anything
like that?
Or it's just kinda
stationary in the soil?
>> Yeah, from what I know,
they buried it
and they buried
it pretty deep.
And a lot of places where they
had very radioactive buildings,
and furniture,
and clothes, etcetera,
they buried it and then they
covered it with concrete.
So, to the extent it does
get into the water table
and then eventually comes
back out, I can't answer that.
I don't know.
>> They don't have
any monitoring
going on there to...?
>> Oh, I think they do, yeah.
I think they do, but I don't
know what the statistics are
for what--
>> All those maps, you know,
after was there were
all those clouds were...
is there anything
like that currently
that they can see or tell
if there's anything
up in the atmosphere?
>> That, I don't know.
My guess was
probably, yeah.
Yes, Al?
>> You mentioned farming.
Question on farming-- are they
monitoring or what is...?
>> You know, that's
a great question.
And no one could answer
that really well for me
as I asked, because that
woman's house that you saw,
she grows stuff there.
And there's people that live
in the town of Chernobyl
and other little towns--
these resettlers,
they grow food
and they eat food,
and, as we know today,
lots of acres of farm land
outside the exclusionary zone
were contaminated, as well.
Since there's
no official--
I'm sure some people
are monitoring this
but as far as I'm concerned,
I haven't read anything
that's published on what
happens to that food.
While we were there, one of my
pictures had a bunch of apples
that had dropped
from a tree,
and all I can think of
was I would eat that apple
and I'm gonna
get cancer.
I mean, just--
so I don't know.
Sometimes, when people move
back to places like that,
they just-- that's their
home, and if they die there
because of that,
that's okay with them.
>> As I look back in the
late '50s or early '60s,
there's quite a bit of,
concerning the states,
with dairy milk.
>> Right.
>> Well, there was testing
that was going on.
>> Yeah, the whole
Love Canal thing
and other stuff
like that, yeah.
Yes?
>> If their had been a
containment vessel
in the first place, would it
have made any difference?
>> You mean with the
explosion, with the explosion?
I doubt it.
I don't know that it
could have operated
with a containment vessel
over it-- I don't know,
but I doubt it.
Yes, Jamie?
>> When did they
open permitted tours?
>> In 2011... is when they
opened up the exclusion zone
for tourists--
yes, sir?
>> On your last slide, you had
that (indistinct) scale.
What's the range of that?
Zero to 10, zero to 20?
>> Yeah, 7.
>> 7's the highest?
>> 7's the worst.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah...
yup, Bill?
>> Yeah, you mentioned
that the Soviets knew
that the design was flawed
and these reactors were flawed,
and obviously were installed
in other locations.
Did the Soviets go back
and re-engineer this
or (indistinct)?
>> With the kind of grief
they took for Chernobyl,
I imagine they did.
You know, up until
they opened up again,
it was pretty closed society
so I can't answer that
with any sort
of accuracy.
I don't know, but you'd
think that they would
'cause the whole physics,
nuclear physics community
knew of the flaws-- well, they
knew of the flaws themselves.
As a matter of fact, three
years before, in Lithuania,
and a Soviet reactor, they
had an accident similar.
It was not nearly as dramatic,
but three years earlier
in Lithuania, they had
the same thing happen.
They said, "Well, probably
should change some things,"
and we see
what happened.
Yeah, I was shocked
to read that, too.
(chuckling)
Mark?
>> So, the tours--
are they advertised and promoted
like a tour of Camp Gettysburg,
or-- and--
>> Chernobyl tours,
chernobyltours.com.
You know, it just--
I thought, "I wonder if you
can go through that place?"
I Googled "Chernobyl tours,"
went right to the website,
(gasping)
"Oh, yes!"
So it's great--
it's really great.
Yes?
>> About the children
of Pripyat,
how many children were
there-- 5,000 you said?
>> Well, there was-- the
population was 45,000
and there was a lot of kids,
there were five schools
and 15 kindergartens.
>> Any follow-up,
I mean, with
World Health?
>> Yeah, I'm sure
World Health Organization
probably has
follow-up studies
of what happened
to those kids.
You know, I kinda included
that in my macro view
of 20,000 people
eventually died,
20% of those via suicide,
and 200,000 disabled.
Yeah, but there's no
official statistics, Anna.
Like Ukraine has not said,
"Okay, here's what happened,
"we followed
these kids."
No, nothing
like that.
Yes?
>> I'm curious
about who gets to account for
the damage to human beings?
And I'm thinking
specifically of Hiroshima
which I'm hoping
to visit next month
and I have read,
well, first of all,
I've read
John Hersey's work,
and then I read something
else that talk about
peoples' skin liquefying--
I couldn't finish that.
>> Yeah.
>> But then I decided
to check the Atomic
Energy Commission.
And I was frankly--
I mean, I would think
that that would be a
really (indistinct) site,
but I was shocked,
and what seemed to me
to be a really minimal count
of human consequences of--
>> Yeah, the IAEA came under
some fire after Chernobyl
because, as I said, when Legasov
was giving off his statistics,
they were complicit
in trying to hide
some of the
disaster's results.
And I haven't gone
to their site.
I've never read any
of the stuff they do,
but yeah, it's
not a surprise.
That Hersey book is--
that's a pretty gruesome book.
I read that,
as well.
And the skin melting
off right to the bone--
that's Chernobyl
syndrome all over.
Yeah--
oh, yeah.
Yeah, I've seen some of the
pictures-- it's terrible, yeah.
Judy?
>> So, when you left,
you went through those
radiation meters.
>> Yeah.
(mimicking buzzing noise)
>> How much were you
taking out with you?
And how comfortable
were you
feeling that those
were reliable?
>> Oh, you mean the
machines themselves?
I don't know.
(chuckling)
Maybe it was
for show.
I have no idea.
(laughing)
I was comfortable
with the amount of--
>> You've had your thyroid
checked, right?
>> Uh, no.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, you know, I thought
about that before I went.
I think there's-- although
liability in Eastern Europe
is not quite the
same as liability
in the United States
of America.
I would think that it's a
fairly popular thing to do now.
You know, I just kinda--
I think it's okay.
Oxana was pretty good,
she has a dosimeter,
she says, "Okay,
we gotta go."
And the other thing
that gave me ease
was she seemed like a
smart "with it" a person,
she's a teacher, and she does
these things every weekend.
Well, she make 10 times what
she does teaching school,
doing that, but so--
I'm not that bothered by it.
As a matter of fact, you get--
x-rays and different things,
flying in a plane,
you get radiation.
So anyway, Al?
>> Well, I understand
that flying in a plane
over a certain
length of time--
>> Yeah.
>> Worse than that.
>> Yeah, that's
exactly right.
Thanks for bringing
that up-- it's--
and I fly a lot in
planes and, you know,
15 hours LA to Sydney and
I've done that seven times,
so I probably-- I was
exposed to a lot more
than walking through
the exclusion zone.
>> We have time for
one more question.
>> All right.
Okay?
>> The sarcophagus.
>> Yeah.
>> 30 years-- what's going on?
Time to build
a new one?
>> Oh, yeah,
that one is--
>> That's what
they are building?
>> That's what that gigantic
thing is that you saw right--
that giant
really shiny one.
It's nice and new-- they polish
that thing every single day.
They really want to make that
thing really look really good
'cause they spent
$2 billion on it,
so it better
shine nicely.
Uhhh, there it is,
right there.
That's gonna be on rails--
they're gonna push that bad boy
right over the other one,
and then seal it.
Now, that one is for--
oh, I can't remember.
That one is for
several hundred years.
That's what they
think it'll be.
Quick!
>> There was four
reactors there, right?
>> Yes.
>> The one blew up on a test.
It didn't even
get going, right?
>> No, no, it was
fully operational
but they wanted
to save energy,
they were gonna do
a test on it so--
>> Then the other ones,
did they shut 'em down, or
were they still running?
'Cause you said they just
closed the last one down.
>> Yeah.
>> So they shut the
other ones down
and start them up some
time in the future?
>> My guess is that they
would've shut them down
during those seven months
that they were doing
the battle of
Chernobyl.
>> Start it back up?
>> But that's what's goes on.
I suppose, yeah,
'cause it--
>> When did the
people move back in?
The resettlers.
>> The resettlers moved in,
I think, over
a year later,
they started letting
people back in.
>> Wow.
>> Yeah.
Yeah, okay, well,
thanks very much.
(applause)
