Thirty years ago today--Close-up lesson from Chernobyl 

 I was in Munich as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry when Chernobyl exploded.   Below is the letter I wrote to friends in San Diego on May 1, 1986...

...I’m writing to give you another perspective on what’s been happening here in Bavaria since the radiation from Chernobyl has been introduced into our daily lives. Aside from what you may read or hear from the U.S media-mongers. This is what I experienced and how I interpret those experiences. All of what I’m writing is true according to my experience.

Waina and I had heard the news and read the limited newspaper report about the Chernobyl accident, but like many reports of global atrocities, this remained to us a rather abstract and distant problem affecting some unknown people in an unfamiliar place. We had calmly discussed the problem and mostly discounted its life-threatening potential, although I remember we were both somewhat worried because this time it was ominously close to home. Among my colleagues at the lab it was generally agreed that this was an unfortunate, but not threatening situation, and it was even suggested that perhaps the whole incident was grossly exaggerated by the western media to draw attention away from the smoldering houses and overfilled hospitals in Tripoli-people should not have too much time to think about Reagan’s “heroic” act of terrorism that would end all terrorism in the world.

Early in the week there were reports from Sweden indicating that “high levels” of radiation were floating around in the atmosphere, but we received very few significant details. Information about how much radiation, what kind, the potential health hazard, the total area affected, etc was not given.

Incidentally, it was reported that this “increased radiation” was initially discovered when a radiation worker was found to be contaminated when he arrived at work one morning and entered a radiation control area from outside. That must have been a shock. These reports from Sweden went on for a few days and were combined with every superficial report about serious, but unspecified problems at Chernobyl, Kiev and vicinity. Finally, it was our turn. It was announced that on April 30 the prevailing winds changed and would bring the “radioactive cloud” in our direction. Now we could expect some “increased levels ofradiation,” but we were assured that this represented no “significant hazard” whatever that meant.

Actually, I don’t remember being particularly disturbed by these first reports of fallout coming our direction. In hindsight I think my attitude was a little callous, but this was at least partly due to the innocuous way the affair was reported. I was more angry than worried: why should we be involved in someone else’s mistake?

I felt righteously indignant-being anti-nuclear-everything from way back and having an I-knew-that-this-was-going-to-happen-sooner-or-later attitude. I wasn’t particularly worried because I guess I didn’t believe that it was really happening. It was somehow a political problem and didn’t seem to really involve me or Waina or the “hallowed” halls of the Max-Planck Institute.

I think I went through all four emotional responses to trauma described by Kubeler Ross: disbelief, anger, sadness and finally, acceptance. At the lab that day I got into a heated discussion about honesty in the media which Waina and I had discussed the night before and that led to a conviction to take our fate in our own hands and try to see what’s happening ourselves. We all had the nagging and serious impression that they (the media) won’t really tell us what’s happening if it’s really dangerous?

A few of us at the lab agreed to try to measure the levels of radiation in the air that day. Although when we actually got back into the lab, we sort of lost interest confronted by our normal research projects. I pursued it, however, and set up a filtration system outside the window of the lab at about 1 pm. The plan was to filter air for four or five hours and then to measure the filters in the scintillation counter. We assumed the levels of radiation in the air would be extremely low and thought that at least this much time would be needed to filter a large enough volume of air to get measurable levels of radiation on our small filters.

Unfortunately, we never found out what the levels in the air actually were, because at about 1530 it began to rain (I should say it began to pour) and my filters were all drowned. Just as it began to rain, I ran outside with a large plastic tray and placed it on the concrete rail outside the window. The tray was under a drainage spout and collected runoff from the roof as well as rain falling directly into it. This cloud-burst only lasted about an hour as I recall, but because of the large collecting area it provided about 15 liters of water.

A few minutes after the rain had stopped I retrieved the full tray and put it on the bench in Felicitas Pfifer’s lab. I went off to look for scintillation-fluor, vials, etc. About 10 minutes later the technician from Pfifer’s lab came running down the hall yelling, “It worked, it worked, your experiment worked; the rain is hot!” While I had assumed we wouldn’t be able to measure anything in the rain except in the scintillation counter, Felicitas and her technician had taken the geiger counter from the isotope lab and held it over the rainwater-it went off scale!

The geiger counter value for the rain was about 300, which can be translated into more meaningful units if you know the isotopes involved, but for purposes of comparison suffice it to say that anything over 20 in the isotope lab is considered unacceptable contamination. With this value as a standard, I was shocked, really stunned. I ran down the hall into Zillig’s office and insisted he follow me immediately to the lab. When I showed him the response of the geiger counter to the rain he had a fit.

At first he accused me of intentionally contaminating the water or using a contaminated tray to collect the rain: he didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t believe it. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to believe it either. We took the geiger counter and rushed down the hall to the door that led out onto the roof. Holding the counter toward the sky, counts were between 100 and 200, the free-standing water on the roof was between 200 and 300, and later outside on the gravel walk we found areas that measured above 1000! (Remember in the isotope lab about  10 is normal background and more than 20 is considered contamination.)

The news spread through our department in minutes and I think everyone in the Max Planck with geiger counter was independently discovering or verifying the same shocking results we had just obtained. I remember the expression on the face of Herman Lederer, a graduate student from downstairs, who came into the lab dripping wet, having been caught in the rain during his daily jog, with the geiger counter telling him he was measuring well over 100, he rushed off with a look of horror to shower.

I proceeded to measure 1 milliliter of the rain water in the scintillation counter: it was about 1,800 CPM in the energy range above tritium. I called Waina and told her not to go outside and to fill all the containers in the apartment with water in case the drinking water becomes contaminated. (Waina and I later agreed we would leave Germany if the water ever became contaminated, but so far it hasn’t.)

Zillig somewhat frantically called one of the top government officials for public health in Bavaria and hold him about our findings so warnings would be issued immediately. Apparently, this fellow was not only unimpressed by our measurements but he was quite flippant and when Zillig was unable to give him values in REMs, he discounted all further comments as insignificant.

This was really infuriating, because the next few days were the May-Day holiday and since the weather was forecasted to be nice for the first time in a long time, the meant that a lot of people would be exposed to a lot more than just solar radiation. Austria received a similar dose of fallout to Bavaria and the Austrian government issued immediate warnings indicating that although there was no call for alarm, people should not eat vegetables from their gardens, restrict their children from playing outside or wash them when they came inside, remove their shoes when entering the house, and so on; at least until more information about the full extent of the problem was available.

What the German government did was really irresponsible since the radiation was mostly I-131 with a half-life of eight days, and the highest radiation danger was during the first few days, when the government was still making political decisions rather than rational ones. Why didn’t the German Government issue warning like the Austrians?  (The French were also apparently told nothing.)

I really can’t imagine why, except that perhaps the nuclear power plant mafia in Germany controls the politicians and the politicians control the government “scientists” responsible for reporting such things. Everyone at the Max-Planck was outraged, because we knew what the levels of radiation were and what was considered an acceptable level, at least in the laboratory. Later from what I could find in the literature about the potential health hazard from exposures like ours it appears that in general normal healthy adults may not have been in any significant danger. But the hazard for pregnant women, children, or people with thyroid problem or iodine deficiencies is not at all clear. According to the available date the limits set for the laboratory are ridiculously low.

During the weeks that followed I monitored the decay of the April 30 rainwater and collected all subsequent rains to monitor what the radiation cloud was doing. The decay curve indicated a large component of I-131 as reported in the news and the fourth, fifth and sixth rains, four to six days later, were already back down to tolerable levels (less than 75 CPM/mi). The soil remained hot, however, and when I took core samples and measured the radiation in fractions taken at 0.5 cm intervals it appeared that nearly all the radiation was concentrated in the upper 1Ž2 cm of soil. Furthermore, when I took some of the non-radioactive soil from down the core and mixed it with the hot rain water, centrifuged the soil down and re-measured the rain, about 95% of the radiation was removed from the water! The soil was acting like an excellent ion exchange system and firmly bound the isotopes. This means the longer – lived isotopes will stay in the surface soil perhaps for some time.

The questions that come to mind: How much of these isotopes are transferred to the herbs and herbivores we eat? When we eat these isotopes, what it their behavior in our bodies- where do they go? How long do they stay in our systems? What damage do they do? Can their uptake be inhibited or once inside can they be removed? How long until we see their affects?

I’ve spent a lot of time in the library trying to answer some of these questions and I’ve managed to get some partial answers to at least some of them. Unfortunately, in many cases there is no good experimental information or the available information is ambiguous. Studies of low levels of radiation (X-rays, or gamma rays) are based on statistical analyses of population with different exposures and results tend to be equivocal-insufficient controls or sample size (Clearly, different isotopes have very different biological activity and different people must have different susceptibilities.)

In general, it appears that we have received a very low dose of radiation so far, and there will probably not be any measurable affects for at least 10 to 30 years. I hate to sound too pessimistic, but by the year 2000 I think our little Chernobyl catastrophe will seem relatively small and insignificant compared with other global problems…

The lesson for me from Chernobyl came while I was sitting in my office on that sunny May day looking out over a pastoral scene of freshly sprouted fields, filled with spring flowers, and hearing the geiger counter’s raucous alarm insisting that this was no longer what I thought it was…It really happened this time… perhaps the biblical reference wasn’t to a fall, but to fallout.

Radioactively yours

Jonathan Trent, MPI Martinsried, West Germany

May 1, 1986