Japan can learn from Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster
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Franciscan University of Steubenville physics professor Alexander Sich did extensive research at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster.
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Alexander Sich's long-standing goal has been to dispel myths surrounding the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.
Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in March revived many of those myths, including claims the Soviet Union ended the Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine by burying exposed nuclear fuel under concrete and other materials.
Mr. Sich knows firsthand that didn't happen.
The associate professor of physics at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, spent 18 months inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone -- a circle with an 18.8-mile radius surrounding the four-reactor-unit power plant, including damaged Reactor No. 4.
As a nuclear-engineering graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was the first Westerner to study the accident up close. His peer-reviewed findings were detailed in 1994 and 1995 in three issues of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission journal, Nuclear Safety.
Mr. Sich knows that the Soviet government failed to reduce radiation levels with unsuccessful attempts to bury the nuclear core. He knows the meltdown and massive releases of radiation ended on their own, but not before causing widespread radiation exposure.
The 25th anniversary of the accident Tuesday represents a good opportunity, Mr. Sich said, to get out the facts about the world's worst nuclear accident.
Thirty-two people died from immediate lethal radiation doses at Chernobyl, with radioactive iodine exposure later causing 6,000 to 10,000 childhood thyroid cancers.
Researchers' estimates of radiation releases during the accident range from the equivalent of dozens to hundreds of Hiroshima atomic bombs, although the 1945 bombing killed far more people with its thermal blast, neutron exposure and other radioactive factors.
Flawed design for the Soviet RBMK reactors and lax safety culture coupled with human error not only prompted the meltdown but allowed its active phase to continue unabated for nine days. Soviet authorities then announced they had solved the problem by burying the reactor -- but they hadn't accomplished that burial, nor would such a burial have been the best way to address the crisis, Mr. Sich said.
First Published April 24, 2011 12:00 am
