by Robert James Parsons, Independent Journalist, 26 April 2023
The WHO's refusal to acknowledge the catastrophe's stupendous implications and ever greater ramifications for the life of the planet as time goes on prompted a civil society organization in France and French-speaking Switzerland (Independent WHO) to set up a vigil at the entry of the WHO. The vigil, which lasted ten years and had at least one person there every working day from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., demanded that the WHO end the stranglehold that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has over the WHO by virtue of a legally binding agreement that gives the IAEA veto power over anything that the WHO might wish to undertake in the area of radiation and health.
The IAEA's adamant refusal to allow the WHO any substantive work in this crucial area of public health is logical since its mandate requires it to support and promote the entire nuclear sector. This is in direct contradiction to the WHO's mandate, which is to bring the world's populations to the highest attainable level of health possible. Set beside what the WHO should be doing, what the IAEA is actually doing amounts to the pursuit of a long-term death wish.
The vigil ended after ten years, with NO reaction from the WHO except, finally, in response to repeated and vehement requests for a meeting with the director general, three meetings, one (finally!) with the WHO director general, Dr Margaret Chan. Dr Chan openly admitted to the members of the Independent WHO group (which included the mayor of Geneva) the lethality of ionizing radiation for all forms of life. However, she was not authorized to issue a public, official statement to this effect, so, this remains an informal statement, a personal opinion as it were.
On Easter Sunday morning of this year, Wladimir Tchertkoff died at the age of 88. He was of Russian origin and spoke French and Russian at home. However, his family settled in Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and he was schooled in Italian, then went on to university in France and finally became a brilliant journalist for the Televisione della Svizzera italiana. When the Chernobyl catastrophe occurred, owing to his mastery of Russian, he was sent to report on it. What he saw horrified him and marked him for life, and he spent the rest of his time on earth in relentless work in support of the millions of Chernobyl victims, especially the children, trying to make known to the world their terrible fate.
Ultimately, he wrote THE book on Chernobyl, a seven-hundred page masterpiece, the work of an intrepid journalist and meticulous historian: Le crime de Tchernobyl. Le goulag nucléaire (The Crime of Chernobyl: The Nuclear Gulag). The book was published in 2006, the year of the major conference at the Medical School of the University of Berne mentioned in the article, which dealt with the liquidators, the almost one million men who risked -- and, for most, ultimately gave -- their lives to put out the fire in the reactor and build the sarcophagus encasing it.
Among the hundreds of interviews that Tchertkoff conducted in Ukraine and Belarus were long discussions with top scientists from the Soviet Union. One in particular confirmed unequivocally what had been until then only a persistent and plausible rumor, to wit that the Soviet Union authorities had feared that the reactor's meltdown would result in a nuclear explosion hundreds of times more powerful than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs. It was only by dint of heroic perseverance against all the odds that the rescue crew at Chernobyl prevented this. Otherwise, the fallout from such an explosion would have rendered most of Europe uninhabitable for centuries.
In other words, as appalling as the Chernobyl catastrophe has been, it is minor compared to what almost happened.
After the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident in the United States, President Carter entrusted to Admiral Rickover ("the father of the nuclear Navy") the task of assessing the damage. The final report was heavily censored, but before his death Rickover confided to his son-in-law that, if the report had been published as written and submitted, within weeks there would have been no more nuclear anything in the United States, so terrifying was what he had found and reported, for there would have been a colossal country-wide public out-cry, indeed an uprising, until the the entire nuclear sector, civilian and military both, was shut down and dismantled.
The nuclear threat is alive and well today.
Calls to build nuclear power plants as non-fossil-fuel sources of energy ignore the already existing hundreds of millions of tons of nuclear waste from the treatment of uranium ore (the "tailings"), low-level but nonetheless radioactive for 22 billion years. They also ignore the huge amount of energy needed to process that ore, then to transform it into usable nuclear fuel. They also ignore the huge amounts of energy needed to run these reactors. They also ignore the threat of nuclear waste, also radioactive for 22 billion years, for which no proper solution is possible since, from being dispersed in the earth's crust, that uranium is now concentrated as much as 300 times more densely than in the ore. They also ignore the plutonium -- the most toxic substance on earth -- produced by these reactors, which were originally designed to produce precisely this plutonium, for nuclear weapons. They also ignore the simple fact that there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation and that the "safety" standards regarding this material, established by the United States military, are entirely bogus. And they also ignore the impossibility of designing, building and operating a safe reactor in the absence of perfect human beings incapable of making even the slightest error in this process.
The decommissioned Chernobyl reactor complex remains a ghastly, fearsome monument to the hubris of a human race drunk on the delusion of power from technical mastery that it does not possess. The world's nuclear power plants are aging and steadily becoming more vulnerable to leaks, breakdowns and outright disasters, as the colossal heat that they generate wears them down irreparably. The only answer is a complete shut down. then slow, meticulous decommissioning, dismantling and... we still do not know what we will do with the detritus that they will leave behind once dismantled.
Instead of being passed over in silence, the anniversaries of Chernobyl and Fukushima should be international days of reflection and recommitment to a nuclear-free world, for we maintain this complex at our own risk and peril and that of all future generations.
Robert James Parsons
Independent Journalist
Geneva
Chernobyl, 30 Years On
https://truthout.org/articles/chernobyl-30-years-on/
Chernobyl, 30 Years On
https://truthout.org/articles/chernobyl-30-years-on/
See also blog posts relating to the nuclear issue:
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