“The last ice age,” Carol said quietly.
“That’s right.” Garner nodded. “Unless we can stop the heat coming from this radioactive debris, we’re sitting on top of the next ice age. And this one will be our fault.”
10
After a late dinner, Junko and Zubov retired to the doctor’s cabin and shared a pot of green tea. The level of intimacy in their discussion might have disappointed Garner and Carol.
“The Aral Sea is nearly extinct,” Junko said. Unlike Zubov, she had been to eastern Europe many times since the accident at Chernobyl — significantly, she was allowed to tour these areas — and was well abreast of the latest reclamation projects going on there. The Aral Sea, once part of one of the largest lakes in the world, now practically a desert, was a recent destination.
“Virtually all of it is gone, drained off to Central Asia to provide irrigation for the drought-starved crops,” she said. “What remains is a sludge of toxic sediment, pesticides, and heavy metals. Kidney disease, liver cancer, arthritis, bronchitis, all of them up more than 2,000 percent in the past decade.”
“There must be a million people on the Aral in Karakalpakia alone,” Zubov considered grimly. He remembered the Aral from childhood summer vacations.
“I had no idea it was so bad,” he said, almost apologetically. For his entire adult life, he had found that the best way not to miss his homeland was not to think about it. Talking to Junko, he realized just how much he still yearned to know.
“It’s not the land you once left,” Junko said. “In another twenty years it might become the land everyone has left. Now the gold-mining industry there is responsible for spilling hundreds of tons of cyanide as waste byproduct.”
“How is Belarus?” Zubov asked. Belarus, in what was now an independent territory, had been less than a hundred miles north of the reactor at Chernobyl and directly in the path of the immediate fallout.
“That depends on whose numbers you want to believe,” Junko said. “The Soviet statistics still list thirty-one fatalities from the explosion itself and as many as seven thousand — eventually — from the radiation. Those are only immediate estimates — as many as seventeen million people could have received at least some exposure. The World Health Organization released a study that showed no significant increase in leukemia or other cancers in the decade after the disaster. An exception was thyroid cancer, of which more than one thousand new cases have been reported in adults.”
“In adults,” Zubov repeated.
“Yes, but congenital malformations in children, by some reports, are up more than 30 percent. In the areas worst hit, 80 percent.” Junko tried to push away the vision of precious, cherubic faces horribly skewed by deformations of bone and cartilage, hands and feet twisted into indistinct, fleshy clubs. Down syndrome. Cleft palate. Blindness. Stillbirths. The list of horrors went on and on.
“As usual, once the hysteria of the moment died down, the far graver problem of long-term exposure to the radioactive fallout was almost completely ignored.”
There would forever be detractors who claimed that the alarming increase in cancers and birth defects was merely a statistical anomaly, the result of better reporting and closer global scrutiny that had brought the worst fringes of the problem to the verge of public outrage. But statistical anomalies would not help the children of Belarus and Pripyat.
Zubov asked about his hometown, where fifty thousand people had been evacuated days after the explosion. The evacuation should have begun within hours if public safety were the true issue, but the government had reacted too slowly.
Even then, many of the local villagers, ignorant of the invisible killer and mistrustful of any effort to displace them from their land, refused to evacuate.
Eventually relieved of the 135,000 human “obstacles,” Soviet chemical troops excavated six inches of topsoil from hundreds of acres of land, asphalt was laid down over hundreds of acres more, and thousands of buildings were washed with chemicals designed to bind radioactive particles. Entire forests were leveled and marshes plowed under in an attempt to cover over the radioactive cloak that coated everything.
In the areas tens or hundreds of miles north of Chernobyl, rain deposited the radioactive fallout on an unsuspecting populace. Entire farms were forever contaminated, and fresh food and water had to be brought in from far-distant places. For those closest to the explosion, most of the immediate health risk was believed to be from inhalation or other incidental consumption of radioactive iodine isotopes.
“A lot of those cancers could have been prevented if emergency crews had known enough to treat people with simple iodine,” Junko explained. “That’s why it was one of the first preventatives I asked Carol to get up here.”
“What about lowering safe-exposure thresholds?” Zubov suggested, struggling to find any resolution to such permanent destruction.
“How low is low enough when you’re talking about radiation, Sergei? Plutonium, cesium, radium unstable isotopes cause cancer. They will destroy genetic material. They will kill. Now or later, but eventually they will kill.”
“We haven’t learned much, have we?” Zubov said. “In the thirties and forties the United States introduced a generation of kids to cancers by exposing them to X rays. Hell, the nuclear tests in Nevada exposed everyone to some degree of fallout. If Eastman Kodak hadn’t noticed the radiation spoiling their film stock in Rochester Rochester, New York! Twenty-five hundred miles away, right down the jet stream just think of what the public wouldn’t have known.”
“Or still wouldn’t know,” Junko agreed. “Like the accident at Rocky Flats.”
Beginning in 1951, the facility at Rocky Flats, Colorado, had been responsible for building and storing the cores for virtually all U.S. nuclear weapons for nearly forty years. In May of 1969, a fire in a building that contained thirty-five hundred kilograms of plutonium nearly sent up a volcanic eruption of deadly plutonium oxide.
Their conversation eventually returned to the Arctic and Junko’s growing concern that the Inuit were about to face an environmental calamity they were incapable of preparing for.
“After Chernobyl, there was a massive survey by the Scandinavian countries to look at the degree of exposure over their own populations. Eventually they found entire herds of reindeer contaminated at levels well above the acceptable limits. But just as the Inuit rely on caribou, the Lapps rely on reindeer for sustenance, so what was the government to do? Allow the Lapps to eat meat known to be dangerous, or keep them away from the herds and effectively destroy their entire culture? A slow death, whichever you choose.”
“What about Victor’s situation?”
“I’ve called both of the clinics he mentioned and asked them to track specific case histories on Melville Peninsula,” Junko said. “Obviously they wouldn’t tell me much over the radio, but they did say they’d welcome a visit anytime.”
“That sounds encouraging.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t try to hide anything,” she said. “No one is covering up cases like Victor’s, it’s just that no one is looking into them. Community doctors in the Arctic are spread far too thin as it is. Even if you can get supplies and equipment, even if you can get women and men like Victor on the examination table, this is hardly the climate social or otherwise to develop and promote proper health-care programs. It’s enough of an effort to give out condoms and antibiotics, let alone setting out to discover hidden sources of radiation.” She looked at him staring back at her with rapt attention.