Chernobyl Woman Survivor Reveals Painful Realities of Nuclear Disasters

By Christina Maria Paschyn/WeNewsWFS

Natalia Manzurova was a 35-year-old nuclear engineer in Russia when she was assigned to be part of the clean-up crew at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, the site of the worst nuclear accident in history.

Despite her training, Manzurova did not fully comprehend the dangers. On a preliminary visit to Chernobyl shortly after the disaster, she stood out amidst the slew of workers dressed in anti-contamination suits. “I arrived in a short dress and sandals. I had no idea what I was going in for,” she recalls.

On April 26, 1986, 25 years ago, Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor No. 4 exploded after an experiment went awry. The blast released 400 times more radiation than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Manzurova began her work as a so-called liquidator at Chernobyl in the summer of 1987. Her job was to help clean up Pripyat, a city located less than two miles from the reactor, whose entire population of 50,000 was evacuated after the disaster.

During her four-and-a-half years here, burying contaminated houses and conducting experiments on affected plants and animals, Manzurova would come to experience the noxious effects of nuclear power firsthand.

She says Soviet officials monitored and studied the effects of radiation exposure on the liquidators, but that she and her colleagues were never informed of the results, nor were they given proper tools to monitor their radiation exposure themselves.

As a result of her work in the contaminated zone, Manzurova says she now bears the “Chernobyl necklace,” two scars on her neck from operations to remove cancer from her thyroid. “The left part of my thyroid gland was removed in 1990 when I was still working in Chernobyl,” she says, adding, “Less than a year ago the gland was operated on and removed entirely because of tumors in the remaining part.” Manzurova was recently in the U.S. on a speaking tour organised by the anti-nuclear activist organisation, Beyond Nuclear, to mark the 25th anniversary of the disaster.

After stories of forced abortions in the region surfaced, Manzurova revealed how her own suspicions were raised during a routine assignment in Pripyat. “Next to the operation theatre in the gynaecology department, we saw a big can that is usually used in villages to carry milk. I opened the lid of this can and saw that there were foetuses that were from about the seventh to eighth months of pregnancy,” she recalls.

Manzurova claims that Soviet authorities forced thousands of pregnant women to abort during the evacuations. “There was a secret order by the government that all the pregnant women inside the 30-kilometre [18.6 mile] exclusion zone were to undergo either a Caesarean operation or were to be induced so that they would give birth prematurely,” she says. “Only later the question came to my mind: What happened? Were these small children still alive when they were put into these big cans? It was evident they were forgotten in haste.”

Now 59, Manzurova says she is the only living member of her 14-person team in Chernobyl. She says most of her colleagues died from cancers and illnesses due to radiation poisoning.

Figures of the number of people harmed by the accident remain in dispute. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates 4,000 cancer deaths among the individuals most-highly exposed to radiation at Chernobyl and another 5,000 in peripheral populations. But several separate studies predict much higher numbers. One of them, a 2006 Greenpeace report based on national health statistics from neighbouring Belarus, estimates 93,000 fatal cancer cases in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.

Twenty-eight firefighters and clean-up workers died within three months of the disaster, almost all from acute radiation sickness, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

But the agency says health studies conducted among samples of the 700,000 registered clean-up workers do not show a direct correlation between radiation exposure and an increase in cancer or disease.

Manzurova disagrees. She attributes several other health conditions to her exposure. “My health problems started a while ago, and they were medically linked to radiation exposure,” she says. “I survived [a stroke] and clinical death and a long period of rehabilitation after.”

But, according to The International Atomic Energy Agency, such health problems are more the result of psychological trauma experienced by the liquidators while working in the contamination zone. Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, challenges this notion. He says the powerful effects of radiation on the human body are only just beginning to be understood.

“There’s now growing evidence that radiation can cause a lot of other things to happen because it’s one of the few environmental poisons that can damage your overall immune system,” Alvarez says. “Anything that would do that can cause your overall death rate to increase.”

Alvarez says supporters of the nuclear power industry are underestimating the potential risk. “There is this mindset in the government, amongst public health researchers involved in ascertaining the effects of radiation from nuclear activities, that nothing good will emerge from making certain information public,” he says.

Alvarez and Manzurova fear that Japan may now be facing a similar situation following the 9.0 earthquake and the resulting tsunami that devastated the island nation’s northeastern shore on March 11, 2011. The natural disasters pummeled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility, where reactor cooling systems failed. Populations within a roughly 12-mile area surrounding the plant have been evacuated following several hydrogen explosions in the reactors and evidence of radiation leakage. Recently Japan raised the severity of the crisis to level 7, the same as the Chernobyl disaster.

While the disasters appear to be comparable in the amount of radiation released, how and where it has been released and the structural damage to the facilities differ greatly.

“With Fukushima … reactor vessels which hold these radioactive cores have more or less remained intact,” Alvarez says. “There may be cracks or other things which may compromise their integrity, but they don’t have that kind of full-blown release of everything that Chernobyl experienced.”

But he adds that Chernobyl was one reactor, while Fukushima is four reactors plus spent fuel pools. “And the spent fuel pools do not have that extra barrier of steel and concrete to prevent the escape [of radiation].”

Alvarez says if the Fukushima crisis continues to escalate, it will put many Japanese at risk, particularly women and children.

“Women are twice as sensitive to contracting cancer of the thyroid and breast [from ionising radiation] than men, and of course, you have the offspring,” Alvarez says. “Exposures during that period [pregnancy] are much more serious than they would be for an adult, and you’re looking at the probability of raising the risk of childhood cancer and things like that.”

Manzurova hopes the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe will inspire the public to demand energy alternatives. She believes that similar accidents will continue to occur unless the industry is held accountable and takes safety precautions much more seriously. Her advice to the people of Japan is to monitor the situation themselves and to demand accurate information from their leaders.

“The matter of rescuing is in the hands of the person being rescued. As soon as [the people] recognise the high number of victims in the population and the damage to the environment, then the real cost of the nuclear power industry will be immediately understood for what it is,” she says.

(Zoe Jennings of the Pulitzer Center contributed to this report.)

By arrangement with Women’s eNews.

(Adapted from original content published by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Christina Maria Paschyn is a multimedia journalist and the projects coordinator for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. For original story, log on to: http://www.womensenews.org/story/environment/110426/chernobyl-survivor-flags-womens-radiation-risk)

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