IMAGE ESSAY

The impact of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident:32 years on

Mie NAIKIJapanese Red Cross College of Nursing, International and Disaster Nursing, Tokyo, Japan

The accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plantoccurred at 01:23 h on April 26, 1986. There was a large-scale explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant,which was located near the city of Pripyat in the formerSoviet Union. This area currently belongs to the KyivRegion in Ukraine. Because of the accident, radioactivematerials in large quantities were scattered throughout theterritory of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and other areas ofEurope. Because the soil was contaminated by radio-active materials, people who lived in those areas, andwho were expected to be exposed to excessive radiationif they remained, had to be evacuated (InternationalAtomic Energy Agency, 2006, pp. 75–77). As for themethods used for decontamination, the reclamation wascarried out in Belarus, while in Ukraine, the surface soilwas removed (International Atomic Energy Agency2006, pp. 72–74).Because I have been supporting people who suffered

from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident, I’minterested in the aftermath of the Chernobyl NuclearPower Plant accident. Therefore, I visited Kyiv and thesurrounding area of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plantfor 8 days starting on October 19, 2019. The purpose ofthis visit was to determine the situation in the surround-ing area of the nuclear power plant 32 years after theaccident.The nuclear power plant accident area was a 2-h bus

ride from Kyiv. Visitors were allowed to enter the area,and they came not only from Ukraine, but also fromforeign countries. The zone within a radius of 30 km ofthe nuclear power plant was designated as a restrictedarea and has a checkpoint at its entrance. Visitors were

requested to show their passport and instructed not totouch or take away any fallen leaves, waste on the road,or even building remnants. The reason for this instructionwas to prevent the radioactive materials from sticking toone’s body and being taken out of the restricted area. MyGeiger counter, an instrument used to detect radioactivebackground, showed the same readings as before passingthrough the checkpoint. We could see several villagesalong both sides of the paved road, but no one lived there.There were only collapsing houses, and thickly growingplants and trees. One of the visitors held his radiometerclose to the root of a tall tree. It showed that the dose wasmore than 30 times higher than that of many other places.There were several excessively contaminated places suchas a roof of the café that had runoff, which was located bythe lake near the nuclear power plant. However, most ofthe places had a similar level of radiation to that of thecheckpoint. We met several plant workers next to thedecommissioned reactors. Those workers and visitorscould have lunch together at the cafeteria near thedecommissioned reactors. At the entrance of the cafeteria,a device was installed to measure the external exposuredose for workers of this facility. No alarm detecting ahigh contamination level went off as dozens of visitorsalso passed through the device and entered the cafeteria.Although there were still some places where the spatialradiation dose was high, most of the places had the sameradiation level as those outside of the checkpoint. Also,some crumbling nursing houses and parks remained inthe villages from where people were forced to evacuate.A visitor described one of those villages as “a ghosttown,” which made me feel depressed. However, thicklygrown trees, houses covered with ivy, and birds eatingnuts provided evidence that the ruins have been turninginto forests. Due to the nuclear power plant accident,residents were driven out of this land. It would takeseveral decades for the environment to revive so thatpeople could live here again. This area has been gradually

Copyright © 2020 Disaster Nursing Global Leader Degree Program DOI http://doi.org/10.24298/hedn.2019-0009

Correspondence: Mie Naiki, Japanese Red Cross College of Nurs-ing, International and Disaster Nursing, 4–1–3 Hiroo Shibuya-ku,Tokyo 150–0012, Japan. Email: m-naiki@redcross.ac.jpReceived 5 October 2019; accepted 12 November 2019; J-STAGEadvance published 13 February 2020.

Health Emergency and Disaster Nursing (2020) 7, 71–72

recovering from the nuclear damage through actions suchas decontamination, radiation half-life, and naturalrecuperative powers of animals and plants for 32 yearssince the nuclear accident.It seems that the natural environment is gradually

getting back to what it was originally, but this is not thecase for everything. My interpreter was a medical studentin her 20s. Her father was born and raised in the currentrestricted area but was evacuated because of the nuclearpower plant accident. She was born after her father’sresettlement and did not suffer any effects from thenuclear accident. However, as a second-generationmember of the nuclear power plant accident victims,she felt anxious about her health because she has had afew fractures in her childhood. She even said that sheshould not have children after her marriage. Sheconfessed that this sense of anxiety about her healthand having children was related to the radiation. Thereremain unsolved problems about the effects of theradioactivity on human genes, although the research isongoing. Together with the scientific elucidation, wepresume that there are still unseen anxieties of theaffected people and from which they suffer. One can saythat this is a new problem that is emerging with time. A

preceding study by Kamite (2017) showed that thesecond generation of people who suffered from theatomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 feltanxiety as they linked their diseases to the atomic bombs.I think it is necessary to discuss the future psychologicalimpacts on the descendants of people affected by theFukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident by studying thenew problems, considering and relating the experiencesof previous cases.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI GrantNumber JP15K15815.

REFERENCES

International Atomic Energy Agency (2006). Environmentalconsequences of the Chernobyl accident and their remediation:Twenty Years of Experience. Austria: IAEA.

Kamite, Y. (2017). Prejudice and health anxiety about radiationexposure from second-generation atomic bomb survivors:results from a qualitative interview study. Frontiers inPsychology. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01462.

Figure 1 The university building located with Chernobyl area. Figure 2 Decommissioned Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant cov-ered by a dome.

Copyright © 2020 Disaster Nursing Global Leader Degree Program72

M. Naiki Health Emergency and Disaster Nursing (2020) 7, 71–72