A Child of Chernobyl – Growing Up in the Aftermath of Nuclear Disaster

On April 26, 1986, when I was about four and a half years old, reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine exploded. This was before the age of instant information, and the world did not find out what had happened until days later. The winds were blowing westward that day, bringing nuclear debris with it all the way to my native Sweden. The impact we saw was of course nothing compared to the devastation in the immediately surrounding areas, but still enough to affect a whole generation. My mother does not recall if we were out in the radioactive rain that day, but many people who were may have gotten very sick.

View of Chernobyl power plant taken from the roof of a building in Pripyat, Ukraine. Photo by Jason Minshull (Wikimedia Commons).

Four hundred times more radioactive material was released in the Chernobyl explosion than by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the fallout was detected over all of Europe except for the Iberian Peninsula. The seriousness of it all alluded me at the time — perhaps not strangely since I was not yet five years old — but I can’t recall that my parents or any other adults ever really talked about it either. Except for one thing: “don’t eat the blueberries!” That’s what the adults always said to us kids as we got ready to go off and play in the woods (which kids actually did—unsupervised—at that point in time). We never really thought about why this was and every now and then, as kids do, we would eat a few blueberries just to see what would happen. Radioactivity did not sound like a dangerous thing to us, quite the opposite — maybe we’d glow in the dark!

I can’t recall that my parents or any other adults ever really talked about the impact of the Chernobyl disaster. Except for one thing: “don’t eat the blueberries!”

I now know that, because of their thin skin, blueberries are particularly good at sucking up toxins, which includes not only radioactivity but also pesticides, a good reason to always buy organic ones. I’ve never had my radioactive levels tested or experienced any symptoms, but it scares me to think about how narrow-minded our view of this nuclear disaster seems to have been. The blueberries weren’t the only thing we should’ve avoided — wild mushrooms, fish from lakes, wild game, and, really, anything that grows or lives in lakes and forests had elevated levels of radiation making them unfit for consumption. In some areas, this is still true today.

The Pripyat funfair was due to be opened on May 1st. The Chernobyl disaster happened April 26th, soo one ever managed to ride the ferries wheel. It remains one of the most irradiated parts of Pripyat since the disaster, making it still dangerous today. Photo by Vivo (Ben).

A study made by scientists at Linköping and Örebro University and published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 2004 was the first to show a clear correlation between cancer rates and nuclear fallout. The study followed over a million Swedes who lived in the affected areas and showed that all types of cancers increased significantly, along with malignancies of already existing cancers. The particularly disturbing fact is that we still don’t really know, since these effects can take many years to develop. The half-life of radioactive Caesium is thirty years, and the Chernobyl disaster happened only 25 years ago.

When the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were flooded after the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit on March 11 of this year, the whole world was standing by, unable to do anything but watch, wait and hope that the Japanese Government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company would be able to divert a complete catastrophe.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Credit: Digital Globe (Wikimedia Commons).

People as far away as California stocked up on iodine and fled from coastal areas in fear of elevated levels of radiation. Were they exaggerating or had we in Sweden not realized just how serious the effects of Chernobyl would be? I don’t know how growing up in the aftermath of nuclear disaster has affected me. Radiation outlives us by thousands of years, so there’s really no way of knowing for sure. We know that instances of cancer in Sweden have increased dramatically since, something I have had the misfortune to experience up-close. Is that a result of Chernobyl or could it be because we’ve changed the way we live and eat so dramatically? Will we ever know?

A Ukrainian tourist visits the site of Chernobyl. For the first time in 25 years, official tours are being formed. Credit: VOA Photo / D. Markosian (Wikimedia Commons).

The burning question is: should we follow Germany’s lead and ban nuclear power until we are able to make it safer? Will we ever be able to make it safer? What are the alternatives? I feel like all I have are a lot of questions longing to be answered, questions I never asked myself before Fukushima reminded us all of the dangers of nuclear radiation. Maybe I should have asked more questions back in 1986?

The author, in a photo taken in 1986, roughly around the time the Chernobyl disaster occurred.

We often think that what happens in another part of the world is someone else’s problem — that things like environmental degradation and poor pollution oversight in Asia will somehow not affect us. That could not be further from the truth. Earth is round, and we are all share this delicate eco-system, for better or for worse. “What goes around comes around,” quite literally. When highly toxic levels of mercury is found in pristine lakes in vast nature preserves and birds on the most remote island in the world are starving to death because they have ingested too much plastic that have filled their bellies, we have to recognize the wake-up call and start thinking more holistically. Remember, those elevated cancer levels in the study mentioned above occurred nearly a thousand miles from the Ukraine, on the other side of the Baltic Sea. When we don’t know, shouldn’t we always choose the safer route?

Laws only apply on a country-by-country basis, and perhaps that’s where we got it wrong. Since the Earth belongs to everyone and no one, shouldn’t we treat the laws that govern it as such? Imagine if there was something like the UN designed to care for the planet? Maybe then these kinds of disasters could finally be a thing of the past. Our main responsibility, after all, is to protect the children of the future.