What it’s like to...

Experience the aftermath of Chernobyl

Hervé Hacard
Rotary Club of Dinan, France

One evening in 2003, my wife, Annick, and I were having our usual chitchat about our workday. “By the way,” I said, “I need to leave for at least a couple of weeks on a mission.”

“Where to?” she asked.

“Chernobyl,” I replied.

“I only hope you know what you’re doing,” she said.

The company I worked for had been contracted to manage the aftermath of the worst disaster in civil nuclear history. On 26 April 1986, in northern Ukraine, multiple explosions and fire had destroyed the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere. We had been hired to safely store the used radioactive fuel at the site. However, after Ukrainians reported deficiencies in the process, the company assembled a team to evaluate the situation. I was the team leader.

The first of our four visits occurred in June 2003. We stayed in Slavutych, about 45 miles east of the power plant, a boomtown created to house evacuated personnel and workers employed in the cleanup, as well as some local residents displaced by the disaster. Seventeen years after the accident, the city already showed serious signs of dereliction. That summer, our hotel had hot water only on Thursdays.

Our work was complicated by the fact that, since the demise of the USSR, Belarus and Ukraine were no longer part of one country. Now a sliver of Belarus stood between Slavutych and Chernobyl, meaning we had to cross the border twice to get to our destination, adding three hours to our daily commute.

Chernobyl had become a unique ground for studies on decontamination. It is still a true open-air laboratory where we can examine the effects of radioactivity on the soil, plants, and animals. During our visit, we saw that nature had taken over what is called the exclusion zone. The vegetation had become extremely luxuriant, and it was teeming with deer, boars, wolves, and other wildlife.

We were able to visit three of the reactors; the fourth — the one that had exploded — was off-limits. I realized right away we would have been unable to do what the Soviets had done to handle the crisis. Safety concerns would not have allowed it. That kind of reckless behavior was still going on: An employee eager to show me some damaged liquid fuel lifted a steel door without wearing protective gloves.

The most moving moment came when we saw a plaque with the name of Valery Khodemchuk, a worker at Chernobyl who died instantly when the No. 4 reactor exploded. His was the first death, but it wouldn’t be the last. The operators in the control room did what they were supposed to do to deal with the accident. They had no idea what awaited them.

As told to Alain Drouot

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• Illustration by Sébastien Thibault

• This story originally appeared in the January 2020 issue of The Rotarian magazine.