What HBO’s Chernobyl didn’t show you about air pollution
By: Dyson On
Tags: Health, Television, Chernobyl, HBO, Air Pollution

Chances are you’re now up to date on HBO’s Chernobyl (incidentally IMDB’s highest-rated show of all time). Detailing the fallout from the 1986 explosion of reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat in what was the Ukrainian SSR, the show offers a bleak and apocalyptic insight into the raw power of nuclear energy and its devastating and unprecedented impact on the lives of those called upon to help contain the disaster. From firefighters being broken down at a cellular level to villages full of infected dogs being exterminated, it’s grim viewing, to say the least. Warning, unless you are a history or air pollution nut; there are spoilers ahead.

But one aspect HBO’s limited series doesn’t quite have the scope to explore fully is how the spread of airborne radioactive particles actually made the Chernobyl disaster one of the worst air pollution incidents in history.

Naturally, while our concern about air pollution is relatively modern, the problem itself has been building for a long time with over a century of industrialisation, deforestation and population booms across the globe adding to the issue.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 91% of us breathe in polluted air on a daily basis, leading to the premature deaths of 7 million people per year. Meanwhile, a UK-based study published in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters attributes one in 20 deaths to pollution-related causes — costing £40 billion per year.

Throw a nuclear reactor explosion into the mix, and you’re lighting the fuse on a deadly series of events…

A Soviet rescue worker digging through rubble after the reactor meltdown | Photograph © HBO

The Spread Of Radiation

There’s a brief mention in the HBO show that the Chernobyl Disaster first became known to the outside world three days after the disaster when a spike in airborne radiation levels was detected by researchers at Sweden’s Forsmark power station almost 1,000 miles away.

Research since the incident suggests that the radioactive particles not only spread northward across Scandinavia, but eastward across Russia, before eventually encompassing the entirety of Europe. With radioactive particles borne by air currents, researchers estimate the radioactive plume released from the reactor explosion eventually contributed to over 16,000 deaths across Europe — raising concerns about the low official death toll of just 31.

And the effects are still being felt; with researchers at Sweden’s Linköping University attributing over 1,000 cancer-related deaths in Northern Sweden to the direct effects of the Chernobyl Disaster between 1986 and 1999. According to lead scientist Martin Tondel, northern cities such as Gävle and Umeå were particularly afflicted.

“This is a follow up to our previous studies, which showed that out of 22,400 cases of cancer, 849 were directly related to radiation until 1996,” he said.

Data for the rest of Europe is hard to come by, but one thing experts can agree on is that the former Soviet Union is the area worst affected by the Chernobyl fallout. According to a WHO study, around five million people lived in areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine with dangerous levels of radioactive particles (as of 2006). Among them, about 270 000 people continue to live in particularly dangerous areas classified by Soviet authorities as ‘Strictly Controlled Zones’.

The report goes on to say that while many people in the infected areas received low doses, many people ingested radioactive particles through infected milk, which had a particularly significant effect on their thyroid glands leading to a large increase in the incidence — up to 4,000 new cases — of thyroid cancer among those who were children or adolescents at the time of the accident. The good news is to date the thyroid cancer survival rate among these people is 99% (according to a UN report).

A doctor inspecting an afflicted rescue worker in the TV show | Photograph © HBO

The Bridge Of Death

One of the most desolate scenes of the HBO series is the residents of Pripyat watching the power plant fire from a nearby bridge. As the graphite fire rages against the night, the citizens look up in awe and children play in the snow-like ash floating down from the heavens. This bridge became known as The Bridge of Death and while those watching the fire from it certainly exposed themselves to huge levels of radiation, there is little evidence that they all died — as per the HBO show.

“People talk about the “bridge of death,” about the idea that a load of residents of Pripyat went out to stand on this railway bridge, which stood at the top of Lenina Prospekt, the main boulevard into the city, and watched the burning reactor from that standpoint. And that, in the subsequent years, every person who stood on that bridge died,” explains author Adam Higginbotham in an interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to promote his new book Midnight in Chernobyl.

But, in Higginbotham’s extensive research, he didn’t find a single scrap of evidence that the residents had gone out to the bridge, or that any of them had died as a result. “I could find no evidence of that…I spoke to a guy who was seven or eight at the time, who did indeed cycle over to the bridge to see what he could see at the reactor, which was only three kilometres away. But he’s not dead. He’s apparently perfectly healthy,” Higginbotham explains.

The majority of the 28 people who died in the immediate aftermath of the plant explosion were fire and rescue workers, not civilians. Over 50,000 people were excavated from Pripyat, but there is little information on how many later developed serious illnesses or died as a result of their exposure on the night of the fire.

Another person who was actually there on the night was Pasha Kondratiev who watched the fire from the bridge with his wife and daughters. Speaking to The Guardian in 2016, Kondratiev had this to say:

“I could see the ruins of the reactor. It was completely destroyed and there was a cloud of smoke coming from it. Nobody gave us any information, but we knew it was serious. We knew it was something terrifying.”

Seven years later one of Kondratiev’s daughters collapsed and died in the street from complications related to asthma, which Kondratiev’s wife Natasha links to Chernobyl, although, she acknowledges with what must be acute frustration, that “no one can say for sure.”

The mini-series Chernobyl is available on Sky on demand and NOW TV in the UK & IRE. It is available on HBO in the US | Photograph © HBO

Animal Kingdom

As mentioned, one of the most touching episodes of the HBO show dealt with the round-up and extermination of contaminated animals, from an old woman’s milking cow to thousands of pet dogs left abandoned post evacuation.

Animals weren’t the only victims. A 10km ring of forest around Chernobyl was killed by acute radiant poisoning carried on the air. Known as the Red Forest, the trees were bulldozed and buried along with animal carcasses.

Meanwhile, many animals born in the area in the decades since the disaster have displayed numerous physical abnormalities, while invertebrate populations have significantly decreased. As most of the remaining radioactivity is located in the top layer of the soil — where invertebrates live and lay their eggs — many have died off, with negative implications for the entire ecosystem around Chernobyl.

Elsewhere in Europe, air-born radiation had a knock-on effect on health and the local economy. In Sweden and Finland fish from deepwater lakes were banned from resale. Also in Sweden, several areas of countryside around Gävle were cordoned off in the Eighties with residents evacuated and unable to sell their assets. Martina Krüger, a Greenpeace specialist on energy and climate explained that in recent years hunters around Gävle have caught moose carrying an exceptionally high amount of radiation.

As of 2019, animals in 37 Norwegian municipalities are subject to radiation testing before being deemed safe for slaughter. And, in the UK, radiation leached into the soil through rainfall is thought to have affected 10,000 Welsh farms and four million sheep with similar restrictions across Cumbria and Scotland. Ten years after the disaster, in 1996, Welsh sheep were still failing radiation tests.

Much like the human cost of Chernobyl, it is unclear when animals and plant life across Europe will be free of radiation. What is clear is that the impact of the Chernobyl Disaster is going to impact European life for the next few decades at least, making it one of the most significant — and harmful — air pollution incidences in modern history.