Unsanitized: Chernobyl and Disaster Response

The Soviet state lied relentlessly, but they did solve the problem. Our pandemic response, by contrast, has faded away. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for June 7, 2020.

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First Response

Like many others with nothing to do, quarantine has been a time to catch up on light, escapist entertainment, like the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which I missed during its debut. Now every indication of this treatment of the world’s greatest nuclear disaster is that it’s a practiced fiction, inventing characters and devising climactic scenes that never happened. But the docudrama does get at least one conclusion right: all of Europe is spared from radiation poisoning, a real possibility in the early hours of the explosion. The exclusion zone, which could have been a large chunk of the continent, was confined to 30 kilometers in every direction. The water supply for much of Europe was preserved.

Watching the series during the outbreak was I imagine a different experience than watching it when it premiered a year ago. The initial watchers focused on the web of Soviet lies: lies to their own people, to the international community, to their network of scientists and reactor operators. I was more interested in the methodical way in which the state prevented a wider disaster, mustering whatever manpower or equipment needed (all the liquid nitrogen in the country at one point) to drain the reservoir under the reactor, tunnel underneath to build a new cooling system, remove the graphite from the roof, and contain the plant inside a new structure.

This was carried out through trial and error and improvised problem-solving, where scientists drove the policy and the government served as the distributor of whatever was needed. I’m sure the series’ foregrounding of Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) and the fictional Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) made them look more in charge than reality; party apparatchik Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) is portrayed as a functionary, the muscle for a project driven by brainpower. 

Read all of our Unsanitized reports

But the end result did follow the script, as the reactor was contained. This came at great and really unknown cost to human life; the largest estimate of the dead from Chernobyl is 93,000 (the official and laughable Soviet death toll remains 31), and there’s no question that the errors in the Soviet system that led to the explosion and the delays in evacuation as the party leadership clamped down on disclosure were responsible for that loss of life. Furthermore, the disaster response itself, while facing truly difficult odds, was at least centralized enough to get your arms around: the danger lay at one site, in one reactor, which needed to be disarmed and housed.

As we sit here with over 110,000 dead from the coronavirus just in the United States, and over 400,000 worldwide, I look at this sustained commitment from the Soviet state and can’t help but compare it to our response to a slower moving disaster (though obviously greater in scope and landmass). Listening to scientists doesn’t appear to have been a great feature of this moment. The early inability in the U.S. to test for the virus, even those traveling in from known hotspots abroad, and the complete failure of the tracing system, were unforgivable developments. A catastrophe that has already breached Chernobyl’s worst estimated impact has yet to fully resolve, and yet our country has all but reopened. The task force entrusted with crisis response has effectively disbanded. Cities and states have no coordinated authority at the federal level to assist them. Trump’s team is explicitly walking away from the virus. Dr. Fauci is a nice interview get rather than a driver of decision-making.

It would have been unthinkable a year ago to describe Chernobyl, of all things, as an example of competent crisis response. And I don’t want to diminish its importance and effect. But even amid propaganda and lies, the Russians cleaned up their mess. We’re crossing our fingers that it doesn’t get worse.

Today I Learned

  • The unemployment rate for African Americans went up in a month with an increase of 2.5 million jobs. (Vox)
  • Bank branches have become ghost towns and many will be closed as online banking predominates, further exacerbating the digital divide. (Wall Street Journal)
  • Hospitals are also struggling as people shun potential vectors for viral spread. Closures will also hurt poor communities. Sensing a pattern? (CNBC)
  • AstraZeneca is looking to buy Gilead Sciences, maker of potential COVID-19 treatment remdesivir. (Bloomberg)
  • How Iceland beat the coronavirus. (The New Yorker)
  • Views of policing fall by double digits in a week. (USA Today)
  • Facemasks are a fashion statement now. (Wall Street Journal)

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