Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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culty because much of the data was kept secret between one village
and the next, and even people who were generating data weren't
sure where it was going or what was happening to it. So I think a
lot of valuable information was lost.
There certainly is a residual major problem, particularly with
the thjn-oid, and that is that the thyroid damage will predominantly
be due to radioactive iodine, which has a very short half-life
about eight days—so that within several months after the accident,
it
was virtually impossible to make any measurements to discover
where the iodine had gone. The international group basically came
away and said, "Well, we know where the cesium is"—that s what
that map is — "but where the iodine went is another story." And
there were hundreds of thousands of measurements made of iodine
with completely different protocols, under completely different circumstances,
and the reliability of those is subject to significant
doubt.
So we don't know a lot because we weren't there early, and in
fact, the magnitude of this accident, I think, is an important problem,
and I think the distribution, as you can see from that map, is
a significant problem. The Soviets initially decided to evacuate the
30-lalometer zone, and if you get actually slightly more detailed
maps than the one that's up there, there are some places inside the
30-kilometer zone where there's very little radioactivity. So in fact,
one could be living, at least some spots, inside the 30-kilometer
zone and be getting less radiation than at some places 300 kilometers
from the accident.
Now, that, in the accident management scenario—and it's true
for the U.S. We have a 10-mile evacuation zone around our reactors.
Well, what this shows you is that if you have this type of accident,
it could go a long way and drop someplace where you're totally
unprepared, and in fact, you may end up evacuating people out
of a place that doesn't have much radioactivity and into a place
that does. And you're certainly subject to the vagaries of the
weather. We had that difficulty at TMI. I think at least on one day
at TMI, the wind changed on us 270 degrees. So evacuation is a
real problem.
Certainly the magnitude of this accident is a major problem, and
I don't think any country would have had the resources to deal
with this in what anybody would have liked to think of as an optimum
way. When one looks at distribution of potassium iodide to
block thyroid gland, less than 20 percent of the people in the contaminated
areas actually took any. But I'm not sure that we would
have had the resources to do it, either. We certainly don't have the
resources to handle measurements that quickly on that kind of a
geographical scale and in that kind of inhomogeneous fallout. So I
think it became quite clear that when you have this sort of a problem,
no country, including the U.S., can handle it alone, and an
international effort has to be done.
I think it's clear that the base line of health effects data before
the accident is extremely poor, and it wouldn't be too good in this
country, either. We don't go around doing hemoglobins on perfectly
normal children, or at least the ones that aren't complaining. And
if we went to a city or someplace in the United States and started
randomly doing blood testing, we'd find all sorts of things that