Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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information on the actual doses of radiation released, and the estimated exposures. '^
Due to lack of time, I
cannot dwell on all the details of the IAEA study, but we need to
draw atfention to the fact that the IAEA commission worked under circumstances
dictated by a secretive regime which had oversight authority over the Chernobyl
problem.
Just as the IAEA has had to abandon some of its
conclusions about the safety of
RBMK reactors,^" we are confident that the IAEA will also re-think some of Its conclusions
about the health situation in Ukraine, once its has reviewed new documents which were
not available at the time of its initial study. Let me just cite the following example;
In September of 1991 , (6 months after the IAEA report was completed), the office
of the federal prosecutor of the USSR addressed the sole of 47.5 thousand tons of meat,
and 2 million tons of milk produced between 1986-89 on contaminated territories.
Politburo's (secret) merruDrandum admits that the radioactivity of these products
substantially exceeded the maximum permissible limits which, in May of 1986, had been
relaxed by fifty-fold on the recommendation of the Soviet Health Ministry.^'
The
In another
of the Politburo's recently declassified protocols dated August 22, 1986, Izvestiya reveals
that the Soviet Health Ministry ordered some 10,000 tons of contaminated meat to be
distributed to meatpacking plants around the country, and "to use it for the preparation
of sausage products... at a ratio of one to ten with normal meat"." Yet the IAEA
concluded that "Doses actually received due to the ingestion of contaminated
foodstuffs was substantially lower than the prescribed intervention levels of dose,
typically by a factor of 2-4, and as a consequence, foodstuffs may have been
restricted unnecessarily. "^^
19 Ibid. , at p. 3: 'The International Chernobyl Project was not intended to have the rigor or the
comprehensive scope of an elaborate, long-term research study. Nor was it even remotely
intended to duplicate the voluminous existing assessments of the environmental contamination,
the radiation exposures of the population and possible health effects due to exposures resulting
from the accident...."
20 Marples, D.R.; "Chernobyl: Five Years Later*. Soviet Geography. May 1991. pp. 291-313. (See
especially subsection entitled: "A New Interpretation of the Accident", pp. 292-294. "Chernobyl's
'Shameless Lies'; Ex-Engineer Denounces Official History*, Michael Dobbs, The Washington Post,
April 27, 1992.
21 YaroshitTska, supra, Izvestiya, 'Forty Secret Protocols.. .'
22 Ibid. It is interesting to note that the protocol specifically excluded meatpacking plants in
the Moscow area from receiving a fair share of the contaminated meat.
23 International Advisory Committee, supra, at 43.