Liquidator (Chernobyl)

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The drop of blood on the liquidators' medal, an appreciation of their work

Liquidator ( Russian : ликвида́тор, sometimes Germanized as “unwinding” or “eliminator”) is the name given to someone who worked to contain the disaster during and after the Chernobyl disaster in order to “liquidate” the ionizing radiation . They are also called "Chernobylez" (чернобылец, German: Chernobyler) in Russian.

Term and areas of activity

In a narrower sense, liquidators are the workers who had to remove highly radiating rubble and graphite blocks from the roof of the neighboring reactor block 3 , which had been thrown there by the pressure of the explosion in block 4. They replaced the German and Japanese robots that were first used for this purpose, but which failed because of the radiation, and were also referred to as "biorobots". Igor Kostin , who became known as the “Chernobyl photographer” and who, according to his own account, was there five times, later explained: “Because of the high radiation, they were only allowed on the roof for 40 seconds, threw a shovel of rubble down and came back ran back. They got a certificate, 100 rubles, and were sent away. "

But not only those employees are part of the field of activity, but also, in a broader sense, "starting with the immediate attempts to protect the damaged reactor through to the evacuation of the population and the washing of cities":

  • the personnel on duty in the reactor immediately during and after the disaster, such as the test leader Anatoly Djatlov ,
  • the 40 or so firefighters who were among the first to be called, including Vasily Ignatenko
  • a 300 person strong civil defense brigade from Kiev , which removed the contaminated soil,
  • the medical staff,
  • various workers and members of the military who carried out the cleaning and leveling work on the power plant site and in its contaminated area,
  • the construction workers who erected the sarcophagus over the exploded reactor 4,
  • Members of the troops and militia who controlled access to the complex and the exclusion zone and who regulated traffic,
  • Transport workers such as bus and truck drivers,
  • a group of miners who, by building a tunnel, prevented contaminated (extinguishing) water from entering the groundwater that supplied Ukraine and also prevented the fire water from colliding with the melting reactor core, which would otherwise have led to a steam explosion .
  • Hunters who killed contaminated animals so that they would not contaminate the helpers,
  • the helicopter pilot Nikolai Melnik , who placed sensors for measuring radiation on the ruins and repeatedly checked the radioactivity above the reactor, and the approximately 600 helicopter pilots who dropped tons of sand, lead, the mineral dolomite and the semi-metal boron above the destroyed block sticky, synthetic polymer- based binder , called “Burda” ( Russian бурда for “brew, broth”), sprayed around the damaged reactor. The latter measure should prevent radioactive dust from being blown away.

E. Cardis and others from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) specified the liquidators in a lecture on the occasion of the conference "One Decade After Chernobyl: Summing up the consequences of." Hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the Accident "from April 8 to 12, 1996 in Vienna as follows:

“The 'liquidators' (also referred to as cleanup or recovery workers): they include persons who participated in the cleanup after the accident (cleaning up the plant and its surroundings, construction of the sarcophagus, decontamination, building of roads, destruction and burial of contaminated buildings, forests and equipment), as well as many others, including physicians, teachers, cooks and interpreters who worked in the 'contaminated' territories. "

“The 'liquidators' (also referred to as cleaning and repair workers): This includes people who take part in cleaning after the accident (cleaning the facility and its surroundings, construction of the sarcophagus, construction of roads, demolition and storage of the contaminated buildings, forests and equipment), as well as many others including doctors, teachers, cooks and translators who worked in the 'contaminated' territories. "

Apart from the personnel already on site, the government of the former Soviet Union brought them together first from the Belarusian , Ukrainian and Russian Soviet republics and later from the entire national territory and were mostly young soldiers and reservists, but also forced laborers. Volunteers are also said to have registered.

Health aspects

Monument to the Liquidators in Kharkiv
Trumpeting angel , memorial at the liquidators cemetery in Chornobyl
The monument to those who saved the world is a monument to the liquidators erected in Chornobyl in 1996

According to the WHO, there were 600,000 to 800,000 liquidators. The soldiers on the roof were exposed to high radiation doses , the fire fighters and the helicopter pilots even extremely high . Up to 1996, 200,000 liquidators were registered in these states, most recently around 400,000. Around half of them were on duty without receiving any receipts. The report submitted by WHO on behalf of the IAEA takes into account the 200,000 liquidators who were on duty in 1986 and 1987. Those registered beyond this will not be considered. Official WHO figures speak of fewer than 50 direct deaths in 2005 (“fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster”). However, this figure is not only questioned by the German section of the International Doctors for the Prevention of Nuclear War ( IPPNW ) and the Society for Radiation Protection (GS). Edmund Lengfelder , Professor of Radiation Biology and Head of the Otto Hug Radiation Institute in Munich, estimates the total number of liquidators who have died so far at 50,000.

According to the governments of the current states concerned, Russia , Belarus and Ukraine , complete data are not always available even from the registered liquidators. The records of the registered Russian liquidators contain information on the radiation dose in 63% of the cases , those of the Ukrainian in 56% and that of the Belarusian liquidators in only 9% of the cases. We know from Ukraine that there are 17,000 families of liquidators who receive a (small) state pension. Many of the former liquidators still alive today still suffer from radiation sickness and have to undergo regular medical examinations.

According to the order U-2617 C of June 27, 1986 from III. Headquarters of the Ministry of Health of the Soviet Union on the increase in confidentiality measures for liquidation work at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant:

"The data on the accident are declared secret, the results on the healing of the diseases are declared secret, the data on the extent of radioactive irradiation of personnel who took part in the liquidation of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are declared secret."

- signed Schulschenko :

According to further government orders, acute and chronic illnesses of people who had taken part in the liquidation could not be linked to the effects of ionizing radiation if they had received a dose of less than 500  millisievert . With this in mind, only comparatively few radiation victims can be identified in Hiroshima and Nagasaki . There, radiation exposure was still underestimated decades after the atomic bombs were dropped. According to Edmund Lengfelder, who assumes a number of "800,000 mostly young soldiers", however, they received a radiation dose with "values ​​[n] up to 15,000 millisievert." In addition, it was decided to reduce the permissible radiation values ​​to around 40 to 50 Increase fold: "As a result, most of the people were declared healthy and discharged from hospitals without any treatment."

Artistic implementation

In addition to many documentations about the Chernobyl catastrophe, there are also artistic implementations with special attention to the work of the liquidators. The Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich wrote the drama Conversations with the Living and the Dead, for which she had spoken for several years with people for whom this catastrophe was the central event in their lives. The radio play adaptation by Frank Werner, directed by Ulrich Gerhardt , a production by Saarländischem , Norddeutschem , SFB-ORB and Westdeutschem Rundfunk from 1998 was voted radio play of the year in 1999.

Kilian Leypold dedicated his radio play Black Dog. Weißes Gras, a Bayerischer Rundfunk production from 2011 that takes up elements from Tarkowski's film Stalker , by the photographer Igor Kostin.

The German thrash metal band Pripjat , whose founders come from the Ukraine, dealt with the Chernobyl disaster in several songs. The piece Liquidators was the first demo of the band and was released in 2014 on the album Sons of Chernobyl .

In 2019 the HBO series Chernobyl was published, which impressively shows the work and the effects of the disaster.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "The True Story of Chernobyl (6/10)" and "The True Story of Chernobyl (7/10)" , YouTube, last accessed on March 20, 2011
  2. ↑ a b Book tip for the Kulturjournal program: “Der Tschernobyl -Fotograf”, NDR, March 14, 2011
  3. ↑ "Liquidators of Chernobyl" , YouTube with documentary recordings from the UK Horizons channel, last accessed on March 18, 2011 (English and Russian with English subtitles)
  4. ↑ a b Interview with radiation biologist Lengfelder: “Never again Sushi” , Frankfurter Rundschau , March 21, 2011, pp. 8 - 9, last accessed on May 16, 2011
  5. ↑ Anatoli Michailowitsch Ligun in defacto, hr-fernsehen from March 20, 2011. He used a unit to line the contaminated buildings with lead so that workers could clean them with brushes, buckets and shovels. According to Lengfelder, young men "also wandered through the towns, washed houses, scraped off paint and knocked off plaster in the hope of making the towns and villages habitable again."
  6. ↑ Leonid Khorz in culture Journal: "Life after the disaster", NDR, 21. March 2011
  7. ↑ "Chernobyl: Anatomy of a Catastrophe, p. 5" STERN.de, April 26, 2006, last accessed on October 29, 2011
  8. ↑ Constantin Seibt: They called themselves bio-robots . In: Tages-Anzeiger . March 28, 2011, ISSN  1422-9994 ( tagesanzeiger.ch [accessed June 12, 2019]).
  9. ↑ "Former Chernobyl Pilot Soars Above His Obstacles" ( Memento from March 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), St. Petersburg Times from May 31, 2005, last accessed on March 21, 2011 (English)
  10. ↑ a b “Chernobyl: Anatomy of a Catastrophe, p. 3” STERN.de, April 26, 2006, last accessed on October 29, 2011
  11. ↑ Влад Шурыгин (Wlad Shurigin): Чернобыль. История ликвидации. Редкие фотокадры. (Chernobyl. The story of liquidation. Rare snapshots.). April 26, 2011, accessed October 29, 2011 (Russian): “После эвакуации населения из поселка Припять ликвидаторы смывают смывают смывают, радиоактивну. Жидкость, которой поливали всю зараженную местность, называли «бурда». (German: "After the evacuation of the city of Pripyat, liquidators wash radioactive dust from the streets, trees and houses. The liquid that was spilled over the entire infested area was called 'Burda'.") "
  12. ↑ E. Cardis et al .: “Estimated Long Term Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident” , 1996, p. 3, last accessed on March 23, 2013 (PDF, 8.76 MB, English)
  13. ^ World Health Organization: "Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programs. Report of the UN Chernobyl Forum Expert Group 'Health' " , 2006, last accessed on March 23, 2013 (PDF, 1.58 MB, English)
  14. ↑ Federal Office for Radiation Protection : "The 1986 reactor accident in Chernobyl" , p. 16, last accessed on September 26, 2012 (PDF, 2.81 MB)
  15. ↑ WHO: "Chernobyl: the true scale of the accident" , September 5, 2005, last accessed on March 31, 2011 (English)
  16. ↑ German Section of International Doctors for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Society for Radiation Protection e. V .: "Health consequences of Chernobyl" , 2006, p. 10 (PDF, 473 kB)
  17. ↑ Ully Günther, Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen /gruene-thueringen.de: “20 years later” ( memento of October 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), last accessed on September 26, 2012
  18. ↑ Quotation in: E. Lengfelder: The importance of modifying factors for the collection, evaluation and dissemination of research results on the consequences of the reactor disaster in Chernobyl. Otto Hug Radiation Institute, Report No. 5, 1992, pp. 3-21.
  19. ↑ See also “We kill you very quietly” , conversation with nuclear physicist Wladimir Tschernosenko, SPIEGEL-Online of January 27, 1992, last accessed on April 19, 2011
  20. ↑ See also the comparison of radiation values ​​in millisievert (mSv) , SPIEGEL-Online, last accessed on May 16, 2011
  21. ↑ Deutsche Welle : "Chernobyl catastrophe: extent kept secret for years" , April 20, 2006, last accessed on April 10, 2011