Journey Back to Chernobyl

April 26, 2006 — -- It's one of the spookiest places I've ever been.

Haunted not just by the people who used to live there but also by the aspirations -- some would say hubris -- of the society they served.

For example, in Chernobyl a huge Russian sign stands in front of a row of pine trees on the road leading to the Dead Zone. It's an environmental slogan, left over from the Soviet era. "Trees are the lungs of the planet!" it says.

Now trees have this place almost all to themselves. The man-made catastrophe that happened here 20 years ago means it'll be thousands of years before this region is safe again for humans.

Finding Childhood Treasures

The children of Chernobyl are all grown up now. We met quite a few of them, all haunted in one way or another by the experience.

One of them, Nikolai Luchinsky, took us back to his family's old apartment in Pripyet, the small city that served as worker housing for the reactor.

He was 6 years old when he left this apartment, located less than a mile from the fire in Reactor 4 that was more radioactive than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

It was clear the family had left in a rush. On the windowsill were still the syringes full of medicine -- antidotes for radiation poisoning. On the walls of what used to be the kitchen were hot rod stickers Nikolai had put there 20 years ago, when he was 6. He showed us the secret shelf in his closet, where he used to hide his childhood treasures.

But much is gone, as the place has been picked over. Even though radioactive dust is everywhere, it hasn't kept looters away.

Nikolai posted his phone number on the wall of the apartment building, hoping some of his old friends would contact him. He hasn't heard from most of his friends since they were kids. He has no idea what's happened to them.

Another woman we met, named Tamara, was the same age as Nikolai. The 25-year old is now a schoolteacher and mother. And she has thyroid cancer, just diagnosed.

Calculating the Disaster

Thyroid cancer surged among the children of Chernobyl, because of their exposure to high doses of radioactive iodine. It's the only cancer with a proven link to Chernobyl, although doctors suspect new cases of leukemia, along with retinal tumors, are also results of the accident.

There is a fierce debate raging over just how deadly the disaster was. In the immediate aftermath, many predicted tens of thousands of deaths. But the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated recently that just 9,000 would die as a direct result of Chernobyl.

Others, including the environmental group Greenpeace, say the figure will easily be 10 times higher than that.

Doctors in Ukraine and Belarus -- the two countries hit with the highest concentration of fallout -- told us it's way too early to tell.

Cancer can have a slow fuse. Even two decades, they say, is not enough time to measure the impact.