The Silkwood Project

JL: That’s really depressing. Did he leave any kind of note?

Adi Roche: He left a very very long statement and the final lines of the statement said this, and this is the exact quote, “no task is more pressing or more noble than that of the prevention of nuclear annihilation”. 

The BBC did a tremendous documentary about this guy, and I just cried the whole way through when I saw it, because they re-enacted like a docudrama all the time when he went to Europe and what happened down at the reactor and all the heroism of the people, like you know when you had the firefighters.

JL: You mean 911?

Adi Roche: Yes. I get a lump in my throat even thinking about these guys in Chernobyl.  When you think about how they self sacrificed and how they self sacrificed particularly for Europe; because when the Academy of Sciences in the first forty-eight hours after the accident, they were able to project - given the readings and the information they were getting from the site – they knew that they were near what they knew in nuclear terms – a critical mass happening; and that would have caused a second explosion and that would have literally declared all of Europe a dead zone and it would have very seriously contaminated the rest of the world.  But these guys actually self sacrificed and you know, 25,000 of them died afterwards.  Nobody talks about them. 

 

 

Belarussian liquidator Nikadai Yanchin  Photo. © Paul Fusco
 

JL:  That's truly terrible. True heroes. What are they these guys called again?

Adi Roche:  They’re called the liquidators.  These men are absolutely heroes.  In modern times we very rarely talk about people that we consider in our life times to be heroes or heroines.  But these guys were heroes and I have met with so many of them and it’s a privilege.  Some of them that have survived feel so abandoned by the world.  They have been discarded by their own societies because they are no longer of any use, but they sacrificed in order to go in to the tunnel under the reactor to stabilize it in order that the convulsing reactor, as it was then, which indeed stabilized the foundation.  It was an extraordinary task; to put a cooling system in to prevent the critical mass from happening.  The scientists were able to predict even the date when this would happen, down to within 24 hours.  They reckoned I think it was about the 8^th of May 1986.  It was literally to the wire.

 

Photo. Igor Kostin. Liquidators  www.elenafilatova.com

 

JL: That’s unreal.

Adi Roche:   It was something like the 7^th of May and I write about that in the Liquidator chapter; but these guys literally on the 7^th of May managed to stabilize the reactor; and none of us were aware of it.  None of us.  We were oblivious.  There should be monuments to these guys.  The awful thing is these guys were given no protective clothing.  They went home.  They were deemed to secrecy and all of that and they went home and they created loving acts with their partners and wives and everything and unfortunately they passed on the radioactivity.

Some of the horror stories of what happened genetically to the children of these men would be enough to move the hardest heart.  John, it’s just extraordinary.  If you read it or if you saw it in a science fiction movie and you’ld say “well, Jesus, thank goodness to God, that’s not true – you know it’s only science fiction; but actually it is much worse than science fiction, believe me.  Even going around the dead cities of places like Pripyat – which is a modern city – I did a lot of filming work there last year for the 20^th anniversary and I never cease to be chilled by it when I go there,  because when you look at it; the difference between there and the thousand year old villages – which are beautifully quaint and medieval and everything (and that’s a different kind of loss); but what’s weird about the modern city of Pripyat (it’s only say 30 years old – so it was built with sort of a plan; it was built with confidence – the oldest person there was like 30).  This was a town of like 40,000 young people, young families.  Vibrant, alive, cinemas, cafes, theatres, everything.   Magnificent square, huge playground; everything on a grand scale.  And to see that empty now – you just say – Oh my God – and all these people just scattered to the four winds. 

 

JL: Yes.

Adi Roche: So I say to people, look it isn’t always about dead bodies; it isn’t always about grotesque deformities; we’re asking the wrong questions. We’re looking in the wrong places. We need to look at this with new eyes with new questions because we have never experienced anything like this in the history of mankind before.  There are times when I get almost frustrated with some of the kinds of questions, from journalists – how many people died? How many will die? Is this or that cancer definitely caused by radiation? What is Chernobyl? How much radiation were you exposed to? Show me the evidence because you look too healthy.  And in a sense, some of these questions – they don’t have specific answers or answers that don’t satisfy neat logic because we are seeking absolutes in situations where there are no absolutes.  No definitive answers because we are asking the wrong questions.  Sometimes people have this expectation of the grotesque, of the distorted, of the deformed and with no realization that what they’re doing is putting the burden of proof, if you like, on radiation related injuries, onto the victims. 

JL:  Yes it is.

Adi Roche; As long as we continue to seek only logical neat answers, we will be diverted from the truth and from that picture of human and ecological frailty which is showing us how delicately balanced the inter-relationship between man and nature really is.  How precarious that balance has become in the hands of man.  The reality will continue to allude us until we face up to this new understanding which really, John, does require a new courage, a new bravery and a new open heart.

JL:  Adi, You mentioned the sarcophagus earlier and that they are planning to work on it.  What is that situation like today?  Is there any plan at this point for people to work on it, and how would they even work on it?   I mean, wouldn’t they be in the same situation as the liquidators all over again?

Adi Roche; Yes, that’s a very good question.  I throw my eyes to heaven when I hear them talking about solutions for the sarcophagus.  Whatever solution they’re going to come up with is already 21 years too late.  The debris that’s there – the radioactivity, like has longevity of hundreds of thousands of years.  We have to first of all look at how they are going to decontaminate it, decommission it; because nobody has.  We haven’t developed the technology, the wherewithal to do that yet.  And neither have we as human beings, by the way, developed a resistance to natural or to man-made radioactivity.  The plan now is, or supposed to be, and I say supposed to be, as the plans keep changing; the EBRD, which is the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, they are supposed to be putting a new sarcophagus plan together.  It is going to be a gargantuan task.  Just imagine this from an engineering feat.  It is going to the largest movable structure ever built; and that’s period – EVER BUILT.  It’s going to be a 20,000 ton steel shell and if the plan is successful – and it’s only an if – because we only know that it’s a model at the moment; it’s going to be the height of a 35 story building and inside robotic cranes, because you know where possible, live workers will have to then begin the process of prying apart that wreckage and removing the material.

 

JL: How much will this cost?

Adi Roche;  I don’t know, it’s going to cost over a billion and they also have to design a way of getting water in there to keep down the dust  for almost a hundred years. They’ve got to get a water system working in there which is going to have to last a hundred years. Can you imagine it - inside; because it’s such a huge construction.  It’s actually going to have it’s own micro-climate because it is going to be so big that it will rain inside of it.  So now they have to develop a process of using some kind of natural air current system which will somehow keep the moisture levels down.  I mean, we’re talking very much in the science fiction futuristic terms because we genuinely don’t know what is going to happen inside that and yet, it has to happen, because you know there’s just too much at risk. 

So basically, we’re hoping that this will be done in the next year or two.  Every single deadline that they have given us for the sarcophagus, they have missed and they have argued about.  And because it has never been done before, and it has to last for a hundred years, we have to be so extra careful because there’s so many possibilities of what they call – a chain reaction can happen inside the sarcophagus; and already there’s a guy called professor Alexei Yablakov and he’s a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and he states that on several occasions on working there that they have seen this luminescence characteristic, which is a characteristic of a chain reaction inside there. What he is afraid of is that if it happens, that it will shoot up about 1.5 kilometers  into the atmosphere - an uncontrollable radioactive plume.

 

 

JL:  Like before; will it be another Chernobyl or even worse?

Adi Roche: Oh, it would be worse, because there’s so much left in there.  You know, it’s just an extraordinary unpredictable scenario.  And of course, the other scenario since 9/11; Chernobyl is an ideal – if you have the mind of some crazy person that’s looking for a really heavy target that wants to wipe out Europe for some reason or other, it would be a fantastic target, because of what it has inside of it – the lethality.  You could cause mega deaths by just an absolute crash in the right place, in a sarcophagus that’s already crumbling, that’s already structurally very weak, into one of these hole areas.  It’s not rocket science.  All it takes is a mad man or two and we know from 9/11 that these kind of things can happen. 

Plutonium

 

JL.  Exactly.

Adi Roche:  So we are by no means safe in relation to the sarcophagus right now.

JL.  There’s 216 tons of uranium left there, approximately?

Adi Roche: Yes, on page 84 of the book; I talk about how locked inside lies 30 tons of highly contaminated dust, 16 tons of uranium and plutonium and 200 tons of radioactive lava.  Wow; I mean we’re talking about a radioactive soup here.  Beyond anything that you could ever possibly imagine and actually there’s also the weight of something like 2000 cubic meters of water and that lodges every year to sub the holes and this is what they call radio-active soup.   So we’re talking about like any number of things which have the lethality of  beyond any Armageddon that you’ve ever seen in any movie in your worst case nightmare.

JL:  Honestly, it just sounds like an apocalypse waiting to happen.

 

Adi Roche:  Isn’t it.  Do you remember during the days when people were campaigning against nuclear weapons against the arms race; do you remember a black and white movie  came out which was banned by the BBC; it was made by hand held cameras and ordinary actors and actresses.

It was an enactment of a nuclear bomb dropped say in London.  Do you remember it? It was a classic.

JL: Yes I do, remember people were really freaking out over it, but don’t remember the name of it.

Adi Roche:  We used to show it to people just to let them know that this could happen.  There was, The Day After and then there was the China Syndrome.  None of them in their wildest imaginings could any of the directors or the writers of any of those films, or doomsday scenarios ever have imagined the actual reality.  To make you go gray, I swear to God, there’s times I say to myself, am I in a nightmare, have I just been having a nightmare, that I’m just not waking from? 

 

From the War Game by Peter Watkins. This film was banned for 20 years .

See film The War Game here

The Black Hills of South Dakota

www.defendblackhills.org

JL: What about depleted uranium?

Adi Roche:  When we had the Iraq war in the early 90s and I was looking sort of the effects of the depleted uranium and the uranium tipped weapons and we were starting to see some of the similar effects on the children.  And you see, uranium is uranium; radiation is radiation; whether it comes from a uranium tipped weapon or whether it comes from an exploded nuclear reactor.  It is still the same lethal material.  Even if we were to leave it in the ground forever and not touch it. It’s still  as dangerous because it leaks into the – I mean we all know that even from the Black Hills of South Dakota and the various testing grounds in the Nevada Deserts and the Aboriginal grounds in Australia and we know from Tahiti and all those places where the French did nuclear weapons testing; the lethality of what they leave behind goes on forever.

I was even just thinking back even those nuclear explosions that went on in the 50s and 60s, when the Americans were testing in the Pacific, how the Island Bikini even got its name was when they blew the center out of an entire island and just leaving a top and a bottom and eventually – the bikini island.  That’s where the bikini swimsuit actually got its name from that. 

JL: Yes. I can just imagine all the wild life, fauna, exotic birds, and little creatures that were incinerated, when they did that?  When you think about it the concept of a bikini, its really ugly isn’t it?

Adi Roche:  Yes, you know it kind of leaves such a bad taste when you think what has happened to some of these islands all that time.  I often remember when I was trying to wonder when Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, the fathers of the atomic age, what were they thinking of, what kind of men were they, and I just discovered some extraordinary insightful things about both of them. 

JL: Adi, that's interesting you say that, I've been thinking a lot about these men myself lately. Must have been hard living with that on their conscience.

Adi Roche:  Albert Einstein, this is a beautiful quote from him, “the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe."  And in that quote, he foresaw what was going to happen, at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Islands, the Nevada Desert, the Black Hills of Dakota.  He foresaw, and he foresaw Chernobyl, he just didn’t know when it was going to happen; but he did.  And so did Oppenheimer.  These were guys that were in the McCarthy era, were queried, who were run into the ground; who were castigated, and like had trumped up charges of being called communists and godless, traitors and like everything else.  These guys actually did see what they had helped to create but it was too late and when they couldn’t get their science back from the hands of the military at that time it was too late. 

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