Chernobyl

Chapter 37

The gull-winged TWA airline terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport is not only an architectural spectacle, it is huge. It has its own customs and immigration facilities for passengers arriving from abroad. That relieves crowding, and that's a good thing. The United States is not the easiest country in the world to enter. The customs searches can be very thorough. Foreign nationals must have visas and health cards, and sometimes they are subjected to considerable questioning about their politics and their possible criminal records. Sometimes they are even turned back at the airport and must reboard their plane for its return flight. For many years, even returning American citizens had to spend eternities of time in the long lines, but because so many American voters complained to so many American congressmen, it has now been made easier for Americans to get back into their country; they pass by the immigration desks completely, and even at customs if they say they have nothing to declare they are generally waved through. But not always; and those who are asked to step into another room are sometimes in for an ordeal.

When Dean and Candace Garfield were politely invited out of the line at the customs counter, the shock was nasty. "But we've written everything down on the form," Garfield expostulated. "We haven't even talked to the customs officer yet."

Then he caught sight of his network's New York publicity chief coming toward him with a young woman and a uniformed U.S. Immigration Service official, and Garfield relaxed. "Leave the bags," the man urged, grinning. "Bobbi here will schlepp them through, we've got something else going for you."

The something else turned out to be a little room where a government doctor with a finger-pricking blood sample needle waited for them. Just outside, there were half a dozen newspaper and network people eager to talk, first of all, to celebrities, and, even more, to celebrities who had been near the Chernobyl disaster; and that night the Garfields had the pleasure of seeing themselves on the six o'clock news.

"I should've had my hair done in Paris," Candace fretted.

Her husband, switching channels, said loyally, "You look gor-geous, gorgeous. And, Jesus, he even got us on CBS. Look!"

And there they were. Of course, they got less time than they had been given on their own network, but nevertheless Garfield saw himself once more grinning at the camera and saying, "The doctor says we've got traces of, what do you call it, tellurium and some other 'urium' from the explosion. But so does everybody in the Ukraine. It isn't very much, and we don't have to worry about it. And, yes, the people in Kiev are all doing fine. They've got it all cleared up, far as we could see, though, of course, they're kind of worried about the future. But he— But heck, who isn't?"

"They left out that whole part where I was talking about Comrade Tanya," Candace complained as the newscaster switched to a "related subject."

Her husband said, "Hold it a minute, I want to hear this." The "related subject" was a story about a news conference called by the'American Association of Nuclear Engineers.

They gave the spokesman more time than they had given the Garfields, as he explained that what had happened in Chernobyl couldn't possibly happen here. Yes, there had been accidents in America in the past — little ones; really, only technical mishaps, if you looked at them impartially and if you weren't one of those antinuclear freaks. And certainly nobody had been hurt in any American nuclear accident. Well, very few people, anyway. Yes, it was true that the Chernobyl reactor did in fact turn out to have a containment shell, despite what had been said earlier, but it was rectangular rather than a dome. Yes, all right, at the time of Three Mile Island the authorities had released no information at all on the accident for several days, too, and maybe the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had expressed an irritated wish that sometimes the freedom of the press wasn't observed quite so faithfully in the United States — yes, all right, the man finished, obviously growing annoyed, there were plenty of little nitpicking arguments that could be made against American nuclear power by the Jane Fondas and the people who loved whales. That was certainly their privilege.

But nevertheless it couldn't happen here, and what happened at Chernobyl just showed that the Russians couldn't be trusted with high technology. Their management practices were abysmal. The people in charge at Chernobyl were undoubtedly in bad trouble, and they deserved to be!

"Christ," said Garfield, switching again but getting nothing but the weather report. "I don't like the sound of that. I hope Cousin Simyon's all right."

"I wish I'd worn the blue dress," said his wife.

There was one other "related subject" that didn't get covered on the newscast, although Garfield's clipping service faithfully passed it on to him from the next day's paper. The story came from France, where at the nuclear reprocessing plant in Cap La Hague five workers had received radiation exposure — one of them five times the permitted annual dose— when radioactive liquid leaked from a pipe.

It wasn't much of a story in America. It wasn't even taken very seriously in France, except at one newspaper office, where an enterprising reporter had uncovered something considerably more worrisome. It seemed that earlier that year another French reactor had gone critical when its pumps failed because it lost electrical power on its primary circuits. That was bad enough, but things got worse when they tried to avert total meltdown by switching to the backup diesel generators. The first generator failed. The second was the last resort.

As it happened, the second generator worked. With its electrical power the meltdown was averted. The Frenchmen managed to shut down their errant reactor without catastrophe. They swore a bit, and one or two of them went home to change their underwear; that was all.

That wasn't much of a story, either, because it had a happy ending… except for the fact (as the reporter told his editor) that it had been really very lucky for France that the accident had happened on a warm spring day. The second generator had also been diesel powered, and in cold weather, the workers at the plant admitted, the diesels generally refused to start at all.