 You know, we are all ignorant in this matter. We have been told many times about mili-curie, run-t-in, mili-run-t-in, rem, whatever, the units, but we don't know anything. Well, I know that radiation is bad for health. Even low doses affect health. I read about it in the local paper. I'm not afraid either of radiation or anything else in the world. What can I know about it when science knows to leak about it? Panic was tremendous because of radiation. No one could judge what harm it can do and what happens afterwards. People just abandon their houses and go away. I plan to leave if I have a chance. Find a better job. These people live in cities, towns, and villages, in what became known as areas affected by the Chernobyl accident. These affected areas stretch over parts of territories of the Ukraine, Yellow Russia, and the Russian Federation. All in all, there are some 2,700 settlements with a combined population of about 1 million people. The ill-fated fourth unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been sealed by a sarcophagus. But nonetheless, many concerns and fears exist about immediate and long-term effects of Chernobyl fallout. In October 1989, the Soviet government asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out an assessment of the radiological consequences in the Soviet Union of the Chernobyl accident, as well as an assessment of the protective measures they had taken to protect the population. The response was an international effort carried out by almost 200 scientists from 24 countries. The geography of the project covered affected areas in the three Soviet republics. In the years since the accident, a considerable amount of data on environmental contamination had been collected. And this data served to determine exact locations for the fieldwork. The job of the experts here, as in many other locations, was to measure air and soil contamination. The necessary instrumentation was brought along. Delicate instruments did most of the job and did it well. But there was some muscle work, too. In order to form a representative picture of overall contamination, the number of soil and grass samples ran into hundreds. The grass, sealed in plastic bags together with other samples, traveled to laboratories in various countries for scrupulous analysis. The experts went to selected locations, but they were not restricted in their movement or work. They carried on their activities, as required by the project, and were willingly admitted into public places and individual homes. Moreover, as in this kindergarten, they were specifically asked to take measurements. Savici, some 40 kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Quite high contamination levels were expected in this village. But a visitor to Savici is surprised to see that in spite of radiation, life still goes on here. The villagers showed keen interest in the fieldwork done by the experts. The local people had been relocated soon after the accident, but the majority had come back disregarding the official ban. It seems that nothing could waver the determination of these people to stick to their traditional way of life and their homes. As for the project, one of the main tasks was to determine safe living conditions. This is a so-called APERM type of radiation measurement, which should stay in this house for one month or two months to be picked up again and from the different radiation, which has been measured by this dose meter, which is exactly the same, but packed in a plastic and sealed up here to be proof against the radon which comes from the ground. And this will measure all the radiation which is here in this room. The stops at villages designated for the survey lasted longer than strictly required for the measurements. The human dimension was always in evidence. Time for a quick polaroid photo before the group takes its leave and moves on to another location. Facts do not always lie on the surface. Sediment samples from a lake close to the evacuations zone provide valuable material for analysis. Water flows, time passes, and things change. But this brown slice of sediment from the bottom of the lake possesses a memory that can be probed. In the late stages of the project, radiation meters were collected from locations where they were deposited by previous teams. Some 2,000 measurements of external gamma dose rates at outdoor and indoor locations were taken. This particular task has been carried out to meet one of the goals of the project, to verify the available data on environmental contamination. The locations were private homes, schools, and kindergartens. Since the project did not undertake to duplicate all of the efforts of the Soviet authorities, the measurements taken have served as key input parameters to corroborate methodology used in the Soviet analysis. Is that a real thing? It's true. It's true. It's a real thing. Your house is clean. It's not clean. It's not clean. Not all of the houses in the affected areas are that safe. The evacuation zone has villages and settlements abandoned immediately after the accident because of high radiation levels. The deserted houses are slowly decaying, and there's little chance that people would ever come back to these settlements. One way to quantify the radiological situation in the affected areas is by contamination maps. This one shows contamination in cesium 137. Area is extremely large, stretching from the north of Kiev, running through southern and eastern provinces of Bielorussia, and then going into the south of the Russian Federation. Shortly after the accident, the highest environmental contamination was in the 30-kilometer zone shown as a circle on the map. Few accessible roads coming close to the 30-kilometer zone are left. This is the prohibited zone. Since the accident, this is as far as you can go. Fenced off by barbed wire, this zone immediately around Chernobyl will remain closed for human habitation for many years to come. Within a stone's throw from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant lies the town of Pripyat. It's a ghost town now, abandoned by its 45,000 inhabitants. Pripyat is designed to stand out in solitude until it falls down under its own weight. Relocation of people from these areas was mandated by the authorities. But rehousing population from places with lower levels of radiation remains a controversial issue. We all have the same plans. There is immediate relocation. There is a plan for relocation, but the whole point is where. There is no housing, no place to move in. The psychological pressure put on the population with the help of the press by means of incompetent and professional judgments is being felt more strongly now. And probably after the accident itself, the biggest misfortune is when people can't grasp the situation, when they can't correctly estimate the risk factor. At the time of the Chernobyl accident, the prevailing winds blew to the north and west. Because of the wind factor and sporadic rainfall, the heaviest radiation effects were felt across an area between the eastern provinces of Belarus and the south of the Russian Federation. That is why teams of experts have also explored the southern parts of the Russian Federation. Here in Novia Bobovici, water samples were taken from one of the many public water wells closed down for fear of contamination. One of the goals of the project was to verify the Soviet methodology. In implementing this task, international experts had understanding and assistance from their Soviet counterparts. An Austrian expert and a local Soviet radiation officer probed the same soil, but with different tools. Teams of international experts were also able to examine work done and data accumulated by research institutions in the affected areas. For example, a visit to the Institute of Agricultural Radiology in Gomel provided a lot of evidence. I was very impressed because they collected a tremendous amount of data. They are well stored there. They are used for tables, for graphs, for maps, and above all, I was deeply impressed because they did not just only collect data. They gave also advice to the people to improve the situation. And I was deeply impressed by that improvement. If you just compare the contamination level, for instance, of pasture land or what is even more important of milk in the years 1986, 87, 89, and now you see a really great improvement, which now in most of the areas came down to background level. One of the major features of the contamination pattern, it is very uneven with wide variations in intensity. However, the numbers in this map should be taken with caution. The external limit of this area represents a contamination level that has been found in many West European cities. Therefore, it can give you a wrong picture if you look in the full contamination map. The real problem is not the contamination. The problem is the doses that people receive, radiation dose that people receive, and the health effects on these people. To calculate doses properly, information was needed on internal body contaminants. Novosibkov in the Russian Federation was one of the locations for the mobile laboratory that measured whole body radiation counts. The mobile van was provided by France. It was equipped with four whole body counters and packed with electronics, which enabled the team who worked there to produce immediate results of internal cesium contamination. Over a 10-week period, project teams used this mobile laboratory to measure internal contamination in some 10,000 people in the Ukraine, Belarusia, and the Russian Federation. The service was offered to anyone who came, and people queued up for measurements to be taken. How do they see their own health? We hear that because of the nature of our diseases, we get more chronic ailments. Children suffer. Whichever way it takes here or there, I couldn't care less. It's my time to die anyway. I'm 61. In general, I feel bad. For example, I didn't feel any pain before. Now it hurts to leave my arms. I feel as if something is put over my head. Radiation is the most dangerous thing. Fear is fear, but radiation is worse. I'm afraid for the sake of little children. They told us that our doses are so small that the instrument could not pick up our radiation count. Well, I've been living here for four years, and the boys have been living for four years, but they've gone away for this summer. No, it's very, very little. For instance, if you're flying with a plane from Moscow to New York and back, if you fly back from Moscow to New York by plane, then you will receive about the same dose. You will receive the same dose. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. The work plan did not try to duplicate the vast amount of work that had been done in the Soviet Union. Its job was to evaluate the data that had been accumulated for accuracy, for reliability, and to carry out independent fieldwork to substantiate the judgments that would have to be made. Project teams sought to corroborate the available data on environmental contamination. In doing so, the experts often consulted radiological maps compiled by local radiation protection authorities. The maps gave a fair picture of radiation contamination when verified through fieldwork. This is not too high here, as it would be according to the maps. It's certainly lower here than it was over there. A principal pathway of radiation exposure for humans is through consumption of contaminated foodstuffs. It was essential, therefore, to establish the uptake of radionuclides in the food chain. One of the control villages for the survey of radionuclides in the food chain was Daletta in the Ukraine. It was selected for the survey because of peculiar soil characteristics. We have a relatively low external gamma-dose rate in the area, but due to the soil characteristics, we have an increased transfer from radionuclides deposited on the soil into the plant. This results that there's no restriction necessary in terms of movement of children playing or in the area, movement of adults carrying out agricultural work, but the locally grown food can contain increased levels of radionuclides, such as cesium and strontium-90. Peculiar soil characteristics of country roads were negotiated by Volga taxicabs, a familiar means of transportation for the project teams. We carried out food sampling in two very different areas, different in respect to the radioactive contamination. One area, Daletta in the Ukraine, is known to be characterized by very high transfer factors from the environment into the food chain. The other area is serving as a control village, which means that according to the official USSR data, radioactive contamination in that area is known to be very low. We sampled locally produced milk, vegetables, bread in the area, or potatoes. These samples will be analyzed in laboratories in different parts of the world, and the outcome of this result will be used as an input parameter for those calculations to the critical group or particular segments of the population in the affected areas. One of the impressions gained during the fieldwork was that people living in the affected areas have poor nutrition. Empty shelves in shops reflect difficult social conditions presently affecting large parts of the country. The supply of clean products runs into the problem of adequate production and distribution. The question of supply and demand affects big towns and small villages equally. We found out in talking to these two ladies that there is milk produced in this town, and we got a sample from the lady in the white scarf. She was kind enough to bring us a sample to bring back for analysis. And in a quick survey here, we found that this milk is contaminated, and so we asked her if she drinks the milk, and she says no, she gets milk from Kiev. Once a week, the state provides enough milk for the people in the town to drink. However, the lady in the red scarf says that she dislikes the taste of this milk from Kiev. She won't drink it, her family doesn't drink it, she has grown children, she's not worried, and they will drink their own contaminated milk. So it's obvious in the town there's really a variation in how much contaminated milk people drink and what effect it will have on them ultimately. There have been many media reports on severe somatic effects and genetic malformations in the affected areas attributed to radiation exposure. Since these observations do not correlate with available radio epidemiological data, one of the main tasks was to clarify the clinical health situation in these regions. A typical medical team conducted thorough medical checkups. The day today is devoted to children and we are looking at two-year-old children, five-year-old children, and 10-year-old children. The reason for seeing the two-year-old children is to look at the incidents of anemia and nutritional factors. The reason for looking at the five-year-old children is that they should have been exposed to the most radioactive iodine since they would have been drinking milk at the time of the accident. And the 10-year-old children were specifically interested in their thyroid function since this is possibly an endemic goiter region or a region of thyroid abnormality before the accident. Okay, in this room, they're palpating thyroids looking for nodules as well as size of the thyroid. We are even doing it in the two-year-olds. In this particular instance, Dr. Hurley and one of our colleagues from Keev are working together. It's really turned out to be essential to have them working together in order to be able to deal especially with children in their own language and in terminology that they understand. Further on, thyroid ultrasound is being done with the help of machines brought in as part of the project instrumentation. The Soviet colleagues were also trained to work on the machine. We have again our colleagues from Keev in Moscow here helping us and working with us. The particular machine is used for measuring the size of the thyroid as well as looking for nodules and the consistency and internal architecture of the thyroid gland itself. Simultaneously, blood samples were being analyzed next door. This particular hematological analysis machine can analyze a blood sample 300 times in one minute, giving a most complete picture. The result is printed out immediately. Complete physical examination is done by Dr. Sasaki from Hiroshima, Japan. I think she has some very mild stomach problem. But by my examination, I can find any abnormalities. Dr. Stark is a pediatrician, hematologist, and oncologist. But besides that, he has qualities that make him a favorite with his little patients. Inlanda, inlanda, inlanda, inlanda, inlanda. Nicolay Nicolayevich, how are you feeling? How are you feeling? I'm fine. A few blocks away from the hospital during musical hour at a kindergarten, the children are largely unaware of the Chernobyl debate that often bewilders the adults. If they are to grow free from fear, facts about Chernobyl must be established, documented, and communicated. The overall strategy of the International Chernobyl Project was to examine the validity of the official methodologies and independently verify them through field samples and laboratory analysis. The last measurement having been taken and the last sample having been packed, the field work was completed. Science and research laboratories in many countries began to analyze the results. The findings of the project were handed over to the International Advisory Committee, which was set up to direct the project and be solely responsible for its findings. It is composed of scientists from United Nations organizations, universities, and renowned institutions worldwide. To achieve a balanced perspective on interpreting the scientific findings, the members were chosen to represent a wide spectrum of disciplines. It is chaired by Dr. Itsuzo Shigematsu, Director of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, Japan. As a result, we're fortunate to say that we have found no such serious health hazards as the ones which had been reported in the past. We have also found out that the survey results gained by the USSR were in large part consistent with our international findings. We hope that this report, presented at the International Atomic Energy Agency, will be helpful to the Soviet people and that they will continue their endeavor to maintain the health of the affected population.