25 Years After Chernobyl, Memories Still Painful for Survivor

On a spring day 25 years ago, life changed forever for Tatsiana Alcantara.

She was a 16-year-old schoolgirl in the Belarusian city of Gomel on April 26, 1986, when 50 miles away, across what is now the Ukranian border, a series of errors and misfortunes led to a massive explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. What followed was the worst nuclear disaster the world has yet seen. 

Chernobyl left its mark on Alcantara’s life, and her family. Tuesday evening, she spoke about the aftermath of the disaster as the guest of Jersey Shore Nuclear Watch, whose members gathered at the Toms River Administration Building downtown to commemorate the Chernobyl tragedy and launch a discussion about its own aim: shutting down the Oyster Creek nuclear generating station in Lacey Township.

Recalling the human toll from nuclear accidents is vitally important, said Edith Gbur, president of Jersey Shore Nuclear Watch, especially as people worldwide watch a new disaster unfold in Japan.

“It’s our job to try to keep the memory of Chernobyl alive,” she said.

Gbur said she learned of Alcantara, who lives in Atlantic City with her husband, David, and her two daughters, through another anti-nuclear organization in south Jersey, she said. Though she’d never spoken publicly about the aftermath of the meltdown in the Ukraine, Alcantara agreed to tell her story Tuesday.

A long-lived tragedy

“There’s been a problem – something nuclear.”

That’s what Alcantara’s brother Pavel, a Soviet soldier, called in to respond to a vague report of trouble, told his family 25 years ago yesterday, said David Alcantara, Tatsiana’s husband, introducing his wife to last night’s audience. The couple and Tatsiana’s two daughters live in Atlantic City.

Even Pavel, one of the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” who responded to the Chernobyl explosion and worked to stem the outpouring of radiation from the plant, didn’t understand what he was heading into, the Alcantaras said.

But he couldn’t escape the consequences. Many who worked alongside him died, said David. The powerful radiation exposure made them sick. Their skin melted from their bodies like wax. Pavel survived, but like many of the liquidators, he’s permanently disabled, David said.

Wind carried radioactive fallout north into Belarus, where Tatsiana watched rain glow yellow as it fell over her town, David said. 

Tatsiana spoke briefly, her voice heavily accented and choked with emotion. She saw her community and those around it suffer in the years after the disaster, she said.

“So many young children die from cancer,” she said. “They have pain from bones, pain from thyroid.”

Ever since, she herself has had thyroid problems, weakness and pain in her bones and constant exhaustion. Her two daughters, born years later, also suffer from unexplained back and knee pain. According to a 2001 BBC film screened later that evening, many Belarussian women who were teenagers at the time of the disaster have children with unexplained congenital problems.

They can’t be sure how many of their symptoms can be blamed on radiation. Doctors do what they can, Tatsiana said, prescribing medications.

“It’s not enough,” she said, holding back tears. 

Close to home

For the members of Jersey Shore Nuclear Watch who organized and attended the event, giving Tatsiana an audience wasn’t just a way to recognize a 25-year-old tragedy. It was a chance to point out the dangers they say many southern Ocean County residents face as neighbors of Lacey’s Oyster Creek plant – dangers made more worrisome in the wake of the post-tsunami disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, they said.

Several organization members took the microphone to point to the plant’s problems – leaking tritium, a lack of cooling towers, and what they said was a dangerously outdated design and a high level of radiation release.

And all spoke under the watchful eyes of half a dozen reporters from NHK, Japan’s largest broadcast news organization, who drove in from their New York bureau to film the event as part of their ongoing coverage of U.S. citizens’ feelings on nuclear power following the Fukushima accident.

“Chernobyl is not over yet,” said Nuclear Watch Vice President Grace Costanza. “Fukushima just started. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t want it to happen here.”

Berkeley Township mayor Jason J. Varano agreed. Varano attended the event while his own township’s committee voted 6-0 to adopt a resolution calling for the immediate closure of Oyster Creek.

“A resolution doesn’t have the power you’d wish it has,” he said, “but at least it allows the people to know where we stand as a governing body in Berkeley Township.”

Edith Gbur, president of Jersey Shore Nuclear Watch, applauded the resolution. Her group will keep fighting for the shuttering of the plant with petitions to legislators, she said.

“We hope… people can work together for a society where people have renewable energy, and we don’t have to worry about these horrible things happening,” she said.