A production of Instructional Television and South Carolina ETV.

Mark Quinn> Twenty five years ago, the largest nuclear disaster in history took place behind the Soviet Iron Curtain.

Join us for this special three part series as we pull back the curtain with a panel of experts, including naturalists, scientists and historians, to learn about the effects Chernobyl had on nature, nuclear science, U.S. - Soviet relations, and the people who work there and call Chernobyl home.

Rare photos and video captured by South Carolina ETV, in partnership with the University of South Carolina, will transport you across the world to an area that was devastated by an accident of catastrophic proportions.

But over time, the people and the nature have returned.

♪ Hello, I'm Mark Quinn.

Welcome to the first part of our three part series.

Nature Comes Back: 25 years after Chernobyl.

During this program, we'll look at the events that led to the accident at Chernobyl and the political fallout that resulted.

So join us in pulling back the Iron Curtain.

♪ Dr. Eduardo Farfan is the principal engineer for environmental science and biotechnology at the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.

He lived in Belarus, near Chernobyl for five years, and worked with the Chernobyl Center's International Radio Ecology Laboratory.

Dr. Gordon Smith is a professor of political science and director of the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina.

Dr. Smith is a noted authority on Russian politics and the author of numerous books, including Soviet Politics Struggling with Change.

Dr. Tim Mousseau is professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina.

He has made numerous trips to Chernobyl to study the impact of radioactive contaminants, and is a leading authority on the impact of radioactivity on birds and insects in the area surrounding Chernobyl.

Charles Bierbauer is the dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina.

As the CNN Senior White House correspondent in 1986, he reported on President Reagan's trip to Indonesia in Japan.

As Chernobyl's radiation cloud drifted across two continents.

Sherry Beasley is the grants director and foundations coordinator for Clemson University's Provost office.

Ms. Beasley made four trips with USC to Chernobyl to chronicle and report on the activities.

Her articles were featured in South Carolina's, The State newspaper.

Rudy Mancke is the naturalist in residence for the University of South Carolina, and was the host and naturalist on Nature Scene produced by South Carolina ETV and broadcasted nationally on PBS for 25 years.

He made four trips to Chernobyl and recorded a Nature Scene program there in 2003.

Allen Sharpe was the director of photography for South Carolina ETV's Nature Scene series that aired on over 300 PBS stations across the United States.

He was part of the SCETV crew that visited Chernobyl, and his photographs and video are used in this series.

Eduardo Farfan let me begin with you and take us back to the day in April of 1986.

And what exactly was it, the physics that happened at Chernobyl, if you can explain that away.

Dr. Eduardo Farfan> They were conducting an experiment, and it seems that there was an error.

And because of the error, there was a meltdown of the reactor core.

And there was subsequently there was a fire for about ten days, causing the release of tons of radioactive materials into the atmosphere.

Mark> The fear at the time was that perhaps it could even get worse, in those days, following news was hard to come by, at least here in the Western world.

Was there a danger that perhaps it could even get that much worse at that time?

Dr. Eduardo Farfan> Well, people were scared.

And one of the reasons people were scared is because the lack of the news, current status of the incident.

So it was a struggle in the very beginning.

Mark> Dr. Smith, you've studied these Soviet - American relations for many years at the time, 1986, not the height of the Cold War by any stretch.

But the Cold War was still on.

You know, it was still very difficult to get news out of the Soviet Union at that time.

How closed of a society were they in 1986?

Dr. Gordon Smith> They were closed.

They had just gone through 18 years of Brezhnev's leadership and back during that time, any kind of disaster, whether it was a plane crash or a train wreck or a natural disaster, like an earthquake.

Basically, the news, there was no news.

So it was on the censorship list.

They were prohibited from writing about it and talking about it, with the exception of the plane crashed and it had foreigners on board.

They would report that.

But with the incident in Chernobyl, there was a blackout of news, actually, and, and it's ironic because Gorbachev had started this policy of glasnost just less than a month before the turn.

Mark> Openness, right?

Dr. Gordon Smith> Openness, candor, freedom of expression and talking honestly about issues.

And yet, when this blew up, the Politburo met on the same morning of the accident on the 26th.

And apparently, according to the records, Gorbachev proposed being open and talking about it.

Two other members of the Politburo supported him.

But the rest of the Politburo said no, nothing doing Mark> This was still very much probably the old Soviet regime that's dominated by the military in many ways, Dr. Gordon Smith> The military and the Communist Party and the Communist Party of Ukraine, where the reactor was located, The chief of that Communist Party organization, Vladimir Stravinsky, was one of the arch conservatives.

He had been appointed by Brezhnev to the Politburo in 1971.

He was one of the most repressive, corrupt and hardline members of the Public bureau.

And so there's even speculation that the Ukrainian party apparatus was keeping Moscow in the dark, that it took some time, for, you know, for the full extent of the disaster to be known even by, by Gorbachev and other leaders.

Mark> Charles Bierbauer, these are fascinating story about, what was happening then with President Reagan as Americans tried to struggle to figure out exactly what was going on in Chernobyl and you were with the president, as this was unfolding, were you not?

Charles Bierbauer> I was with President Reagan.

We were on Bali, the island in Indonesia, where he was attending a conference of Southeast Asian leaders.

And we got the first indication, that there had been something at Chernobyl occurred while we were there, as my, my recollection was kind of the day before we got ready to move on to Tokyo, where the, the annual economic summit was taking place.

But there was very little information, as Gordon points out.

That's that's absolutely the old Soviet model is to say nothing until absolutely compelled to.

And so for, in the neighborhood of two and a half days, there was no word even within, the Soviet Union, obviously, people in and around there that something had gone, badly awry.

And it was in fact, Sweden, because this cloud had been drifting to the north.

Mark> They had the monitors.

Charles Bierbauer> Well, it was ...headed their way, frankly, it was headed towards Sweden, Finland and other parts of, of Eastern Europe.

And they picked up the monitoring and they said, what's going on here?

And kind of forced the Soviet hand, on, on that two days, after time frame, where there was a very terse announcement that said that there had been, an accident, an incident at Chernobyl with absolutely no detail.

Gorbachev didn't talk about it publicly until about 14 days later.

Mark> There was still something- Dr. Gordon> 18 Days later, he did a televised address.

It went on for like 25 minutes, and it was interesting.

He, he spun the whole episode and turned it into, there, in fact, challenged Reagan to address nuclear nonproliferation and arms reduction talks.

Mark> Well, because if I'm not mistaken, they were going to meet, later that year in Reykjavik, in Iceland.

Charles Bierbauer> They were they were moving towards, their second meeting the first time had taken place the year before, in Geneva.

Which was the first time that Reagan had ever met a Soviet leader.

He used to say they kept dying on him.

(laughing) It was true.

Three three of them did eventually.

Dr. Gordon> Some of that might have been a good thing.

Charles Bierbauer> When when he met Gorbachev in Geneva, there was kind of a warmth.

In fact, it was called the fireside chats.

They went to a little, the Russians would call it a dacha, a little, a little building on the grounds of the estate.

And they, they developed some sense of, of, ability to talk to each other, but not without suspicion.

And what Reagan did was to say, well, how do we trust them when it comes to arms control, when we're dealing with nuclear missiles, if they're not going to be forthright when they're dealing with a nuclear power plant incident.

Gordon's absolutely right.

Gorbachev, when he talked about it, complained about lies in the Western media and how it hadn't been, you know, over overdrawn, over blown.

Clearly it was.

Mark>Well, I think it's important to dwell on this particular aspect of the, the incident because for many Americans at that particular time, certainly in politics, there seemed to be or appear to be something vaguely sinister about the Soviet Union because we had such mistrust dating back, to the 1950s.

I mean, this had been embedded with our relations for many years.

Had it now?

Dr. Gordon Smith> It had, and Gorbachev had only been in office about an year.

He came into office in March of 1985.

So, almost a year, to the episode.

And during that first year, he really didn't roll out his full agenda of glasnost.

More candor in discussion.

Perestroika, economic reform and more participation in democratization.

All of those things were very controversial.

And the majority of the Politburo were still holdovers of the Brezhnev regime, arch conservatives that were threatened by change.

And Gorbachev was, young.

He was the youngest member of the Politburo when he became Communist Party head.

And so he hadn't built his coalition yet.

And and so this, this crisis hit him, and you could tell that he was struggling to try to figure out how were we going to handle this instinctively, apparently, he wanted to be more open about it, but a majority on the Politburo said, absolutely not.

The people will panic.

You'll have panic in the streets.

They were seriously worried about all sorts of panic, and as a result, they tried to play that everything was normal, including holding the May day parades in Kiev and in Belarus- Mark> Just 60 miles away, Dr. Gordon>..and exposing people to high levels of radiation.

But if canceling the parade would have, they thought, sent a dangerous signal to the public that would have started mass hysteria.

Mark> That seems incredibly irresponsible.

Dr. Gordon> Yes.

Mark> Eduardo, let me ask you about the construction of this particular reactor, this, set of reactors that they had there at Chernobyl.

Was there anything about the way they were designed or constructed that suggested they might not somehow, be up to standards, that they were defective in a way, or, certainly not up to what we would call Western standards.

Dr. Eduardo> The design is completely different, but I think, the design was not the problem.

The problem was that some of the operators were conducting a test, and, they didn't have the right permission to do that.

So that was the cause of the accident.

Mark> Dr. Mousseau, somebody who studies avian birds, insects for a living, a naturalist of sorts.

Was there a point when you first heard of, this accident, you thought this could be an absolutely incredible time to study a terrible time tragedy?

But from your vantage point, did this offer an experience you might not ever otherwise have?

>> Well, it really didn't occur to me, that I would be, working in this part of the world until, 1999, actually, long after the event, after I met some of, my colleagues here today, who, invited me along for, for a visit at my first visit to the Chernobyl zone in September of 1999, in fact.

Mark> In your previous study, I said before 1999, had you ever considered radiation and its effects on animals or insects?

Dr. Mousseau> No, no, I, I was, I, I've been a, a basic ecologist, working on insects, mainly insects and fish.

Prior to that, I hadn't actually been.

I've been interested in global climate change and issues like that.

But the, the notion of working in Eastern Europe on the, the effects of radioactive contaminants had never really crossed my mind until that time.

Mark> Well, Rudy Mancke let me ask you, as we think about there, this connection between the University of South Carolina, ETV and Chernobyl.

I mean, for so many years, obviously there was never any consideration, to make a trip or travel there.

I mean, what was it that prompted your interest or the interest of others that you worked with?

>> Well, Henry Cauthen, when he was, president, of ETV, had an interest in taking Nature Scene beyond the boundaries of the United States and pushed us in that direction in a variety of ways and, and had a real interest, I think, in, in, Russia, the first Nature Scene we did was in 1993.

And the reason for that connection, I think, as much as Henry Cauthen was, Bill Murray, who really, had a great interest in the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union had lots of connections there and was convinced that we as, a University of South Carolina and ETV as a, as a public broadcasting station, should have an interest in looking at the contamination problems in, in Russia.

I mean, in, yeah, in Russia, Ukraine, here, Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk, I think was the other place that he suggested that the University of South Carolina might want to investigate.

He knew how ETV worked, and he knew that we had done television programs in Russia before.

So this was an opportunity after the demise of the Soviet Union to, to do a little more over there.

And he had the connections and the Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust had the money.

And that was a very good combination.

And really, Sherry, you were the one that got Bill Murray together with Bruce Coull at the University of South Carolina, to kind of get this idea of doing something in Ukraine, get it going.

Mark> Ms. Sherry you are deeply involved in Russian literature, of course, Russian studies and teaching Russian to students here.

What was your overriding interest with seeing this project through?

>> Well, I think the connection that we had already made with ETV and the Nature Scene trips to Russia and Bill Murray served on the ETV Endowment board.

And as Rudy said, he knew of all the connections that were kind of already in place.

And so one day during a meeting in New York City, Bill just popped the question to me.

Do you think anybody would be interested in going to Chernobyl?

He had visited there.

He was a member of the East-West Commission and had really interesting political contacts in the former Soviet Union.

We often joked we never knew really what those were, but they were very powerful and effective.

And he was very mysterious, I think, on purpose about all that.

He enjoyed the kind of cloak of mystery.

But, I talked with Bruce Coull, who was then the dean of the school of the environment at the University.

And, of course, he was very interested.

And one thing led to the, to another, with the collaboration between the two of them.

And Bruce organized the first team and got the funding and the political support both here and in Ukraine.

That bill helped establish with the Ukrainian government.

Mark> Well, Dr. Smith, let's go ahead and set up a timeline if we would, the breakup of the Soviet Union happened in say, the early 90s?

<end of 1991> end of 1991.

It would have been impossible for him to envision anybody traveling there, period, for any reason whatsoever.

As time went on, as they became more open and some of the old Soviet republics began to split off.

Did it seem possible that people could travel there much more freely, with much more interest?

Yes.

Dr. Gordon> So I'm not exactly sure, when they opened the Chernobyl region for, for for people to come in other than a few scientists and things like that.

But lately there have been talking about, turning it into a tourist destination.

But travel to the Soviet Union was quite possible.

and my first trip to the Soviet Union, as a student was back in 1970.

And so, student groups, tourist groups, were were going to the Soviet Union pretty extensively, throughout the 1970s.

And then it picked up with detente in the 1980s, a kind of an improvement of relations between the two countries.

And, you know, I spent a year in Russia as a Fulbright scholar in 1975, 76.

So and then through the 80s and at the time of the Chernobyl accident, there were hundreds of probably thousands of Westerners traveling into Russia all the time.

The breakup of the Soviet Union has presented real challenges for the Ukraine.

And many of them really go back to the Chernobyl disaster.

It's, it's created an economic disaster for for the Ukrainian government to have to deal with the cleanup.

It's been a huge disaster also for Belarus that even though the reactor is located in Ukraine, the prevailing winds took most of the radioactive fallout.

And it landed heavily on Belarus, which is a pretty backward and poor country, anyway, very agricultural.

And as much as three quarters of the land of Belarus is contaminated.

And so for years afterwards, they weren't supposed to be, selling on market any cabbage or sugar beets or milk products from cows that have been grazing on fields that were contaminated.

Frankly, I, I'm, I'm skeptical.

I, I'm not sure I really believe that no produce coming out of Belarus was allowed to be sold anywhere.

Mark> Well, Eduardo, I spent two years there in Belarus.

Did you, five years?

Dr. Eduardo> Actually I spent five years.

I went to school, Belarussian State University.

I got a degree in physics.

One of the things, regarding your first question is that, the Soviet Union back then was relatively open.

You could see a lot of foreigners from different countries, western areas and, even, countries from Africa and Asia.

So it was relatively open.

So, so I was, a witness of some of the changes, political and economical changes.

And, I can say it was a very interesting time Charles Bierbauer>...if I may.

Mark> Yes.

Charles> Relatively open, but it was substantially closed.

You may have been there as a tourist.

You may have been there as a student.

You may have been there as a journalist as I was.

But you didn't travel freely.

You didn't roam around the country.

If you wanted to go from Moscow to Leningrad, you could get on the train.

You could buy a ticket.

That would be simple.

You could go to, to Kiev in the Ukraine.

But you couldn't drive out to Chernobyl to see the nuclear plant.

You couldn't go to (indiscernible town) to see what had taken place there.

You couldn't visit cities and whole regions that were substantially off limits.

Again, as a journalist, if I wanted to visit some place, I had to apply.

I had to get permission, usually denied.

So anything that had military value, most things that had economic value were not highly visible and certainly not open to the West.

Mark> And this would be for any of you, you folks who have traveled or know the region more extensively than I.

The Ukraine obviously, serious agricultural region.

I've heard it called or referred to as a breadbasket.

of the Soviet Union.

Is there a correlation similarity to this just being the American Midwest, as if we had a reactor and an Iowa cornfield, or perhaps a contaminate a large amount of our food supply?

There's similarities that exist there.

Dr. Gordon> I'm from Iowa, and so I have to tell you, my first trip to Kiev, well, it was in the summertime.

We landed at the airport and looked out and there were cornfields everywhere.

And I thought, Mark> This looks like home.

Dr. Gordon> This just looks like Iowa.

But then you have to think, well, they actually grew less corn there and a lot more wheat.

And if you look at a map, it's more like Manitoba than it is Iowa.

It's a lot further north than the Midwest.

But yes, you're right, it's a big open agricultural area, very important for the agriculture production for that whole region, because even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine is exporting large amounts of grain to the west, but also to Russia.

And their production was badly hurt.

I saw one report that was estimating that the Ukrainian government has, has had to absorb something like almost $5 billion in lost sales, the cost of, the cleanup and that sort of thing.

So and that report was done as of 1999.

So I'm sure that the price tag has gone up over that.

Rudy> And in 93, when we did the Nature Scene show in Russia, the hoops that we jumped through were pretty incredible.

And we had government officials with us to make sure we went where we were supposed to go and those sorts of things.

And I think one of the shocking things to me, since I usually just did what I wanted anywhere else in the world that I'd been, was to see a list of places that we were supposed to go in Russian, which I could not read.

Sherry, of course, and Valentina, our, our guide, helped me understand it, but I didn't really want to go to all of those places.

I wanted to go and scout, which meant go to lots of places.

Not on your list.

And it was really a challenging thing to do.

And it was the first time, I think, that that we as a, as a crew, understood that we weren't going to get to do exactly what we wanted to do.

And of course, when we went to Chernobyl, it was it was even, even more controlled.

Mark> About how much later was that in 93?

Rudy> 2003, so it was ten years later.

Mark> Well, let me ask you, Allen, because you were on Nature Scene from the very beginning, principal photographer you'd been on literally hundreds of trips, everywhere.

Seen some of the most beautiful places in the entire world.

I don't know that Chernobyl would strike anybody's top of the list as beautiful places in the world.

And they said, hey, listen, Allen, we're taking Nature Scene to one of the most, ecologically big, largest disasters in human history.

What was your reaction?

Allen> It didn't bother me.

It really did.

And I had I had, yeah, I keep up with the news.

I tried to, and, I was a little bit concerned, and people kept saying, well, you'll turn green if you go there.

And I knew obviously that wasn't going to happen, but, I was more of a logistics person.

You know, what do we have to do to get there?

What kind of equipment can we take?

How are we going to get around?

You know, I was always concerned about that.

A daily schedule and that's.

That's a problem.

Rudy and I had normally when we did a show in the United States and anywhere else except Russia, we could do whatever we wanted, you know, well, either we drove ourself or in the case of like in Costa Rica, we hired, we hired a bus, a translator, a bus and a driver that took us around the country.

But he did whatever we wanted to do.

And, there it's very limited.

It was.

But after being in Russia, I would say Ukraine was a lot easier because we had been to Russia and we had a lot of problems, or we had a lot of opportunities in Russia that we'd never had before.

Just trying to deal with people is very difficult.

And, they were really in the money at that time, In 1993.

Cash money.

(laughing) And, I remember our last night in Saint Petersburg and, apparently during the time that we were on this trip, this two week trip to Russia.

We'd gone to Saint Petersburg, and with then we'd gone to, the frozen Siberia, which was beautiful.

It wasn't frozen in the summertime.

But when we came back, the price of tourist as we were supposed, that's what we were.

we were tourist, had increased like five times $100 a day, was now $500 a day.

And, and I just remember sitting on the bed with this very nice Russian gentleman counting out $100 bills to him, and he would look at one.

And if it wasn't, if it was at least wrinkly he said, I'm not taking it.

He only wanted good money.

Well, it got to the, it got to the end, I said, this is all I got.

Take it or leave it, you know.

And so of course, he took it all, but, we learned a lot of lessons in Russia that made it a lot easier when we went to the Ukraine in terms of dealing with the people.

Mark> Well, Sherry I know you've always had that deep, abiding love for Russia, Russian culture, but was there any trepidation on your part to travel to a region that, you know would honestly scare an awful lot of people?

Sherry> No, not really.

I was a veteran of taking, five different groups of hormonally active high school students to Russia for a month at a time.

So... Mark> Much more dangerous.

Sherry> Well, I don't know, the trip with Nature Scene in 1993 was you couldn't hold grades or any control over these guys, so I kind of lost control there.

But, we were very fortunate in Chernobyl to have this wonderful government guide, Rima Carmelita.

And she, she quickly adjusted to our Western ways.

She made a lot of things possible that I don't think she had ever been asked to do for the other scientific groups that, that had come through.

And she just became a wonderful, a wonderful friend.

And she really was accommodating.

I mean, Rima could make things happen pretty easily for us, that might have been more difficult.

She had a way of getting around the the Ukrainian bureaucracy as well as the the Chernobyl bureaucracy and what we could or couldn't do.

Rudy> I think that's one thing that really is true all over the world.

When you're in a position of authority and leadership, you're harder to deal with as a general rule than regular folks.

Once you get out in the field, into the woods, into the forests.

I never have met anybody anywhere in the world that wasn't kind and reasonable.

Mark> Thank you for joining us for part one of our three part series.

Join us next time as we learn more about how nature and the people of Chernobyl have returned.

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