Announcer> 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 worked there and called 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 second part of our three-part series, "Nature Comes Back: 25 Years After Chernobyl."

During this program, we'll talk about the impact of the accident on nature and the people of Chernobyl.

So join us in "Reflecting on the Impact."

♪ Dr. Eduardo Farfán 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 Radioecology 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 a 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 and Japan as Chernobyl's radiation cloud drifted across the 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 "NatureScene," produced by South Carolina ETV and broadcast nationally on PBS for 25 years.

He made four trips to Chernobyl and recorded a "NatureScene" program there in 2003.

Allen Sharpe was the director of photography for South Carolina ETV's "NatureScene" 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.

♪ Rudy> I think the first trip that Bruce Coull led was '98, and I was asked to go, and I did, just as a naturalist, to do flora/fauna lists and to see what was there.

And then '99, Tim was along and others.

It took us a while to get set, but every time I went, I said, "This is something that should be shared with other people."

Most of the video that I had seen on the Chernobyl area was, the reactor or the sarcophagus, empty buildings.

Mark> In many, you see those old Eastern Block buildings, the apartment buildings close by.

Rudy> Yeah, or the city of Pryp'yat' where you see the Ferris wheel.

I think the Ferris wheel must appear in everything.

Mark> Because it looks as if it's frozen in time, literally.

Rudy> It's pretty spooky, and it is a spooky feeling... to be there.

I wanted to deal more with the woods, rather than just the buildings.

Mark> The living world, as opposed to what had transpired.

Rudy> Yeah, and that's really what the emphasis was, just to see the diversity that would be there.

That's what we wanted to share through the "NatureScene"program, and Allen and the way he shoots and all the people at ETV did it, I think, in a wonderful way, like we always did.

Took lots of pictures of these wonderful faces smiling and actually recorded some of their songs because it was just beautiful to hear them singing.

But it's a neat place and yet a very disturbing place, and it's all of that rolled into one, and that's what television can do so powerfully, I think.

Words are wonderful, but with a shot, you notice things that we're not talking about that are just as powerful as what's being said on camera, and we were able, I think, to capture that fairly well.

Mark> There was a spirit about many of those Ukrainian people who were devastated by the accident, I'm sure, who were told to stay away, not come back, this land was forbidden.

But those folks sort of defied many of those orders and said this is our homeland, this is our ancestral homeland, this is where we've been for millennia, and we're coming back.

And they did come back, didn't they?

Sherry> They did.

They defied the government, and many of the resettlers, as they were known, with whom we spoke, who lived in the villages surrounding where the reactor was, indicated that they had gotten back home by walking, some the 60 miles from Kiev, under the cloak of darkness really.

They were defying the government by coming back to their villages.

And we often asked them if they felt afraid that they would be removed again, and they said "no."

They would get checked on by government officials occasionally, but they never had the idea that anybody was going to force them to move back.

The scientists from Chernobyl took medical care of them.

They brought food to them.

Rimma, our dear friend, was responsible for taking care of lots of them and for introducing us to them.

They were lovely people, many of them elderly, many of them widows.

Mark> For any people tied to their land, people who farm land for a living, there's a deep connection that you can feel.

It's almost in their DNA, and you felt that in speaking with these people, did you not?

Rudy> Yeah, and we saw them plowing the fields, and there are radionuclides in the soil, and you know they're in the crops, and they're collecting mushrooms in the woods which pick up radionuclides.

The well there, they were drinking water out of the well, and we know the aquifer is contaminated.

I mean, that was clear.

Even though it was interesting, the first trip we made, the government officials, as you two have said, were very guarded in sharing anything with us.

I think a lot of people- and this is what I'm proud of the University of South Carolina doing- I think a lot of people go once to say they've been, take a lot of pictures, ooh-ahh, and never go back.

The University of South Carolina made a commitment, early on, to help in every way we could as far as health and human services.

We took lots of equipment in on the first trip.

We took a lot of food and medical supplies in on basically every trip that we went on.

And that commitment was something that opened up the eyes of some of the government officials, who were very guarded the first year.

Mark> Were they surprised by your generosity?

Rudy> They may have been surprised.

I don't know exactly what it was, but the second year, they were more open than they were the first year because it was as if they recognized us and realized- just by a second trip- we're making a commitment to this.

And then we learned that, of course, the aquifer is contaminated.

The water in Kiev is contaminated.

That's the other thing that we take for granted in this country.

When you go overseas, you just don't turn on the faucet and drink water.

You don't brush your teeth with it.

It's a different world.

And the contamination there in Kiev was something that had always been there, but it was not admitted for a long time.

It was amazing how much more open they were.

But the general public, once you get to meet the regular folks, they're good people, and they have wonderful stories.

Almost all the resettlers are older people who are going back.

They know they're near death.

This was said to us through interpreters.

They want to die in the house where they grew up and where their parents lived and where their grandparents lived.

Sherry> And where they raised their own children.

Rudy> Raised their own children.

Mark> A universal theme of sorts.

Rudy> Exactly.

Mark> Dr. Mousseau, you said you never had any expectation that this would be an area or field of study.

It comes up in 1999, this opportunity to go.

Why take the opportunity?

What prompted you?

Dr. Mousseau> As a scientist, I'm very excited by new discoveries, and this provided an opportunity to visit a part of the world that I had never been to before and to share the experience with some of my colleagues.

And, actually, I had made contact with some other scientists in France before going back to Chernobyl, and we had decided that this could offer an opportunity to do some fundamental biology that had never been done before.

So mainly it was the opportunity to engage in scientific studies that were unique and exciting.

Mark> Had there been a number of studies that had been conducted, say, in Japan?

I know the two events aren't exactly similar, but that would be the only large scale event that we could look back on and study years later in your particular field.

Dr. Mousseau> Indeed.

There's been a tremendous amount of research conducted on the survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and I had actually visited Nagasaki on a couple of occasions prior to the Chernobyl work, and that was a small part of the developing interest.

The truth is that there's very little similarity in terms of the two events.

They both involve nuclear things, but one was a bomb where there was a large pulse of high-intensity radiation, and many of the people died of course.

Many of the plants and animals were killed by that.

There was very little residual effect following that.

Whereas in Chernobyl, we had ten days of a nuclear fire burning, spewing perhaps 2,000 tons of radioactive materials into the atmosphere, which was then spread out across mostly Eastern Europe, but also parts of Western Europe and Central Europe, and leaving a much lower amount of contamination spread out over a much wider area.

So two very different circumstances from a biological standpoint.

From my perspective as a geneticist, I was very interested in seeing how this radioactive contamination would generate, increase mutation rates, and what the consequences for all these extra mutations would be for the natural populations and, by extension of course, to the human populations that were also living under these conditions.

Mark> As I look at some of those pictures from that particular time frame, when you folks made your first visit, I'm struck by just how peaceful it looks, how natural it looks, as if an accident had never occurred there.

The countryside looks as pastoral as it probably ever did.

There's something striking about those particular scenes that would say how are we to ever know that there was this tragic event that happened here.

Dr. Mousseau> I think that's the first- you know, people go there expecting to see this lunar landscape, this armageddon, and of course that's not the case because there wasn't a bomb that went off, it was this nuclear fire, and so the entire landscape is slightly contaminated.

It's not heavily contaminated.

You wouldn't want to live there, you wouldn't want to eat anything from there, but the contamination, for the most part, isn't high enough that anything would die immediately.

There are many plants and animals in this area, so the first impression that somebody, especially somebody who's not a naturalist, might get is, "Wow, this is much better than I was expecting.

It seems okay.

I see a bird there.

I see some plants there.

Maybe it's not so bad."

Rudy> I didn't know what to expect, but I expected more damage, visual damage, than I was able to see.

And took an insect net and collected.

I actually think I had a permit to do that.

[laughter] That was one of the papers that we paid for.

Mark> I can see you coming through customs with some of these radioactive insects.

Rudy> I was doing a little bit of collecting, and I was looking at venation in the wings on dragonflies and those kinds of things and was a little surprised, pleasantly surprised to some degree, with the typical variations in venation in wings that I saw with the small number of specimens that I was able to collect.

But very short-lived animals, like dragonflies, aren't exposed to these radionuclides that are in the soil and on the bottom of water as much as animals that live longer.

Radiation effects are cumulative.

I got excited as much about the history and the people as I did about the natural history, and I also was very interested in bird species, like Tim is, about which species were not so common as they were prior to the meltdown.

Mark> Many people, when they think back to the old Soviet Union, they think of Russia.

They don't think about all the republics that existed before the consolidation of power, Ukraine, Belarus, or Estonia.

We could go on and on.

But Ukraine, obviously was so essential to the old Soviet republic, wasn't it?

Dr. Smith> It was.

It was, as we have said, the breadbasket of the former Soviet Union.

There were 15 republics, and actually Ukraine would have been considered one of the stronger economically because... it has a lot of heavy industry, a lot of coal, a lot of wheat and other agricultural productions, shipping out of the Black Sea, a big metallurgical center as well.

So Ukraine had a diversified economy.

It was an important piece of the former Soviet Union.

When Ukraine voted in November of 1991 to break the union with the U.S.S.R., it was really the death knell of the U.S.S.R. Charles> From a historical perspective, President Bush, Reagan's successor, went to Kiev, went to the Ukrainian capital, just prior to that and delivered a speech at the Ukrainian parliament almost saying don't withdraw from the Soviet Union.

He was concerned about the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union if it pulled apart.

It was called the "chicken Kiev speech" and not entirely lightheartedly, but it was that degree of concern.

I think it also derived from the fact that Reagan and then Bush still felt this compatibility with Gorbachev, and Gorbachev's role here, even though he equivocated in the initial days, obviously under pressure- he had to under that kind of pressure- remained significant in the ongoing process.

You don't get to glasnost, you don't get to the dissolution of the Soviet Union without Gorbachev's role.

He wrote subsequently that in his thinking, looking back on it, that more than perestroika, that Chernobyl was the catalyst, literally, for his rethinking.

Mark> Was there a sense among American policy officials that Gorbachev was going to be a different kind of leader at that time, or did you still have a ways to go?

Charles> Well, there was an absolute hope that he was going to be different because the old school was not going to work, and the passage from Brezhnev to Andropov and Chernenko was more of the same.

Gorbachev had come into the Politburo while Brezhnev was still there, right towards the end of it.

I was in Moscow up until 1980, and he had just come into the Politburo, and we were saying, "Who is this guy?

He's come out of an agricultural background."

But people were already talking about him then, and he rose quite quickly, partly because the rest of the Politburo had calcified.

He was the only fresh blood that was there, and that was important, without question.

Dr. Smith> But I think that we also have to understand that Gorbachev wasn't all-powerful.

He couldn't set the agenda and drive it, so he had to move very cautiously to do that.

And he was trying to save the Soviet Union, rather than destroy it.

He believed that these reforms were necessary because he saw, at its core, citizens were losing trust and faith and legitimacy in the government.

And so he introduced glasnost and perestroika and democratization trying to engage the citizens, bring them on board and keep the Soviet Union together but in a reformed manner.

And it all got out of control when the right wingers saw the Soviet Union beginning to show signs of imploding, and they imposed a coup d'état.

They tried to take over government.

Gorbachev and Raisa, his wife, were put under house arrest down in the Crimea, held at gunpoint for three days.

Mark> In 1991?

Dr. Smith> Summer of 1991.

And finally, when the coup that had tried to oust Gorbachev and hold things together broke down, Gorbachev comes back to Moscow where Boris Yeltsin had rallied the forces and people into the streets in defense of what was going on, and Yeltsin ridicules Gorbachev on national television in front of everybody, saying, "Look, these guys that tried to mount this coup were your appointees."

There had been this personal spat between Yeltsin and Gorbachev.

Yeltsin was president of the Russian republic within the U.S.S.R. Gorbachev was president of the U.S.S.R. Yeltsin understood that if the Soviet Union breaks into 15 pieces, I'll still be president of Russia, the U.S.S.R. will not exist anymore, and Gorbachev will be history.

And that's exactly what happened.

Mark> Allen, I know one of the favorite parts about your job all these years is being able to go out and meet different types of people from all over the country and all over the world.

These strike me as the type of folks who were used to hardship in a way.

Now this is a tragedy beyond their comprehension, but these were folks that were used to the ups and downs of agriculture.

Their crops may be wiped out.

How did you take to the people that you met there?

Allen> People were wonderful.

They really were.

They were very proud people.

They didn't have a lot in terms of material things, but to them, that was home.

And they said many times to us- you know, "You're not worried about the radioactivity?"

They said, "No, this is home.

I want to die here."

And they were farming.

They were doing their things.

When you would go into their home and visit, they were very gracious.

They would probably give us the last thing they had to eat.

They'd bring out fish that you knew came from the lakes around there.

They'd bring out milk that they got from their cows that were eating the grass.

And it was one of those- you don't want to offend them, but these are very sincere people, and they were happy to see us.

Dr. Mousseau> The government has really only tolerated those coming back to areas that are not particularly contaminated, so one of the interesting features of the Chernobyl zone is that it's really very heterogeneous.

It's not one big contaminated area.

It's actually some areas that are very highly contaminated, little pockets of clean areas nestled within this larger area of high contamination.

And so the government's really only tolerated folks returning to these little pockets of clean areas so that the possible health implications are reduced.

They've been very careful, and they have provided medical service.

Rudy> And electricity.

They didn't get that at first.

Again, when they came back on their own, they literally were violating the law and coming back on their own and building a little fire.

I remember the stove where they have the fire, and then they sleep on top of the stove so that the heat would still be there.

But the houses, I think the one thing that was really interesting for me were the lilacs were in bloom a couple of times that we were visiting, so you've got these beautiful lilacs, these really rough-looking buildings.

But then you walk inside, and it's just wonderful handwork that these women do.

In these long winters, they've got time to do that.

I mean, it's absolutely incredibly beautiful, photographs of family, that sort of thing.

But the only younger people we saw there were daughters and- mainly daughters, not many sons visiting- but visiting their parents, helping in the flower garden by the house, and then they would rather quickly leave, was the way I saw it.

And basically there were women more than men.

Of course live longer than men, put up with stress better than males, don't drink as much as males.

I think, as a little Southern Baptist, the one thing that really got me about Chernobyl was the notion in some of their minds, I think, that radionuclides do not affect those who drink vodka or vodkalike beverages heavily.

Mark> There's a story behind that, right?

Rudy> [laughing] Yeah!

Mark> Weren't they all gathered together on the night of this fire?

Rudy> We were told there was a party of some of the firefighters on the night that they got this call that there was a fire.

Didn't say anything about a reactor meltdown, but there was a fire that needed to be put out.

So the firemen on call, who were not at the party, went immediately, as they should have.

The guys at the party kept drinking.

After they were there and realized it's a bigger deal, then they called the folks who were at the party, who had been drinking, to come.

And of course they were not exposed to as much as the first people on the scene were, and this really took'em a while to get there, you might imagine.

So the notion was that the more vodka imbibed, the less effects you have from the radionuclides.

And it was really an amazing kind of notion.

Mark> Vodka immunity.

Rudy> But it seems to be a reality in these people's minds, and that's true of a lot of things.

A lot of things can be in your mind that aren't necessarily facts.

Charles> There's a lot of fatalism in the Russian or the Slavic mind and spirit.

Mark> That always has been part of their mindset.

Charles> Absolutely.

Dr. Smith> And there's a huge folklore with regard to vodka anyway, that vodka can do all sorts of miraculous things.

Sherry> And Rimma had explained very gingerly and carefully to the resettlers that we would not be eating anything with them, and one of the... neatest resettler couples we met were the elderly couple whose picture is behind us.

And they convinced us they had made their own vodka from their own potatoes, and they convinced us that because it was alcoholic, it was antiseptic, so it would kill everything, including radiation, and not only was it nonradioactive, but again it would protect us from any radiation that we- and they were insistent, absolutely insistent, that if were weren't gonna eat anything, at least we could try their Ukrainian version of moonshine, which we all did, with no ill effects, I guess... to date!

Mark> Eduardo, let me ask you, many folks at the time, I think, were fearful that perhaps that you could never contain the radiation, could never contain the leak.

What did they go about doing to sort of cap that reactor, and can we be sure today that there's no radiation either leaking underneath or outside of the old reactor?

Dr. Farfán> Well, soon after the incident, they built a concrete sarcophagus, and it was supposed to last for 20, 25 years.

During my last visit, they were planning to build another one on top of it.

Mark> We're at 25 years.

Should there be concern?

Dr. Farfán> They are concerned, and the European community is funding that effort.

Mark> I know I have read some accounts that perhaps they were worried not about the radiation escaping upwards, but downwards.

Is there any fear that perhaps the groundwater, the aquifers there, could continue to be contaminated, that it's escaping underneath and we can't detect.

Dr. Farfán> They monitor that constantly.

They have monitoring areas, and they have a way to monitor that.

It is a possibility.

Maybe Tim can help me with this.

Dr. Mousseau> I think, there's a huge concern with the reactor in its current state and the fact that the actual reactor is built in an area of high seismic activity, which they didn't realize when they built it.

A small earthquake could bring down that structure that's currently there.

Mark> That concrete structure?

Dr. Mousseau> That concrete structure that's currently in place, intended to keep the material from spreading further, could actually collapse and lead to another sort of cloud.

But I don't think there's any real fear that there would be another meltdown or any kind of nuclear fire.

Mark> It's old material, per se.

Dr. Mousseau> It's mostly sort of diluted, material inside this old reactor shell.

The Japanese and the European community and Canada and the U.S. are all contributing in an attempt to rebuild a new enclosure, but the problem has been funding so far.

I think the bigger concern, from a health and environmental perspective, is the fact that, thousands of square miles surrounding the reactor are heavily contaminated, saturated with radionuclides from the original event, and every time it rains, every time there's a dry period, every time there's a forest fire in the area, there's a redistribution of these radionuclides.

Mark> Thank you for joining us for Part Two of our three-part series.

Join us next time as we hear about visits to the area and learn more about how life has returned to Chernobyl.

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