Address the situation and provide answers to questions such as: Is it safe to leave the house? Is it safe to drink water? Is it safe to eat local produce?

No reports were released until the third day after the Chernobyl explosion. Then, Swedish authorities correlated a map of enhanced radiation levels in Europe with wind direction and announced to the world that a nuclear accident had occurred somewhere in the Soviet Union. Before Sweden’s announcement, the Soviet authorities were conducting emergency fire-fighting and clean-up operations but had chosen not to report the accident or its scale in full. No established legitimate authority was able to immediately address the situation and provide answers to questions such as: Is it safe to leave the house? Is it safe to drink water? Is it safe to eat local produce? 

Communicating protective measures early would also have most likely enabled the population to escape exposure to some radionuclides, such as iodine 131, which are known to cause thyroid cancer. Early evacuation would have helped people avoid the area during the period when iodine 131 is most dangerous, 8-16 days after release.

The Elephant’s Foot is the nickname given to a large mass of corium formed underneath the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It is still an extremely radioactive object. Photo by: Artur Korneyev, 1996

During the first four years after the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet authorities decided to largely deal with the consequences of the explosion at a national level. Without Soviet endorsement, the United Nations and its partners sought ways to provide emergency support, which included assessing the nuclear safety and environmental conditions of the contaminated area, and diagnosing the various medical conditions that resulted from the accident. The UN also focused on raising the awareness of the area’s inhabitants, teaching them how to protect themselves from radionuclides found in the environment and in agricultural products.