For Valentyna Tkachenko, the mere mention of the Zaporizhzhia power plant brings tears to her eyes. Like many people around the world, she anxiously watched the news about the war around the nuclear plant in southern Ukraine – but unlike most, she witnessed firsthand a nuclear disaster unfolding around her.
Tkachenko was 12 years old in 1986 when she spotted bright lights in the direction of the Chernobyl power plant from her home in the village of Lubyanka, about 20 kilometers away. The factory in northern Ukraine exploded and caught fire.
She and her family were evacuated, and never returned to their home. Her aunt later died of cancer, a disease that Ms. Tkachenko said affected many people in her village. Tkachenko’s thick blonde hair – “a braid that no hairpin could handle”, she recalls – grew thinner, and then began to fall out.
And now fears are growing about another nuclear plant in Ukraine, as Russian and Ukrainian forces exchange fire nearby.
Ms. Tkachenko said in a phone call from her home in Pogreby, a village near Kyiv, where Chernobyl evacuees have been resettled. Growing up there, she said that everyone in the surrounding area was afraid of her, as if she was carrying some kind of disease.
“We have to shout to the whole world so that the history of Chernobyl does not repeat itself,” she said.
The risk of breakdown or other disaster at the Zaporizhzhia power plant has resonated all over the world, raising the specter of unknown calamity.
For Chernobyl survivors, however, at least some of the consequences were obvious. They recall the exact characteristics: ghost towns, contaminated milk, fear and disease.
The Chernobyl accidentoften considered the worst nuclear disaster in history, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, empty villages and poisoned lands of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Experts say Zaporizhzhia may be less of a hazard because containment structures around the reactor can block any radiation; Chernobyl has no structure. The reactors at Zaporizhzhia also have separate water circuits to cool the reactor and generate steam.
However, the threat remains significant.
If a shelling or another attack causes a fire to break out at the power transformers and the power grid goes down, it can lead to failure of the plant’s cooling system and lead to breakdowns. Explosion, Edwin Lyman saysa nuclear energy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass.
Dmytro Orlov, the mayor of Enerhodar, the city where the plant is located, said on Saturday that it had received 25,000 tablets of potassium iodide, a drug that prevents the thyroid gland from absorbing radioactive forms of iodine.
From a scientific perspective, the health consequences of Chernobyl are uncertain as to the eventual number of deaths that may have resulted from the disaster.
What is indisputable is that several dozen people died from acute radiation syndrome immediately after the disaster. And according to the United Nationsin the first 30 years after the explosion, about 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus were linked to radiation exposure.
UN experts have also estimated that radiation could cause about 4,000 eventual deaths among those with higher Chernobyl exposures, such as emergency workers, evacuees, and residents of the most heavily contaminated areas.
Now, the Chernobyl disaster is casting a shadow over Zaporizhzhia and the wider region.
“We don’t want another Chernobyl,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday.
In March, after the plant was first attacked, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, issued a stark warning: “You know the word ‘Chernobyl,'” he said.
Some of the survivors of that disaster couldn’t even say the word themselves, all these years later, and wouldn’t talk about it. Others say they are still dealing with the aftermath.
Andriy Kulish, a former Soviet military officer, said he was ordered to clean up highly radioactive debris from the exploding reactor on the roof of an adjacent reactor.
Mr. Kulish said that on the evening of the same day, he felt dizzy and nauseous, vomited and lost consciousness. Doctors at the Kyiv hospital, where he said radiation-exposed soldiers occupy two floors of the neurology ward, said he had been subjected to a high dose of radiation.
Over the years, his thyroid has doubled in size, he said. He later developed chronic heart disease and severe physical weakness, which led him to resign as a senior officer of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and later from the civilian job he had pursued. He said most of the soldiers from his company fell ill or died.
“I know better than others what high radiation is,” he wrote in an email.
Natalia Kuziomko recalls being evacuated from her village of Illintsi when she was 9 years old and returning there for many years just for a brief visit. “When I visit my hometown, my heart aches,” she said.
Her mother stayed for a week to try to evacuate the pigs from her farm, and later died of ovarian cancer.
“Russia doesn’t understand that they are creating such a danger?” Miss Kuziomko asked. “This is very scary.”
She has stocked up again with iodine tablets.
