We found out about Chernobyl because nuclear power plant operators in Sweden noticed their geiger counters indicating radiation – outside the reactor … From Der Speigel
Murderous Atoms
The Geiger counters continued to tick away for days as much as 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) away from the disaster zone, as air masses contaminated with radiation pushed across Europe. Many fears are justified. The major disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant proved the prophets wrong who underestimated the “residual risk” of nuclear energy. A look back from the archives of DER SPIEGEL.
The following article appeared in the May 5, 1986 issue of DER SPIEGEL:
The staff at Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear power plant, located on the Baltic coast north of Stockholm, was just changing shifts. It was 7:00 a.m. last Monday when workers passing through a routine check in the security sluice at the entrance to the plant’s reactor building set off warning signals.
Radiation testing personnel were alerted. Using a piece of equipment that looks like a handheld vacuum cleaner, they scanned the plant employees and took radioactivity readings on the walls, on the plant grounds and in rainwater cisterns. The results were astonishing. The Geiger counters were ticking like crazy — but outside, not in the reactor buildings.
“It was crazy,” says measuring technician Bengt Wellman. According to Wellman, where the normal reading would be four radioactive decay units per second, “we measured 100 per second,” even four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the reactor. Plant manager Karl Erik Sehlstedt issued a level 2 alarm, which meant that the local population was notified by radio. At 11:00 a.m., 800 employees left the power plant and gathered on a nearby athletic field, where they were all scanned for radiation and where many had to leave their shoes behind for decontamination and walk home with their feet covered in plastic bags. An hour and a half later, officials were still unable to rule out the possibility that something had gone wrong at Forsmark.
But then similar reports about elevated radioactivity levels began coming in from almost every other Swedish testing station and from neighboring Finland. In some places, the radiation was 10 times as high as natural environmental radioactivity. By then, Swedish experts knew that the invisible radiation and silent danger had blown across the Baltic Sea on a southeasterly air current. Meteorologists simulated the wind patterns of the preceding few days and physicists analyzed the spectrum of radioactive particles. Finally, everything pointed to the presumed source of the heightened radioactivity, a nuclear power plant near Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine.
At this point, the people of Kiev were unaware that a nuclear inferno had erupted two days earlier less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of their city. They continued to buy fruit and vegetable in local markets and decorate the city’s houses and streets for the annual May Day celebration. Horrified, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William J. Crowe told US members of Congress that satellite images revealed that only hours after the accident, Soviet authorities had allowed a soccer match to continue in the vicinity of the reactor meltdown. The players and onlookers had no idea of the hazards to which they were being exposed.