THE NUCLEAR SHADOW : The Threat of Chernobyl is not Old News. Another Accident would have Grevious Fallout for the World.

CHERNOBYL, SOVIET UNION â€”  “I am alone as a dry stick in the field.â€� The words are spoken slowly with a profound and unself-conscious dignity. The dialect is ancient Byelorussian. The face is deeply wrinkled, the hair thin and white. The speaker, bent almost double with osteoporosis, is one of the old women of the Forbidden Zone, a 30-kilometer circle around Chernobyl.

I am a surprise visitor. Except for a narrow cot, there is no furniture in the woman’s supposedly abandoned hut. No electricity and no water, except for a well. She lives off the land and the occasional kindness of the militiamen, who know she is there but never admit it openly.

The radiation level at her front door, nearly five years after the Chernobyl accident, is more than 200 times normal. She has not seen anyone for three months. She knows there are others like her nearby, but it is too far for her to walk to see them.

She came back to the Forbidden Zone after being evacuated. “Why?� I asked. “Because my home is here. I came back two years ago. I came back to die,� she says.

This woman is part of a story the United States has been mistakenly ignoring. We have been relegating Chernobyl to that most unimportant of all categories known as “old news.� But the stark realities of the nightmare that began on April 28, 1986, continue to be a major force shaping the future of the Soviet Union and global geopolitics.

No one knows how to cope with the still-unfolding consequences of what happened at Chernobyl Reactor Unit 4. No one knows what may happen next. This, in effect, gives entrenched authorities and those arrayed against them great piles of blank checks to fill in as they please to buy support for vastly different agendas.

Another stark reality is the alarmingly high probability that the Soviets could suffer another nuclear accident of near Chernobyl-like proportions. Over a dozen Chernobyl-style reactors continue to operate. The consequences of a Chernobyl II, both for the future of the Soviet Union and for the future of nuclear-power programs and politics worldwide, would be monumental. Nuclear power from these reactors is indispensable to the Soviet Union--even more so than the power from the Japanese reactor near Kyoto that malfunctioned last weekend is indispensable to Japan. Japan’s high-quality safety system prevented a disaster. Soviet systems, operating procedures and maintenance are not nearly as good.

The next Chernobyl probably would not come from the grotesque combination of arrogance, stupidity and complacency that led to the first. No one is again likely to deliberately disable major safety systems to run tests on a reactor whose builders made a Faustian bargain: They accepted the inherent tendency of their design to produce wild surges in power, and they accepted the risks of a pathetic lack of containment to increase plutonium generation for weapons.

Since 1986, the Soviets have done several technical things to make the Chernobyl reactors less skittish, and they have improved their operating and training procedures. But the reactors remain unstable, their containment systems ineffective. Studies also have identified at least six ways the reactors can fail that appear entirely outside the original Soviet designs for controllable worst-case situations. Another nine types of failures that would be difficult to handle have also been uncovered.

The contamination from the Chernobyl disaster has become an inexhaustible source of personal political leverage. In a society where a poorly informed populace must grapple on a learn-as-you-go basis with the unfamiliar processes of democracy, politicians who wrap themselves in mantels of sure-voiced expertise can seem persuasive even though they are often wrong.

If future relocation policy for the contaminated areas in the Ukraine and Byelorussia is set according to Moscow’s wishes, for example, the threshold for new evacuations would be roughly one-half to one-third that allowed for U.S. Navy nuclear personnel or nuclear-industry workers with several decades on the job. The U.S. standard implies a fatal cancer rate about equal to the frequency of fatal accidents in non-nuclear industries generally consid ered safe. Using this level as a guideline, Moscow should still move several hundred thousand more people to new homes and jobs.

But many politicians and scientists in the affected republics feel Moscow’s threshold is far too high. They argue vehemently for a standard five times lower--corresponding to current U.S. guidelines for exposure of the general American population. This tighter standard would require that a huge number--perhaps millions--of Ukrainians and Byelorussians would have to be uprooted.

Relocation presents deep problems. Those who move are often treated as “nuclear lepers,� but those who stay suffer, too. Ivan Smykovski, chairman of one of the most heavily contaminated areas in Byelorussia lamented that almost all his skilled administrators, engineers and doctors have deserted his district of 26,000 people. How is he to govern? He hears that Bragin, the keystone city of the district, will be entirely evacuated. Smykovski has been here four years. The radioactivity is everywhere. In a half-whisper, he tells you he is afraid for his family and for himself.

Moscow claims to be rigorously monitoring state food supplies for radioactive content. But it doesn’t have the money, the equipment or the trained manpower to do the job effectively. Indeed, such immense monitoring programs would be nearly impossible in the United States, even with all its wealth and technical resources.

Furthermore, more and more food and milk supplies are flowing into black markets or are handled by local arrangements that preclude strict controls. Pigs and chickens raised on contaminated land are slaughtered on the farms to feed villages nearby. Cows grazing on radioactive fodder supply milk for the children and babies of their owners. As a result, radiation-emitting materials become built into body organs and tissues. These extra sources confound the “safe threshold� arguments.

No wonder a new word has crept into the language of the people--�radiophobia.� Almost every disease and psychological misfortune, every malformed animal and plant, have become a part of Chernobyl’s legacy. Radiophobia is rampant. It can be fought only by educating its victims. But the victims do not trust what they are being told.

The constant stress of living with radiophobia, it is reasonably argued by some scientists, weakens the immune system, making victims less resistant to diseases they might otherwise shrug off. This phenomenon should be a matter of statistics and numbers. But valid baseline data often are nonexistent, so the arguments go on while the villagers shiver with fear. And where there is fear, there is also anger. Angry populations do not always make wise political decisions.

Still another phenomenon is looming ever larger: “hot particles.� These are microscopic spheres of intensely radioactive material released in smoky clouds from the heart of Reactor Unit 4.

Hot particles can be inhaled or ingested. They can stick to the lungs or other organs and remain there for months or years, bombarding the surrounding cells with prodigious doses of radiation. More than 650,000 soldiers fought the Chernobyl disaster, often without protective masks. Tens of thousands of civilians were also involved. Many of these people are likely to have thousands of hot particles in their bodies.

Hot particles are not the only challenge to a crumbling health-care system. At the new Radiation Medicine Child Care Clinic near Minsk, Dr. Sergei S. Korytko worries that a gigantic wave of thyroid problems, especially among children and young adults, may be approaching. In one school, 51% of the children show thyroid abnormalities, compared with 15% with more minor problems pre-Chernobyl. And the types of abnormalities are much more severe. The greater incidence may partly be a result of increased surveillance, but 13 cases of thyroid cancer have been confirmed where previously there were none.

Unbelievably, in their hunger for hard currency and probably for psychological effect as well, certain Moscow authorities propose to use Chernobyl as a tourist attraction. Quick trips in and out would pose no great danger to thrill-seeking travelers. The real deviltry in this is that it will mislead local populations into believing long-term residency is safe, too.

The United States can ill afford to treat Chernobyl as finished business. Chernobyl is not like a five-year-old earthquake or a flood.

Our responses need not be limited by arguments about what we can afford to spend to help or whether the money will be wasted. There are low-budget private and governmental initiatives that could be launched: public education programs for the Soviet population; advisory programs for Moscow, Minsk and Kiev; teleconferencing systems to improve the safety of the reactors in operation; staff training both for current personnel and for job candidates and inspectors from the republics; cooperative research; detailed U.S. computer support to help analyze the reactor systems, even medical fund-raisers and benefit shows to help acquire better equipment.

The U.S. Energy Department has a useful, though small, new effort under way, aimed at improving Soviet control-room practices. But our government obviously does not feel sufficiently empowered to undertake more than token projects. What is really needed--and urgently if this situation is to change in time--is an awakened American public that realizes Chernobyl is not old news. Rather, it is a ticking bomb with the power to affect us all.