| GENERAL NOTE
Many relevant documents have now been published,
however:
- All of them are either in Russian
or Ukrainian languages and, most importantly,
- The units of radiation measurements
in these documents are the ones that were used at the
time (Curie, Roentgen, rem) and do not have much meaning
for the new generation of radiation protection
professionals, who use the new units, Becquerels and
Sieverts.
The aim of the work is to make the radiation safety
information available and understandable to the wider
radiation protection community, thus –
- The documents were translated into
English, and
- The values in old units have been
converted to the ones that are currently used.
The translations of several documents are available on
the internet, but the radiation measurement units were
not converted and, in some cases, misinterpreted.
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| There are two sets of documents that are
publicly available on the internet:
⦁Thirty-five documents by the Ukrainian Security
Service were published on the internet in 2018, in the “Digital
Archive of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement”:
Several attempts to contact the administrators of
the website where the documents were published and
other organisations referenced by the website were not
successful.
⦁ Out of 35 documents only 20 were selected for
translation, as others do not contain the information
relevant to radiation protection.
A separate book “The Chernobyl Dossier of the KGB” was
published in two volumes.
The first volume (~1,200 pages) was published in 2019
and contains 249 documents, from 27th of April 1986 to
10th of September 1991.
The second volume (~700 pages) was published in 2020 and
contains 229 documents from the commencement of the
Chernobyl NPP construction (19th of September 1971) to
21st of November 1986.
As the PDF files are very large in size, the Calytrix
site visitors who read and understand Russian and
Ukrainian languages can, more or less easily, locate
both volumes on the internet, by searching for
«Чорнобильське досьє КҐБ».
Several attempts to contact the compilers of these
two volumes were not successful.
It is physically impossible to translate hundreds of
pages of documents published in these two volumes.
Therefore,
⦁ 130 documents from both volumes were selected for
translation and units’ conversion.
⦁ Each document has a number, which allows for its
matching with the relevant document in Russian in
volumes 1 and 2.
350 other documents from these books were not
translated, as they are mostly of a general and/or
political nature and are not relevant to radiation
protection.
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| TECHNICAL NOTE
A reference note for site visitors who are interested
in the documents, but are not familiar with radiation
protection concepts:
⦁ The radiation exposure is measured in Sieverts, the
annual limits are 1 milliSievert per year (mSv/year) for
members of the public and 20 mSv/year for the workers.
⦁ To compare the values reported in the documents with
the natural background - the external gamma radiation is
measured in microSieverts per hour and, for the
reference, a typical natural background around the world
is around 0.05-0.20 µSv/hour. The areas of high natural
background exist and values around 0.30-0.60 µSv/hr were
measured in Australia, 0.50-0.70 µSv/hr in Sri Lanka and
over 1 µSv/hr in Kenya.
⦁ The concentrations of radioactivity in soil, water and
agricultural products are measured in Becquerels. 1
Becquerel (Bq) is one atomic transformation per second –
thus, if, for example, we say that the water contains 2
Bq/L of radium, it means that two atoms of radium
disintegrate in one litre of this water every second.
⦁ Of course, trace amounts of naturally occurring
radionuclides (uranium, thorium, radium, etc) are
present everywhere – but the nuclides that were emitted
into the environment due to the accident at Chernobyl
were created by nuclear reactions and are artificial –
meaning that background of those is typically considered
to be zero. Yes, there are some almost undetectable
amounts of artificial radionuclides present in the
environment, due to historical nuclear testing, but
those can be generally ignored.
An additional note on the radiation units:
These are typically used with prefixes, which were
avoided as much as possible in the conversion to
minimise possible confusion and to ensure consistency:
⦁ Dose and dose rates can be given in nanoSieverts,
microSieverts, milliSieverts and Sieverts –
microSieverts per hour (µSv/hr) are used for dose rates
and milliSieverts (mSv) for the radiation exposure of
people;
⦁ Radioactivity concentrations can be given in
Becquerels, kiloBecquerels, MegaBecquerels,
GibaBecquerels and TeraBecquerels – Becquerels (Bq) are
used for radioactivity concentrations.
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