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In France, nuclear power produces 65% of the country's electricity, and it is solidly backed by Socialist President Francois Mitterrand and Conservative Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Nonetheless, the French government has been forced to admit that radiation levels from Chernobyl were much higher than originally thought, and some farmers in the eastern part of the country have had to plow under tainted lettuce and cabbage crops. On Wednesday, Paris announced that five workers at a reprocessing plant at Cap de la Hague had accidentally received from .7 to 18 rems of radiation over their bodies. Five rems a year is the maximum exposure considered to be safe.
Moscow, of course, has many Chernobyl troubles in addition to the damage caused by the blast and radiation. It suffers from a serious credibility gap as a result of its lack of candor about the accident. Other nations have severely criticized the Soviets for first concealing the disaster from the world and then providing scant information. Many Soviet citizens are also resentful because they were not warned of the danger until more than a week after the accident. Residents of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 80 miles from the crippled reactor, took no safety precautions in the same period. Many now fear that they suffered radiation damage. Some pregnant women are reportedly being advised by doctors to have abortions.
The Soviets last week disclosed a few new details about the accident. In Vienna, Boris Semyonov, a governor of the International Atomic Energy Agency, raised the official death toll from nine victims to 15, and said that 20 people remain gravely ill from radiation sickness. Members of the energy agency later agreed to draw up plans to provide early warning and detailed information about future accidents. While Soviet papers did not report the new death toll, some publications continued to complain about exaggerated foreign reports of the disaster and wildly distorted rumors. One tale making the rounds, according to the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, was that vodka and red wine could cure the effects of radiation exposure. First Deputy Health Minister Oleg Shchepin called that boozy prescription dangerous nonsense.
While diplomats try to gauge the political effects of Chernobyl, nuclear experts have renewed their search for safer atomic power systems. Many engineers and scientists argue that well-designed existing reactors are safe by any reasonable standards, but others insist that it will take a new generation of machines to ease people's fears and restore their confidence. "Chernobyl was the Hindenburg of the current nuclear power business," says Lawrence Lidsky, an M.I.T. nuclear engineer, referring to the 1937 explosion of a German dirigible that ended the use of hydrogen in lighter- than-air passenger craft. "People simply do not trust the present nuclear technology."