nuclear-news

Secrecy surrounds the toxic legacy of Chernobyl nuclear disaster

an estimated five million people were exposed to potentially hazardous levels of radiation in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Doctors claim that cancer rates are far higher than they were before 1986, and that tens of thousands of Ukrainians and people in neighbouring Belarus (worse affected than Ukraine because of the wind direction at the time) may have died prematurely as a result.

Chernobyl: The toxic tourist attraction – Telegraph, Andrew Osborne 6 Mar 11, As Ukraine prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster next month, its legacy remains as divisive as ever, however.

Opponents of nuclear power insist that Chernobyl proved once and for all that the technology is unsafe. They argue that no more nuclear power stations should be built – ever.”Chernobyl was a warning for the future,” said Valery Makarenko, the first Soviet TV reporter on the scene. “It was not just a banal disaster, it was a message that nuclear power is not safe. It is time to think, consider alternatives, and bring the industry under tight international control. Otherwise, humankind will destroy itself.”….

in the small hours of April 26, 1986, when a “routine experiment” went badly wrong and Chernobyl’s fourth reactor exploded, sending a plume of radiation equivalent to 400 Hiroshimas into the night sky.

Many of the 176 staff on duty that night were killed instantly; others would die later in hospital. The reactor core burned for 10 days, and the resultant pollutants – including plutonium isotopes with a half-life of 24,360 years – drifted around the world, raining toxicity down on faraway places such as the lakes of Japan and the glens of Scotland.

The Soviets tried to hush the disaster up and waited almost three days – until the drifting radioactive fallout triggered alarms in Sweden – before publicly acknowledging that an accident had occurred. The reactor-core eventually had to be sealed with a cement mixture, dropped from the air, and a giant steel and concrete sarcophagus erected over it to contain the radiation.

The Soviet Union’s mania for secrecy and its desire to save face mean that it is still not known precisely how many people died as a result of the tragedy. Estimates of human fatalities, both direct and indirect, vary wildly, from less than a hundred in the immediate aftermath to tens of thousands in the years that followed.

More widely, an estimated five million people were exposed to potentially hazardous levels of radiation in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Doctors claim that cancer rates are far higher than they were before 1986, and that tens of thousands of Ukrainians and people in neighbouring Belarus (worse affected than Ukraine because of the wind direction at the time) may have died prematurely as a result.

“I now understand that health is the main thing in life,” laments Ilya Bosakovsky, 72, a former Chernobyl worker, who recalls how soldiers drafted in to help with the clean-up operation refused to do some jobs because they feared being irradiated……

March 7, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine