nuclear-news

Video on Chernobyl’s continuing disaster

VIDEO Chernobyl: A Nuclear Accident With No End?J, Voice of Amerca James Brooke | Chernobyl, Ukraine, 30 march 11, As nuclear workers in Japan struggle to contain radiation from the Fukushima reactor, world attention is turning back to Chernobyl, Ukraine. There, people prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of the explosion that blew the roof off Reactor Number 4…….Twenty-five years later, Andreyev runs Chernobyl Forum, a political lobby for Ukraine’s 100,000 surviving “liquidators” or clean-up men and women. After weeks of heroic work, the liquidators had succeeded in sealing the plant in an improvised steel and cement “sarcophagus.”

But that was not before Chernobyl leaked 10 times the radiation of the Hiroshima atom bomb into the environment.

Authorities mapped out the area of the highest contamination – and closed it to human habitation. About 350,000 were forcibly evacuated from a largely rural area slightly larger than the American state of Rhode Island. Still living in this area are sprinkled about 300 largely elderly holdouts, now called ‘forest people.’…..
Laurin Dodd, an American engineer, has come to the site to talk to VOA. He is directing an American-led project to build a new, modern sarcophagus.

“The structure itself is almost a house of cards,” says Dodd. “It was built with some robotics and under extreme conditions. And there are large gaping holes. If you go inside, you will see holes the size of picture windows with small mammals going in and out, birds flying in and out.” As scaffolding props up the old ventilation stack, Dodd races to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle.

“There is almost 200 tons of radioactive material still inside the old sarcophagus,” said Dodd, who has worked here off and on since 1995……
As authorities in Japan may soon discover, big nuclear accidents have a defined beginning. It is unclear when they ever end.
Chernobyl: A Nuclear Accident With No End? | Europe | English

March 31, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Resources -audiovicual