Danger of Chernobyl nuclear reactor wreck will remain for thousands of years

Ruined Chernobyl nuclear plant will remain a threat for 3,000 years @mattschodcnews BY MATTHEW SCHOFIELD mschofield@mcclatchydc.com , Miami Herald, 24 Apr 16,

30 years since Chernobyl may seem like a long time, but it’s really just the start
Below reactor’s ruins is a 2,000-ton radioactive mass that can’t be removed
How do you protect a site for as long a time as Western civilization has existed?

….It will be 30 years ago on 26 April that Pripyat and the nearby Chernobyl nuclear plant became synonymous with nuclear disaster, that the word Chernobyl came to mean more than just a little village in rural Ukraine, and this place became more than just another spot in the shadowy Soviet Union.

Even 30 years later – 25 years after the country that built it ceased to exist – the full damage of that day is still argued.

Death toll estimates run from hundreds to millions. The area near the reactor is both a teeming wildlife refuge and an irradiated ghost-scape. Much of eastern and central Europe continues to deal with fallout aftermath. The infamous Reactor Number 4 remains a problem that is neither solved nor solvable………..

Chernobyl’s irradiated geography When an explosion destroyed Reactor No. 4 at the Soviet-run Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine on April 26, 1986, an estimated 10 tons of radioactive fuel and debris were thrown into the atmosphere. The most toxic ground is the Exclusion Zone, and the evacuated ghost town of Pripyat……….

All told, about 4,000 people would eventually die from the accident, according to a report by the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Others say those numbers are wildly low. Alexey Yablokov, a former environment adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, estimated the global death toll to be 1.44 million. Other reports placed the cancer death totals at 30,000 to 60,000. Belarusian physicist Georgiy Lepin, a vice president of the association of liquidators of Chernobyl, the men brought in to fight the fire and clean up, estimated that within a few years, 13,000 rescue workers had died and another 70,000 were left unfit for work. The official number of disabled Chernobyl rescue workers today in Ukraine is 106,000.

A United Nations study says that “5 million people currently live in areas of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine that are contaminated with radionuclides due to the accident; about 100,000 of them live in areas classified in the past by government authorities as areas of ‘strict control.’ ”……….

What they figured out was the worst nuclear-energy disaster in human history, far worse than the explosion at Kyshtym nuclear complex in 1957 in what was then the Soviet Union, which released 70 tons of radioactive material into the air, or the 1957 fire at the Windscale Nuclear Reactor in northwestern England, which forced a ban on milk sales for a month, or the Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania on March 29, 1979, where a cooling malfunction led to a partial meltdown.

All of central and eastern Europe was at risk. Even today, in Bavaria in southern Germany, wildlife officials warn hunters not to eat the meat of wild boars, which continue to show high levels of radiation contamination……..http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article73405857.html

April 25, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, safety, Ukraine, wastes

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