Twenty years ago today, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine exploded.
The accident happened at one of four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 110km (70 miles) north of the capital, Kiev.
Throughout most of the following day the Soviet authorities refused to admit anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
It was only two weeks after the explosion, when radiation releases had tailed off, that the first Soviet official gave a frank account, speaking of the “possibility of a catastrophe”.
Official UN figures predicted up to 9,000 Chernobyl-related cancer deaths. But a Greenpeace report released last week estimated a figure of 93,000. Greenpeace said other illnesses could bring the toll up to 200,000.
A restricted area with a radius of 30km (19 miles) remains in force around the destroyed nuclear reactor which is encased in concrete.
The reactor is encased in concrete, but that is hardly the end of the story.
The Chernobyl disaster was not over when the sarcophagus took shape above the ruins of reactor number four in the summer and autumn of 1986.
Nor will it be over when a new giant arch – as tall as St Paul’s cathedral or the Statue of Liberty – slides over the top of the sarcophagus three or four years from now.
…For the last decade, the main concern has been that the hastily built sarcophagus might collapse, blowing tonnes of highly radioactive dust into the surrounding forests and waterways.
But work is now under way to shore up badly leaning walls, secure unsteady beams, and strengthen tilting supports under the plant’s giant red and white chimney.
By the end of 2006 it will be much stronger, though fingers may still need crossing in case of tornadoes or earthquakes.
It’s a measure of the urgency of these stabilisation tasks, that they are being carried out despite plans to un-do them again – and dismantle most of the sarcophagus – once the new arch is in place, some time after 2008.
It’s not only the unstable structure that is a major concern. There is also a problem dealing with the spent fuel from the other reactors. And then there are the unmarked nuclear graveyards:
The graveyards are described as a “radiation emergency” by one of the men responsible for them, Valery Antropov, because no-one knows where they all are, or what is in them.
They were intended to be temporary, but 20 years on, only half of them have even been mapped and inventorised.
An estimated 500 trenches in seven areas around the plant have yet to be studied at all.
“We know the graveyards are in these areas, but exactly where – so as not to step on them – we cannot be sure,” says Mr Antropov, a senior member of a waste and decontamination unit known as “Complex”.
Some of the trenches closest to the Pripyat river have been partly washed away by spring floods, others are slowly seeping radionuclides into ground water.
Neither was properly built, he says, one is too close the river, and the contents of both should really be somewhere deep underground.
“Where to store highly radioactive and long-lived waste is a huge problem,” he says.
“We have containers queuing up. We need to build a deep geological deposit, but Greens object. It’s a problem that people don’t want to see.”
Chernobyl was truly a nightmare. The Soviet response was so inadequate and infuriating that it contributed to the collapse of the Soviet system. They are holding vigils and other ceremonies today throughout the Ukraine, Belarus, and in Moscow (where there was a little incident). Even Ireland is having a ceremony. The Vatican has issued a statement.
Russia’s chief medical doctor said that people in the region would be monitored until 2056. “Some 1.5 million people in Russia have suffered as a result of exposure to radiation following the Chernobyl accident,” he said. Seven of the 600,000 reservists that were sent to clean up Chernobyl are ending a hunger strike today. They have been protesting their paltry disability payments ($110/month)
You can read about what caused the Chernobyl disaster, here.
I found this site a couple of years ago. Photos from within Chernobyl.
that’s a pretty cool site. Lots of good info.
Thats amazing my brother sent me that link also a couple of years ago. The part that really grabbed me was the people watching the glowing reactor core from a bridge, people who all then died from the radiation.
I was floored the first time I saw the photos.
BBC has a brief Photo Essay of some of the memorials today. Also, look for several other related essays under “In Pictures”.
Peace
nuclear power+governments= reliable mendacity
no it ain’t e=mc>, there’s an absolute for ya!
Hadn’t realized it, time flies! I remember I was in the Sinai on the Multinational Force and Observers (who got bombed yesterday) six months after Chernobyl. This is why GWB’s talk of nukes scares me:
We found dead birds all over the friggin place. Our battalion photographer picked one up and got a dose of 50 rads of radiation. It turned out that these birds migrate every year from Ukraine. Radiation poisoning and bird flu working the same way as far as spreading. Who really knows what the after effects of a nuke strike on Tehran would be – obviously I don’t trust these lunatics to have thought about it or even care.
The world still has no reliable plan to deal with its nucler wastes, yet the industry wants to rev itself up again after suffering ‘setbacks’ like Chernobyl & Three Mile Island.
Few Americans are even aware of our worst nuclear accident, a partial melt-down of an experimentl reactor in June, 1959 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Ventura County, CA. For twenty years nearby residents weren’t even aware there had been an accident until a student activist unearthed documents after TMI. Though it was a small unit, there was no containment structure whatsoever, & it’s estimated that the radiation released may have been 250 times greater than that at Three Mile Island. Radiation levels were so high they were unmeasurable by the monitoring equipment, i.e. ‘off the scale.’ The April, 2006 issue of California Lawyer has an article on the site by Kathy Braidhill.
Running the reactor for two weeks after irregular radiation levels were detected, it was finally shut down, narrowly escaping a total meltdown. Unprotected workers can be seen in a company-made movie of the ‘cleanup’ looking into the open reactor vessel, dropping & breaking fuel rods on the floor, and finally using kotex pads rather than mechanical scrubbers because “it was cheaper.”
Why bring up such ancient history? First, because it’s an important piece of our hidden nuclear history. Second, cleanup issues at the site remain to this day.
This didn’t happen in the middle of nowhere; there is residential housing within a mile of the site (Roy Rodgers had a house there). A lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council against the Dept. of Energy seeks to force the DOE to follow EPA cleanup standards. The Bush administration DOE guidelines allow levels between 5,000 & 700,000 times higher than those of the EPA, and would allow home construction on the site within 10 years.
Daniel Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap says that “If [the courts rule that] you can house people on top of a meltdown site, you can pretty much ignore contamination on every other nuclear site in our country.”
Have you signed the Federation of American Scientists’ petition opposing the Nuclear Technology Trade Agreement with India yet?
The world still has no reliable plan to deal with its nuclear wastes
The advocates of “clean” atomic energy will not admit that. They gloss over the enormous problem. Where’s the research and where are the studies on this? There are also waste emissions from each plant going into the atmosphere during normal operation, but the industry claims they are insignificant.
are available in triplicate. The gov’t & industry are trying to convince themselves (& us) that Yucca Mountain will work.
The cover-up of radiation’s effects, started by the War Dept’s paid propagandist in the 40’s NY Times’ science reporter Laurence, continues apace as the DOE’s stance in Santa Susana makes clear.
& then there’s that nifty idea of stuffing it all our nuclear waste on the end of a rocket & blasting it into space . . .
DOE located it as close as possible to the Canadian border after all, “there’s nothin’ up there but ice & snow & a few Eskimos.”
The clean-up is years behind schedule and in need of $10 billion.
I always figured Hanford was sited where it was because that location had the three things a secret nuclear project needed:
1 – Electricity, and lots of it and cheap, thanks to the Grand Coulee dam and other projects taking advantage of the area’s
2 – Water, which it has in abundance from the Columbia River, but both of which paled before the need for
3 – Secrecy — in those days before spy satellites it was pretty easy to restrict access to a site like Hanford way out in the boonies of eastern Washington farm country. Considering that it didn’t really have much that would lure tourists — there’s much better fishing in more accessible parts of the state, and IIRC from growing up in Richland in the 50s and 60s the biggest tourist draw was a Lewis & Clark campsite out where the Snake meets up with the Columbia — anybody who was “just visiting” would have been pretty suspect to start with.
Well, I was speaking in 1940s terms, when the Manhattan Project was ongoing. These days I suppose you could visit the Hanford site, and I have fond memories of the little museum they had on the ground floor of the Federal Building, but neither one seems to be something you would go out of your way to go visit.
Interestingly enough, even though my father worked at Hanford I’ve never visited the site. We drove through the reservation once in a while on our way to somewhere else, and drove past some of the “areas” (the 300 area, IIRC) and the signs warning people not to get too interested in what was going on out there, like interested enough to stray from the road and take pictures and stuff.
Spent the day on this charcoal drawing:
It was the saddest image I could come up with and it now hangs in a Jesuit Peace Centre in Montreal.
Along the same lines as some have already posted above, here’s another heartbreaking photo essay of by photographer Paul Fusco of the kids of Chernobyl (flash with sound).