This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. In case you didn't know (or had forgotten, which I had), "disaster" in no way describes the nightmare which resulted from this fiasco. The radiation released in the event (I don't know what else to call it) was over a 100 times more than that released by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are huge portions of the Ukraine and Belarus which will be unihabitable for hundreds of years.
Boing Boing provides some interesting links which address both the event itself and its long-term consequences. The picture on the Boing Boing page ("An aerial view of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after its explosion.") is only terrifying when you consider just how much radiation continues to emanate from the wreckage 20 years later. Think Vladimir Repik of Reuters (the attribution on the photo) is still with us today?
My memory of Chernobyl is fuzzy at best, which is partly due to 1986 being my third year of college, but more due to the Soviet government's official policy of denying the obvious: "What shiny explosion and glowing forest are you talking about? Firemen cooked like microwave burritos? This is some sort of imperialist plot."
No comments:
Post a Comment