CHERNOBYL 30TH ANNIVERSARY

CHERNOBYL TOWNHALL

Today, 26 April 30 years ago in 1986 on the border of Ukraine and Belarus the Reactor Number Four at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin power plant in Chernobyl had exploded.

The reactor's 160-ton concrete lid was blown off, releasing a radioactive cloud of plutonium and other deadly nuclear isotopes into the atmosphere.

After three days Moscow admitted the explosion. Later on it was revealed if a legion of Soviet soldiers, miners divers, firemen and helicopter pilots had not risk, literally, their lives to tackle the reactor's molten core a second explosion would occurred and it would have wiped out western Europe and left it a toxic wasteland for tens of thousands of years.
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The second explosion would have been 10,000 times greater then that which devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in the Second World War.

Those heroic men succeeded to seal the reactor and paid with a horrendous death. None of them were ever honoured for their heroic sacrifices. It is assumed that 5,000 died of agonising deaths from radiation poisoning.

Today, the area of a radius of 19 miles of the plant is a no-man land with deformed nature, and the shattered buildings.

The city of Pripyat where 50,000 workers from the plant lived is now the most eerie of the deserted towns and villages in the Dead Zone. Now, trees irradiated by superheated plutonium, cesium 137, iodine 131 and strontium 90 started to grow at the public plaza.

Wolves, wild horses, bats, rats, rabbits and mice took up residence in the houses, cinemas, swimming pool, restaurants where all plant life is mutated and irradiated soil has a half-life of 240,000 years.

The town was only evacuated a day after the explosion when people collapsed in the street and blood running from their noses. A fleet of 400 cars, 1,200 buses and dozen trains made them leave with only a few hours of notice. They had to leave everything behind which was looted by soldiers who were the last ones to leave.

Chernobyl despite of radiation contamination people seem to be determined to move back. Already 4,000 people work, eat and sleep there. They are the engineers, labourers, technicians, electricians and atomic specialists who keep the Reactor Number Four under control. The units at the gigantic complex - size of 40 Wembley Stadiums - the fuel rods were removed and moved far away.

The other workforce of nurses and doctors caring for the workers are all aware of the silent killer around them.

Due to harsh winters and hot summers the protection built by the first squads is corroding and it needs now another group of workers to construct a giant rubber and steel sheath put instead to protect the reactor ageing shield. It will take 2 years and cost £1.5billion.

It is hard to understand why people want to live there again after around one million died of cancer. Nevertheless, the people seem to be willing to move back into the Dead Zone even they are aware of the silent killer.

It is even harder to understand that governments are not closing down any Nuclear power Stations leave alone building new ones. This explosion should give a lesson that nuclear power is far beyond the capacity of man to cope with. Not to speak of seeking constantly new dumping grounds for the waste with will not disintegrate for hundred of thousands of years and piling up more and more.

Also the radiation of the explosion was recorded thousands of miles away in Uppsala, Sweden. Japan still contaminates the Pacific Ocean with radiation seeping into the sea because they cannot control or stop it. If the Soldiers and engineers did not risk their lives with which they had to pay for it, there would have been a second explosion which would have wiped western Europe out and contaminated for tens of thousands of years.