Chernobyl Disaster 20 years ago - we must listen to history
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20 years ago today the world awoke to a nuclear nightmare. A lethal chain of events at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant resulted in a radioactive fire that eventually left 17 ghost villages within 19 miles of the facility. Four hundred times more radioactivity than Hiroshima bomb was released and traveled around the world. The fallout drove a third of a million people permanently from their homes. And as devastating as Katrina was last year, it pales in comparison to this tragedy.
Why should this be of concern to Los Angeles? The radioactive plume from Chernobyl was first acknowledged in Sweden, hundreds of miles from Ukraine. It had been two days since the accident and the Soviet government had yet to tell their people. Los Angeles County sits less than 50 miles from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and approximately 150 miles from Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant. Los Angeles is also on the proposed transport route for both nuclear plants to Yucca Mountain, should it ever open.
The nuclear industry continues to downplay the devastation of the Chernobyl nuclear fire. Remembering the Chernobyl accident contradicts the claim that new nuclear power plants are safe and the solution to global warming. Nuclear advocates shy away from discussing the economic costs of Chernobyl, which continue to this day. The sarcophagus that covers Chernobyl�s nuclear coffin is leaking. A new cover is set to be in place in 3 years, but not without international aide. In the meantime, it leaks.
The lasting impacts of the Chernobyl accident cannot be denied. The impacts include seventeen ghost villages, hundreds of thousands of displaced residents, continuing fear of radioactive related illnesses and contaminated agriculture. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency:
Massive radioactive contamination forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people from the affected region during 1986, and the relocation, after 1986, of another 200,000 from Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Some five million people continue to live in areas contaminated by the accident and have to deal with its environmental, health, social and economic consequences.
Agriculture and forestry are forbidden in wide areas. Poverty forces many people to eat contaminated berries, mushrooms, game and fish, to feed contaminated hay to their cattle and to burn radioactively contaminated firewood in their stoves. Many of those living in the affected areas are ignorant of the risks that they face, or have adopted an apathetic and fatalistic attitude.
A total of some seven million people are in receipt of Chernobyl-related welfare benefits of one kind or another... According to the Ukrainian national report �15 Years after the Chernobyl Catastrophe� the Soviet Union spent $18 billion on Chernobyl rehabilitation between 1986 and 1991.
Far from the burnt shell of Chernobyl the consequences of massive radioactive smoke that traveled worldwide from Chernobyl are still being felt.
After two decades, the legacy of the Chernobyl disaster is still casting its poisonous shadow over Britain's countryside. The Department of Health has admitted that more than 200,000 sheep are grazing on land contaminated by fallout from the explosion at the Ukrainian nuclear plant 1,500 miles away. Emergency orders still apply to 355 Welsh farms, 11 in Scotland and nine in England as a result of the catastrophe in April 1986.
Last September I returned to Kiev after 20 years. In the fall of 1985, no one I met in Kiev appeared concerned about four reactors 70 miles from their homes. No one in Ukraine could have known that in less than six months their lives would be drastically altered. Since my last visit in 1985, Ukrainians have gone from denial that an accident could happen to skepticism that the government will effectively stop the radiation from leaking in their lifetimes.
Phase out aging nuclear plants, limiting the waste and securing California�s nuclear sites are the goals of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility. It took an accident to accomplish two of these three things at Chernobyl. Support the Alliance, share your ideas, become a part of our effort to leave a less radioactive future as our legacy to this community (state). Don�t let this tragedy be forgotten. Please join us to remember Chernobyl � 20 years later.
For more information please contact the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility at www.a4nr.org
Posted by: Rochelle.Becker on Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - 06:58 AM
