Chernobyl, 20 years on

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Ukraine remembers Chernobyl blast 
 
The blast was marked by pealing bells at 0123 (2223 GMT Tuesday) - the time the alarm was set off on 26 April 1986.

President Viktor Yushchenko attended a candlelit service at a small church in Kiev built in honour of the victims.

The explosion tore off the plant's roof, spewing radioactive fallout over swathes of the then-USSR and Europe.

'Ask for forgiveness'

Hundreds of mourners, each carrying a single red carnation and flickering candles, gathered for the outdoor Orthodox Christian service at the church in Kiev.

President Yushchenko laid a wreath to remember those who were sent to deal with the accident and to the many who have since been affected.

At precisely 0123, the church bells tolled 20 times.

A similar ceremony got under way an hour earlier, to coincide with 0123 Moscow time, in Slavutych, the town built to house the Chernobyl plant workers displaced by the accident.

To the sound of bells tolling and alarm sirens blaring, mourners laid flowers and candles at a monument dedicated to those who died in the immediate aftermath of the accident.

"I knew all of these people," a tearful Mykola Ryabushkin told the AFP news agency, pointing to the portraits hanging on the monument.

The 59-year-old was working as an operator at the plant when the explosion happened.

"I look at them and I want to ask them for forgiveness," he said. "Maybe we're all to blame for letting this accident happen."

Disputed death toll

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.

[angus]

Bad business Chernobyl was.  I spoke with a woman who grew up about a hundred miles from there at a party on Sunday for another colleague (Dravidian, or South Indian) who got a job in Seattle.  The woman is the wife of a Ukranian colleague of mine.  She said it was the talk of the town for many years.  Mostly we talked about the sorry economic state of Ukraine.  Anyway, she's reluctant to believe the 240,000 number given by some agencies, but she may or may not be representative of the locals.  I think it's hard to put a number on it anyway.  Locally vodka is thought to be an elixir for radiation exposure.  As if the Ukraines needed an excuse...

A team from Texas Tech is using the empty city of Pripyat (formerly the nearest city of 50,000 people but was evacuated in 1986) to study fallout, given the interest in dirty bombs and such.  Nifty DOE/DOD grant angle, you gotta admit.  Wish I'd thought of it.  But then, I wouldn't want to spend a third of my on-the-clock time tooling around radioactive sites with all sorts of geiger counters strapped to my neck and such.

Well, happy anniversary anyway.  Today is the 25th anniversary of my father's death as well.  Always an introspective time.  With or without Chernobyl.  My guess is that public support for nuclear power always lags a bit this time of year, what with all the public interest stories about Chernobyl in the papers.   Anyway, eventually all the radionuclides will run their courses.  Half-lives aren't forever.  And because the people left and never came back, the forests are thriving.  How resilient is nature in the face of radiological adversity?  Wolves prowl the forest, the endangered black storks and white-tailed eagles are once again, finally, nesting in the marshes, and several dozen rare horses that went extinct in the wild decades ago are thriving after being released near Pripyat in 1998.  No wonder Greenpeace is continuing to scare folks away:  an empty forest is a fine place for non-human members of the animal kingdom.  But it's probably not necessary to invent numbers to scare folks away from the Chernobyl region.  I wouldn't want to work near there these days.  The very name chernobyl evokes images of glowing children and bad headaches.  We used to call the partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil that passes for "cheese" at Pancho's restaurants Chernobyl Cheese back when I was in grad school.   Mmmmmm.  Pancho's.

They are looking to entomb the site again.  a megastructure is being built now, and for the next several years, to seal the ruins of reactor number four (or whatever it's called) in a radiation-proof enclosure.  this is probably a good idea, but the thought of it makes nuclear energy a hard sell.  All of which means we better keep armies of occupation at the ready, because we're likely to be addicted to oil for the foreseeable future.