Chernobyl is still horrifyingly relevant – the lessons have not been learned. I was two years old and living in Kyiv when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster happened. In spite of my grandfather’s fairly high military rank, we weren’t the first to know. When we did find out, I was, like many other children, shipped off to St Petersburg with my mother. My father, who was an engineer and had visited Chernobyl during his student years, later recalled how empty and ghostly Kyiv became. Chernobyl is familiar in more ways than one. I didn’t recognise only those intelligent, earnest Soviet men and women – dying because people more powerful than them needed them to die to protect their own standing – but I also recognised how the mind-numbing lies and the political expediency of the horror is not something we can safely put away into a box. We can’t say, “That’s what happened then, and sure, it was incredibly awful and sad, but it doesn’t apply to us.” Whether it’s the demagogue sitting in the White House, the people who engineered Brexit, or the chorus on the right and corporate interests telling us that the climate crisis is nothing but an alarmist hoax, there are people who do the expedient thing for their own ends all around us. Many are powerful enough to decide our collective fates.
Guardian 10th June 2019 read more »
The explosion in the Russian town in 1986 released deadly radioactive clouds to drift across Europe contaminating land and livestock for thousands of miles around. The force of the blast had created a deadly radioactive fallout 400 times larger than the Hiroshima bomb and it’s thought that thousands of people in Ukraine and the surrounding countries died as a result,
Welsh farming was paralysed for 26 years after Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster.
Stoke on Trent Live 10th June 2019 read more »
Leeds Live 10th June 2019 read more »
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has led international efforts to transform the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Here, Balthasar Lindauer, director of the London-headquartered bank’s Nuclear Safety Department, gives an insight into the change in safety culture at the plant.
World Nuclear News 10th June 2019 read more »