Three dates we would do well to remember when the worst nuclear accidents in world history took place.
Three Mile Island - US - March 28, 1979 - 40 years ago
Chernobyl Ukraine - USSR - April 26, 1986 - 33 years ago
Fukushima Daiichi - Japan -
Of course, for purposes of historical accuracy, we must also include the release date of the terrifying Hollywood movie about a nuclear reactor meltdown, the China Syndrome. In an eerie and haunting twist of fate, this movie hit the box offices on March 16, 1979, just twelve days before the first nuclear meltdown in history took place in real life at TMI.
Nuclear energy, is not cheap. The cost of a new reactor is $9 billion, while the cost to decommission it (shut it down) is about 15.6 times more than it cost to build it. It uses uranium mined from the earth, a product of science and technology, source of the most powerful and destructive weapons ever known, and capable of doing devastating environmental damage to our air, water and land.
When you think about it it is a miracle we have only had three nuclear disasters throughout the world. Standards vary, construction techniques and materials vary, and if it is located near a river or ocean, on an earthquake fault line, or where it can flood, you have a problem.
Of course, there is also the sad fact there is no place to dispose of or permanently store the spent reactor rods and radioactive cooling water. A final drawback, we do not have much experience with damaged reactors and long-term study of the real effects of high levels of radiation on humans over lifetimes, and into the genetic coding of future generations.
In this article I want t remind you of the real consequences of a nuclear disaster which can happen anyplace and anytime most everywhere in the world.
This article is about Chernobyl, the first true meltdown of the core, the first explosion in a reactor, and the most extensive radioactive cloud ever experienced. In a report by Reuters written by Richard Balmforth, these are the main facts.
Chernobyl before the nuclear accident.
When you think about it it is a miracle we have only had three nuclear disasters throughout the world. Standards vary, construction techniques and materials vary, and if it is located near a river or ocean, on an earthquake fault line, or where it can flood, you have a problem.
Of course, there is also the sad fact there is no place to dispose of or permanently store the spent reactor rods and radioactive cooling water. A final drawback, we do not have much experience with damaged reactors and long-term study of the real effects of high levels of radiation on humans over lifetimes, and into the genetic coding of future generations.
In this article I want t remind you of the real consequences of a nuclear disaster which can happen anyplace and anytime most everywhere in the world.
This article is about Chernobyl, the first true meltdown of the core, the first explosion in a reactor, and the most extensive radioactive cloud ever experienced. In a report by Reuters written by Richard Balmforth, these are the main facts.
Key
facts:
* The cloud of
radioactive strontium, caesium and plutonium affected mainly Ukraine and
neighboring Belarus, as well as parts of Russia and Europe.
* Estimates for the
numbers of direct and indirect deaths from the disaster vary.
* The Chernobyl Forum,
a group of eight U.N. agencies, and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus and
Russia, have estimated the death toll at only a few thousand as a result of the
explosion. U.N. agencies have said some 4,000 people will die in total because
of radiation exposure.
* The environmental
group Greenpeace puts the eventual death toll far higher than official
estimates, with up to 93,000 extra cancer deaths worldwide.
* The Chernobyl Union
of Ukraine, a non-government body, estimates the present death toll from the
disaster at almost 734,000.
* The disaster was the
object of a cover-up by secretive Soviet authorities who did not immediately
admit to the explosion.
* The accident dented
the image of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev who had earlier launched
his ‘glasnost’ policies for greater openness in Soviet society.
* Chernobyl engineers
shut down the last functioning reactor, Number Three, in December 2000.
Radioactive nuclear fuel is still being removed from the plant.
* A make-shift cover —
the ‘Sarcophagus’ — was built in six months after the explosion. It covers the
stricken reactor to protect the environment from radiation for at least 30
years. This has now developed cracks, triggering an international effort to
fund a new encasement.
* Ukraine is seeking a
further 600 million euros ($840 million) to help finance the new convex
structure which will slip over the aging ‘Sarcophagus’ and allow the old
reactor to be dismantled.
* Officials say it
could be up to 100 years before the station is completely decommissioned.
* A 30-km (19-mile)
exclusion zone is in place round the disaster site.
* Wildlife has made a
comeback in this area and there are said to be more than 60 different types of
mammals living there including wild boar and elk.
* Although research
continues, the first reports about long-term radiation damage have been
published, and the results are that the radiation did less damage than
initially feared. “There is a tendency to attribute increases in the rates of
all cancers over time to the Chernobyl accident, but it should be noted that
increases were also observed before the accident in the affected areas,” the
United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation
(UNSCEAR) said in its summer 2010 assessments of the radiation effects in
Chernobyl.
“Moreover, a general
increase in mortality has been reported in recent years in most areas of the
former Soviet Union, and this must be taken into account when interpreting the
results of Chernobyl-related studies,” the report said.
* In its conclusion,
the U.N. report said that “the vast majority of the population need not live in
fear of serious health consequences due to the radiation from the Chernobyl
accident.”
* The report also said
that the majority of the affected population in the region was exposed to
radiation levels “comparable to or a few times higher than the natural
background levels, and future exposures continue to slowly diminish as the
radionuclides decay.”
Residents of Chernobyl and Pripyat surround the reactor and after considerable delay they were completely evacuated several hours after the radiation explosion. Today, 33 years later, they remain part of the dead zone of high radiation levels and for the most part are abandoned. This was life before the fateful day in April 1986.
The disaster!
Today.
.
The cleanup of the area
surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is expected to continue for decades,
while parts may remain uninhabitable for thousands of years.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GERD LUDWIG, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
The
Chernobyl disaster: What happened, and the long-term impacts
The accident at
a nuclear power plant in Ukraine shocked the world, permanently altered a
region, and leaves many questions unanswered.
PUBLISHED MAY 17, 2019
BY ERIN
BLAKEMORE
On April 25 and 26, 1986, the worst nuclear
accident in history unfolded in what is now northern Ukraine as a reactor at a
nuclear power plant exploded and burned. Shrouded in secrecy, the incident was
a watershed moment in both the Cold War and the history of nuclear power. More than 30 years on, scientists
estimate the zone around the former plant will not be habitable for up to 20,000 years.
The disaster took place near the city of
Chernobyl in the former USSR, which invested heavily in nuclear power after
World War II. Starting in 1977, Soviet scientists installed four RBMK nuclear reactors at the power plant,
which is located just south of what is now Ukraine’s border with Belarus.
A few months after
reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant went up in toxic flames in 1986,
it was encased in a concrete and steel "sarcophagus" to contain the
radioactive material inside. That aging structure, seen here, was covered with
a larger, newer containment housing in 2016.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GERD LUDWIG, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
On April 25, 1986, routine maintenance was
scheduled at V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station’s fourth reactor, and workers
planned to use the downtime to test whether the reactor could still be cooled
if the plant lost power. During the test, however, workers violated safety protocols and power surged
inside the plant. Despite attempts to shut down the reactor entirely, another
power surge caused a chain reaction of explosions inside. Finally, the nuclear
core itself was exposed, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere.
Firefighters attempted to put out a series
of blazes at the plant, and eventually helicopters dumped sand and other
materials in an attempt to squelch the fires and contain the contamination.
Despite the death of two people in the explosions, the hospitalization of
workers and firefighters, and the danger from fallout and fire, no one in the
surrounding areas—including the nearby city of Pripyat, which was built in the 1970s to house
workers at the plant—was evacuated until about 36 hours after the disaster
began.
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Publicizing a nuclear accident was considered a significant political risk, but
by then it was too late: The meltdown had already spread radiation as far as
Sweden, where officials at another nuclear plant began to ask about what was
happening in the USSR. After first denying any accident, the Soviets finally made
a brief announcement on April 28.
Soon, the world realized that it was
witnessing a historic event. Up to 30 percent of Chernobyl’s 190 metric tons of
uranium was now in the atmosphere, and the Soviet Union eventually evacuated 335,000 people, establishing a
19-mile-wide “exclusion zone” around the reactor.
At least 28 people initially died as a
result of the accident, while more than 100 were injured. The United Nations
Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has reported that more
than 6,000 children and adolescents developed thyroid cancer after being exposed
to radiation from the incident, although some experts have challenged that claim.
International researchers have predicted that
ultimately, around 4,000 people exposed to high levels of radiation could
succumb to radiation-related cancer, while about 5,000 people exposed to lower
levels of radiation may suffer the same fate. Yet the full consequences of the
accident, including impacts on mental health and even subsequent generations,
remain highly debated and under study.
What remains of the reactor is now inside a
massive steel containment structure deployed in late 2016.
Containment efforts and monitoring continue and cleanup is expected to last
until at least 2065.
The city of Pripyat was
built to house workers of the nuclear power plant in the 1970s. It has been an
abandoned ghost town since the accident, and is now used as a laboratory to
study fallout patterns.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GERD LUDWIG, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
The impact of the disaster on the
surrounding forest and wildlife also remains an area of active research. In the
immediate aftermath of the accident, an area of about four-square miles became
known as the “Red Forest” because so many trees turned reddish-brown and died
after absorbing high levels of radiation.
Today, the exclusion zone is eerily quiet,
yet full of life. Though many trees have regrown, scientists have found
evidence of elevated levels of cataracts and albinism, and lower rates of
beneficial bacteria, among some wildlife species in the area in recent years. Yet, due to the exclusion of
human activity around the shuttered power plant, the numbers of some wildlife,
from lynxes to elk, have increased. In 2015, scientists estimated there were seven times
more wolves in the exclusion zone than in nearby comparable reserves, thanks to
humans’ absence.
The Chernobyl disaster had other fallout:
The economic and political toll hastened the end of the USSR and fueled a global anti-nuclear movement. The
disaster has been estimated to cost some $235 billion in damages. What is now Belarus,
which saw 23 percent of its territory contaminated by
the accident, lost about a fifth of its agricultural land. At the height of
disaster response efforts, in 1991, Belarus spent 22 percent of its total budget dealing with
Chernobyl.
Today, Chernobyl beckons to tourists who are intrigued by its
history and its danger. But though Chernobyl symbolizes the potential
devastation of nuclear power, Russia never quite moved beyond its legacy—or its
technology. As of 2019, there are still 11 operational RBMK reactors in Russia.
