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News :: Agriculture : Children : Civil & Human Rights : Environment : Government Secrecy : Health : Nukes |
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20 Years After Chernobyl: Hell on Earth |
Current rating: 0 |
by John Vidal
(No verified email address) |
26 Apr 2006
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Chernobyl was the world's worst environmental disaster. Twenty years on, John Vidal reports on the clean-up, the false medical records, the communities that refused to leave and the continuing cost to people and planet |
Twenty years ago today, Konstantin Tatuyan, a Ukrainian radio engineer, was horrified when Reactor No 4 at Chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded, caught fire, and for the next 10 days spewed the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima bombs' worth of radioactivity across 150,000 sq miles of Europe and beyond. He was just married, and he and his young family lived in the town of Chernobyl, just a few miles from the reactor.
Like 120,000 people, the family was evacuated, but Tatuyan volunteered to become a "liquidator", to help with the clean up, believing that his knowledge of radiation could save not just him but many of the 200,000 young soldiers and others who were rushed in from all over the Soviet Union. "We felt we had to do it," he says. "Who else, if not us, would do it?"
Tatuyan spent the next seven years in charge of 5,000 mostly young army reservists - drafted in from Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Chechnya, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in what was the Soviet Union - working 22 days on, eight days off, digging great holes, demolishing villages, dumping high-level waste, monitoring hot spots, testing the water, cleaning railway lines and roads, decontaminating ground and travelling throughout some of the most radioactive regions of Ukraine, Belarus and southern Russia.
He survived the worst environment disaster in history, he says, because he knew the danger and could monitor the radioactivity that varied from yard to yard and from village to village depending on where the plume descended to ground level, and on where the deadly bits of graphite from the core of the reactor were carried by the wind.
He took precautions but he also kept meticulous - albeit illegal - records of his own accumulating exposure. Every year the authorities told him he was "fit for duty", and when he left Chernobyl they gave him a letter saying he had received just under the safe lifetime dose of radiation. He knew he had received more than five times that amount.
What he saw in those years, he says, appalled him: young men dying for want of the simplest information about exposure to radiation; the wide-scale falsification of medical histories by the Soviet army and the disappearance of people's records so the state would not have to compensate them; the wholesale looting of evacuated houses and abandoned churches; the haste and carelessness with which the concrete "sarcophagus" was erected over the stricken reactor; and, above all, the horror of seeing land almost twice the size of Britain contaminated, with thousands of villages made uninhabitable.
It was sometimes surreal, he says. He had people beg him to leave their homes or villages contaminated because that would guarantee them a pension; he recalls how several carriages of radioactive animal carcasses travelled for five years around the Soviet Union being rejected by every state, returning to Chernobyl to be buried - train and all. He helped fill a 4 sq mile dump with radioactive lorries, cement mixers, trains and helicopters. He knows where the Chernobyl bodies are buried, he says, because he was the grave digger. "We made up the response as we went along," he says. "It was hell."
Optimistic
Tatuyan has now retired, an invalid. He says he surely saved many lives and made great parts of the Ukraine semi-habitable, but the price is a heart condition, an enlarged thyroid, diabetes, pains in the right side of his body, breathing difficulties and headaches. But he is optimistic and, like several million people across Ukraine, Belarus and southern Russia, says he now looks at his life in terms of the time before and after Chernobyl. Most of his team of liquidators are dead; the rest, like him, are ill.
Tatuyan is now 56, and his children and country are proud of him. For him, the effect of the radiation on the environment was shocking. "The first thing we noticed was that many miles of trees in the forest turned red," he says. "They had to be cut down and buried. All the animals left. The birds did not come back for four years. It was strange not hearing them.
"In the winter of 1986/87, there was an infestation of mice because the crops had not been harvested. So the population of foxes increased. Most of them had rabies, and hunters were called to come and kill them. The wild pigs came back first. Then the wolves. Because people were evacuated, thinking they would be gone for only a few days, they left their dogs. But the dogs then crossed with the wolves and were not afraid of humans. It was very dangerous."
Today, the forest is moving in on the modernistic town of Pripyat, built for the reactor workers just a few miles from the plant. According to ecologists, weathering, decay and the migration of radionuclides down the soil have already led to a significant reduction of the contamination of plants and animals. Some scientists are upbeat. Biodiversity, says the Institute of Ecology in the Ukraine, has increased due to the removal of human influence. Moose, wild boar, roe and red deer, beavers, wolves, badgers, otters and lynx have all been reported in the area, and species associated with humans - rats, house mice, sparrows and pigeons - have all declined. Indeed, of 270 species of birds in the area, 180 are breeding.
But it is not as simple as that. Other scientists report mammals experiencing heavy doses from internally deposited Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 radioactive fallout. One study has found mutations in 18 generations of birds; another that radioactivity levels in trees are still rising. Contamination has been found migrating into underground aquifers.
Levels of Caesium-137 are expected to remain high all over Europe for decades, says the United Nations. In parts of Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania and Poland, levels in wild game, mushrooms, berries and fish from some lakes are well over a safe dose, as they are in all the most affected regions of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. In Britain, there are still restrictions on milk on 375 hill farms, mainly in Snowdonia and the Lake District. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of square miles of agricultural land still cannot be used for farming until the soil has been remediated.
Humans have fared badly. In the past few weeks four major scientific reports have challenged the World Health Organisation (WHO), which believes that only 50 people have died and 9,000 may over the coming years. The reports widely accuse WHO of ignoring the evidence and dismissing illnesses that many doctors in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus say are worsening, especially in children of liquidators.
The charge is led by the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, which last week declared that 212,000 people have now died as a direct consequence of Chernobyl. Meanwhile, a major report commissioned by Greenpeace considers the evidence of 52 scientists and estimates the deaths and illnesses to be 93,000 terminal cancers already and perhaps 100,000 deaths in time. A further report for European parliamentarians suggested 60,000 deaths. In truth no one knows.
More than 500km from Chernobyl, the peasant farmers of the village of Boudimca, one of the most affected in Ukraine, refuse to leave, despite the fact that many of their children are suffering from acute radiation diseases. Every child in Boudimca has a thyroid problem - known as the "Chernobyl necklace". The villagers are attached to the land. "We would prefer to die in our own land rather than go somewhere else and not survive," says Valentina Molchanovich, one of whose daughters is in hospital in Vilne with radiation sickness. "We understand the paradox, but we prefer to stay."
Though they live simple lives - each family has a cow, ducks and a few chickens - they suffer all the ailments of stressed out western executives: high blood pressure, headaches, diabetes and respiratory problems. They know that the berries and the mushrooms they have always lived on are contaminated. "We are just so used to living here," says Molchanovich. "My parents lived here. We build our houses together. We are a very tight community."
But others are, literally, dying to leave the village. Mikola Molchanovich, a distant relation, is the father of Sasha, a 12- year-old girl who this month was also being treated for constant stomach aches in a children's hospital in Rivne. He says: "My wife is in hospital giving birth, my son is in another hospital being treated for radiation sickness. My sister has 30,000 becquerels [units of radioactivity] in her body. Some people have 80,000, or more.
"This is our community; my parents lived and died here. We used to be able to collect 100kg of mushrooms a day - the whole village would collect them. Some of our cows have leukaemia. The people who moved away from the village are healthier and better. I would go if I had the chance. But I am trapped. I cannot sell my house because it is contaminated. People are becoming weaker. We cannot feel it, we cannot see it, yet we are not afraid of it.
Situation worsening
"Everyone who helped on the clean up is now ill," says Tatiana, a senior doctor at the Dispensary for Radiological Protection at Rivne. "The situation is worsening. In 1985, we had four lymph cancers a year. Now we have seven times that many. We have between five and eight people a year with rare bone cancers, when we never had any. We expect more cancers, and ill health. One in three pregnancies here are malformed. We are overwhelmed."
A doctor in the local region's children's hospital says: "The children born to the people who cleaned up Chernobyl are dying very young. We are finding Caesium and Strontium in breast milk and the placenta. More children now have leukaemias, and there has been a quadrupling of spina bifida cases. There are more clusters of cancers. Children are being born with stunted growth and dwarf torsos, without thighs. I would expect more of this over the years."
Tatuyan is now an environmentalist, convinced that nuclear power is no answer. "I go to the forest with friends to care for the deer," he says. Tonight, he and the other liquidators will meet and celebrate the 20 years. "When we meet we make the same toast. We say: 'Let's meet again alive.'"
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
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Chernobyl Kills While Bought ex-Greenpeacer Shills |
by Harvey Wasserman
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
26 Apr 2006
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While children continue to die twenty years after the Chernobyl catastrophe, an out-of-touch (and often corrupt) fringe advocates a "rebirth" for the failed technology that is killing them.
These pro-nuke die-hards seem unable to face the solution to both global warming and our economic future: the exploding revolution in renewable energy and efficiency. Their last-gasp attempt to revive the dead reactor dinosaur may be the last barrier to a truly green-powered planet.
The 1986 explosion at the reactor outside Kiev was the world's worst industrial disaster. It spewed at least 200 times more radiation than the bombing of Hiroshima. It's a fitting tombstone for the most expensive technological failure in human history.
Chernobyl happened exactly 20 years ago. But it is 49 since the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957.
That day the nuke makers said it was "only a matter of time" before private insurers would protect the public from a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island-style accident, both of which they said were "impossible."
In the meantime, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which shielded reactor makers from liability against what did happen at TMI and Chernobyl, and what could be happening as you read this.
A half-century later, we taxpayers are still holding the bag. Not one private insurer will guarantee you or your family against the financial consequences of a reactor disaster. Check out any US homeowner's insurance policy and you'll see their duck and cover in black and white.
In pure economic terms, nukes are a horrendous investment. The electricity they unreliably generate is expensive, with huge hidden ecological costs. Their waste problems remain unsolved, meaning their true price tag can't really be calculated.
And further Chernobyl disasters, through error or terror, are clearly inevitable. No reactor can be guaranteed not to melt. Nor can any be protected from terrorism, by land, sea or air. Continued reactor operations are the equivalent of handing Osama bin Laden an arsenal of pre-deployed nuclear weapons. Building new ones can only be termed an act of treason.
In 1980 I reported extensively from central Pennsylvania on the consequences of the radioactive emissions at Three Mile Island, a year earlier. To this day it is not precisely known how much radiation escaped, or where it went.
But I saw the deformed animals. I spoke to the sick children and their dying parents. America has been fed some big lies lately, but the biggest ever told remains "no one died at Three Mile Island."
A quarter-century later, some 2400 central Pennsylvanians still can't get their day in court. TMI's victims and their families have sued the power company that irradiated them, but the federal courts refuse to hear their case. Why?
"Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" gives an indicator. Compiled by Svetlana Alexievich, this slim award-winning volume contains just a few of the thousands of heart-breaking stories from downwind of Chernobyl. They could just as easily come from central Pennsylvania. They make you wonder how humans could ever be insane enough to continue with an experiment so obviously, insidiously murderous. What other machine continues to kill its victims and their progeny generation after generation?
What's most ironic about the attempt to foist even more of these grim reapers on us all is that they simply cannot compete with new green technologies. Wind power, solar, biomass, increased efficiency and a myriad more "Solartopian" renewables are leaving nukes in the radioactive dust. With a level playing field, the green power revolution is poised to rapidly transform our global economy. Instead, massive subsidies feed a failed technology by gouging taxpayers, then irradiating them.
The true dangers of US nukes are exposed in "An American Chernobyl: Near Misses at US Reactors Since 1986," by Jim Riccio. A widely respected researcher, Riccio documents the terrifying times the US has barely dodged reactor mega-disasters.
Riccio is a long-timer campaigner for Greenpeace, which has published his report, and which leads us to Patrick Moore. A bit player in the original founding, Moore is cashing in on his stale, marginal association to Greenpeace for the benefit of his polluter-employers.
There is always room for honorable debate, even on nuclear power. But Moore has crossed several lines. His long-ago dalliance with one of the world's vanguard eco-crusades does not give him the right to speak as one who has "seen the light."
In perhaps the saddest line in the entire nuclear debate, Moore has termed the Three Mile Island accident "a success," apparently because it didn't explode like Chernobyl. But in a matter of moments, the TMI melt-down turned a $900 million asset into a $2 billion (or more) liability, with an unknowable final price tag or death toll. Not until 9/11/2001 would there be a similar "success" on our soil.
Moore's service to the nuclear industry is hardly his only calling. He shills for a tawdry crew of corporate eco-thugs, including forest clear-cutters and chemical polluters. In making himself a conduit through which pro-nukers and rich polluters can conjure the Greenpeace name, Moore is merely practicing the oldest profession in phony green garb. But even that won't outlast the killing power of the atomic reactors he and his cohorts are attempting to revive.
Eco-opponents of nuclear power know better. We are still committed to the principles of a naturally harmonious planet, pushing deep into the clean, sustainable prosperity of an energy economy based wind, solar, biomass, increased efficiency and more.
Trying to revive nuke power is like trying to refloat the Titanic. There is neither need nor room for a technology that can't compete or be insured, whose radioactive wastes can't be managed, that kills with daily emissions, that remains the ultimate terror target, and that obliterates whole regions in a matter of moments while killing for countless generations to come.
Atomic energy died for good reason, and so will the phony hype surrounding it. Nukes are not now and never will be green or peaceful.
Harvey Wasserman has served as senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 is available at www.harveywasserman.com.
© 2006 The Free Press
http://www.freepress.org |
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Chernobyl was NOT 'a failure of technology'. |
by Peter K. Anderson a.k.a. Hartlod(tm)
Hartlod (nospam) bigpond.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
05 May 2006
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The accident at the Chernobyl Utility was due only to an inability of politically intent and dogmatic individuals, to intent to distrust and dislike those who offer criticism and scrutiny of their ideology, to realise help is offered without ill feeling. These same few ordered the tanks/troops to fire on the people of Russia, fortunately that order was ignored, unfortunately that earlier set of orders, regarding 'security' at Chernobyl, was not.
The reality was...? The 'leaders' of the then USSR could not afford to maintain the utility, and could not afford to reduce its output. This situation was made notice of to those within the 'West' (from 'non official' sources) of the need for remedial work to the utility, simple repair and maintenance.
Effort was made to petition the leadership of the USSR to allow the assembled assistance (poised at nearby National Borders), to enter and do the work, with time to prevent the situation all together.
All that effort was to no avail however.
That technical assistance (by volunteers) was poised at the closest borders, but only after notice of the 'event' did 'the diplomatic book' become disposed of, and volunteers raced in. Many are still going un-commended, many are now dead.
It is that proper procedure to validate effort cannot be ignored, or have policy fabricated to circumvent. This is of no less import on either the side of SCIENCE, or Politics. The event at Chernobyl was not necessary, was preventable, was not a failure of technology, but was instead a failure of Politics and Humanity as a whole.
This event highlighted the many internal situations that eventually lead to the breakdown of the USSR; it was in effect bankrupted in both monetary terms, and in ideological terms. You cannot have and maintain a 'Peoples Revolution' where the 'people' have become ignored and 'expendable'.
It is simply of little real value to continue to protest against Uranium fuelled power with such flawed logic, and when there is still no replacement for such in those REAL situations that still require the implementation of such levels of generation. This is the reality, and there is little of opinion that can alter such.
Whilst these 'alternate power concepts' dance about, with the 'greenhouse protestors' garnering 'support within opinions', URANIUM is moving into the gap made. Long before 'fossil oils' run dry, we will all be seeing URANIUM fuelled power generation, freeing OIL from such mundane tasks.
What is needed is for the 'alternative generation technologists' to realise THEIR responsibilities to make THEIR concept(s) work, and those who would 'blog support' to actually QUALIFY that support with COMPREHENSION of what IS needed to make these concepts PRACTICAL.
In conversation with many of the 'alternative generation technologists', many seem infact to be associated with manufacturers OF fibre optic technologies, often as another 'division' of an overall 'company'.
It should NOT be difficult for these 'alternative technologies' to also produce the DISTRIBUTION technologies needed to make the GENERATION concept practical. But where is the pressure to do such whilst further research monies are being garnered?
Your's,
Peter K. Anderson a.k.a. Hartlod(tm)
From the PC of Peter K Anderson
E-Mail: Hartlod (at) bigpond.com |
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'Greenhouse Opinion' is building the Uranium path. |
by Peter K. Anderson a.k.a. Hartlod(tm)
Hartlod (nospam) bigpond.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
05 May 2006
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With regard to:- http://www.climateimc.org/?q=node/450 with title:- "Earth First! In US initiates EF! Climate Caucus"
There is no SCIENCE to support the 'anti corporate mentality' so often expressed (as within the above link), to make possible even the 'greenhouse effect' (see below *) that is platformed to justify so much of this misdirected angst.
Meanwhile, the Amazonian Forests, the people who live within it AND those trying to protect it are being MURDERED with little indication such 'groups' as mentioned in the link above are even aware, let alone concerned.
Let US ALL notice a section from this (May 5th 2006) mornings paper ('The Daily Telegraph' in NSW) on page 22 (no internet link), under the title "Atomic Power: a great bright hope" attributed to Bob Carr (yes the ex-NSW Premier signed up by the "Climate Institute"):-
["The debate is over. Yesterday WWF Australia, one of the nation's largest environmental groups, accepted the realist of peaceful nuclear power."]
["In other words you won't save the planet from global warming without Nuclear Power."]
["As Premier I made similar comments. I was surprised by the response. It wasn't the outrage and indignation that one would have got in the 70's and 80's."]
["Renewable energy -wind, solar- is a part of the solution. But a smallish part. WE could build windmills from the Blue Mountains to Broken Hill and they would not provide the seven-day-a-week flow of energy that we call base load power."]
These individuals (as in the above link), and the 'groups' they have overrun (as exampled in the above link) are now IGNORING reality, ignoring the Public, and ignoring the Environment, expressing only their 'self interests' wrapped in a veneer of 'environmental concern'.
I would also reprise (in short) my outlines, given as warning, over the past YEARS in various Yahoo groups (especially). "Greenhouse platforming" will be rendered moot by:-
1) The increased use of hybrid bio-diesel vehicles.
2) The increased use of Uranium Fuelled Power generation as backbone generation.
So infact there will be a vast reduction in 'greenhouse pollution'. Thus the incessant (and POINTELESS) 'greenhouse rhetoric' will fall from 'public notice' (from what ever level that is NOW) as pollution OVERALL is reduced. Any INTEREST in listening to CONTINUED claims of 'climate change due to greenhouse warming' will also disappear, as the ENTIRE 'climate/greenhouse' sociopolitical VAPIDITY is rendered MOOT as 'Human additions' of supposed 'greenhouse gases' ARE infact removed in reality AND as a 'climate issue'.
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Welcome to the URANIUM age induced by 'greenhouse' nonsense.
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Next with regard to http://www.climateimc.org/?q=node/439 with the title "New Film: The Great Warming":- To quote from the MOVIE script:- ["Over the past 10,000 years, the amount of 'greenhouse gases' in our atmosphere has been relatively constant"]
Well INFACT over the past ~15000 years the CLIMATE has been rising from a GLACIATION, so it seems that in terms of CLIMATE 'greenhouse concepts' have NO application.
To quote from the MOVIE script:-
["Without greenhouse gases, Earth's average temperature would be -19 degrees C instead of 14 degrees C, or 33 degrees C colder.']
As yet NO valid reason to even BELIEVE these figures has been provided (see *), just a LOT of OPINION being REPEATED.
To quote from the MOVIE script:-
["Earth is heated by sunlight. Most of the Sun's energy passes through the atmosphere to warm the earths surface, oceans and atmosphere."]
Blatantly incorrect as can be seen in slides I have already provided in links, ONLY those photons within the upper and lower VISIBLE spectrum as well as the lower THIRD of the UV spectrum are able to become surface incident. This is on the 'inward' leg, i.e. FROM the outer edge of the atmosphere.
To quote from the MOVIE script:-
["However, in order to keep the atmosphere's energy budget in balance, the warmed earth also emits heat energy back to space as infrared radiation."]
WRONG AGAIN, the photons escaping the CASCADE are infact NOT representing 'heat energy' in ANY manner. These PHOTONS represent NON kinetic interactions by the molecules of the atmosphere with PHOTONS within the cascade. It is the energy NOT released by the interaction that is retained as HEAT. This is the energy recorded within measures of ALBEDO
To quote from the MOVIE script:-
["However, because the energy is recycled downward, surface temperatures become much warmer than if the greenhouse gases were absent form the atmosphere."]
Complete nonsense, the energy is NOT recycled downward with ANY trend, again ALL photons within the atmosphere are absorbed as seen in the slides I have already provided within links.
(*) INFACT photons NOT in the upper/lower VISIBLE spectrum, or the lowest one third of the UV spectrum, or that small portion in and just above the RADIO spectrum DO NOT become surface incident, EVER. So there is NOT POSSIBLE any 'surface warming' from a supposed 'greenhouse effect'. The WARMING that is seen as unnatural is due to humanity rematerialing the surface, end of 'debate'.
This (and other) 'movie(s)' is(are) dispensing POINTLESS nonsense which is leading us all into the URANIUM age.
Boycott these movies, and they will cease attempting to produce their PROPAGANDA.
Ignore those attempting to defend and support these 'movies' and the 'information' they propaganda, THEY are leading us all into the URANIUM AGE.
Your's, Peter K. Anderson a.k.a. Hartlod(tm)
From the PC of Peter K Anderson
E-Mail: Hartlod (at) bigpond.com |
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