Posts Tagged ‘Kyiv’
Week 43: Chernobyl
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It’s been an interesting week and I’m going to start with what we did today even though it throws out the whole chronological order of things. We headed out to visit Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, which released 400 times more fallout than the bombing of Hiroshima. Scary and foolish as that sounds the levels of radiation since the disaster on April 26, 1986 have dropped so much that visiting and working in the exclusion zone is now considered safe. There are around 4,000 people working within the 30km zone (doing 4 day to 2 week stints in the contaminated area followed by time outside). Many of them work at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. These days their main job is to transform the area into a safer place but I was surprised to find out that the plant was operational until December 2000.
At the time of the disaster there were four reactors functioning and two under construction, but now rectors five and six stand unfinished. To get in to the centre of the exclusion zone we had to pass two checkpoints and on the way out were tested for radiation, as was our car. The exclusion zone was initially circular but with later testing it has been changed to more accurately reflect contamination levels. The plume of radioactive fallout was initially blown westward but then winds changed northerly and it’s estimated that 60% of the contamination fell on Belarus. Nuclear rain fell as far away as Ireland.