The Chernobyl disaster began 35 years ago today, on April 26, 1986. For those of us too young to have a living memory of the beginning, let’s just say it was more than just the worst nuclear accident ever. It was a historical watershed. It changed the world we live in. As Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then the leader of the USSR, wrote in 2006:
The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl ... was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.
You can sneak a video peek of the disaster’s current heart in “Deep Inside Chernobyl's Radioactive Ruins”, published yesterday. RFE/RL’s Yevhen Solonyna takes you inside the enormous sarcophagus covering the radioactive ruins. It’s a short video as he couldn’t stay long — it’s too dangerous. If you like ongoing disasters, this is better than any Hollywood disaster movie. While watching it my heart started beating faster, and I almost thought my monitor was going to turn radioactive.
Although a few older people — fatalistic, let’s say — have moved back into the area, when will it be safe for the general population to live there? Experts disagree, with estimates like 3,000 years and 20,000 years. That is, possibly longer than the written history of humans. Nobody really knows.
In the meantime the locals live near the biggest single radiation hazard in the world. Kate Brown’s excellent book Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster tells of some of what goes on. Brown writes of a Ukraine forest where people pick blueberries for export. Each batch is tested for radiation, and batches over the limit are set aside — but they’re not discarded. Instead, some of the more-radioactive blueberries are mixed in with the less-radioactive batches, so that each remixed batch falls under the radiation limit. Ukrainian authorities nab some of the radioactive blueberry smugglers but they don’t catch them all.
That’s how the real world often works when it comes to nuclear disasters. Unfortunately for us all.