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Chernobyl Still Radioactive After 23 Years - Even more so than originally expected - Softpedia
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) on Monday, experts revealed a troublesome fact about Chernobyl, the Ukrainian nuclear power plant that blew up in 1986. Recent measurements in the exclusion zone, where no humans can go without protective equipment, have revealed that the radioactive material that was spilled in the area was nowhere near the decay level that was predicted for it. In other words, the scientists are saying that it will take a lot more time for the land to be cleansed than originally believed, Wired reports.
Previous estimates, based on the fact that the Cesium 137's half-life is 30 years, estimated that the restriction zone could be lifted, and then re-inhabited soon. But experiments reveal that the radioactive material is not decaying as fast as predicted, and scientists have no clue as to why this is happening. The April 26, 1986 accident was the largest nuclear accident in the world, and only a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Its fallout was made worse by the Soviet Union's attempt at covering up the incident, which saw a lot of people exposed to lethal doses of radiations.
Ukraine head criticises slow progress on Chernobyl cover | Reuters
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko criticised his government on Tuesday for slow progress on building a new shelter to encase the wrecked fourth reactor of the Chernobyl power plant, site of the world's worst nuclear accident.
Ukraine signed a deal in September 2007 with the French-led Novarka consortium to erect an arch-shaped shelter at the plant where a fire, followed by an explosion, occurred on April 26, 1986, sending radiation billowing over parts of central Europe.
This project was due to be completed over four to five years at a cost of $1.39 billion. A second deal with U.S.-based Holtec International foresees building a facility to house spent nuclear fuel from reactors. Turning on his political rival Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Yushchenko told a national security meeting: "We have had three international conferences, more than $900 million in resources have been brought together ... why is there an empty building site today?".
Legacy of the Chernobyl disaster | Environment | The Guardian
Exposure to radiation in an incident like the 1986 Chernobyl disaster ruins the health of several generations of people, not just those who lived in the vicinity at the time.
"The effects of Chernobyl on human health will continue for many years to come in the form of anything from an abnormal limb to an extremely severe cancer," explained Dr Tony Nicholson, the vice-president of the Royal College of Radiologists and dean of its clinical radiology faculty.
Radiation damages men's sperm and women's eggs, meaning their children can be born with congenital defects such as a serious heart condition or brain abnormality. "Some of these defects will be fatal, others will require surgery to correct them and all will severely affect the child's quality of life," said Nicholson. Women exposed to radiation also have a much higher chance of miscarriage.
BBC NEWS | Ban on Chernobyl children lifted
Children affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster have resumed respite trips to the UK after the resolution of a long diplomatic row with Belarus.
The eight-month ban was lifted in May following talks between the two countries, the Home Office has said.
Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko stopped all foreign trips after a 16-year-old girl who visited California refused to return home.
Every year hundreds of children around Chernobyl are diagnosed with cancer.
Helsingin Sanomat - Chernobyl was supposed to be a dream job
Oleksi Ananenko hops out of the bus at the Boulevard of Peace and Friendship, and hurries to what used to be his home in Pripjat, near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
The visit is his first since the spring of 1986, when there was an explosion and fire at Ananenko’s workplace, the fourth reactor of the plant. Even brief visits to the abandoned city require a number of permits.
Britain's farmers still restricted by Chernobyl nuclear fallout | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Nearly 370 farms in Britain are still restricted in the way they use land and rear sheep because of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident 23 years ago, the government has admitted.
Environmentalists have seized on the figures as proof of the enormous dangers posed by nuclear power as the UK moves towards building a new generation of plants around the country.
Dawn Primarolo, minister for health, revealed 369 farms and 190,000 sheep were affected, but pointed out this was a tiny number compared with the immediate impact of radioactive fallout from Ukraine.
Welsh farmer talks about farming under Chernobyl restrictions | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Huw Alun Evans's farm in north Wales looks no different from any other; his 400 sheep and lambs graze happily across 125 hectares. His farmland rises to 2,408ft at the summit of the extinct volcano Rhobell Fawr, in the Snowdonia national park. His family has farmed there for three generations and he has run the Hengwrt Uchaf farm at Rhyd-y-main for 31 years.
However, for more than two decades he has lived on the southern periphery of a restricted area due to radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl power station accident in 1986. Thousands of his sheep have been scanned for radiation throughout this time.
Dom Joly: Chernobyl – where better to slake a tourist's thirst? - Dom Joly, Columnists - The Independent
Spring is in the air down in the beautiful Cotswolds. Bluebells carpet the woods while lambs are agambolling in the lush fields. Sadly I know this only from telephone calls home as I'm on a weekend break in Chernobyl.
Only 5,000 visitors a year leave Kiev, the handsome capital of the Ukraine, to take a minibus to the "exclusion zone". This is an area 30km around reactor No 4 of the V I Lenin nuclear power station that blew up on 26 April 1986, covering Europe in a radioactive cloud.
I was at school at the time, and I remember newscasters pointing to frightening maps of the Continent showing wind patterns and the advance of "the cloud". Some teachers at school started wearing masks and doom-laden predictions were everywhere in the press.
Islamic Republic News Agency :: UK farms still under restriction 23 years after Chernobyl
Hundreds of farms in Britain remain under restriction on the use of land as a result of the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union 23 years ago, Health Minister Dawn Primarolo.
“We have been advised by the Food Standards Agency that restrictions on land use as a result of the Chernobyl accident relate to sheep farming only,” Primarolo told MPs.
“ There are 369 farms, or part farms, and approximately 190,000 sheep within the restricted areas of England, Scotland and Wales,” she said in a written parliament reply published Wednesday.
The period of “Chornobyl’s decay” /ДЕНЬ/
Twenty-three years have passed since The Day of April 26 divided human fates into “before” and “after” the disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Until this day it is the world’s worst anthropogenic catastrophe unmatched for its environmental impact.
For Ukraine Chornobyl is an everyday reality and a host of global-scale problems. Unfortunately, the problems caused by the catastrophe are as acute today as they were 23 years ago. Can one get used to devastated villages and abandoned fertile land?
Today nothing prevents us from learning in detail what was happening on the banks of the Prypiat in late April—November 1986. In May 1986 foreigners were the first to learn the truth: on April 30 a Geiger counter on a Swedish nuclear power plant detected an unacceptably high level of radiation. After the Swedish government ascertained that the discharge did not take place in Sweden, it made an official inquiry. Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the people only 18 days after the disaster, on May 14. And three years passed before the information on the radioactivity conditions was declassified and publicized.
After the explosion at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the scientists at the Institute for Nuclear Research (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) identified two groups of radionuclides emitted from the damaged reactor. One of them included volatile radioactive substances carried up high in aerosols with the streams of warm air (iodine-131, iodine-135, cesium-134, cesium-137, and strontium-90). Nearly 30 percent of cesium accumulated in the reactor core was emitted.
The FINANCIAL - UN To Spend USD 2.5 Million On Information About Consequences Of Chornobyl Nuclear Accident
The United Nations Organization has launched a USD-2.5-million project designed to meet the priority information needs of the communities in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine affected by the Chornobyl nuclear accident.
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The information center of the United Nations Organization announced this in a statement.
According to the statement, the project is a joint effort by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO).
OpEdNews » 23 Years After Chernobyl, Nuclear Power is Still a Threat
I am writing this on April 26, 2009, the 23rd anniversary of the tragic and deadly explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The Chernobyl disaster is widely considered to be the biggest technological and industrial disaster the world has ever known.
And I am remembering the 1979 meltdown at the nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, about 100 miles from where I currently sit.
Today, about a block from my home, I can look to the west and see the cooling towers of the Limerick nuclear power plant sending a steady flow of steam into the sky.
Each month, the power company Exelon, which operates the Limerick plant, conducts a siren test to ensure that the noisemakers are in good working order in case they need to notify the public of an emergency.
Chernobyl: The Horrific Legacy
On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station reactor number 4 exploded at 1:24 a.m. “Tons of radioactive dust was” unleashed “into the air…transported by winds, [and] it contaminated both hemispheres of our planet, settling wherever it rained. The emissions of radioactivity lasted [short-term] for 10 days.”(1)
On 29 April, “fatal levels of radioactivity were recorded…in Poland, Austria, Romania, Finland, and Sweden.”(2) The day after (30 April), it hit Switzerland and Italy. By 2 May, it reached France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Great Britain, and Greece. The next day, Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey were contaminated. Then, over the next few days, “radioactive substances” were recorded in Japan (3 May), China (4 May), India (5 May), and the US and Canada (6 May).
The radioactive spew from this explosion was “200 times greater than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.”(3) Not one person was safe from this catastrophic nuclear explosion; and “65-million people were contaminated...more than 400,000 people were forced to evacuate the area [around Chernobyl], losing their homes, possessions and jobs, as well as their economic, social, and family ties.”(4)
The long-term and hidden costs of radioactive contamination have never been adequately reported by mainstream news. According to the authors (including the distinguished Dr. Rosalie Bertell) of a new book, “Chernobyl: The Hidden Legacy” “[i]t will take millennia to recover…[before an area] as large as Italy, will return to normal radioactive levels in about 100,000 years time.”(5)
AFP: Ukraine marks Chernobyl's 23rd anniversary
Ukraine paid homage to victims of the Chernobyl catastrophe 23 years after the worst nuclear accident in history.
"Today we remember with profound sadness those heroes who fought against the nuclear storm and sacrificed themselves for us and our children," President Viktor Yushchenko said in an address published by his press service.
Some 100 Ukrainians, including Yushchenko and other top officials, laid wreaths overnight before the monument to Chernobyl's victims in Kiev and lighted candles during a religious service dedicated to the tragedy, an AFP photographer reported.
Radio Netherlands: Visits by Chernobyl children resume
The Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry has announced that it has reached agreement with the Belarussian authorities on the continuation of the free visits to the Netherlands of children suffering health problems from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 23 years ago today. The first group will arrive in the Netherlands next week, in time to celebrate Queen's Day on 30 April.
In October, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko ruled that only children with cancer would be allowed to leave the country. The Belarus authorities reportedly feared the children would apply for asylum.
Three private organisations fund trips for children from the Chernobyl region; over the years thousands of children have visited host families in the Netherlands.
The Free Press - Harvey Wasserman: How Chernobyl could happen here
A catastrophe like Chernobyl could happen here. It's the radioactive core of the second biggest lie in US industrial history.
The atomic pushers say such a disaster is “impossible” at a US reactor. But Chernobyl's explosion spewed radiation all over the world. And Sunday’s tragic 23rd anniversary reminds us that any reactor on this planet can kill innumerable people anywhere, at any time, by terror, error and more.
It further clarifies why yet another grab at billions of taxpayer dollars for new reactor construction must be stopped NOW!
The BIGGEST lie in US industrial history is that “nobody died at Three Mile Island.” Just before last month’s thirtieth anniversary of the central Pennsylvania melt down, critical new evidence was completely ignored by the corporate media.
Kyiv Post »Emergency Ministry expects to begin storing radioactive waste in storage facility at Chornobyl Nuclear Plant in June-August
The Ministry of Emergency Situations and protection of the Population against the aftermath of the Chornobyl Nuclear Catastrophe expects to begin storing the radioactive waste that accumulated as a result of the accident at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in the specially equipped near-surface facility for storage of solid nuclear waste at the Chornobyl nuclear plant in the period of June-August 2009
Emergency Situations Minister Volodymyr Shandra announced this at a press conference.
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The Ministry of Emergency Situations and protection of the Population against the aftermath of the Chornobyl Nuclear Catastrophe expects to begin storing the radioactive waste that accumulated as a result of the accident at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in the specially equipped near-surface facility for storage of solid nuclear waste at the Chornobyl nuclear plant in the period of June-August 2009
Emergency Situations Minister Volodymyr Shandra announced this at a press conference.
Nuclear Fallout : Journal Watch Online
Legend has it that cockroaches would be the last survivors of a nuclear holocaust, but according to a study in Biology Letters, their invertebrate brethren would not be so lucky. The researchers went back to Chernobyl, where a nuclear reactor exploded in 1986, causing the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history and many deaths and illnesses. Because little is known about the ecological effects of low-level radiation on animals, they surveyed more than 700 forest sites and 17 transects that spanned four orders of magnitude of background radiation levels, looking for bumblebees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies and spider webs. They found the animal abundance dropped with increasing radiation, even after controlling for factors like soil type and habitat quality. The ecological effects of the Chernobyl disaster are greater than most have previously assumed, they conclude.
Chernobyl animals worse affected than thought-study | Reuters
Radiation has affected animals living near the site of Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear disaster far more than was previously thought, a study showed on Wednesday, challenging beliefs that local wildlife was on the rebound.
The study showed that numbers of bumble-bees, butterflies, spiders, grasshoppers and other invertebrates were lower in contaminated sites than other areas because of high levels of radiation left over from the blast more than 20 years ago.
The findings challenge earlier research that suggested animal populations were rebounding around the site of the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine, which forced thousands to abandon their homes and evacuate the area.
WalesOnline - 22 years on, Welsh farms still under Chernobyl shadow
UP to 359 Welsh farms are still operating under restrictions imposed in the wake of Chernobyl, more than two decades after the Soviet nuclear plant went into meltdown.
The Food Standards Agency Wales revealed the figure before today’s 22nd anniversary of the largest nuclear accident in history.
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