Chernobyl - An Environmental Disaster

80 miles north of Kiev in the Northern Ukraine is a town that prior to 1986, no-one had heard of.

Then on the 26 April 1986 the No 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the northern Ukraine, overheated, exploded, then went in to melt-down.

The world's worst nuclear accident released 190 tons of highly radioactive waste material into the atmosphere exposing the people of Chernobyl to radioactivity 90 times greater than that from the explosion of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. 

Few details were given initially as the Soviet government attempted to cover up the incident,  however following a great deal of international pressure the full horror of the incident was slowly released. A huge area around the plant was devastated by the explosion and the ensuing radioactive contamination spread over the neighbouring countries. To this day there is nothing growing where once agriculture was the main occupation of the common man. Further afield cattle still graze on contaminated land thus causing the population to be continuously exposed to radiation via the food chain.

 As part of the former Soviet Union, Belarussia lies in the shadow of Chernobyl , the southern border being only 15 kilometres from the plant. The wind direction on the day of the disaster caused the majority of the fallout to be directed towards  the Belarusian towns of Gomel and Mogilev. Of the radiation that was released by Chernobyl, over 70% fell onto the population of Belarus resulting in 800,000 children in Belarus and 380,000 in the Ukraine being at a high risk of contracting cancer or leukemia.

It will be another 24,000 years before the land is safe and the children no longer suffer.

At the meeting of the United Nations conference, Belarussian scientists have declared this to be the greatest international ecological disaster in the history of humanity.

These innocent children are the victims of a nuclear catastrophe that has left a legacy of radioactive contamination that will last for decades to come.

We are now told of a huge hangar like structure that is to be built around the crumbling sarcophagus that houses the exploded reactor, starting in 2007. When it is built this structure will slide over the reactor on tracks similar to train tracks, it will be bigger than a football pitch and taller than the statue of liberty. The expected cost is many millions of dollars, and is expected to be finished in about 5 years. But before that can be done, reactor fuel and radioactive waste buried haphazardly around the site will have to be excavated and no-one knows what they will find down there.

If this construction is successful it should safeguard the site for the next 100 years, but warnings have already been given that this is one of the most complicated constructions ever to be built and even if it is built it could take up to 50 years to dismantle the sarcophagus and the estimated 200 tonnes of highly radioactive material still inside it.

One cannot help but wonder if this disaster area could ever be proclaimed "safe", certainly not for many generations to come. In the meantime the reactor continues to leak its poison into the atmosphere and when the wind blows north re-contaminates the land and the people of Belarus. It is vital that charities such as ours the world over continue to work on, and do more than they already do if we are to make a difference. At no point can we say "enough is enough".