Henry Shukman: Unlearned Lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima
[Henry Shukman is a poet and novelist who lives in New Mexico. His most recent work is the novel "The Lost City."]
As far as I could tell from the advertising at the hotel where I stayed in Kiev last year, Ukraine's chief export these days is brides. But it wasn't always that way. Twenty-five years ago this month, Ukraine's best-known export was a whole lot of radiation.
After Reactor No. 4 blew up at Chernobyl power station on April 26, 1986, the resulting disaster took two years and 650,000 people to clean up. Except it will never really be cleaned up. Nuclear fallout and waste can be moved and sequestered, but not deactivated. Even today the meltdown at Chernobyl leaks radiation through cracks in the vast "sarcophagus" of steel and concrete that was intended to seal it. The whole area around it is still deeply, if unevenly, contaminated.
And that contamination isn't confined to Ukraine. A quarter-century later, there are farmers in Wales whose lamb is too radioactive to sell, and just last summer thousands of wild boar hunted in Germany were declared unfit for human consumption for the same reason.
In 1973, the ecological prophet E.F. Schumacher wrote, "No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an intangible danger to the whole of creation." He was talking about nuclear waste from the relatively young nuclear power industry. To pursue nuclear power, he declared, meant "conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all."...
Read entire article at LA Times
As far as I could tell from the advertising at the hotel where I stayed in Kiev last year, Ukraine's chief export these days is brides. But it wasn't always that way. Twenty-five years ago this month, Ukraine's best-known export was a whole lot of radiation.
After Reactor No. 4 blew up at Chernobyl power station on April 26, 1986, the resulting disaster took two years and 650,000 people to clean up. Except it will never really be cleaned up. Nuclear fallout and waste can be moved and sequestered, but not deactivated. Even today the meltdown at Chernobyl leaks radiation through cracks in the vast "sarcophagus" of steel and concrete that was intended to seal it. The whole area around it is still deeply, if unevenly, contaminated.
And that contamination isn't confined to Ukraine. A quarter-century later, there are farmers in Wales whose lamb is too radioactive to sell, and just last summer thousands of wild boar hunted in Germany were declared unfit for human consumption for the same reason.
In 1973, the ecological prophet E.F. Schumacher wrote, "No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an intangible danger to the whole of creation." He was talking about nuclear waste from the relatively young nuclear power industry. To pursue nuclear power, he declared, meant "conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all."...