30 Years After the Chernobyl Disaster, a Nuclear Menace Still Hides in Plain Sight
April 25, 2016
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — It was a fine spring night, people peacefully sleeping as weekday passed into weekend, until Chernobyl’s fourth nuclear reactor blew up. Oleksandr Galuh recalls that night well. “My mother woke up as the windows shattered,” Galuh, then a fourth-grader in Pripyat, a town not too far from Chernobyl, remembers. “She thought it was a thunderstorm.”
Život pri Černobyle, Ticho po výbuchu
April 25, 2016
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30 Years After the Chernobyl Meltdown, Why Is the Ukrainian Government Pushing Nuclear Energy?
April 25, 2016
Or, how Ukraine learned to stop worrying and love its nuclear power plants. Later this year, the largest movable structure on earth—essentially a colossal steel tomb shaped like an oversized airplane hangar—is scheduled to begin its slow journey along a rail system, traveling at a glacial pace of 33 feet an hour. Its destination: the crumbling ruins of Chernobyl’s reactor number four, which, 30 years after the worst nuclear meltdown in history, continues to ooze radiation like a wound that refuses to heal.
Decades after Chernobyl, Ukraine hooked on nuclear more than ever
April 25, 2016
It’s the result of war, politics and economics. Three decades after the world’s worst nuclear accident, the home of the shuttered Chernobyl power plant remains more reliant than ever on nuclear power. When a botched test in the early hours of April 26, 1986, blew apart the reactor’s core and spewed huge amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, nuclear power accounted for about a quarter of the energy mix of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Today, nuclear power produces more than half of Ukraine’s energy — the result of war, politics and economics.
A Ukrainian nuclear power plant and the containment of a disaster
April 22, 2016
Zaporizhia is one of Ukraine’s four active nuclear plants. It has six reactors, each with the capacity to produce 1000 MW, and was built at the same time as Chernobyl, with Soviet-era reactors. Oleh Dudar, head of operations, joined the plant in 1986 – the year of the Chernobyl catastrophe.
Chernobyl nuclear disaster marks 30-year anniversary with ‘extreme tours’, boom in wild animals
April 12, 2016
Thirty years after the world’s most catastrophic nuclear accident, the abandoned Ukrainian town of Pripyat, home to the infamous Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four, has been transformed. From the ashes of the site has emerged a $US200 per person “extreme tourism” theme park. Each week more than 1,000 tourists are taken through security and radiation checkpoints, before being allowed to walk through the abandoned buildings, including the swimming pool complex, kindergarten and police station.
Ukraine’s Other Chernobyls
April 30, 2015
For safety reasons, Europe must help the Ukrainian government retire, not revive, its nuclear reactors. (This commentary originally appeared on Project Syndicate.)
Discovering Ukraine’s Nuclear Shadows
April 27, 2015
– UPDATING STORY – A Bankwatch fact-finding mission is currently in Ukraine to explore the state of nuclear energy in the country, particularly in light of intentions to extend the lifetime of 12 Soviet-era nuclear units.
29 de ani de la dezastrul nuclear din Cernobîl
April 27, 2015
În Ucraina, la Cernobîl, în urmă cu 29 de ani se producea cel mai grav accident nuclear din istorie. Explozia reactorului 4 din centrala nucleară de la Cernobîl a degajat un nor radioactiv care a acoperit toată Europa. Însă Ucraina este o țară cu 15 reactoare nucleare, iar incidente s-au inregistrat și la alte centrale. Ascultați un reportaj realizat în Ucraina, de Laurențiu Colintineanu.
Chernobyl at 26: nuclear dynamite is growing in Ukraine
April 26, 2012
26 years ago, the days after the nuclear accident in Chernobyl had been marked by the glaring lack of information. Today, Europe’s population is similarly clueless as back then about the nuclear risk brewing in Ukraine.
