Opaque Lucidity

Ghost Town

I ran across this interesting site linked at slashdot. It's the personal website of a Russian or Ukrainian (she does not specify) woman who is an avid cyclist. The entire site is a photographic journal of her trip through the abandoned region surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. If you're easily depressed, you may want to skip the site entirely.

The Chernobyl complex contained more than one reactor (I believe it had eight) and I was of the understanding that the surviving units were kept in operation for a while, perhaps a decade, after the accident. However, all the towns surrounding the complex were evacuated in 1986 and no one has been allowed to move back. It is doubtful they ever will. The evacuation was sudden, because there are pictures of personal effects strewn around apartments that have been lying there for the better part of two decades. One of the towns was home to 50,000 people; all that remains there now is a town guard. Evidently, there was a Russian tour company that was offering tours to the less radioactive areas of the town. According to the town guard, the silence in the town made many people feel uneasy and want to leave early.

When I was going through Nuclear Power School in 1990-91, the accident at Chernobyl was still a hot topic of conversation in nuclear power circles. The Soviet Union was still in existence then, so much of the information we had about the incident came from "confidential" sources. This was the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki that so many people had been exposed to so much radiation in such a short period of time. Many helicopter pilots who dropped boron on the site died almost immediately from radiation sickness. Their helicopters are still in a nearby field; their metal skins were irradiated so much that they can never be flown again. Many firefighters suffered the same fate.

We will never know how many people died directly or indirectly from the accident at Chernobyl. Some put the number as high as 300,000, although we don't know for sure how many people lived in the area before the accident. The thing that frightens me is that there are identical reactor designs still at work in Russia and the Ukraine. Are they better maintained now than they were 20 years ago?