Children of Chernobyl
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster. From wikipedia:
The Chernobyl disaster arose from an accident that occurred on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine. It is regarded as the worst accident in the history of nuclear power. Because there was no containment building, a plume of radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and eastern North America. Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people. About 60% of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus according to official post-Sovietic data. According to the 2006 TORCH report, half of the radioactive fallout landed outside those three Soviet countries. The disaster released over four hundred times more radiation than the atomic bomb of Hiroshima.
There is a wonderful irony in the world, that this anniversary would come up now as we in the United States finally seem to be getting serious about our energy consumption and production habits. On the one hand, changes to the existing energy infrastructure must be made, and the new infrastructure must consider nuclear power. On the other we must remember the consequences of failure. The IAEA & WHO estimate 9,000 deaths from cancer induced by the accident. Other organizations, such as Greenpeace, have much higher totals.
But this is a site on Baldness. So I leave you with with a couple links.
First, at IndexOnline photojournalist Anatol Klaščuk reflects on his time covering the Chernobyl aftermath.
Today is a special day for me, a happy one, I am going to a meeting with a former oncology ‘prisoner’. It is almost 15 years since we last saw each other, since the time I photographed him in the Baraŭlany clinic, one of many seriously ill boys and girls, tied to a drip-feed, bald-headed, wrapped in a padded quilt. Then he was dying of leukaemia.
And second, I came across this documentary: Children of Chernobyl. Using archival film and eyewittness accounts, Children of Chernobyl investigates the far-reaching consequences of the fallout.
Tags: Anatol-Klaščuk, chernobyl, children-of-chernobylRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Bald Children, General
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