3/23/2023 0 Comments Nuclear reactor meltdown video![]() ![]() "The water in the calm stretch of river is black as ink," said Ruelfs. The ever-present effects of the disaster, even after 30 years, are stark and unmissable. Humans live in close symbiosis with animals, slaughtering takes place at home, apples ripen on the windowsill."īut Chernobyl today is of course not simply bucolic at all. "We look onto a tranquil, peaceful world, a positively paradise-like, apparently pre-industrial idyll. As Hamburg Museum of Art photography expert Esther Ruelfs said about Russian photographer Andrej Krementschouk's images captured inside Chernobyl in recent years: SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images Mykola Kovalenko, a 73-year-old resident of the exclusion zone, poses near his homemade tractor.Īnd, lingering health risks aside, it's apparently not quite the apocalyptic wasteland one might expect. Millions of acres of surrounding forests and farmlands were crippled and anyone even close to ground zero was in serious danger. The disaster had released several times more radioactive material into the air than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (with harmful radiation drifting as far away as France and Italy). Dozens of emergency workers become seriously ill due to the radiation and, over the course of years afterward, untold thousands would follow in their footsteps. The levels of radioactivity inside Chernobyl after the disaster were far too great for any human to stand. The lingering effects, however, had only begun to reveal themselves and shape Chernobyl today. Dozens of people had died horribly in the process, but the plant was contained. Workers risked their lives in those ruins for more than a week afterward to eventually contain the fire, bury the mountains of radioactive debris, and enclose the reactor inside a concrete and steel sarcophagus. And the mistakes and mismanagement that both caused the disaster and compounded that disaster in the immediate aftermath left Chernobyl in ruins. That cover-up saw Soviet authorities attempt to flat-out hide the disaster until the government of Sweden - which had detected high levels of radiation all the way within their own borders - inquired and effectively pushed the Soviets to come clean on April 28.īy then, some 100,000 people were being evacuated, the Soviets made an official announcement, and the world was now aware of what had quickly become the worst nuclear disaster in history. IGOR KOSTIN, SYGMA/CORBIS "Liquidators" preparing for cleanup, 1986.Įmergency workers toiled inside the deadly reactor while officials organized an evacuation of the surrounding area - albeit one that didn't take effect until the following day due to poor communication and an attempted cover-up of the cause. Welcome to Chernobyl today, an empty shell haunted by its disastrous past. Time has stood still and there are memories of past happenings floating around us." Now it's known only as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, forcibly devoid of humans and since retaken by animals and nature itself.Īs documentarian Danny Cooke said upon taking footage of the area just a few years ago, "There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place. Pripyat, the town forged next to the nuclear plant, was meant to be a model nuclear city, a testament to Soviet strength and ingenuity. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on cleanup and literally untold thousands of people have been left dead, injured, or sick - and the area itself still remains a veritable ghost town.Ĭhernobyl today is indeed a place long since abandoned, yet it is still full of relics of its tragic past. More than 30 years have passed since the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl became the most devastating catastrophe of its kind in history. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |