Remembering Chernobyl

[RAMA]

http://darkroom.baltimoresun.com/2012/04/remembering-chernobyl/#1

26 years later.

The timeline of events from Wikipedia makes for some remarkable reading. A steel "dome" is set to be placed around the reactor, and eventually the reactor and concrete tomb around it are set to be removed.

RAMA

 

[MacLeod]

Hard to think it's been that long.

 

[Shurik]

My uncle worked there and he was actually the first one to tell us that something bad happened there, even before the ~20 sec. long announcement on TV or 3-line mention on the last page of some newspaper (Wikipedia is right about the announcements). He and his family lived in Pripyat and were evacuated to Kiev. I was born in Chernigov, which is about 80 km from Chernobyl.
The severity of what happened was really downplayed during the first weeks by the Soviet authorities. Eventually, we did know that the reactor blew up, but we didn't exactly knew how it would affect our health.
I visited Pripyat about half a year before the explosion, it was a really beautiful and modern city (by 1985 standards, anyway).

 

[RAMA]

I don't want to minimize the tragedy, 1000s might die in the long term--and I actually had a friend whose family fled the Soviet Union from the Chernobyl area in the the 90s--but while large areas remain unlivable, the actual number of dead people immediately resulting from the tragedy is relatively small. The number of predicted diseases resulting from it are also relatively small. I've seen news stories and videos on youtube saying 1000s of mutations have resulted, but that's not true, and life is flourishing in the abandoned exclusion zone. The saddest part of Chernobyl may be that the secrecy of the time and the callousness of the gov't led to a lot of heroic workers dying needlessly in the early part of the tragedy.

 

[Lindley]

I've read that due to the government giving those affected superior healthcare, they are actually above average in terms of health.