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| A flower finding purchase in the contaminated wasteland in Pripyat. Photo: Nils Bøhmer |
PRIPYAT, Ukraine – This year has brought some sobering anniversaries.
Everyone likes a round number and 2016 has handed down a straight flush
of elegiac reports on disasters past: the 30-year marker of the
Chernobyl explosion of April 26, 1986, and last month, the five-year remembrance of the meltdowns in Fukushima Japan.
Rather than offer any comforting capstones to these events, however,
reports from the areas of these calamities continue to tick off fresh,
unforeseen consequences of the irresponsible, or just plain naïve, uses
of nuclear power.
In short, these disasters – unlike many other industrial and
environmental catastrophes of our time – seem to have no real endpoint.
While Fukushima grapples with another dump of radioactive water into the
sea, Chernobyl is still, three decades on, having trouble securing
radiation within the sarcophagus of cement dumped over the No 4 reactor
to squelch radioactive releases.
Bellona’s executive director and nuclear physicist Nils Bøhmer has
taken his camera to the exclusion zone to document the freeze-frame of
history to find much of the industry-scape virtually unchanged since the
days following the catastrophe (published below this article).
“Disaster overwhelms all reactions that were normal in a society
before it takes place,” Sergei Mirnyi, who was 27 at the time Chernobyl
exploded and who worked as a liquidator after the disaster, told Bellona
in an interview. “The actual disaster starts after the CNN moment, and
the camera crews pack up and go – then the people are left alone and
alienated.”
For now, more than 200 tons of uranium remains inside Chernobyl’s No 4
reactor, which exploded at 1:23 am that April morning during a safety
test.
Data: 21.04.2016
Fonte: www.bellona.ru
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