Word: chernobyl
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...handling of Chernobyl is hardly reassuring. When workers finished the huge steel-and-concrete shell that entombs the intensely radioactive mass of the shattered No. 4 reactor in late 1986, Soviet officials declared the site safe for at least 30 years. Yet today the sarcophagus is cracked, crumbling and in peril of a disastrous collapse. The melted-down fuel is turning to unstable dust. Contaminated objects are being smuggled out of the poorly guarded 1,092-sq.-mi. exclusion zone. Birds fly into the sarcophagus through holes as big as a garage door; rats breed in the ruin. The structure...
...environmental nightmares strike a more frightening chord than Chernobyl. It is not merely the radioactive mess left by the 1986 meltdown. Six years later, 19 similar graphite-moderated nuclear time bombs are still ticking away, alarming relics of a badly designed, haplessly run nuclear-power program that none of the independent republics of the former Soviet Union can afford to shut down. The potential killers bring light, heat and power to parts of Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania, where their immediate decommissioning would create unacceptable economic disruption and even civil unrest...
...Chernobyl the concern is even more immediate. There is ever-present danger in the operation of reactor No. 3 too. Despite a government plan to shut down the entire plant, No. 3 was reactivated after officials pleaded that its energy was essential for the coming winter. Like its ruined twin, No. 3 is ; considered fundamentally unsafe by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It may be even more so now: many Russian operators have returned home, leaving a reactor run by Ukrainians who are ill-trained, badly paid and demoralized...
...spots abound in the buildings and equipment around Chernobyl. A disabled bulldozer sets off alarms on hand-held radiometers, showing 10 times the internationally accepted exposure level for nuclear-power workers. The big Mi- 8 helicopters that were used to drop sand into the blazing reactor in 1986 -- collecting such heavy radiation that some pilots died -- rest in a field along with hundreds of contaminated trucks and armored personnel carriers, many stripped of engines and electronic gear. The radiation is not enough to cause immediate illness, but looters are taking long-term risks. Health officials estimate that 10,000 deaths...
...Chernobyl is only one of many examples of nuclear contamination and carelessness throughout the former Soviet Union. A devastating 1957 nuclear- waste explosion and subsequent dumping of contaminants near Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of Moscow, is now thought to have released pollution totaling 1.2 billion curies, a unit measure of contamination. That compares with about 3 million curies from the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Says Murray Feshbach, co-author of Ecocide in the USSR: "The new evidence of widespread nuclear pollution is so incredible, it's hard to believe...