Word: chernobyls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...expects to see the end of these nuclear time bombs anytime soon. There are plans afoot to extend the life of some old reactors and to lift a post-Chernobyl moratorium on completing others. Dangerous reactors will be running into the 21st century. The crumbling sarcophagus over Chernobyl's devastated No. 4 may still be there too -- if it has not collapsed by then...
...Chernobyl, radioactive subs and dumps are still ticking...