Word: chernobyls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...people of Pripyat had no way of knowing that their small Ukrainian town was dying that morning as they gazed at the ruddy glow over Chernobyl reactor No. 4 some 2 1/2 miles away. It was a bright spring Saturday, April 26, 1986. A townsman came in from sunning himself on a roof, exclaiming that he had never seen anything like it, he had turned brown in no time at all. He had what would later be known as a nuclear tan. A few hours afterward, the man was taken away in an ambulance, convulsed with uncontrollable vomiting. Soon many...
...full story of the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath may never be known. Soviet officials have managed to keep most of the details secret. But in The Truth About Chernobyl, nuclear physicist and former Chernobyl chief engineer Grigori Medvedev gives a searing account of the accident. His book, published in the Soviet Union two years ago, will be released in English this week by Basic Books to coincide with the disaster's fifth anniversary...
Medvedev, who helped investigate the disaster, interviewed dozens of plant officials and workers, many of whom later died of radiation poisoning. One sobering conclusion: it could easily happen again (the Soviet Union has 16 other reactors of the Chernobyl design). And in the U.S.? Because America has no such reactors, and because the accident resulted from a breathtaking level of ineptitude, ignorance and criminal negligence, Americans have little reason to fear a similar occurrence...
Many key plant managers and technicians at Chernobyl knew nothing about nuclear technology. Patronage held sway over professionalism when it came to filling top jobs that carried prestige and good pay. The accident, ironically, occurred during a safety exercise, when incompetent managers exposed the core, depriving it of vital cooling water...
What Medvedev calls the "conspiracy of silence" that had cloaked the Soviet nuclear power program in secrecy and lies for 35 years added to the human and environmental cost. In a country where nuclear accidents had never been reported, the pressure to cover up the monumental disaster at Chernobyl was enormous. Plant managers misinformed government officials, insisting that the reactor was intact. Even as the radioactive cloud was spreading over thousands of square miles of Europe, Soviet bureaucrats were still denying the accident. At the same time, Moscow bosses quashed early requests by Chernobyl officials to evacuate the area, dooming...