Word: chernobyls
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...prize is worth about $710,000, or about eight times Gorbachev's annual salary. It is a sum that would see any Soviet citizen through a lifetime of shortages, but the President plans to donate the money to charity. One likely recipient: a fund for young victims of the Chernobyl disaster...
Second, it was during the 1980s that mankind for the first time seriously began to think in ecological terms. The need for radically reassessing the relationship between mankind and the planet was made manifest by Chernobyl, acid rain, ozone-layer depletion, the greenhouse effect, vanishing forests and freshwater shortages. The ecological movement is now on the rise. Government policies are beginning to change. International ecological cooperation has begun. Yet it will take a tremendous effort to overcome the inertia of mindless devastation of the environment, or even restrain the inertia generated by the industrial...
...over Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany on an otherwise clear day, one can see whole valleys enveloped in a heavy blue haze from the belching smokestacks that disfigure the landscape. Littered across the East bloc, obsolete and unsafe nuclear reactors are decaying, each threatening a reprise of the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The Danube River and Baltic Sea are deadly sumps. Many lakes and streams are fishless, forests are dying, and blackened cities are decorated with pollution-eroded sculpture...
Plainly, mankind cannot renounce nuclear power, so we must find technical means to guarantee its absolute safety and exclude the possibility of another Chernobyl. The best way is international legislation requiring that all new nuclear reactors be sited deep enough underground so that even a worst-case accident would not discharge radioactive substances into the atmosphere. Existing aboveground reactors should be protected by reliable containment structures. The first priority should be to safeguard atomic plants that supply power and heat to large cities, reactors with graphite moderators like the one that malfunctioned at Chernobyl, and fast-neutron breeder reactors...
...Nuclear weapons divide and threaten mankind. But there are peaceful uses of nuclear energy that should promote the unity of mankind. Chernobyl was an example of the tragic interaction of equipment failure and human error. Nevertheless, the aversion people rightly feel for military applications must not spill over to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Mankind cannot do without nuclear power. We must find a solution to the safety problem that will rule out another Chernobyl resulting from human error, failure to follow instructions, design defects or technical malfunction...