Word: chernobyls
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...abstract, cerebral sense, at least one Harvard academic is getting his hands dirty in the real world. Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics Richard Wilson is applying his research in the field of radiating and ionizing particles to the environmental problems of disaster-ridden countries such as Bangladesh and Chernobyl...
Since his first visit in February 1987, the year after the famous nuclear accident, Wilson has made a dozen trips to Chernobyl. He examined the affects of the radiation crisis first-hand and was appalled at the inaccuracies that were being published. “The [radiation] levels reported in the American media made no sense,” he says. “It’s incredible what non-technical people will believe.” Using Russian reports, Wilson was able to determine the true extent of the crisis. In 1988, he made a documentary, Back...
...sounds like a bad joke, or perhaps the world's biggest public-relations challenge. The Russian firm AtomStroyExport (ASE) is trying to sell nuclear reactors to Finland - one of the countries worst affected by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. It's a tough job. On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear-power station's No. 4 reactor experienced a massive fire and meltdown, releasing radioactive dust that wafted over Finland. The resulting contamination forced Finnish authorities to slaughter almost a half a million farm animals and restrict fishing in rivers and lakes in central and northern Finland until 1988. Those memories...
...environmental catastrophe could be swept under the rug. Man-made famines in Russia in the 1930s and China two decades later were scarcely known outside their borders. But more recently the world has become too interconnected for deception of that magnitude. In 1986, when a nuclear reactor exploded at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, the Soviet government initially tried to keep it quiet. But when Geiger counters in Scandinavia went haywire, Moscow had to come clean. This year the truth about SARS emerged after citizens infected in China traveled outside the country--and after the groundbreaking reporting of TIME and other international...
China still has a long way to go. Beijing even now has been less forthcoming than the Soviets were during their crisis 16 years ago. Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted that Chernobyl was a disaster (with some caveats, to be sure) 18 days after the explosion; Beijing is still being less than honest about SARS, unless you really believe that, as of last week, there were just two cases of the disease in Shanghai (pop. 17 million). Chernobyl eventually helped promote positive change in the Soviet Union as citizens grasped just how awful the system had become. Gorbachev realized that "even...