The SHTF +18 years...

I came across this link also the other day on a local car forum I frequent. Very interesting read. It's very sad as well.
 
Tourists flock to the dead zone of Chernobyl
By Tom Parfitt in Chernobyl

Nearly 20 years after the world's worst nuclear disaster, the Chernobyl power plant and the poisonous wasteland that surrounds it has become an unlikely tourist destination.

Day-trippers armed with Geiger counters take guided tours from Kiev through military checkpoints to the doorstep of the reactor. Increasing numbers of adventurers are finding their way into the irradiated zone, seeking the eerie thrill of entering family homes unchanged since they were evacuated at a few minutes' notice, two decades ago.

They sift through the abandoned homes of 48,000 workers and their families, whisked away as a veil of plutonium settled over the city. Family photographs, telephones, furniture upturned in the hasty departure, shoes, clothes and other belongings lie scattered through apartments.

Naturalists come to explore Chernobyl's "Garden of Eden" - the proliferation of greenery and wildlife that has sprung up in the exclusion zone around the ruined power station since the local population fled. More than 3,000 visitors go to the site every year, and hundreds more explore the abandoned villages in the 20-mile evacuated "dead zone".

"Strange as it may sound, people visit here from all over the world - the United States, Australia, Japan, the UK," said Yulia Marusich, an official guide who leads visitors to a viewing platform overlooking the concrete sarcophagus that encloses the remains of Reactor Four.

As she spoke, standing beside the sarcophagus, a Geiger counter began to tick frantically. It registered 50 times the natural background level of radiation - apparently a "tolerable" level of exposure for a short visit, officials say.

Engineers say that there is a serious risk that the sarcophagus could collapse, exposing hundreds of tons of unstable nuclear debris.

The Chernobyl catastrophe took place 18 years ago tomorrow, on April 26, 1986, when a powerful explosion destroyed the reactor, expelling a huge plume of radioactive dust that drifted across Europe.

Some 31 firefighters who fought the blaze were killed by massive doses of radiation, and thousands of civilians are thought to have died since from radiation-induced cancers. About 200 tons of concrete and other debris mixed with nuclear fuel are still trapped under the hastily-constructed concrete shell. Now, travel companies in Kiev are cashing in by charging day-trippers $190 (£110) for a tour of the disaster area in northern Ukraine.

Tourists can enter the dead zone, visit the ruined fourth unit, talk to villagers who returned to live in the area and see a graveyard of hundreds of trucks, helicopters and armoured personnel vehicles which, according to brochures, are "so soaked with radiation that it is dangerous to approach".

Towns and villages that were evacuated in the days following the disaster are the biggest attraction - a time capsule from the late Soviet era. At Pripyat, two miles from the nuclear plant, communist banners painted for May 1 - a date the city never greeted - are stacked in the back of a ruined theatre.

Tour agents say that there is no health risk from taking the trips. Areas of high radioactivity are marked off with triangular yellow signs. The journey involves passing through a series of military roadblocks. Last week, officials from the nuclear plant led a group of foreign journalists and aid workers on a tour of the disaster zone.

The concrete sarcophagus is to be covered by a new steel shell in 2008. Mrs Marusich said that debris stacked against the inside of the existing shell's southern wall is slowly shifting and "could result in the entire structure collapsing". Parts of the concrete shell are criss-crossed by cracks.

As preparations for the new structure advance, several thousand employees are working to dismantle the plant's remaining reactors and process the leftover nuclear fuel. Each night they are taken by train to Slavutich, the town built outside the dead zone especially for workers.

Visiting the skeleton of the city that Slavutich replaced is the most poignant moment on the Chernobyl tour. Pripyat was a model town with elite apartments, shops, swimming pools and kindergartens. A day and a half after Reactor Four exploded, the entire population of the city was loaded on to buses and taken away.

"There was a forest nearby that turned red from radioactive dust," remembered Nikolai, a driver who was a traffic policeman overseeing the evacuation that day. "People begged us to get past it as fast as we could."

Today, Pripyat is a ghost town where time has stood still. A fairground ride, finished days before the disaster, is enveloped in weeds and contorted vines. Birdsong is clear in the total silence.

Many locals are surprisingly unconcerned by the legacy of Chernobyl. About 600 people have returned to live inside the dead zone. Maria Dika, 42, leaning from a balcony in Chernobyl town, said she had suffered no long-term ill effects after three months of treatment for acute radiation sickness. She was working as a security guard at Reactor Four on the night of the disaster.

"We're fine," she joked. "No health problems. The radiation has got used to us." Tatiana Khrushch, 66, agreed. "The air's clean, the water's lovely and the mushrooms are great," she said. "This is a fine place."
 
I was eleven when this happened and remember the rumors first and then - very late - the reports of an "incident" - of course everything was "under control". The truth came slowly during the next few days.
And then we waited anxiously when the "cloud" would cross our area and if it would rain in these days - it did. Contaminated particles were washed out from the cloud and hit the ground. All the firefighters had endless decontamination drills. It was very threatening - we would not play outside, the school breaks were in the house. We would not eat mushrooms, beans, peas, and wild game - the dosis has not returned to "normal" yet. Some do not eat these things until today - and it happened quite some hundreds of kilometers away from Bavaria. There are still some plants of the Chernobyl-type (with little improvements) that produce electricity right in our neighbourhood - just over the Czech-border, less than 20 km from the frontier. Why is it that they place the atomic plants near the frontiers? It is always said that chances of a big accident are "minimal" but if it happens the outcome is terrible. What if Sept 11th would not have hit the twin towers but an atomic power- plant? I am very critical about these things you see - but I see too that atomic energy is a way to get independent from OPEC etc...

Are you in the US sure that no fallout is left from the surface-tests of the atomic bombs in the 50s? Makes me shiver when I think of what they told the soldiers back then (do not look into the light, take cover, wait there until the pressure-wave passes - then charge.)

Andreas
 
Pan Tau said:
It is always said that chances of a big accident are "minimal" but if it happens the outcome is terrible.
Click to expand...

Andreas, this is one of the aspects of threat analysis that many people find it hard to accept. They focus on the smaller threats they see around them, which leads them to cure symptoms instead of an underlying disease.

National security needs often require us to counter threats that don't exist yet, which makes most people think the money is wasted when the threat never materializes.

Atomic energy should be much further advanced than it is, world-wide, but uncontained reactors like Chernobyl discourage even me. I hope you and your community escape the worst of the long-term effects. Belorussia, where part of my family came from two generations ago, was devastated, medically speaking.
 
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