20 Years Since Chernobyl

In 1986, my secondary school had an exchange with a school in the Arctic circle. The arctic kids came down for a week, saw Niagara Falls, et cetera, and then my school-mates went up to see how the other half lived. When they returned, they naturally asked, "what world events did we miss when we were up north," and we replied, "oh, not much, a nuclear reactor only burnt for days and days in the Ukraine."

20 years, and our memories have faded so much that there is this push for a nuclear revival ... even though it will cost £70 billion to clean up the nuclear waste that we do have ... even though Sellafield is already a terrorist target twice as big as we could imagine.

A great book is "Voices from Chernobyl" by Svetlana Alexievich.

The wife of a Chernobyl firefighter:

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, "I love you." But I didn't know then how much ... One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. "Close the window and go back to sleep. There's a fire at the reactor. I'll be back soon"... I didn't see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he's still not back ... The smoke was from the burning bitumen, which had covered the roof. He said later it was like walking on tar. They tried to beat down the flames. They kicked at the burning graphite with their feet ... They weren't wearing their canvas gear. They went off just as they were, in their shirt sleeves. No one told them.