If you have half hour spare

I have a fascination with Chernobyl, and how the land has been left to go back to nature, there is a website that has lots of pics from the area taken by a woman who rides in on her motorcycle, have a little look here :-

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/spring2007.html

 

Yes very thought provoking pictures and commentary:
"There are more than 2,000 dead towns and villages within a radius of 250 kms (155 miles) around Chernobyl reactor"

 

I saw them a while back -absolutely stunning. I too have a bit of a fascination with Chernobyl, and find it really sad that there have not been more documentaries made including ones relating to the effects on nature even now.

One thing is certain, I am one of those people that would go and pay a visit both to the power station itself and to Pripyat as well if it were allowed, safe to do so, and didn't cost arms and legs.

 

I thought the same thing about Pripyat and Chernobyl, a great documentary could be made showing how nature has started to take back the land.

Somewhere on that site, she mentions that the half-life of the nuclear waste in the area to be 24,000 years !!!

 

Its frightening in one respect, yet intriguing in another; I'd imagine that at some point, someone will come up with a way of cleaning up the contamination, even if that is hundreds of years from now. Its sad that our generation has left such a legacy behind, but then with my optimists head on, there is also the legacy of the lessons that were learned globally as a result.

I grew up within kicking distance of Chapelcross, not a million miles away from Sellafield (or Windscale as it was known), and then in later life lived quite close to Torness, and to be honest was never worried by any of them - even after Chernobyl. Somewhat ironically, it was Chernobyl that caused contamination on land locally to us, and not the local power stations (the contamination blew over in a cloud that settled over SW Scotland).

To be fair, the Chernobyl incident was borne out of a number of factors that are unlikely to ever be repeated - the main one being the archaic technology that the power station had, and the training/personalities of the staff running the site (had it not been for their bull-headed pride, the disaster probably wouldn't have happened, or at the least would have been much better contained in my opinion).

The pessimism around nuclear technology saddens me to be honest, because in relative terms it is fledgling technology (think of all the deaths in factories, construction sites and shipyards etc over the centuries), and again in relative terms it has been fairly safe.

Take the more recent Fukushima incident - the earthquake that the plant endured was way above that of its design specification, and way above the worst that was ever predicted - and to be honest, it faired relatively well; the subsequent tsunami put the final nails in the coffin, and caused the real damage.

Sure, many people have been evacuated as a result (mostly precautionary), but how many died or were injured as a result of the problems at the nuclear power plant? Less than 20 in total. How many died or were injured as a result of the earthquake and tsunami? 19,057.

Surely as a global community we should be congratulating the designers and engineers of the nuclear power station on a job well done? Particularly when you bear in mind that the radiation levels released into the surrounding area are approximately 1/10th of those that were released in the Chernobyl incident, and that effective clear up is already underway.