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Today marks the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl accident in what is now the Ukraine.
The girl in the picture is wearing a traditional Ukrainian headdress of a wreath of flowers and ribbons. The sign in the upper left hand corner says "Radiation", and the signs on the ground say "Chernobyl" and "Pripyat". Most people don't know that there were hundreds of small villages in the 30 km radioactive zone that were razed to the ground and buried because they were so hot. Future generations have remembered these villages by placing signs on the road where they existed, and drawing a red mark through them, indicating they were "marked out". The town of Chernobyl still has a few hundred people living there, mostly those that still work at the nuclear plant and those that keep an eye on the surrounding area. (The nuclear plant closed down in 2000, but it will always have to be monitored for safety reasons). Pripyat, the town actually closest to the nuclear plant, still stands, but it may as well be marked out. It is a ghost town, represented here by it's sign, and by the ferris wheel, which was part of an amusement park built for the children, due to open in May of 86, but it never got that chance. I've taken some artistic license with the plant itself, because the sarcophagus is covering it, but it shows the radiation escaping at the same time. Another fact that most people don't know, and probably the most disturbing, is that during the accident of 1986 only %3 of the total radiation escaped, and we see how much damage it has done. At the same time, %97 of the radiation is still inside, capable of escaping at any time, and the sarcophagus containing it is in danger of collapse. If the remaining radiation inside ever escapes, it will render most of Western Europe uninhabitable. A new containment shelter has been designed, but the Ukraine doesn't have the money to build it.
Immediately following the explosion in 86, thousands of Soviet men gave their lives to stop the radiation from continuing to leak. The lives of millions of women and children were forever changed. Millions of animals were destroyed, like those in the abandoned city of Pripyat, hunted down and shot because they were radioactive. Thyroid cancers in Belarus is up by %200, mostly in children. While our lives go on, day by day, the people of Ukraine and Belarus live with the effects of this disaster.
It will be at least 600 years before anyone can go inside Reactor Number 4 again. |
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