Chernobyl's legacy

摘要

The morning train from Slavutych is packed with commuters playing cards, browsing e-readers, or watching the monotonous flood plains pass by. It looks like any other routine journey to work. But rather than facing a crush through subway turnstiles at the end of the 40-minute trip, the workers are met by a row of full-body radiation monitors. It is the start of another day at the Chernobyl power plant, the site of the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster. As the train trundles through the bleak Ukrainian countryside, another nuclear crisis is unfolding halfway around the world. Barely a week after the partial meltdown at the Fuku-shima Daiichi nuclear power station, it is no surprise that some of the chatter on the train turns to the incident there. "It looks bad," says one commuter. "But not as bad as Chernobyl," he adds, with a hint of grim pride. When Chernobyl's reactor number 4 exploded in the early hours of 26 April 1986, the ensuing blaze spewed 6.7 tonnes of material from the core high into the atmosphere, spreading radioactive isotopes over more than 200,000 square kilometres of Europe (see 'The hottest zone'). Dozens of emergency workers died within months from radiation exposure and thousands of children in the region later developed thyroid cancer. The region around the plant became so contaminated that officials cordoned off a 30-kilometre exclusion zone that straddled Ukraine's border with Belarus. Today, a staff of about 3,500 enters the zone each day to monitor, clean and guard the site, where remediation work will continue for at least another 50 years (see 'Half-life of a disaster').