Thursday, September 30, 2010

Chernobyl and Nuclear Power - part I

I'm saying 'Part I' because this is a big topic, and likely best broken down into multiple posts.

There's a technical and a personal part to this, here's most of the personal.
In April of 1986, my late wife and I went (again, for about the eighth time) to Europe on a three-or-four week vacation. we landed in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, on Friday, April 25, 1986. We had a sort-of-interary, but having 3-month Eurail passes and having been through a lot of European territory on other trips, really planned things day-by-day. Well, we had visas/entry permits for USSR/Russia.Ukraine and intended go to first to Kiev, but the news reports when we landed said it was quite gray and cold; so we decided to go the Paris-Madrid way instead, and hook back up into Russia later in the trip. So took the train to Paris, stayed overnight, and then took the next train to Spain.
(Don't let anyone tell you any crap about 'April in Paris'. April in Paris is almost always bloody cold, damp, rainy and rotten. So we kept on going to Spain... (Alicante, on the Med. coast -- really nice). )
Reactor number four at the Chernobyl complex, outside of the town of Pripyat in the Ukraine, about 60 miles NW of Kiev, suffered a catastrophic accident on that Saturday, April 26, 1986, resulting in the worst nuclear accident in history: the only 'Level 7' event on the International Nuclear Event Scale which has ever happened.
As a matter of course, the then Soviet Union denied the event, hid  and denied details of it, and censored and forbade all press coverage or even mention of the event.
We first heard of it when still in Spain, about a week after the event, when the radioactive plume from the Chernobyl plant drifted into Western Europe, was delected, analyzed and its origin determined. This made big headlines in all papers.
Upon travelling back to southern France, we noted then:
the huge fields of flowers, lavender, etc. outside of St.Paul-de-Vance were gone: cut down -- only things growning in greenhouses were left.
When dining in (some really terrific) inns and restaurants there, we were often laughingly encouraged to have 'The Russian Salad' with our meal: canned peas and carrots, since all 'grown-outside' fruits, vegetables, etc. had been ordered destroyed by the French government. A few days later, that fear spread to even hydroponically-grown produce, because of fear of water comtamination. (Likely, all of these concerns were overreactions, but more real data on that later.)
In any case, aside from just being warmer, spending some time on the Spanish seacoast, etc. it likely was an accidentally good decision, not to go directly to Kiev upon arrival...

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