by Nadia Promi

Created on: April 29, 2008

Are we allowed to forget Chernobyl, no matter be it the result of a crazy experiment, low maintenance or ignorance? There has been a lot of controversy around Chernobyl because at the time when it happened the information was suppressed by the government officials. How many people have actually died, how many have been affected? Chernobyl is an on-going tragic story. It was the worst and the deadliest accident among all nuclear incidents in the world. The accident with the longest lasting impact on the environment and on the health of population in the affected areas.

The explosion that burst out in reactor 4 of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, early on April 26, 1986 continued with the lethal fire that lasted for ten days. Tons of uranium fuel, plutonium and other radio-nuclide were blown into the atmosphere in the range of three miles. The most affected states of then Soviet Union were Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Later the winds blew the radioactive debris northward across Europe. Contamination was widespread and in many directions. In the report prepared by 35 scientists for the Forum Chernobyl Conference in 2005, it was stated that the releases of radio-nuclide were large, in form of gases, condensed particles and fuel particles. The radioactive cloud went to high altitudes. It was detected throughout the Northern hemisphere, as far away as the Great Britain.

Although different sorts of radio-nuclide were released from the Chernobyl power plant, it has been estimated that the overall radiation was 90 times deadlier than the radiation caused by the nuclear bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. For several years the official sources of the Soviet Union claimed that 'only' 32 people were killed in the Chernobyl disaster. Later the death of 254 people was admitted. After the fall of the 'iron curtain' in 1991 more facts about Chernobyl became available to public. However, the real truth about Chernobyl will never be fully revealed.

According to the World Health Organization which relies on the report prepared for the Forum Chernobyl conference in 2005, approximately one thousand on-site reactor staff and emergency workers were heavily exposed to high-level radiation on the first day of the accident. Among the more than two hundred thousand emergency and recovery operation workers exposed during the period from 1986-1987, an estimated twenty-two hundred radiation-caused deaths can be expected during their lifetime.

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