technology

Nuclear Energy is not very popular despite its benefits due to the catastrophic disaster that occurs if something should go wrong in a nuclear power plant. An excellent example of this is the Chernobyl accident. The V.I. Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had been built right near the town housing the power staion employees and their families. The power station was in a wooded, marshy area near the Ukraine-Belarus border, approximately 18 kilometers northwest of the city of Chernobyl and 100 km north of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station included four nuclear reactors, each capable of producing one gigawatt of electric power. At the time of the accident, the four reactors produced about 10 percent of the electricity used in Ukraine. On April 26, 1986, the operating crew planned to test whether the Reactor No. 4 turbines could produce enough energy to keep the coolant pumps running until the emergency diesel generator was activated in case of an external power loss. During the test, power surged unexpectedly, causing an explosion and driving temperatures in the reactor to more than 2,000 degrees Celsius—melting the fuel rods, igniting the reactor’s graphite covering, and releasing a cloud of radiation into the atmosphere.The precise causes of the accident are still uncertain, but it is generally believed that the series of incidents that led to the explosion, fire and nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl was caused by a combination of reactor design flaws and operator error.By mid-2005, fewer than 60 deaths could be linked directly to Chernobyl—mostly workers who were exposed to massive radiation during the accident or children who developed thyroid cancer.



Estimates of the eventual death toll from Chernobyl vary widely. A 2005 report by the Chernobyl Forum—eight U.N. organizations—estimated the accident eventually would cause about 4,000 deaths. Greenpeace places the figure at 93,000 deaths, based on information from the Belarus National Academy of Sciences. Another report by the Center for Independent Environmental Assessment of the Russian Academy of Sciences found a dramatic increase in mortality since 1990—60,000 deaths in Russia and an estimated 140,000 deaths in Ukraine and Belarus—probably due to Chernobyl radiation. The biggest challenge facing communities still coping with the fallout of Chernobyl is the psychological damage to 5 million people in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. The 45,000 inhabitants of Pripyat, 4km away from the Chernobyl power plant, were not evacuated until 36 hours after the accident. For 9 days, fires at the Chernobyl plant continued to burn and emit radioactivity. 130,000 people from settlements within 30km of the reactor were eventually evacuated, but only after being exposed to highly dangerous levels of radiation.