Wednesday, 11 May 2011

Disaster in Czarnobyl

As you know well there occurred a very serious disaster in Russia in 1986. In nuclear power plant exploded hydrogen from a nuclear reactor. It was the biggest disaster in the history of nuclear energy and one of the biggest industrial disasters of the twentieth century.

I would like to discuss with you this topic. I have read many articles about this event and there are written different types of reasons of that disaster. But at the beginning I have to tell you more about what really happened there.

Everything started from nuclear reactor testing. Russians wanted to know what would happen if one of reactor was shut down. They weren’t well prepared to this operation and during shutting down there was a disaster. In the result of this experiment testers allowed for its reactor’s overheating and in the result it exploded. After explosion radioactive cloud moved with wind very fast in each site of the world contaminating almost every single country.

The Russian government wanted do hide information about the disaster and they didn’t tell the truth about this event. Only a few days later the American satellite detected radioactive substances in the air and it was the moment when world got to know the truth.

Russians said that not much of radioactive substances got into atmosphere. Just later research disclosed how serious this disaster was.

After a few years we are still feeling the consequences of this event. Many of us are ill much more often than before. We are weak, don’t have resistance against many disease, we die younger.

Recently I have seen a documentary film about what really happened in Czarnobyl in 1986 and I heard much information I have never heard before. There was told much information which was top secret and it had not come out to light. I saw how people died after radiation, how mutant people were born, how big was the real pollution and how far it moved. Information which was told on television was just a piece of real information which we should know. We have lived for many years in lie and nobody wants to tell the truth.

The worst is that the nuclear power plant is still dangerous for our health because the curtain made of concrete cracked in many place and the radioactive substances are still moving out from the building to the atmosphere.

So now I want to ask you.

1. Why Russian didn’t tell the truth about the real scale of threats?

2. Do you think that current diseases are caused by the disaster in Czarnobyl?

3. Maybe you have your own opinion about this event. If yes please share with us.

4. Do you think that we know all the truth about what really happened or they are still hiding something?

11 comments:

  1. I am sure that we don't know everything and normal citizen will never know everything as always. I have heared the same story as you wrote that they wanted to test something but were not prepared well for this. So despite the development of technique, how much advanced it is - always the weakest link will be human with his not well-thought actions. I've heared recently that they are going to make new curtain or already are doing this because old one as you told cracked in many places. Probably a lot of diseases were caused by this disaster but who really knows..

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  2. I'm pretty sure we know only part of history and we can't be sure if it's even true. Russian have been always hiding their dirty mysteries and dark tests with different things. They probably show only small part of their real researches.
    You ask why, it's quite easy imo. First of all a lot of their researches are top secret because it's probably not really ethical. They may afraid worlds and society reaction. Here works rule: out of sight, out of mind.
    Probably it's also dangerous for many of us so again - to not be stopped they just pretend to do quite normal stuff. They also don't want to take responsibility if something will go wrong.
    I'm also sure that after Czarnobyl disaster many illness has its beggining, like cancer or different mutations.
    Also, just like Kamyk said, I've heard rumors about needs to rebuild curtain because this one is just old and has some cracs. It's quite serious since many countries decided to donate millions of dollars on this purpose (even Poland as I heard).
    To sum up, we don't know and will not know all about this tragedy. It only shows humans overgrowth ambitions and negligence. Nature shows us we are not mature enough to play with it. The saddest thing is many innocent people paid for someones miasakes.

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  3. Yes, radiation is a serious business. Really. But it's all around us! All the time! And the cracks in the concrete curtains in the Chernobyl plat curtain are hundreds kilometers away.

    I've heard once an interesting opinion of the polish main endocrinology consultant. He said that the problem with the drastic and horryfing statistics after the Chernobyl disaster is that they cannot be compared to any data from previous periods... because they have never been gathered!

    For example, the issue of thyroid diseases haven't been really raised before the accident in USSR in 1986. So we cannot say for sure that more people are affected by those kind of illnesses now in comparison to the past...

    There's no healthy poeple, they just have no diagnosis ;)

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  4. Show me one government that is telling the truth, whatever the case is. There just isn't one.
    After the disaster radiation in Poland was only a little higher than usual. You can read about it in various articles available around the web. Please note that most of the poeple that died had direct contact with the reactor core. It is true that radiation levels around the power plant and higher than normal but mother nature doesn't mind that. There are a lot of species around there, there is a tv show on National Geographic about it.
    In my opinion nuclear powerplants are needed. Renewable power sources such as sun or wind are not enough for our needs and coal fuelled power plants are more harmful for the enviroment.

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  5. You have to honestly say that you will never know the total amount of radioactivity released by the ZSRR, as well as the reason for withholding information about the explosion. It is very difficult to document how the effect of explosion nuclear power plant had an on our health. One thing is certain, if response and prevention wasn't so quick, the effects of radiation would be bigger.

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  6. I believe we don`t know anything about disaster in Czarnobyl and probably will never know the truth. The Russians were afraid to reveal the truth world and they did not know the extent of threats. As for diseases, I am convinced that in those years at the power station area people began to suffer from the unknown disease. Now, rather it's all under control. Travel agencies organize trips there, so it must be ok.

    What was happened in Japan has shown that building of power plants is very controversial. People are afraid to live next door because they did not want to make their lives were threatened such a disasters. In Poland we do not have any nuclear power but for a few years, the government intends to construct one. What do you think? Or in Poland, we need nuclear power?

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  7. I remember when I was young and I was forced to take iodine and Lugols fluid in case of preventing damege from radiation, but it turn out that it wasn't good for health because radiation alredy came and this things only could harm us...

    Why russians didn’t tell the truth about the real scale of threats? We all well know that russians don't like to talk about their mistakes. The fact is that it was communist Russia and things like this wasn't a good advertisment for their government and propaganda.

    I think that there is really small percentage of diseases caused by radiation from Czernobyl.

    I think they told everything about consequences of Czernobyl accident but I'm not sure if they told everything about cause of this tragedy.

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  8. Disaster in Czarnobyl was terrifying. Firstly - there was no such incident in the past, nobody really knew what to do in situation like that, secondly, the scale of it was catastrophic.
    I think Russian didn't tell the truth for the rest of the world because they didn't want to admit that something could go wrong in their country. They always wanted to look strong and powerful.

    We still do not know what the effects of the Czarnobyl disaster brought.

    Similar situation we could observe recently in Japan. In my opinion it should cause us to rethink use of nuclear energy.

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  9. I agree with what most of you wrote, that we will probably never know what
    really happened in Czarnobyl. However some tome ago I've read an interesting
    article about the accident in Czarnobyl. According to the scientist who wrote
    it the leak in Czarnobyl wasn't dangerous at all for people living farer than
    30 km from the plant. I don't say that this must be true and everything said
    about the accident before that is worthless, but as Michał Kąkol said, we
    cannot compare the number of sick people now to the number before 1986, as
    there is no data. So we cannot be sure that all the diseases after Czarnobyl
    are caused by it.

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  10. The disaster of such a big scale can't be hidden from the public. I think that Russians were too proud of themselves to admit that they've made such a deadly mistake. Many people--mainly workers of that power plant--probably have known more about the cause of the accident, but most of them have died due to illnesses caused by the radiation so it is possible that we will never know the entire truth. I think that many diseases in the 80s and at the beginning of the 90s may have been caused by the disaster, but today it should be safe enough.

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  11. And why children are hiding their broken toys from parents? They are afraid of their reaction, that they will be punished. The same was with Russians. Perhaps they thought they will be able to minimize the causes of this accident. Maybe they thought that no one will notice that as American satellite did it. But what where the causes? Tests of shutting down the reactor, bad construction, human mistake, we do not know, but what have been lesson from that i that nuclear plants may be danger for life if something go wrong. Close area and regions which were under influence of radio active air were tained for many years (around 30). For many people this was a disaster. But i think that today diseases (which) are not caused by this accident.

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