Today is the 20 year anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster and I’ve spent some of today looking at what, to me, is ancient history. I was 10 at the time of the accident and we were living in the Congo (formerly Zaire). Realtime news was non-existent and we generally got news 6 weeks late. This was ‘us’ as in my family. I’m sure other embassy and military folks were more in real time, but then, this was 1986 when cell phones and email didn’t exist, and the primary mode of communication for commoners was the telex.
I didn’t know about a lot of big events until late. I remember seeing the cover of Newsweek magazine 4 weeks after the Challenger accident so news of Chernobyl was generally lost on a 10 year old.
But today I’m sort of a history junkie and I spent a lot of time combing archives and reading journals and papers, as well as blogs that talked about April 26, 1986.
I am trying to fathom “the coffin” that was built around the reactor. It was all concrete and steel but was built very fast to enclose and entomb the radiation. I think I located the site in Google Earth (equivalent on the web with Yahoo Maps).
Apparently the coffin is dissolving as the radiation eats through the concrete and international plans to create 
another shell around the existing one is still in the planning stage. Scary stuff.
Interesting tidbits:
- The half life of Uranium-235 (how many years it will take for it to become completely benign) is 704 million years
- The timeline of the response of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1986-2001
- Pictures of a A Nuclear winter
Update: The radioactive contaminant present at Chernobylk was Cesium-137, which has a half life of 30 years. So tell me. In 10 more years, would you willingly live in the area of Chernobyl?
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