What You Didn’t, and Won’t, Hear on the 20th Anniversary of Chernobyl

You won’t hear that the scope of the disaster was caused by the economic and social system in force at the time — Soviet-style communism.

From a Reuters report on the grim anniversary:

….. Hundreds filed past a memorial wall engraved with the names of the local fire crew.

They were among the first to perish when Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 blew up on April 26 1986, spewing radioactive dust across Europe.

….. “Today’s ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the accident do not, unfortunately, mean we can say farewell to Chernobyl,” parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn said at a special session of the chamber devoted to the anniversary.

“It will remain with the Ukrainian people for more than one generation to come.”

….. Soviet authorities took two days to inform the world and their own people about the accident. Firefighters and conscripts were sent in to extinguish the fire and clean up radioactive material, some equipped only with shovels.

Thousands of people suffered health problems from the radiation.

The “sarcophagus” is leaking and needs to be replaced - an undertaking likely to cost hundreds of millions of rands.

…..The World Health Organisation puts at 9,000 the number of people expected to die owing to radiation exposure from Chernobyl, while Greenpeace predicts an eventual death toll of 93,000.

Contrast that toll with what happened in the US at Three Mile Island:

No identifiable injuries due to radiation occurred (a government report concluded that “the projected number of excess fatal cancers due to the accident … is approximately one”), but the accident had serious economic and public relations consequences, and the cleanup process was slow and costly.

It’s “funny” how totalitarian governments are so poor at building safety into construction projects, so poor at maintaining them once they are built, so ineffective at responding to disasters, and so slow to tell the world about them.

This is my takeaway from Chernobyl: Never let a communist or totalitarian government be in charge of anything related to nuclear power. To the extent that this is the case around the world right now, it represents a clear and present danger to those in the areas surrounding those plants.