20 Years After Chernobyl

What effects are still being felt by the world’s worst nuclear disaster? In the Ukraine the 18 square miles of still closed of land near the reactor still is too high for human life, call the exclusion zone. Very few people still have to go into this area for short times to do various repair and upkeep of facilities in this area as well as periodical countermeasures to help clean up the radioactive materials.

The health effects have been estimated that at the very least 9,000 deaths will be directly linked to Chernobyl. Presently, 4,000 local children have developed thyroid cancer from the radioactive iodine that was released; many of these children hadn’t even been born at the time of the accident. Also during the fire at the Unit 4 reactor continued to burn for 10 days, a cloud of radioactive debris was released into the atmosphere and contaminated a much larger area, including a lot of Europe.

As the radiation levels keep getting lower by either natural environmental effect or the countermeasures the government are still using, the priority should be decommissioning and total destruction of the Unit 4 reactor and the total removal of all the nuclear waste.

The dealing with this disaster has given the environmentalists plenty of fodder for launching wild volleys against the use of nuclear power as a safe alternative to fossil fuel powered generators or even burning coal and wood.

While I am in total support of using renewable alternative power where it is feasible, I am also a strong supporter of nuclear plants to supplement our needs. In a perfect world alternative methods like wind, hydro, geothermal, and solar would be able to completely fill our needs, but in the real world present, these methods still fall short of producing our total need.

With one accident at Chernobyl and one close call at Three Mile Island, the safety track record of nuclear power is very good. If we used this rule, for example that say 10,000 people’s earlier deaths were blamed on Chernobyl and the waste from the accident still has 18 square miles quarantined land. We would have to ban cars since they kill far more than 10,000 people per year and their waste can easily take 18 square miles, especially when just considering tire and battery waste with out talking the environmental cost of the exhausted, leaking fluids, and direct damage to the environment from crashes such as fire or destroying decade old trees that help fight soil erosion.

While electric cars are still outside common use and affordability and since some electricity is still generated from oil, wood, and coal; all an e-car would do right now is diffuse the pollution production from the highways and the cities to the rural areas where the plants are. The hybrid car is a nice adjustment between the e-car and our current high pollution cars, but they only reduce pollution to some degree, I believe I have seen 20-25% reduction, while is small still is a step in the right direction. While this line of thinking may make cars seem less like they need to be banned right now due to pollution because we are moving towards a clean running car, well the big surprise is, as soon as we fully develop cold fusion, nuclear reactors will also produce virtually no wastes.

Again, even with a clean running nuclear power plants, I would still rather see all our power produced from solar, geothermal, hydro, wind, or even wave. These natural power producers will be best for planet based power; while nuclear will definitely be helpful in space and when we first begin terraforrming planets.

I would like to see roofs covered with solar panels, I would like to see water gutter systems, water drains, and even sewage pipes have small turbines added so even waste water helps produce some power on its way to be recycled, I would like to see every high tension power transmitting tower with a wind generator on them-at that height the wind would be more constant and faster than ground level, I would like to see exercise bicycles fitted with generators-as we become more fit we help produce a clean power, I would like to see bicycles replace cars-for short distance rides during good weather, I would like to see all trash sorted and recycled-glass and plastic can be reused and burnable trash can be burned to produce power and then the ash used for fertilizer to replace what we rob from the land, I would like to see Third World Countries given the infrastructure to greatly reduce their polluting ways, I would like to see all the above done with out placing the weight of the financial burden on the common man, but on all the countries of the world-giving man a home for centuries to come rather than our currently short time table.