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Post by Admin on May 31, 2019 17:56:30 GMT
This visualization posted to Reddit shows how devastatingly widespread the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster was in 1986:
While the main fallout of the nuclear disaster was concentrated in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the radioactive contamination, as you can see from the data visualization above, also affected huge swathes of Europe.
The cloud first spread to neighboring regions of Chernobyl and then proceeded to affect the Nordic countries, many countries in western Europe and the UK and Turkey. From the data visualization, it would seem that only Spain and Portugal were relatively unaffected.
The long-term health impacts of the 1986 disaster currently remain much in debate. Some experts have predicted around 4,000 will die from cancer caused by the incident, while a controversial study from the New York Academy of Sciences estimated the death toll to be even higher and closer to one million.
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Post by Admin on Jun 1, 2019 17:51:59 GMT
He was taken to hospital and his pregnant wife Lyudmilla was ordered not to touch him, but did so when the doctors were not looking. Mr Ignatenkso died 14 days after the incident but the effects of the radiation also affected their unborn child. When his wife gave birth, the baby survived for just four hours as it had absorbed much of the radiation its mother exposed herself to. However, this baby was not the only one to be harmed by radiation poisoning after the Chernobyl disaster.
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Post by Admin on Jun 3, 2019 17:57:57 GMT
Building film sets out of old Soviet buildings is easier than understanding the people who inhabited them – and the hit HBO show doesn’t grasp either why the nuclear accident was allowed to happen, nor the heroism that followed. Authenticity is not an essential virtue even for a docudrama, but it has been one of the main selling points of Chernobyl, the five-part mini-series that is currently the highest-ever rated TV program on film database IMDB. Now, my qualms aren’t with the factual inaccuracies, the creation of Emily Watson’s fictional female scientist in place of the thousands of women actually involved, or the squeezing of such a grand-scale, multi-faceted story into what is, for the most part, a disaster film with two leads. In real life, it was a disaster of consummate elite bureaucrats, who spoke to each other in a mix of déclassé party jargon and that matter-of-fact Russian frankness. The shortcomings of these people, almost all of whom thought they were doing the right thing, was not cartoonish villainy – but a callous sense of careerist self-preservation, a distancing from human suffering, wrong priorities, and an unwillingness to challenge the system. And in skilful hands the chilliness of the Soviet apparatchik could have been every bit as sinister and tragic as the scenery-chewing on display. Similarly, the ordinary Russians tasked with the dirty and dangerous jobs are shown either as patriotic naïfs stirred by speeches, or independent-minded salt-of-the-earth types. But it was neither one nor the other. Other than the very first firefighters, the hundreds of thousands of Soviets involved in the clean-up were broadly aware of the risks they faced, but they went along anyway. Many went with fear, others with a sense of duty, but most complied simply because they lived in a totalitarian state, in which if the government tells you to do something, you do it. The most jarring scene is a Soviet minister bargaining with coal miners at gunpoint to persuade them to dig a tunnel under Chernobyl. Moscow mandarins did not negotiate with those 10 rungs below them – they sent down orders and didn’t need bullets to enforce them.
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Post by Admin on Jun 6, 2019 17:52:34 GMT
Jessie Buckley as Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of fireman Vasily Ignatenko: Buckley started out on the BBC talent show I'd Do Anything, placing second. She's also appeared on the West End and in the TV series War and Peace and Taboo. Ignatenko is still alive today, living with her son in Kiev, but she doesn't speak about Chernobyl and her husband publicly because she "wants to get on with her life." Paul Ritter as Anatoly Dyatlov, deputy chief-engineer of Chernobyl: Ritter is best known in the UK for his role as Martin Goodman in the show Friday Night Dinner, you may also know him as Eldred Worple in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Guy Haines in Quantum of Solace. Dyatlov was the engineer in charge of reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when the disaster happened. He was eventually found guilty of criminal negligence and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He died of heart failure on Dec. 13, 1995, more than nine years after the disaster. David Dencik as Mikhail Gorbachev: Dencik is a Swedish-Danish actor and has had roles in films like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Gorbachev is the former first president of the Soviet Union, serving from 1990 to 1991. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in helping end the Cold War. He's still active in politics today.
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Post by Admin on Jun 9, 2019 17:36:27 GMT
How Chernobyl hit farming in Norway and Sweden The radioactive substance cesium-137 takes many years to break down with an estimated half-life of 30 years. It still exists in the earth in the areas affected by the Chernobyl accident, including large parts of Norway and Sweden. The substance is taken up from the soil by plants and fungi, which in turn are eaten by sheep, reindeer and other grazing animals. In the wake of the 1986 accident, cesium-137 spread over much of northern and central Scandinavia. The weather conditions were such that Norway and Sweden were two of the countries worst hit outside the Soviet Union. In Sweden, the areas around Uppsala, Gävle and Västerbotten were hardest hit, while in Norway the area between Trondheim and Bodø along with mountainous areas further south suffered, mainly because of rainfall. The radiation impacted vegetation to varying degrees, but also led to radioactivity in grazing animals, primarily sheep and reindeer. In reindeer calf meat, up to 40,000 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg) were measured, with up to 10,000 Bq/kg in sheep meat. Norwegian authorities set the highest acceptable level in meat at just 60 Bq/kg, which led to the widespread feeding of animals with non-contaminated feed. This process of feeding livestock from contaminated pastures with non-radioactive feed for a period to reduce radioactivity in meat or milk is known as nedfôring. Norway's Ministry of Agriculture and Food divided the country into four areas in connection with nedfôring: observation zones, free zones, action zones and protection zones. Initially there were 145 municipalities in which animals had to be controlled. Today, that number is 37. "We expect many farmers to live with so-called nedfôring for many more years. This means that the animals must be given feed without radioactive contamination before they can be slaughtered," says researcher Runhild Gjelsvik in the Directorate for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety. If the radioactive content exceeds the safe limit, the farmers must postpone slaughter until the levels have dropped.
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