I have blogged several times about the disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. There was a power surge at reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The operators tried an emergency shutdown which triggered a much bigger power surge which, in turn, ruptured a reactor vessel and caused a series of steam explosions. The graphite moderator rods were exposed to air and ignited. The fire ejected radioactive particles into the atmosphere and they were born by the wind over large areas of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine as well as Western Europe. The radioactive release equaled about one percent of all the radioactivity released by all the atmospheric nuclear tests between 1950 and 1970. It has been estimated that as many any twenty five thousand people may eventually die from the radiation released by the Chernobyl disaster.
The amount of fallout in any given part of Western Europe varied according to weather and geography. In Germany, there was a ban on the import of certain food products. There was also concerns about ground plants, mushrooms and tubers taking up the fallout and concentrating it. There was fear that wild boars, consuming such plants, were being contaminated by cesium.
Currently all wild boars are tested for radioactivity twenty eight years after the disaster. It has been found that one in three wild boars tested turned out to be too radioactive to eat. So decades after a disaster a thousand miles away that released radioactive materials, radioactive contamination is still posing a threat to human health. It is certain that radioactive contamination from Chernobyl is still a potential problem all over Europe.
I have blogged a lot about the Fukushima disaster. Two and a half years after the disaster, fallout is still be found in parts of Japan far from Fukushima. The political, social, economic, environmental and health repercussions are still being discovered. The three melted cores of reactors at Fukushima are contaminating ground water which is being poured into the Pacifica Ocean. If any of those melted cores reach the water table under Fukushima, there will be geysers of super heated radioactive steam. It will be decades before the full extent of the contamination of Japan by Fukushima are clearly understood. Some in Japan are saying that ultimately Japan may have to be abandoned because of the Fukushima disaster.
As I have said several times before, it is almost certain that there will be another major nuclear accident in the near future. As the ripples of that future disaster spread out, there will be a huge public backlash against nuclear power. Investors will be harder to find. Politicians will be less supportive. Ultimately, I believe that nuclear power will be abandoned in most countries. There are just too many reasons that nuclear energy is not a good choice for power generation.
German Wild Boar:
