Many fairy tales and legends feature a haunted forest. The trees are twisted into grotesque shapes and strange creatures roam there. It appears as if we are on the way to having a real haunted forest in the area around Chernobyl where the environment was heavily contaminated with radiation from the accident that happened there in 1986. A sudden power surge during testing destroyed a reactor causing a huge explosion.
I grew up during the Cold War and, as a child, had nightmares of nuclear war. As the Cold War wound down and the nuclear powers agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, I thought that I could relax a bit. Now there are people on both sides of the Earth who would like to restart the Cold War.
In the 1960s, it was estimated that there would be a huge global fleet of nuclear power reactors by the year 2000 that would require reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel in order to create more fuel. As the years passed, interest in nuclear power declined and the world reserves of high grade uranium ore increase. When the year 2000 arrived, the global nuclear power reactor fleet turn out to be one tenth of the early estimate and there was sufficient uranium fuel available.
I try not to get too angry when I read about the misdeeds of companies handling radioactive waste but sometimes it is difficult. Many of my blogs focus on the nuclear industry, nuclear reactors and their waste, mining of uranium, nuclear weapons, etc. but today I am going to talk about an industry that at first glance is not related to nuclear issues. I am talking about fracking.
Recently, I blogged about the accidents at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico which included an accidental release of radiation into the environment. Something happened in the underground repository for plutonium and americium contaminated nuclear waste materials generated by the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The cause and nature of the accident that released the radioactive materials was unknown at the time of my last blog around February 28, 2013.
In this blog, I alternate posts between general and timely topics involving radioactivity. Today, I am going to blog about the situation in Ukraine. Ukraine uses nuclear power generation. The question I am interested in is what happened with the nuclear reactors during the recent political turbulence.
