toejam

Elena's journey is a good story - had to send the link to some friends.

I've had the chance to research the Chernobyl disaster extensively, but I haven't seen Elena's site before. I train the operators at the Comanche Peak nuclear plant. There is a huge difference between my plant and the Chernobyl plants physically and technologically. The human nature elements that caused the accident are the same though.

My job is much safer than riding a motorcycle through the exclusion area. Elena shows good awareness of the external radiation levels, but I'd be a lot more careful about contaminated dust & dirt that you would take home with you from poking around in the old buildings etc. It seems to me the bigger threat is getting an internal uptake of radioactive material that would continue the biological damage after you get back to safer areas.

There is no credible evidence of 300,000 - 400,000 deaths caused by the disaster. Raw statistics show several thousand cases of thyroid cancer in the affected regions that wouldn't have otherwise occured. This is due to breathing radioactive iodine in the air during the first month after the accident, and those affected were mostly under the age of 16 at the time. Thyroid cancer is treatable and there have been few deaths from this. Other forms of cancer and birth defects, while prevalent, have had no unusual increase since the disaster. There are a lot of stories of strange illnesses that people attribute to the disaster. But it's kind of like Gulf War Syndrome - there seems to be something to it but it hasn't been scientifically verifiable.

Did you know that they continued to produce electricity at the Chernobyl station until December 2000?