Health in Ukraine
Radiation, Risk and the “Linear No-Threshold” Model
Earlier this month I posted about the longstanding debate over the ultimate death toll from the Chernobyl accident, and a new look at the data by a Union of Concerned Scientist physicist. Lisbeth Gronlund pored through scattered and hard-to-find data on the distribution of fallout from Chernobyl, crunched the numbers based on a statistical model […]
Japan: Managing a Disaster
A third explosion has rocked Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, in what is being called the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Residents living nearby have been evacuated and emergency workers were removed from the plant. With fears of radiation exposure and a full meltdown, workers are continuing to pump seawater on the reactors in an […]
Forgetting Chernobyl
To commemorate ten years since the Chernobyl nuclear plant core reactor meltdown and radiation release in the Ukraine, Living on Earth sent producer Bruce Gellerman to the site of the world’s most serious nuclear plant disaster. Narrator Gellerman describes the terrain and the fears he enounters as he visits the entombed sarcophagus of the reactor, […]
CHERNOBYL AT 11
For eleven years, the people of Beylorus and Ukraine have been living with the aftermath of Chernobyl; the greatest disaster in the history of nuclear power. On April 26th, 1986, at one-twenty-three in the morning, Chernobyl’s unit four reactor ripped apart in a series of explosions. The core burned for ten days, polluting virtually the […]
Decontaminating Plants
Nature’s own ancient cures are being put to the test for the clean-up of chemical contaminant waste. The process of sun and plants purifying soil is called Phytomediation, and it’s being put to use from New Jersey to Chernobyl, Ukraine. Jeff Rice reports from Salt Lake City, Utah.