Canada and the World

        Current Events with a Canadian Perspective

 

Last update

19 November 2010

Site map

 

Chernobyl Disaster

 

In 1986, a nuclear power plant in Ukraine

exploded causing massive environmental damage

 

 

Shortly after the accident at the Chernobyl (Ukraine) Nuclear Power Plant (left) in 1986, 135,000 people were evacuated from an area extending 30 kilometres around the damaged reactor. The area became known as the exclusion zone.

  

Before that, employees of the nuclear power plant and their families lived in Pripyat. Known as The Atomic City, it was considered one of the finest places to live in the former Soviet Union.

 

The first apartments were built in the mid-seventies, when the power plant was under construction, and at the time of the accident, it was home to 45,000 people. Now, it is a ghost town. After the accident, traces of radioactive deposits were found in nearly every country in the northern hemisphere.

 

Effects of Radiation

Scientific opinion is divided on the effects of radiation on local wildlife. Some report that plants and animals have thrived in the area, others say the impact has been greater than previously thought.

  

According to one study (written by Anders Moller of Universitie Pierre and Marie Curie, France, and Tim Mousseau from the U.S. University of South Carolina), “Species richness, abundance, and population density of breeding birds decreased with increasing levels of radiation.”

  

The study, which recorded 1,570 birds from 57 species, found that the number of birds in the most contaminated areas declined by 66 percent compared with sites that had normal background radiation levels.

 

It also reported a decline of more than 50 percent in the range of species as radiation levels increase.

  

By 2007 about 300 people, mostly elderly Ukrainians, had returned and live in a few villages in the exclusion zone. They want to live out their last days there, even though some reports say it will be thousands of years before the area may be safely populated again.

 

© Canada and the World, October 2007

All Rights Reserved   

 

 

Lobby of a cinema in Pripyat, near Chernobyl.

 

“This is the crux of our predicament today: Our

global system is becoming steadily more complex,

yet the high-quality energy

we need to cope with this complexity will soon be

steadily less available. Societies without access

to enough energy to sustain rising complexity and to manage worsening internal stresses…are more likely to

succumb to economic crisis and political disorder…”

Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies

at the University of Toronto

The Globe and Mail,

May 2006

 

Chernobyl