NUCLEAR POWER:CHERNOBYL IS A MUSEUM OF DISASTER

NUCLEAR POWER:CHERNOBYL IS A MUSEUM OF DISASTER
BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU
Almost 31 years of the nuclear disaster that took place in the city of Chernobyl ,in the Old Soviet Union,a tourist and a Journalist ,Mr TimoSipola of the Finnish Broadcasting company who has visited the location of the nuclear disaster has described it as a museum of disaster
In hour long press interview with The News office Desk of Paedia Express Multimedia in Lagos,Nigeria during a two day short visit of a group of expatriate journalists into the country from the Finland Foundation for Media and Development,Mr Sipola said that any nation wishing to go into nuclear power development will have to look beyond just the commercial benefits alone as the long term health implications and other forms of safety measures were a key determinant factor to be taken into account in such a project.
Sipola explained that when officials in Moscow ,Russia discovered that the radioactive wind was blowing towards major cities like Moscow and St Petersburg ,they had to use some chemically synthesizing product which stimulated series of what appeared to be acid rains but with deadly consequences for the people of Belarusia which was just a region in those days in the old Soviet Union just like Russia.
He pointed out that based on the experience he has had covering the nuclear powered industry ,there were areas an individual was not allowed to visit due to the health risks ,saying no ordinary man was allowed to go near a nuclear powered plant within a 30 kilometers radius.
His words:’When you go to a nuclear power plant,there are metres that you will have to wear on your apparel and this helps you to know the level of radiation been emitted at any point in time,In Northern Finland there is a lot of unemployment and so a lot of our people are only looking at the commercial benefits at least for now”
In his own account,Mr Peik Johansson of the same establishment also told this reporter that it was going to be a long day for Nigeria at the box office if the nation did not start to count its costs right now on such a project.
He listed such logistics like the establishment of a security work force different from what the nation was used to,imporation of not less than 100 nuclear physicists who will be in charge of the plant for another 100 years as areas that the nation will have to come to terms with as the project becomes a reality.
He assured that Finland currently has four fully operational nuclear powered plant with plans for another two more and a very vibrant Finnish Radioactive Agency said to be highly respected globally.
He lamented that when the issue of nuclear power is discussed very few people ever bother to talk about the risks as they only think of the short and medium term business benefits and nothing more,insisting that there was really no solution in sight on the issue of treatment of radioactive wastes.
It was gathered as at press time,that not less than a million people have died in between 1986 till date over incidents directly or remotely linked to the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl.
The Chernobyl disaster, also referred to as the Chernobyl accident, was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 in the No.4 light water graphite moderated reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in what was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union (USSR).
During a hurried late night power-failure stress test, in which safety systems were deliberately turned off, a combination of inherent reactor design flaws, together with the reactor operators arranging the core in a manner contrary to the checklist for the stress test, eventually resulted in uncontrolled reaction conditions that flashed water into steam generating a destructive steam explosion and a subsequent open-air graphite "fire".[note 1] This "fire" produced considerable updrafts for about 9 days, that lofted plumes of fission products into the atmosphere, with the estimated radioactive inventory that was released during this very hot "fire" phase, approximately equal in magnitude to the airborne fission products released in the initial destructive explosion.[1] Practically all of this radioactive material would then go on to fall-out/precipitate onto much of the surface of the western USSR and Europe.
The Chernobyl accident dominates the Energy accidents sub-category, of most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history, both in terms of cost and casualties. It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011.[2] The struggle to safeguard against scenarios which were, at many times falsely,[1] perceived as having the potential for greater catastrophe and the later decontamination efforts of the surroundings, ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles.[3] During the accident, blast effects caused 2 deaths within the facility and later 29 firemen and employees died in the days-to-months afterward from acute radiation syndrome, with the potential for long-term cancers still being investigated.[4]
The remains of the No.4 reactor building were enclosed in a large sarcophagus (radiation shield) by December 1986, at a time when what was left of the reactor was entering the cold shut-down phase; the enclosure was built quickly as occupational safety for the crews of the other undamaged reactors at the power station, with No.3 continuing to produce electricity into 2000.[5][6]
The accident motivated safety upgrades on all remaining Soviet-designed reactors in the RBMK (Chernobyl No.4) family, of which eleven continued to power electric grids as of 2013.[7][8]