The 31st March 2011 edition of the science magazine Nature has an article on "Chernobyl's legacy" to co-incide with a major conference on nuclear safety being held this week in Kiev. The article notes that "the quarter-century of work following the Chernobyl disaster will offer some important lessons for Japan as the nation begins to assess the health and environmental consequences of Fukushima".
Since the article was published the scale of the Fukushima nuclear disaster has worsened and is now graded 7 like Chernobyl.
Rather grimly, the Nature article suggests that the ongoing Chernobyl clean-up, forecast to finish in 2065, may be a financial beneficiary of the renewed global interest in nuclear safety following the accident in Japan. For at the core of Chernobyl's legacy is a massively expensive decontamination exercise which is programmed to last for eighty years, and one of the key goals of this week's conference is to "secure more cash from international donors".
The article also draws attention to the "value of accurate information" and its communication during the initial phases of a nuclear disaster and through subsequent years. This requires resources other than funding, although the latter is key to the decommissioning process. Twenty five years after the Chernobyl explosion, the health and wider environmental implications of this are still not fully understood.
Although, as the article notes: "Today, hundreds of farms in Wales still have their sheep tested for Chernobyl radiation before herds can be moved or sold". No wonder countries in the Far East and Pacific region are concerned about the impact of Fukushima, both in the short and longer terms, and are putting pressure on Japanese authorities to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information about the disaster.
However, the greatest impact will obviously be on communities nearby. One of the scientists interviewed for the Nature article says that: "Ultimately...Chernobyl's most important lesson for Fukushima is that a nuclear accident haunts a region long after the reactors have cooled....and the government may have to maintain an exclusion zone for decades".
These themes are taken up in my most recent post at my "shadow blog" - http://the-edge-of-town.blogspot.com/
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