A week after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, one of the biggest concerns is the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Ukraine.
The firefighters of the latter country have achieved control and extinguish the firebut the international community and the Ukrainians themselves are afraid of the consequences.
According to experts, the danger of radiation is latent and the ghosts of what happened in Chernobyl 36 years ago reappear.
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“The nuclear fuel is inside the atomic reactor. It hasn’t been discharged yet. In addition, there is a nuclear fuel storage and refueling pool in the central hall that also contains uranium and fuel assemblies,” said a spokesman for this plant, Andrii Tuz, stressing that one of the greatest dangers is that “it would break the sealed cover.”
Currently, the radiation measurement is within “normal” limits, as Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dimitro Kuleba assured. But the Russian military continues to bombard him “from all sides,” he added.
“If it explodes it will be ten times bigger than Chernobyl in 1986,” Kuleba said. “The Russians must cease fire immediately, allow firefighters access and create a safety zone,” he continued.
For his part, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has asked the Russian army to cease the attacks on the plant, which is in the Enerhodar zone, recalling what happened in Chernobyl, its personal, health and economic consequences, which they were terrible.
On April 26, 1986, when the world was still in the so-called Cold War, after a chain of errors and failures in the control room of reactor four of the VI Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, what happened to date has been the biggest nuclear accident in history.
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The Pripyat sector (border between Ukraine and Belarus), an exclusion zone due to the high level of radiation, still has traces in the environment today, despite the fact that nature has already resumed its life in that place.
For almost two weeks a large fire was recorded and this fact claimed the lives of 30 people. Exact figures have not been given on the victims of radiation, but, according to estimates, they number in the thousands. 142,000 square kilometers in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were contaminated.
But according to National Geographic, in a special on the consequences of the attack and the stories of some victims, “the radioactive fallout was 400 times greater than that released in Hiroshima. This led to the expulsion of 300,000 people from their homes and generated a childhood epidemic of thyroid cancer. A 2005 report put the figure at 4,000 lives lost to Chernobyl to date.”
For its part, a 2018 New York Times report states that more than 200 kilometers away from the explosion zone, the land is still contaminated and will not be habitable until 2040.
The Chernobyl radioactive cloud spread over almost all of Europe. Many people had to confine themselves to their homes, due to the high levels of toxicity.
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