Chernobyl, 20 years later

Chernobyl, 20 years later

Boy, 1986 sure was a historically-interesting year. In January of that year, Space Shuttle Challenger blew up on takeoff, and then on April 26, 20 years ago today, the world's worst-ever nuclear accident took place in Chernobyl. 29 firefighters and plant workers died in the immediate aftermath of the meltdown, and longer-term deaths due to thyroid cancer and other radiation-induced sicknesses are expected to total about 9500.

Today, the Chernobyl area is a bizarre wilderness, as ably documented by Elena at Kidd of Speed.

In my work in electronics manufacturing for Sanmina a few years ago, I worked with a number of Russian immigrants, one of whom was from the Chernobyl area (not from the immediate vicinity, but fairly close). He told me stories of people who refused to move away, even though radiation levels were still fairly high there, as the food production was incredible - such as tomatoes the size of basketballs.

I don't want to make light of Chernobyl, but I have to tell the following story. The Chernobyl disaster occurred during my last semester of high school, and I happened to be taking senior-level Biology that semester. A few weeks prior to the disaster, the teacher assigned our class a project - to divide up into groups of two and present an oral report to the class on any Biology topic we desired. My buddy Rod Bland and I decided to make a movie on radiation. So, we did a bit of research at the university, interviewed Rod's radiologist brother-in-law, and set about writing the script. Included in our script was a little skit showing a meltdown at a fictional nuclear reactor (in the small town close to our small city). We decided to do our filming on the weekend before our presentation was due, and that Saturday just happened to be April 26th, 1986. So, the morning of our filming we found out about Chernobyl, and after some discussion on the appropriateness of using an actual disaster in our movie, the Calmar nuclear reactor quickly became the Chernobyl reactor in our script. My sister Heidi did some fine acting as a nuclear technician that day. That little skit really made our film Radiation: is it all bad? into a success; Rod and I got an A on the project. Rod went on to a career in film, doing computer-generated special effects for movies and commercials, and my fascination with Chernobyl was a big factor in my choosing to major in Physics in university. Both of our careers basically began with that disaster 20 years ago today.

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