Pollution

It is useful to know…

For many people, the most alarming of all human assaults on the environment is the contamination of air, earth, and water from dumping. Evidence of dumping can be found everywhere, done by individuals and large corporations alike. Hong Kong dumps more than 1.000 tons of plastic a day. Americans throw away 16 billion disposable diapers each year. Open sewage drains and festering landfills are common sites in many parts of the world.

In a small Malaysian village, babies are born deformed and children die of rare illness, which their doctors claim are caused by exposure to radiation from a multinational company that set up business in this small community.

Creatures of the sea are also vulnerable to pollutants that enter the rivers, lakes, and oceans of the world. Over half of the world’s population lives alone coastlines that are being increasingly polluted by sewage, industrial waste water, and runoff from the cities and farms. Half of the fish in the areas polluted by toxic chemicals fail to spawn, and many die. Those that are fished pass on high levels of cancer causing chemicals to the consumer. It appears that humans are polluting at the expense of their own lives.

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The Nuclear Disaster at Chernobyl

In April 1986 the world stood in horror as the news of a major nuclear accident at the USSR’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant unfolded. In the days that followed the first signs of the accidents, pandemonium broke loose. The property damage caused by the explosion would, however, turn out to be far greater than many people had anticipated. The Soviet and European lives lost to cancer over the years, while still in question, may make this the worst disaster in the history of industrial society.

What happened at Chernobyl? A report released says that the plant operators were running some tests on the reactor. They reduced power output to test the turbines. To approximate an emergency, however, the men decided to deactivate several safety systems, a direct violation of plant regulations. During the test, the cooling water flowing through the reactor core fell rapidly. Without sufficient coolant the 200 tons of uranium housed in the reactor’s fuel rods quickly heated up. The reactor temperature soared as high as 2800 degrees Celsius, twice the temperature required to melt steel. An enormous stem explosion blew the roof off the building. Flames from 1700 tons of burning graphite, a neutron –absorbing agent in the core, shot 30 meters into the air. The uranium fuel melted, spewing highly radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Swept upward by the heat, these materials circulated far and wide. On the advice of Swedish and West German nuclear experts Soviet helicopters began to drop sand, lead and boron on the molten mass of graphite and uranium. In the days that followed the explosion, workers tunneled under the molten core to install a cooling system. Cement was poured around the molten fuel to keep radioactivity from contaminating groundwater.

The plant was eventually entombed in concrete, where it will sit for several hundred years at least while the radiation levels dissipate.

The Chernobyl’s accident was made worse by the Soviet government’s delays in reporting the accident and in evacuating people. All told, 116,000 people living within a 30-kilometer radius of the plant were relocated. Many of them will never be able to return to their homes.

Besides losing their homes and their personal possessions, tens of thousands of Soviets may have been exposed to high levels of radiation. Although no one knows for certain, it is likely that about one of every ten people, or about 15,000 people exposed to radiation from Chernobyl in the 30- kilometer radius, will succumb to cancer.

The accident at Chernobyl caused a number of immediate deaths from radiation poisoning.

One hundred thirty kilometers south of Chernobyl lies the city of Kyiv, with a population of 2.4 million. Early reports indicated that Kyiv had been unaffected by the accident, since prevailing winds had swept the radioactive cloud north and west. Unfortunately, the winds later shifted, sending radioactivity over the city.

In July of 1989, the New York Times reported that 1000,000 additional Soviet citizens may have to be evacuated from nearby areas as many as 330 kilometers from Chernobyl. Scientists in the neighboring republic of Byelorussia have found dangerous levels of radiation in the soil in that region three years after the explosion.

Radiation also spread throughout Europe. One study shows that at least 13,000 people will die from cancer caused by the accident in the next 50 years. That’s not a lot, unless you are one of the victims.

Besides exposing large numbers of people to potentially harmful radiation, the Chernobyl accident threatened crops, farmland, and livestock in Ukraine. Agriculture outside of the Soviet Union also suffered from the ill effects of radiation. Soon after the accident, for example, Italian officials turned back 32 freight cars loaded with cattle, sheep and horses from neighboring Austria and Poland because of abnormally high levels of radiation.

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