Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster - Surviving Disaster (Nuclear Power Generation as International Crime!)

Coming across this film was astonishing since this is not the past, but what's been going on right in front of us in Japan.  (Well, for friends in Fukushima, the early part is "deja vu" - they were left uninformed of the serious fallout, walked under the sun, or in the radioactive rain/snow.)

The pattern of politicians' actions is universal.　If we give up, and the world still support IAEA, the same thing will happen, which we are very sure of.

GREENVK uploaded on 2008/12/22 

The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster from the BBC documentary series, Surviving Disaster. This episode follows the accident as told by Valeri Legasov (played by Adrian Edmondson, in one of his more serious roles), the Russian scientist who was a key member of the Soviet government commission formed to investigate the causes of the catastrophe and to plan the mitigation of its consequences. This is quite a chilling tale of events. Some of the documentary was filmed on location in the abandoned town of Pripyat and inside one of the remaining 3 (now closed) nuclear reactors located at Chernobyl.

Reactor #1 Explodes in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

[backdated post written in April 2012 out of my digital logs]


On Twitter, I was retweeting whatever looked worthwhile even if I didn't understand the situation well enough.  One of such RT's had a link to BBC with a comment "Good, it's a video.  Now I see what happened.  NHK showed only two pictures before and after the explosion."


I was still more worried about Tsunami, and what this tweet meant to myself, let alone those who lived near the power plant in Fukushima.

BBC NEWS Asia-Pacific
Japan earthquake: Footage of blast at nuclear plant

(Even at the time of Reactor #3's explosion, all our media kept using this image and video repeatedly, except Nippon TV just for twice - live and recorded - till forced to switch to this #1 images later that day, i.e., 14th.  Very few Japanese knew about the true picture of the MOX #3 explosion.)


And in the afternoon, about 26 hours after Tsunami hit Tohoku, things like this was going on in Tomioka Town very near Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Children and Radiation from "Children of Tsunami" by BBC
with Japanese/English subtitles, posted by tokyobrowntabby

Note that this is about the hydrogen explosion of Reactor #1, even before the worse one (Reactor #3 on 3/14).  Also, this part of the stories has not been reported by any major Japanese media due to full of coverups, and the most Japanese are left unaware of the seriousness of the Fukushima disaster - even today, as of April 2012.)


I know it is not only in Japan.  Most people around the world focus so much on the Tsunami, and cannot realize the magnitude of eternal effects of radiation still emitted from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi.  The air around the Globe - not just the northern hemisphere - is contaminated, the Pacific Ocean is contaminated to Hawaii or the West Coast of the US, and the emission of radioactive gas and water has never stopped yet.


That said, on this day, I had no knowledge about the world nuclear history in the past some 70 years.  Everybody will have to learn sooner or later that we are only lucky to be still alive today.


This was only the beginning of the beginning of everything that changed the lives of almost all of us living in Japan (either being aware or not), and caused extra 14,000 deaths (statistically speaking) in North America.