POWER May 2011 - 28

NUCLEAR
Courtesy: Reuters
Chernobyl: Twenty-Five Years of
Wormwood
Wormwood is a bitter herb. The woody perennial in the genus Artemesia is found
around the world. In the Christian Bible (King James version) the plant shows
up in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, 8:10-11: " And the third angel sounded,
and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell
upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the
name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became
wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. "
In Ukrainian, the word for wormwood is " Chernobyl. "
By Kennedy Maize
T
28
wenty-five years ago last month, engineers
and technicians were running lowpower
tests at the 1,000-MW Reactor
No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
outside Kiev. They quickly, inexplicably, lost
control of the light-water-cooled, graphitemoderated
reactor. In an instant, the critical
chain reaction flared out of control. The plant
exploded like a small, dirty bomb, the graphite
caught fire, and the worst catastrophe in
civilian nuclear power was under way.
The immediate fallout, using the term broadly,
not only killed brave first responders-who
faced brutal radiation doses as they flew helicopters
over the smoking carcass to drop sand,
clay, boron, and lead to suffocate the beast-but
also a photographer who documented their bravery
and plant workers unlucky to be working the
early morning shift when the unit went wild.
How many died? Former USSR President
Mikhail Gorbachev was running the Soviet
government when the reactor exploded. Writing
in the March-April 2011 issue of the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, Gorbachev's
estimate 25 years later remains imprecise:
" Some 50 workers died fighting the fire and
reactor core meltdown, and another 4,000
or more deaths may eventually be shown
www.powermag.com
to have resulted from radioactive releases.
The radiation dosage at the power plant during
the accident has been estimated at over
20,000 roentgens per hour, about 40 times
the estimated lethal dosage, and the World
Health Organization identified 237 workers
with Acute Radiation Sickness. "
The Accident was Local . . .
A radioactive cloud spread westward over
much of Europe. For weeks, the release fell
over cities and fields. The atomic industry
coined a euphemism to describe the event:
" rapid disassembly of the core. "
POWER | May 2011

http://www.powermag.com

POWER May 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER May 2011

Contents
POWER May 2011 - Cover1
POWER May 2011 - Cover2
POWER May 2011 - Contents
POWER May 2011 - 2
POWER May 2011 - 3
POWER May 2011 - 4
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