EU neighbourhood

Source: Xinhua, Xinhua

KIEV, April 26 (Xinhua) -- Thirty years have passed since the Chernobyl power plant disaster, one of the world's worst nuclear accidents, which has caused widespread environmental pollution and left the areas around the plant uninhabitable for centuries or even millennia to come.

The anniversary of the catastrophe is another reminder that nuclear energy could become a major threat to the world if it is not handled with care and caution. Yet, many experts argue that currently, nuclear power is much safer than it was three decades ago and its role in Ukraine's energy mix is irreplaceable.

Source: Marie Chartron, Vincent Decque, france culture

Les voix que nous entendons approchent Tchernobyl en racontant l’histoire qui a traversé leur famille ou leur corps, tentent de saisir la catastrophe par un film, un texte, des objets collectés dans les maisons évacuées.

Un documentaire de Marie Chartron et Vincent Decque

Prise de son : Raymond Albouy

Source: Olga Bakova, Soňa Gyarfášová, RTVS

...

Source: Василина Думан, Ольга Веснянка, Громадське радіо

Ірина Головко розповідає про проблеми України з застарілими атомними енергоблоками та російським паливом. А ще називає популізмом заяву нового міністра екології про створення закритого ядерного циклу

Ольга Веснянка: Який зв’язок між екологією, атомною енергетикою та громадськими кампаніями? І чим займається мережа «Bankwatch»?

Source: Ioana Moldovan, Huffington Post

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — It was a fine spring night, people peacefully sleeping as weekday passed into weekend, until Chernobyl’s fourth nuclear reactor blew up.

Oleksandr Galuh recalls that night well.

“My mother woke up as the windows shattered,” Galuh, then a fourth-grader in Pripyat, a town not too far from Chernobyl, remembers. “She thought it was a thunderstorm.”

Source: Dusty Christensen, The Nation

Or, how Ukraine learned to stop worrying and love its nuclear power plants.

Later this year, the largest movable structure on earth—essentially a colossal steel tomb shaped like an oversized airplane hangar—is scheduled to begin its slow journey along a rail system, traveling at a glacial pace of 33 feet an hour. Its destination: the crumbling ruins of Chernobyl’s reactor number four, which, 30 years after the worst nuclear meltdown in history, continues to ooze radiation like a wound that refuses to heal.

Source: Kalina Oroschakoff, Politico

It’s the result of war, politics and economics.

Three decades after the world’s worst nuclear accident, the home of the shuttered Chernobyl power plant remains more reliant than ever on nuclear power.

When a botched test in the early hours of April 26, 1986, blew apart the reactor’s core and spewed huge amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, nuclear power accounted for about a quarter of the energy mix of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Today, nuclear power produces more than half of Ukraine’s energy — the result of war, politics and economics.

Source: Nelson Pereira, Euronews

Zaporizhia is one of Ukraine’s four active nuclear plants. It has six reactors, each with the capacity to produce 1000 MW, and was built at the same time as Chernobyl, with Soviet-era reactors.

Oleh Dudar, head of operations, joined the plant in 1986 – the year of the Chernobyl catastrophe.

Source: Noel Wauchope, Independent Australia

As the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster approaches, Noel Wauchope outlines just a few compelling reasons why the Coalition Government's uranium deal with Ukraine may have further disastrous consequences.

WHAT AMAZINGLY insensitive timing. As the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe approaches, Australia makes a deal (at the Nuclear Security Summit) to sell uranium to Ukraine.

This is such a bad idea for so many reasons — it's hard to know which to pick first!

Economics: simply because uranium exporting is not really economically worthwhile.