Bankwatch in the media

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.

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»?

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.”

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.