Source: Olga Bakova, Soňa Gyarfášová, RTVS

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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: 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: 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: 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: Vincent Harmsen, Adriana Homolova, OneWorld

Automerken als Volkswagen kregen miljarden euro's om schonere auto's te bouwen. Maar waar werd het geld precies voor gebruikt? ''Deze leningen zijn verbonden aan het emissieschandaal.''

Source: Ryskeldi Satke, Glacier Hub

The most controversial gold mining project in Central Asia is back in the spotlight again this month. Canadian mining company Centerra Gold has re-launched its public relations campaign in Kyrgyzstan to improve the company’s image over the status of glaciers at the Kumtor gold mine, one of the world’s biggest open-pit gold mines and a flagship project that accounts for 90 percent of company’s profits.

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.