Chernobyl's "cloud
The Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine is 80 miles from Kiev (pop. 2½ million). It is situated on the banks of the river Dnipro which flows the rough some densely populated and industrialised areas and is set in a town of about 50,000 people.
It consists of 5 operational 1.000 megawatt reactors and is the largest nuclear plant in the USSR. The accident occured reactor.
At the moment the share of nuclear power in the USSR's total output of electricity is 10 per cent, and planned to rise to 20 per cent by 1990 - according to the 5 year plan devised in 1985.
Chernobyl is a water-cooled grahpite moderated used only in the USSR. It is also designed to produce plutonium for military purposes (i.e. for nuclear weapons).
The Chernobyl occurred on April 26. It took 3 days for Moscow to admit the accident. It took Il days for Soviet press reports to give any details at all.
It took 7 days for the people of Chernobyl to be evacuated, and 9 days for the peasants in the surrounding area to be avacuated. The people of Kiev and Minsk were not told of the dangers of consuming milk or any tresh produce.
Gorbachov himself was silent for 18 days, and then blamed local officials for the disaster. Clearly the new "openness' in government is determined by the convenience of bureaucracy, not by the needs and demands of the people. The whole media manipulation was designed to avoid protest and criticism at all costs.
The process was one of silence at first, then bland denials, then admissions.
Experts at the post mortem on of friendship"
Chernobyl at the internationa
Atomic Energey Agency HQ ir
Vienna spoke of between 20,000 dying from from radiation
Others claim nuclear conservative estimate.
In addition in No. 4 with unknown children yet to be born.
land the
Ill contaminated to farm for 10 years at the minimum — at the worst it could be too dangerous to grow crops for 3 centuries.
gave design how the disaster occurred and the experts and "badly shaken".
disaster the belated
By DAVE SPENCER the
"deliberate numerous effects the
A
that this is a the radiation creates a "genetic time bomb"
(March 27).
effects on
The Observer also reported on
Ukraine too
"slackening supplies"
of an
Soviet Academician Legasov a 5-hour presentation on emerged "ashen faced"
industry, adds to
Socialist Viewpoint No. 14 November-December 1986 p33
Apparently a main explanation he gave was over-confidence in safety of nuclear reactors which led the operators to lose all sense of danger and. to make systematic and procedure, Violations of safety much more likely explanation however was given by a Ukranian woman engineer exactly one month before the accident in Literatura Ukraina
Here she complained of the bureaucratic bungling in the construction and development of the Chernobyl plant. She spoke of standards", "deficiencand "an accumulation providing basic enormous number of unresolved problems."
Here we see the result of the lack of workers' control over the lack of accountability to democratically elected Soviets.
The absolute mainpulation of the media by the bureaucracy the alienation and confusion of the people.