When a titanic explosion ripped through the Number Four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in 1986, spewing flames and chunks of burning, radioactive material into the atmosphere, one of our worst nightmares came true. As the news gradually seeped out of the USSR and the extent of the disaster was realized, it became clear how horribly wrong things had gone. Dozens died - two from the explosion and many more from radiation illness during the following months - while scores of additional victims came down with acute radiation sickness. Hundreds of thousands were evacuated from the most contaminated areas. The prognosis for Chernobyl and its environs - succinctly dubbed the Zone of Alienation - was grim. Today, 20 years after the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, intrepid journalist Mary Mycio dons dosimeter and camouflage protective gear to explore the world's most infamous radioactive wilderness. As she tours the Zone to report on the disaster's long-term effects on its human, faunal, and floral inhabitants, she meets pockets of defiant local residents who have remained behind to survive and make a life in the Zone. And she is shocked to discover that the area surrounding Chernobyl has become Europe's largest wildlife sanctuary, a flourishing - at times unearthly - wilderness teeming with large animals and a variety of birds, many of them members of rare and endangered species. Like the forests, fields, and swamps of their unexpectedly inviting habitat, both the people and the animals are all radioactive. Cesium-137 is packed in their muscles and strontium-90 in their bones. But quite astonishingly, they are also thriving. If fears of the Apocalypse and a lifeless, barren radioactive future have been constant companions of the nuclear age, Chernobyl now shows us a different view of the future. A vivid blend of reportage, popular science, and illuminating encounters that explode the myths of Chernobyl with facts that are at once beautiful and horrible, Wormwood Forest brings a remarkable land - and its people and animals - to life to tell a unique story of science, surprise and suspense.

The Chernobyl accident contaminated large parts of the Soviet Union and Europe. Radioactivity was ultimately detected everywhere in the Northern hemisphere. Doses to the emergency workers from external gamma-rays an internal fission-product radionuclides were significantly high, many died at the time.20 years later, many liquidators still die and all are ill.

Although years have passed since the nuclear plant at Chernobyl exploded, the scope of the disaster & its long-term effects are only now coming to light. Especially hard hit are the hundreds of thousands of children exposed to radiation through the dust on their shoes & the food they eat. This book is the heart wrenching & inspiring account of the suffering caused by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster & the valiant international efforts of volunteers as they pooled their resources to deliver lifesaving medicines to the people of Belarus. Olga Korbut, former Olympic gymnast, is from the area of Eastern Europe most heavily affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. As the mother of a child of Chernobyl, she & her family left Minsk because of the dangerous levels of radioactivity. She then established the Olga Korbut Foundation to raise money for bone marrow treatments for children from her home country of Belarus. Michelle Carter is the managing editor of the San Mateo Times & a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She is founder & chair of a United Church of Christ Children of Chernobyl Project. Michael J. Christensen is the director of the Chernobyl Mental Health Project, sponsored by World Vision & Citihope International. A graduate of Yale University Divinity School & an ordained Nazarene minister, he is the author of CITY STREET, CITY PEOPLE, THE SAMARITAN'S IMPERATIVE, & C.S. LEWIS ON SCRIPTURE. Volume discounts available from the publisher: Augsburg Fortress, 426 South 5th St., Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 54440-1209. (612) 330-3300. Trade paper Code CR9-2677 ISBN 0-8066-2677-1 $14.99 (Canada $17.95). Cloth Code CR9-2685 ISBN 0-8066-2685-2 $24.99 (Canada $29.95).

Lessons from the massive Chernobyl nuclear accident about how we deal with modern hazards that are largely imperceptible. Before Fukushima, the most notorious large-scale nuclear accident the world had seen was Chernobyl in 1986. The fallout from Chernobyl covered vast areas in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Europe. Belarus, at the time a Soviet republic, suffered heavily: nearly a quarter of its territory was covered with long-lasting radionuclides. Yet the damage from the massive fallout was largely imperceptible; contaminated communities looked exactly like noncontaminated ones. It could be known only through constructed representations of it. In The Politics of Invisibility, Olga Kuchinskaya explores how we know what we know about Chernobyl, describing how the consequences of a nuclear accident were made invisible. Her analysis sheds valuable light on how we deal with other modern hazards--toxins or global warming--that are largely imperceptible to the human senses. Kuchinskaya describes the production of invisibility of Chernobyl's consequences in Belarus--practices that limit public attention to radiation and make its health effects impossible to observe. Just as mitigating radiological contamination requires infrastructural solutions, she argues, the production and propagation of invisibility also involves infrastructural efforts, from redefining the scope and nature of the accident's consequences to reshaping research and protection practices. Kuchinskaya finds vast fluctuations in recognition, tracing varyingly successful efforts to conceal or reveal Chernobyl's consequences at different levels--among affected populations, scientists, government, media, and international organizations. The production of invisibility, she argues, is a function of power relations.

Medical Consequences Of The Chernobyl Nuclear Accident

Nuclear Energy Law after Chernobyl

The 1986 accident at the Chernobyl plant highlighted the need to examine and clarify the obligations imposed by international law on States engaged in nuclear and other ultra-hazardous activities. This volume brings together in full the texts of the most important materials necessary for a comprehensive examination of the international law and communication issues arising from nuclear and other accidents with transboundary effects.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award A journalist by trade, who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book, presents personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus after the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

An East German writer, awaiting a call from the hospital where her brother is undergoing brain surgery, instead receives news of a massive nuclear accident at Chernobyl, one thousand miles away. In the space of a single day, in a potent, lyrical stream of thought, the narrator confronts both mortality and life and above all, the import of each moment lived-open, as Wolf reveals, to infinite analysis.

April 26, 1986, Chernobyl- the reactor core of the nuclear power plant begins to melt. It is the greatest nuclear disaster of the twentieth century. A cloud laden with radionuclides travels thousands of miles in every direction, contaminating a populace unaware of its danger and who cannot protect themselves. At that time, Emmanuel Lepage was 19 years old watching and listening, incredulous, to the news on television. 22 years later, April 2008- he travels to Chernobyl to report, both in writing and drawings, about the lives of the survivors and their children living on the highly contaminated land. Upon making the decision to travel there, Emmanuel has the feeling that he is defying death, and when he finds himself on a train to Ukraine, where the old power station is located, a question keeps popping up in his mind- What am I doing here?

Chernobyl: The very name conjures the catastrophe that the world feared could happen someday at a nuclear power plant. On April 26, 1986, a power surge caused the core of one of the reactors to explode, spewing a cloud of radioactive steam into the air. More than four thousand people died, as many as a half-million suffered potentially cancer-causing exposure, and the city around the plant became a toxic wasteland in which nothing could live. Before the disaster at the Chernobyl plant, nuclear catastrophe had been only a fear, a threat. But when the Chernobyl plant was destroyed, those fears were suddenly all too real. Frederik Pohl's novel about this disaster was written months after the tragic events. He had the cooperation of many people inside the USSR with access to technical information and first-person accounts of the events of what is still the most tragic nuclear event in human history and only one of two level-7 nuclear accidents, along with the Fukushima disaster of 2011. This is fiction, but it is the most riveting, realistic account of what happened that has ever been written. It is also a cautionary tale that reminds us of the dangers of nuclear power plants and the terrible devastation they can unleash. Including a new Afterword by the author, this is an important book.

'Bombshell' is a feminist nuclear thriller set twenty-five years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which an alienated young Russian woman born in its shadow undertakes a road trip across the U.S., waging a guerrilla war against the nuclear industry and leaving in her wake a trail of destruction and assassinations. Obsessed with would-be Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas, Varyushka Cash recreates her atomic past through escalating violence and her one true goal: an assault on the Indian Point nuclearplant on the bank of the Hudson River. All along she is relentlessly pursued by the CIA, eager to capture Varyushka on charges of domestic terrorism. The cat-and-mouse chase leads to a final showdown in a decimated and irradiated New York, there on the cusp of a frightening new future.The initial draft of 'Bombshell' was completed five months before the Fukushima catastrophe, written from the author's morbid suspicion that the twenty-fifth anniversary of catastrophe at Chernobyl, Pripyat, and beyond would be marked by an echo in the present, shadowed by the real threat present in our unguarded and deteriorating nuclear facilities. Bombshell is a combustible and commercial step forward by one of our most creative and intellectual writers today.