The True Battle Of Chernobyl

A condensed version of this 90 minute documentary has been playing on the Discovery Channel this year in the United States. I suppose everyone within a few thousand miles of a nuclear power plant, ie almost everyone on this planet, would do well to watch this video. Especially before we build another fifty or one hundred plants in the United States, which our President would like to do. I hear remarks about how this type of disaster could never happen in the United States for various reasons. Doesn't that sound vaguely familiar across a wide range of issues? I would guess anyone saying that never understood the full depth of the Three Mile Island incident because the outcomes were very close to being similar.

If this is a topic that interests you, this is an excellent documentary. Mikhail Gorbachev, numerous former Soviet officials and "liquidators" as well as a top physicist assigned to this crisis are interviewed. Their remarks are very frank and very sobering.

A nuclear power plant crisis is not like an atomic bomb. Although this crisis almost ended with an atomic bomb-type explosion. Nuclear power plants have thousands of tons of radioactive material with a radioactive life of thousands of years. You'll likely be surprised to hear how close this crisis was to making much of the Soviet Union and Europe uninhabitable for a few hundred thousand years while possibly killing millions in the process. 500,000 Soviet citizens worked at this site and surrounding communities to contain the disaster during the first few months of this crisis. They literally sacrificed their lives to save the world.