Living with Chernobyl

What Happened
On 26th April 1986, a combination of human error and technological problems caused a reactor at Chernobyl nuclear power station to overheat and melt down. One hundred and ninety tons of highly radioactive uranium and graphite exploded into the atmosphere. It was the worst nuclear energy disaster in history. It will be two generations before contamination drops to permissible levels in the worst affected areas. The fallout spread as far as Scotland, North Wales and Northern England, contaminating crops and livestock there, but the worst area to be affected was Belarus, and particularly the Vetka district.

The Impact on Belarus
Altogether, 70%-80% of the Chernobyl fallout came down in Belarus. More than 2 million Belarussians lived in the contaminated area, including 700,000 children. During the critical few days after the explosion, people in Belarus continued their daily lives unaware of the danger. Many were outside on May 1st enjoying the tradition May Day parades.

Environmental Effects
Research shows that toxic waste from Chernobyl will be around for more than 244,000 years. In the worst affected area, the exclusion zone, there is no prospect of people returning for more than a human lifetime. Children in Vetka are taught from an early age to stay out of the forest.

Outside the exclusion zone much decontamination work has been carried out, including physical removal of massive quantities of topsoil. Some 68 settlements and 11,000 farms were dismantled and buried in the early 1990s. Even roads and roofs needed to be replaced. Vetka is an agricultural area and is therefore reliant on its land. There is still a huge amount of work to be done, both in terms of reducing contamination of land and supporting health services.

The most recent evaluation by the UN (Chernobyl 20 Years On: Towards Sustainable Development 2006), after noting that 330,000 people were resettled, states that "there are encouraging signs that many of the zones originally classified as 'contaminated' no longer merit that label, and our expectation is that restrictions on habitation and cultivation will gradually be lifted and a number of abandoned communities can take root again."
The original assessment was that caesium contamination covered 46,000 km2 over 137 separate sites. This has contracted to 5,000 km2 (about 2000 square miles - twice the size of Oxfordshire) and still contains 1.3 million people

The report describes the development of crops such as rapeseed which trap the radiation in the stalk and produce a radiation-free seed. There has also been the development of iodine-rich crops to offset the risk of thyroid cancer ( the most serious continuing physical health risk to people living in contaminated areas).
The real scale of loss following the accident will never be easy to evaluate and will always be controversial. There is agreement that the most wide reaching effect is upon the morale of a settled agricultural people massively disrupted and taught to fear the land that was their livelihood.