Headline Feb06, 2013 /

'''PRIPYAT'S TRAGEDY AND TORMENT!!'''

Sadly. even heartbreakingly, -Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pripyat's name should be better known!!
They are the three cities to have been destroyed by nuclear catastrophe.And Pripyat, four kilometers from Reactor No: 4, is the only one that just didn't recover. The lowest estimates put the quantity of radiation released during the Chernobyl accident at ten times of either explosion in Japan, albeit without the explosive force of the A-Bomb!


On 25th April, 1986, Pripyat was a model Soviet New Town which had been founded in 1970, to house the ''Best and the Brightest'' of the USSR's nuclear technicians. By 28  April, 1986, Pripyat was abandoned.
They never came home, and never will. Their town was fatally poisoned, and its corpse is slowly decomposing into eternity.


Pripyat was a lovely place to live, apparently. Before the accident many many people wanted to move in here. One hopeful who never made it recalls: One of the best places in the USSR. Lots of young families, and people who worked at the plant, earned good money. You could get imported things. Good clothes, good food.''


The atomic Pompeii of Pripyat is a complete mismatch of sound and vision. To walk through the city and hear no sound other than your footsteps and the occasional tweets and buzzes of birds and insects is as disorientating as anything you can imagine..


Reactor 4 exploded after a test of the cooling systems went disastrously wrong. Safety procedures were ignored or over ridden and many many panic errors  so a huge built of steam blew the 1000 tonne top of the reactor. Control rods melted. the graphite insulation rods burned uncontrollably and about 50 tonnes of radioactive fallout was propelled into the ether.


The scale of the disaster may never be precisely measured. What is known is dreadful enough. More than five million people, mostly in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, suffered terrible and even mysterious detriment to their health. At least 2000 cases of thyroid cancer have been attributed to Chernobyl.
In the Gomel region of Belarus, the birthrate is halved, DNA abnormalities in the children are widespread and growing. The average lifespan in the population is down from 72 in 1986 to 67 in 2000.
But, but, the No 4 was the first crack in the Berlin Wall!


And what is even more worrying is the fact that according to the U.N. report many hundreds of thousands of people still live in these ''highly contaminated territories!!??''
Mankind never seems to care and learn!!


With respectful dedication to all the victims and to those heroes who gave their lives in the rescue effort!!

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless