Saturday, March 27, 2004
Elena's Bike Rides through Chernobyl
Passing the Atomic Plant:
Usually, beeping of dosimeter speed me up and I pass this part of road as fast as road condition allow. The place in front of me called red or magic wood. In 1986 this wood has been red with radiation and then they cut it off and left there and bury under 1 meter of earth. As you can see, on asphalt things not bad, but if I step 10 meters forward, my dosimeter will run out of scale, if I walk few hundred meters towards reactor, then I will find 3 roengen. If I keep walking all the way to reactor, then at the end of a journey I will glow in a dark. May be this is why they call it a magic wood. this sort of a magic when one walk in in a biker leather and coming out like a knight in a shinning armour.
I don't think I would be brave enough - or stupid enough to go into the 'dead zone', (lets face it, non organic vegetables are dangerous enough for me!) uninhabitable for at least 900 years, only 20 odd years after the accident. This is essential reading though. More than a modern Pompei - a comparison that Elena makes - because it was after all human errors of judgement that led to this... Elena even talks about the local attempts at attracting tourists to the area - morbid tours of the Ghost Town.
Official Chernobyl information site
Ludicrous Nuclear industry propoganda that tries to make us believe there have been '40' deaths due to the accident.
From the UN:
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, April 26, 1986- the routine 20-second shut down of the system seemed to be another test of the electrical equipment. But seven seconds later, a surge created a chemical explosion that released nearly 520 dangerous radionuclides into the atmosphere. The total power of the explosion was estimated to be more than 100 times that of the atomic weapons used in World War II. The force of the explosion spread contamination over large parts of the Soviet Union, now the territories of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Had the other three RBMK blocks exploded, high-levels of radiation would have spread to the English Channel. According to official reports, thirty-one people died immediately and 600,000 “liquidators,” involved in fire fighting and clean-up operations, were exposed to the high doses of radiation. Based on the official reports, near 8,400,000 people in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia were exposed to the radiation, which is more than the population of Austria. About 155,000 sq. km of territories in the three countries were contaminated, which is almost half of the total territory of Italy. Agricultural areas covering nearly 52,000 sq. km, which is more than the size of Denmark, were contaminated with cesium-137 and strontium-90, with 30-year and 28-year half-lives respectively. Nearly 404,000 people were resettled but millions continued to live in an environment where continued residual exposure created a range of adverse effects.
It's so fucked up people try and say that those people didn't die. And why? Because they want to make fucking money. MONEY. ¶ 9:50 PM
Friday, March 26, 2004
I am wearing my sexy new pirate t-shirt today. That is all. ¶ 10:05 AM
Thursday, March 25, 2004
The problem with living in your home town, even when your home town has a population of over 7 million warm bodies, is that you keep running into people you went to school with. Even jury service isn't safe from this terrifying phenomenon. So far I have met my year 8 French teacher and a girl called Charlie that was in my year. I had half thought it was her, but when Madame French teacher pointed her out I finally had to say hello. This is terribly awkward. Charlie and me were never friends, never even talked to each other much. Excepting one disastrous Duke of Edinburgh expedition (cruel and unusual punishment for largely inactive teenagers), which Pippa will remember with glee no doubt, but the details of which are probably not interesting enough for everyone else to include here. Anyway, what do you say to someone from your... not even from your past, from your non-past. The answer, in my case, was to moan at her about being back in England, and talk about the French teacher, then pretend I had to go and do something else. Should I have tried to get to know her? Perhaps. ¶ 10:38 AM
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
For Mike:
¶ 2:06 AM
Me and Mike took our first foray into our local cheap rental place tonight: at least it's not Blockbusters, but our DVD rental came in a deeply scratched tatty empty CD case and there was certainly no Passolini on offer. We weren't really all that enthused about 25th hour: as you might tell from the fact we didn't see it at the cinema. It's probably one of the best films we've seen this year. I cried and cried. It's honestly really moving in a way that is totally without the Spielburg-smaltz of something like Shawshank Redemption, or so many of those other tear worthy movies. The characters are absolutely real. The camera work, which - taken seperately - has a kind of 'This Life'/MTV feel to it, integrates perfectly and zones you into the film in an inspired way. Basically - go and see it :)