Wormwood Revisited
The Chernobyl accident, the greatest disaster in the history of nuclear power, occurred 20 years ago this week. The name Chernobyl comes from a Ukranian word that translates as mugwort, a species of wormwood -- the bitter ingredient used in the manufacture of absinthe. Historically, wormwood has been used to repel fleas, wean babies and de-worm intestines. Through what some scholars believe is a mis-translation of the Bible to English, it has also come to have apocalyptic associations, which seems entirely fitting.
On the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, there is much debate as to how many deaths the accident caused. The UN says 9,300 people will die of cancers related to radiation exposure from the accident, while Greenpeace puts the figure a full order of magnitude higher, at 93,000.
The argument reveals how little is understood about the health effects of low-level radiation exposure. (Researchers have had to use statistics from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings -- very different events -- as their model for assessing the health consequences of Chernobyl). The debate also reminds me of Joseph Stalin's remark that, while one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic.
Thankfully, much of the reporting in commemoration of the event did get beyond the numbers. Some of the best coverage came from the BBC, which interviewed some of the survivors, including one of the so-called "liquidators" -- people who were conscripted to contain the contamination and hurriedly construct a giant sarcophagus over the shattered reactor. The man, named Vladimir Usatenko, who was later elected to parliament, remembers Chernobyl as a "fantastic lesson, a huge school."
On the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, there is much debate as to how many deaths the accident caused. The UN says 9,300 people will die of cancers related to radiation exposure from the accident, while Greenpeace puts the figure a full order of magnitude higher, at 93,000.
The argument reveals how little is understood about the health effects of low-level radiation exposure. (Researchers have had to use statistics from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings -- very different events -- as their model for assessing the health consequences of Chernobyl). The debate also reminds me of Joseph Stalin's remark that, while one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic.
Thankfully, much of the reporting in commemoration of the event did get beyond the numbers. Some of the best coverage came from the BBC, which interviewed some of the survivors, including one of the so-called "liquidators" -- people who were conscripted to contain the contamination and hurriedly construct a giant sarcophagus over the shattered reactor. The man, named Vladimir Usatenko, who was later elected to parliament, remembers Chernobyl as a "fantastic lesson, a huge school."
In the end I understood that in reality, our world is a big supermarket where you can do what you want, if you do not stop to think that the cash register is located near the exit. It's not in vain that the sarcophagus is in fact shaped like an old shop's cash register.Strangely, Ukraine continues to be infatuated with nuclear power. According to the BBC, the country recently completed two new reactors has plans for 11 more by 2030. Just a month before the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl, Ukraine's Prime Minister Yuri Yekhanurov unabashedly declared: "God gave us uranium and today we should use it."
Everyone should understand that everything will end with a sarcophagus just like this one - and that is the best case scenario - if we continue unthinkingly with our existing, absolutely ineffective ways of using and producing energy.
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