July 11, 2021

Chernobyl- disaster that shook the world

the Chernobyl disaster was a unique event and the only accident in the history of nuclear, accident that shook the world where radiation related thousands of fatalities occurred, on April 1986 this disaster took place, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. There was serious mistakes made by the plant operators, test was supposed to be performed during day time by the day staff, but due to shortage of electricity it was reschedule in night, the night staffs were not experienced or highly qualified, it was a direct consequence of cold war isolation and resulting lack of any safety culture.

During the course of a safety system test being carried out just before a routine maintenance, Chernobyl reactor 4 was destroyed on 26 April 1986. The accident destroyed the Chernobyl 4 reactor killing 30 operators and firemen within three months. One person was killed immediately and a second died in hospital soon after as a result of injuries received. The radiation recorded at the time of explosion was more than 15000 roentgen per hour which was enough to kill a person in 48 hours, another person is reported to have died at the time from a coronary thrombosis. Acute radiation syndrome (ARS) was originally diagnosed in 237 people onsite and involved with the clean up and it was later confirmed in 134 cases.

Of these 28 people died as a result of ARS within a few weeks of accident. Nineteen more workers subsequently died between 1987 and 2004, but their deaths cannot necessarily be attributed to radiation exposure, several people were diagnosed with cancer disease due to radiation, this incident shook the whole Russia, its affects were so adverse that everything around the radius of 400km became radioactive even the soil, water etc furthermore large areas of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and beyond were contaminated in varying degrees, vast territories of these 3 countries ( at that time the republic of soviet union) were contaminated, and trace deposition of released radionuclides was measurable in all countries of the northern hemisphere. Within a few weeks after the accident, more than 100,000 persons were evacuated from the most contaminated areas of Ukraine and of Belarus.

Thyroid doss also has been estimated for the residents of the contaminated areas who were not evacuated. The papers available for review by the committee to date regarding the evaluation of health effects of the Chernobyl accident have in many instances suffered from methodological weaknesses that make them difficult to interpret. The weakness includes inadequate diagnoses and classification of diseases, selection of inadequate control of reference groups, inadequate estimation of radiation doses or lack of individual data. Apart from the substantial increase in thyroid cancer after childhood exposure observed in Belarus, in the Russian federation and in Ukraine, there is no evidence of a major public health impact related to ionizing radiation 14 years after the Chernobyl accident. Present knowledge of the late effects of protracted exposure to ionizing radiation is limited, since the dose response assessments rely heavily on high dose exposure studies and animal experiments.

Aishwarya Says:

I have always been against Glorifying Over Work and therefore, in the year 2021, I have decided to launch this campaign “Balancing Life”and talk about this wrong practice, that we have been following since last few years. I will be talking to and interviewing around 1 lakh people in the coming 2021 and publish their interview regarding their opinion on glamourising Over Work.

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