Beyond Nuclear International
Stalking Chernobyl
Where a dose of adrenaline matters more than a dose of radiation
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Chernobyl is a place of loss and abandonment. The Zone is radioactive. So why do people flock there today? Iara Lee’s fascinating documentary goes with them to find out, and reminds us about life there before the April 26, 1986 nuclear disaster.
For most of us, Pripyat — the Ukrainian city that has become an iconic symbol of forced abandonment — summons images of drab, Soviet decay. Pripyat is a place of ghastly tower blocks, rusting playgrounds, a deserted Ferris wheel and peeling paint, its workforce trudging like automata to toil at the doomed Chernobyl nuclear power plant just 2.5km away.
But in the opening sequence of Iara Lee’s new documentary — Stalking Chernobyl; exploration after the apocalypse — we see a very different Pripyat, before the April 26, 1986 nuclear disaster. It is a place of singing and roses, swimming pools and picnics, and dancing babushkas.
And then, as someone in the film says, “On April 26, what had once been our pride became our grief.”
As we now know, and as the film reminds us, the residents of Pripyat did not fully understand the scope of the accident. They were told over an official loudspeaker announcement, with classic Soviet obfuscation, that “an unfavorable radiation environment is forming.” They packed up a few possessions and some food and left, forced into an evacuation that would endure not only for their own lifetimes, but for those of their descendants as well.
At the heart of Lee’s vivid and compelling film is a firsthand look not at those who fled, but at those who feel compelled to journey into the Chernobyl Zone — whether officially as tourists, or illegally as “stalkers” or aficionados of extreme sports. They are an eccentric, often misinformed bunch, in particular the stalkers, most of whom are young men and some of whom appear to be embarked on a kind of vodka-fueled macho right of passage.
Schoolroom in the Zone. (Photo by Thierry Vanhuysse, courtesy Cultures of Resistance Films)
But there are others who are appalled at the desecration of what they see as a mausoleum. As one young man notes, visitors to Chernobyl are staging scenes, bringing in their own props, and posing for gleeful selfies in a place that represents profound loss to those forced to abandon their homes and to those whose family members died during their heroic sacrifice as liquidators.
“They are destroying something that should be untouched,” he says.
Farewell Fessenheim, finally
The long fight to close French nuclear plant ends in relief rather than victory
By Linda Pentz Gunter
France’s two oldest reactors are finally closing. But their waste inventories sit perilously in pools adjacent to a canal, in a seismic area and on top of Europe’s largest groundwater source. Consequently, the Stop Fessenheim movement isn’t closing its doors.
On a sunny October day in 2009, a French border town was put under siege. There was no virus, but there was an invasion of sorts.
Protesters against the continued operation of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant were streaming into town. French authorities weren’t worried about their own citizens, but what they really feared were “rioting” Germans.
We were in Colmar, a town in Alsace, a region that has historically been a source of conflict between France and Germany for more than a century, changing hands several times until finally becoming French again in the waning days of World War II.
Possibly unaware of this, but maybe guilty of watching too many news clips of German protesters at Gorleben, the French police locked Colmar down.
The original protest site in the central Place Rapp was moved to one on the fringes of town adjacent to the station.
The German protesters turned out not to be as fierce as French authorities feared. (Photo: Linda Pentz Gunter)
Helicopters circled overhead, police with dogs (yes, Alsatians) blocked intersections, and trucks with the word “horses” plastered on them idled in side streets.
On the morning of the protest, the only place to get a cup of coffee was in the local butcher shop. Everything else was closed. When the French close their cafes, you know something serious is going on.
If we can tackle corona, why not climate?
What the pandemic can teach us about changing our ways
By Alex Kirby, Climate News Network
Societies worldwide are changing overnight to meet the coronavirus threat. The climate crisis should match the rapid pandemic response.
If you want to know how fast a modern society can change, go to most British town centres and see the pandemic response. They will be unrecognisable from what they were 10 days ago.
You’ll see far fewer pedestrians, now sheltering from coronavirus infection at home, far fewer vehicles, hardly an aircraft in the skies above. The familiar levels of urban noise have faded to a murmur. The usual air pollution is dropping fast, with reports of significant falls from not just the UK but China and northern Italy as well.
So we can change when we decide to, and a pandemic demands change that’s both radical and rapid. But pandemics are not unique in that respect: there’s something else on the world’s agenda that’s crying out for action to match what’s happening today.
Dieter Helm is professor of economic policy at New College, University of Oxford. He writes in the latest entry on his site: “The coronavirus crisis will come to an end even if coronavirus does not … What will not be forgotten by future historians is climate change and the destruction of the natural environment.” What can we learn from this crisis that will help us when it’s over?
Dieter Helm says that while the coronavirus crisis will end, historians will not forget our inaction on climate change. (Photo: Policy Exchange/Wikimedia Commons)
The wrong crisis stopped the Olympics
Radiation risks couldn’t kill the Games, but Covid-19 has
The Japanese government allowed 50,000 people to cluster around the Olympic flame, then hesitated to postpone the Games, until the IOC (and a reluctant Abe) called them off until 2021. Now those concerned about the persistent radiological contamination, which could harm athletes and spectators, have one more year to organize to stop the Tokyo Olympics altogether.
By Linda Pentz Gunter
On Saturday, March 21, 50,000 people queued up at Sendai station to see the Olympic flame displayed in a cauldron there. Packed together, not all of them wearing masks, the eager spectators waited as long as three hours to glimpse a flame that should have been extinguished in Japan months ago.
Sendai is just 112 kilometers up the Japanese coast from the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactors that exploded and melted down on March 11, 2011.
Around the same time that those 50,000 people, and the authorities who govern them, failed to take the novel coronavirus pandemic seriously, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was making lukewarm noises about maybe possibly postponing the Olympic Games.
After some skillful negotiating designed to spare Japan embarrassment, that decision was finally made on March 24, when the International Olympic Committee, and the Abe government, each announced that the Games would be postponed until the summer of 2021.
The 50,000 who queued to see the Olympic torch in Fukushima will not see Japanese Olympians or any others this summer. (Photo: Kyriazis/Creative Commons)
Yes, it was beyond stupidity to have continued contemplating an event that would have brought tens of thousands of corona-carrying athletes and spectators to Tokyo and beyond. But it was worse that the persistent radiological contamination of Japan in the now 9-year long aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster didn’t cancel the Games months ago. Or better still, disqualify Japan’s bid in the first place. Things in Japan won’t be significantly better in that regard one year from now. But radiation remains untouchable as a topic.
Put people and health before nukes
Government should wash its hands of Trident during coronavirus crisis
The Pentagon is working on developing new nuclear warheads. Britain, totally under the US nuclear thumb, is lining up to buy them. But while both governments pour billions of dollars into these destructive projects their health services are sinking in a time of pandemic crisis. That now all has to change.
By Ken Livingstone
With the ongoing coronavirus crisis, these are frightening times for millions of people here in Britain and around the world.
It is important to note that pandemics have been designated as tier-one threats to our security for many years.
Successive national-security risk assessments have rightly identified such human-health crises as worthy of the highest level of concern and planning, so why has Britain seemingly found itself unprepared for this crisis?
We had insufficient equipment, staff and infrastructure, and have been widely seen internationally as being slow to respond to the spread of the virus, while failing to implement fully World Health Organisation suggestions.
Despite the tier-one designation of pandemics, for many years totally wrong priorities have seen billions wasted on nuclear weapons rather than preparing for situations such as we now find ourselves in with the spread of Covid-19, or indeed climate-change emergencies including severe flooding.
Outgoing CND General Secretary, Kate Hudson, has frequently spoken out against Trident. (Photo: Garry Knight/Wikimedia Commons)
It was good therefore to see that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has launched a vital campaign for the government to wash its hands of Trident so we can begin to spend the money saved to address the real security threats we face.*
Out of control?
While industry looks for handouts, NRC gives nod to reduced safety oversight
By Linda Pentz Gunter
It was no surprise really, when the first to line up with outstretched palms as Congress debated and formulated its now passed $2 trillion coronavirus-prompted emergency relief bill, were nuclear corporations.
The sinking nuclear power industry spotted an economic lifeline and couldn’t wait to make a grab for it. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of the nuclear power industry, rushed off a letter to congressional leaders asking for a 30% tax credit and waivers for existing regulatory fees.
One of NEI’s apparently needy recipients is the financial fiasco known as Vogtle 3 and 4, the new nuclear power plant construction project in Georgia, which is already more than five years behind schedule and is projected to cost $28 billion, double the original predicted price.
The nuclear industry wants federal funding to keep construction going at the over-budget, behind schedule and unneeded Vogtle 3 and 4 nuclear power plant site in Georgia. (Photo: NRC)
The two new Georgia reactors aren’t needed, and their continued slow progress is by no means a matter of national security right now — or at all. But the NEI would like to see a nice fat grant go to Georgia Power to continue construction there, even though the company has already received two federal loan guarantees totaling $12 billion.
In addition, the company is also gouging ratepayers in advance to cover the costs for the two reactors through the state’s Construction Work in Progress law, with no guarantee that they will ever reach completion.
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