what is about to follow is a very personal blog entry. today is the 18th anniversary of the death of my father. he died from colon cancer aged 42 back in 1992. i don’t know why i feel compelled to write about this though… it’s something that has been on the back of my head for years: the question why? why my father? why so young? i don’t want to exaggerate but the experience of losing my father when i was 13 years old shaped me. it seems like ages ago but it’s still present some days like today.
so what does that have to do with chernobyl you may ask? let me explain! those that know me better are well familiar with my interest in everything nuclear; in fact at one stage during school i wanted to study quantum physics and work at a research nuclear reactor. nuclear reactors hold a certain fascination… i can’t exactly pinpoint it, but it’s partly due to the fact you can’t see, hear, smell, taste or feel radiation and yet it can kill you. running a nuclear power plant is like playing with fire: if you aren’t careful enough you can get burned… or burn the whole plant down. and that what happened on april 26, 1986 in the reactor block 4 of the chernobyl nuclear power plant.
what followed is well known (at least i assume) and the impact of the meltdown was underscored by cold war politics and the way communism worked. (in fact, one could easily point out the communist system as one of the culprits that eventually led to the meltdown but that would be too easy. shift changes and less experienced night shift workers were/are also common in western countries.) so reactor block 4 blew up and nobody actually knew the extend of the incident or how to deal with it properly. brave firemen rushed to the site to deal with the fire but eventually that made things worse and the top of the reactor blew off and spew a crazy amount of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. naturally, communist russia didn’t tell anyone in the west about the incident: mind you, cold war times didn’t promote open communication between the east and west at all. only when workers at a swedish nuclear power plant picked up unusual high radiation readings things started to surface… and the nuclear fallout cloud was well on its way to central and western europe.
i do remember quite clearly the day when it was made public in austria: authorities urged everyone to stay inside and discard home grown vegetables and fruits. in school we weren’t allowed to go play outside in the playground in the breaks. but my father, being the man he was, ignored all of that. by the time the fallout cloud reached austria it was raining heavily and hence all the radioactive isotopes came nicely down with the raid. and my father was out in the field all day long, right out there in the radioactive rain… you can’t see or smell radiation so he didn’t believe that it could do any harm to him. he even insisted on eating the home grown salad from our garden, just to prove nothing could happen to him.
well, he clearly was wrong. in november 1991 he was diagnosed with colon cancer… he underwent surgery and one round of chemo but he lost the fight to cancer on june 24, 1992. of course i can’t say with absolute certainty that chernobyl is to blame for him getting cancer. “official” reports say that the overall effect on the health of people in central/western europe is negligible and the fallout cloud did not cause an increase of cancer. anyway, austria got hit by the fallout pretty hard and there is still a lot of cesium 137 in the ground. in fact authorities still issue warnings not to eat large amounts of wild mushrooms.
this all led to me being quite interested in radiation, nuclear fission and the chernobyl accident in general. the internet is a wonderful source for information in this regard… since a year or so you can book guided day trips to the “exclusion zone” (30 km around the power plant) and see the places of the worst man made industrial accident yourself. some people who went there post awesome pictures and reports. it’s both awesome and creepy at the same time. i often say i would like to go on a day trip to the chernobyl nuclear power plant… time stands still there, everything is like it was at the end of april 1986 with all the cold war atmosphere to it. considering the remaining reactor blocks were only shut down back in 2000… it cannot be so dangerous. yet it still has a dangerous aspect to it… step off the road into the vegetation and you are greeted with a hefty dose of radiation… the fascination remains…