Chernobyl, 20 years and counting

[Earniel]

It's 20 years to the day since the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl taught the world a hard lesson.

Dawn 26th of april 1986, an exploding reactor resulting in 30 deaths, a huge fire that lasted for days and a fall-out over more then tens of thousands of square miles. 400 times more radioactivity was released than in Hiroshima.

Almost everybody now knows the name of Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear incident in our history. Not just because of the incident but because of the vast consequences it brought with it. Even today the radioactivity scars many miles of land around Chernobyl and it will remain so for many, many lifetimes. The incident is also blamed for triggering an epidemic of cancer in people and their children living in that area.

Chernobyl has been in the news over the past few years also about the bad condition of the concrete tomb that was erected around the reactor to minimise the radioactivity. A new sarcophagus is being constructed to be placed over the old one.

National geographic Chernobyl photo gallery

But oddly, while the area around Chernobyl looks like a dead zone, it is yet thriving with wildlife. With no disturbance by humans, nature has reclaimed much of it; and many species that were rare or eradicated are returning. The genetic defects already observed in several of the returned species does not seem to slow them down yet.

But what with the future of nuclear energy today? Chernobyl may have woken the public opinion about the dangers of nuclear power, but yet we still use it today. In fact, the majority of energy produced in several European countries comes from nuclear energy.

What are your ideas about this? Should we continue to use nuclear energy or should we, as many groups ask, phase out our dependancy on it? Is nuclear energy safer than in the days of Chernobyl or can we have another Chernobyl in the future? Do the benefits outweigh the dangers? Are there any viable alternatives for nuclear energy?