By The Fairewinds Crew

Today is the tenth installment of our Nuclear Spring Series, and thirty-five years ago (yesterday), the Chernobyl disaster began on April 26, 1986. We hope you will join us this week in reflecting and revisiting the Chernobyl meltdown and remember the heroes who died so bravely fighting such a fierce fire. Those heroes fought to protect all of us from what could have been even worse consequences as the meltdown-induced radioactivity began to spread around the world.

Since the triple meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi atomic power reactor site, those of us at Fairewinds Energy Education have found our springtime haunted by the atomic disasters of yesteryear. You can find out more information about Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi meltdowns, the Three Mile Island (TMI) meltdown here in the U.S. near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and even the effects and ramifications for human and environmental health here on our Demystifying Nuclear Power Blog.

At Fairewinds, we designed our website to be a one-stop hub for research and information not found elsewhere, especially information concerning the meltdowns at Fukushima, TMI, and Chernobyl. We host countless expert reports, blog posts, videos, audio and podcasts, and links to resources from Fairewinds’ colleagues. With that in mind, on this 35th commemoration of the meltdown at Chernobyl, we wanted to share some essential resources available to you.

You will find a large selection of Chernobyl-related content at this bottom of this blog.

Kate Brown

In Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, MIT’s Dr. Kate Brown spent seven years researching old Soviet-era archives and interviewing hundreds of citizens who lived in the swath of Chernobyl’s contamination. Fairewinds highly recommends her masterful telling of life after the Chernobyl explosion and meltdown.

According to the New York Times:

“Her heroes are not first responders but brave citizen-scientists, independent-minded doctors and health officials, journalists, and activists who fought doggedly to uncover the truth about the long-term damage caused by Chernobyl. Her villains include not only the lying, negligent Soviet authorities, but also the Western governments and international agencies that, in her account, have worked for decades to downplay or actually conceal the human and ecological cost of nuclear war, nuclear tests, and nuclear accidents.” — The Chernobyl Syndrome

Dr. Tim Mousseau

University of South Carolina’s Dr. Tim Mousseau is a phenomenal researcher of the effects of the radiation releases from Chernobyl and Fukushima. His peer-reviewed journal articles and interviews in the popular press are simply too numerous to count! Dr. Mousseau’s dogged persistence in measuring the radiation-induced changes in animal and plant populations at Chernobyl over many years has forced the nuclear industry to acknowledge that radiation from Chernobyl has altered the ecosystem in Ukraine and surrounding countries. We highly recommend this link to Dr. Mousseau’s work: Radiation, Mutations and the Chernobyl Zone.

Below, you can watch Dr. Mousseau present about the effects of radiation on wildlife.

You can find a complete list of Dr. Mousseau’s scientific work here.

The HBO mini-series on Chernobyl

Movies about disasters tend to be overly sensational and weak on science. This five-part award-winning HBO series on the explosion and meltdown at Chernobyl breaks that mold. The HBO special series is accurate and spellbinding at the same time! The first part covers events of the first hour; the second, events of the first day; then the first week, month, and year. The series won a Golden Globe for Best Miniseries and a Prime Time Emmy for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series. Enough said! If you have not seen the Chernobyl mini-series, please do. While you view this series, please envision the ramifications of such a meltdown here in the U.S. and at any atomic-powered reactor in the world. You can watch the trailer for HBO’s Chernobyl series below.

Nuclear Energy Conference 2021

The Nuclear Energy Conference will be held on Thursday, April 29th, in Austria and is hosted entirely online. It is free to the public, and you must register beforehand.

We also wanted to use this blog as a way to let all of our longtime followers, supporters, and friends know that Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds’ own resident “science guy,” has been invited to present at the 2021 Nuclear Energy Conference.

Arnie’s presentation at NEC 2021 is entitled National & International Nuclear Regulators. Who Do They Protect? Not People, but the Atomic Industry. View from an Insider & Whistleblower. Arnie will discuss his life and experience as a nuclear engineer in the atomic power industry, as a nuclear whistleblower, and regulatory capture. We sincerely hope that you will register and join us for this event. From Beyond Nuclear in Takoma Park, Maryland, Linda Pentz Gunter will be wrapping up the forum with a presentation entitled The forgotten human faces of the Atomic Lie: to begin at the beginning.

Excerpt from the Nuclear Energy Conference website:

“Nuclear power has relied on fanciful tales since having been put to work - fanciful tales that have already been exposed as unrealistic, as incorrect prognoses, as brazen presumptuousness, as fatal self-overestimation. Lies, one could call them.
There were high expectations, indeed promises, of a form of energy generation that would be too cheap to be measured at all - too cheap to meter. The opposite has happened, the costs are constantly increasing. In addition, the contribution to global energy supply has remained more than negligible. Dealing with its waste remains the responsibility of the next generations, what a prime example of mendacity! And the allegedly negligible residual risk, i.e. the statistically low probability of occurrence of a Maximum Credible Accident - has been unmasked as lethal misjudgment since Chernobyl & Fukushima. And yet the lying continues.
We must not stop dismantling the atomic lies, breaking them down into individual parts - so that their complex functioning is disturbed, or at best destroyed!”

This powerful Nuclear Energy Conference on Thursday, April 29, 2021, will enable us to pay homage to all the people worldwide who have suffered and died due to the malfeasance of atomic power reactors. We ask that you also take time to envision a new future without nuclear power or atomic weapons. With our dedicated focus, renewable and sustainable energy can give us a renewable energy power grid by 2030 and an entire renewable economy without fossil fuels and entirely powered by sustainable and renewable electricity by 2040. This future protects us from the burgeoning climate emergency and creates millions of jobs as it prevents the flow of trillions of dollars to countries with autocratic leaders.

For those unable to register or attend, we will post the videos when the conference hosts release them.