40 Years Later, Chernobyl Remains a Lesson in the Unthinkable |
For the past 40 years, the wastes of the Chernobyl site have stood as a monument to human arrogance, the danger of secrets, the plodding ineptitude of repressive regimes, and the catastrophes that occur when they all intersect. After four decades — and the production of an enormous scientific and cultural literature on the disaster — it’s tempting to say we’ve learned our lesson.
The word “Chernobyl” itself has passed into our collective lexicon as a synonym for catastrophe. The UN a decade ago designated April 26 — the day in 1986 that Chernobyl’s No. 4 reactor exploded — as an international Day of Remembrance, a dark honor shared with the likes of the Holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade.
Surely — we terribly wish to say as a civilized society — we’ve put this sort of thing behind us. Right?
A Russian military drone that blew a hole in the dome protecting the world from the No 4 Reactor’s still-highly radioactive entrails suggests otherwise. In fact, as we mark the ruby anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident on April 26, we’re discovering newer ways to endanger nuclear power plants — this time by making them targets of war.
Since its invasion of Ukraine commenced in February of 2022, Moscow’s troops have invaded and attacked the Chernobyl site, bombed a research reactor at Kharkiv’s Institute of Physics and Technology in Ukraine’s east and taken over Europe’s largest civilian nuclear power plant, the six-reactor Ukrainian facility at Zaporizhzhia, claiming it as Russian property. All the while, Russian supersonic missiles continue to whiz within mere kilometers of not just Chernobyl, but also the Khmelnytskyi plant, one of Ukraine’s three still-operating nuclear stations.
What’s more, all of this is becoming quite routine. In recent weeks, Washington — the same world capital that was aghast at Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian nuclear facilities — targeted Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant in an attack of its own. The rest of the world, meanwhile, is more or less powerless to stop it. Indeed, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — with its vague mandate to encourage and oversee the safe and peaceful use of atomic energy — is empowered by its governing body (which includes representatives from Russia and the United States) to do little more than be officially horrified. It is a posture that’s unequal to what’s at stake.
In Photos: Chernobyl, 40 Years On
The Chernobyl disaster........