It has been twenty years since the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union. Two decades is a very long time, but it remains hard to predict how many more will suffer from the effects of what happened. In nearby Belarus, for example, cases of thyroid cancer are thirty times more frequent than before the accident.
A group of 60 experts recently predicted that in the future there will be 270,000 more cases of cancer, and 93,000 cases will eventually end in death. It takes a long time for cancer to occur in the human body. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan notes that it would be to early to discuss how many people will come down with the disease until the 30th anniversary of the event in 2016. In the United Kingdom - far from Chernobyl – farmers are still prohibited from grazing their cows in areas contaminated by radioactive fallout.
The Chernobyl disaster says a lot for us in Korea, where there are twenty nuclear power plants. Already you see omens of a major disaster, which, given the country's small size, would turn the entire population into victims. On March 8 there was a fire in reactor number 4 at the Guri Power Plant in Busan. It was a man-made accident resulting from a lack of sensitivity about safety in a key part of a reactor. The reason radioactive heavy water lay exposed for a whole month at the third reactor at the plant in Wolseong, North Gyeongsang province, appears to have been because the facility has deteriorated with age. It is only eight years old, however, and twelve reactors around the country are older, with some among them having been built 28 years ago.
Two days ago there were no less than four earthquakes off the shore of the plant in Uljin, North Gyeongsang, and ten days ago there were five. There are six reactors in operation at Uljin, and eight more nearby. Just as there exists the danger of accidents caused by aging and carelessness, there is also the danger of a disaster caused by events in nature. People spend a lot of time talking about the need for nuclear energy in this era of high gas prices. What, then, is the lesson we have learned from the accident at Chernobyl?
The Hankyoreh, 2 May 2006.
[Translations by Seoul Selection]
[Editorial] Will Korea Avoid Another Chernobyl? |
