Sombre mood marks 30th anniv of Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe

Chernobyl / AFP

Ukrainians held candlelit vigils on Tuesday to mark 30 years since the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl spewed radiation across Europe and left several thousand people dead or dying.
Church bells rang and mourners lit candles and laid flowers at the site’s memorial as the clock turned 1.23 am—the exact moment when the plant’s reactor number four exploded and changed the fate of a generation living across the former Soviet Union.
“There was crying and screaming,” local pensioner Maria Urupa said as she recalled the terror that struck locals as they watched poisonous clouds of radiation waft in from Chernobyl.
At least 30 people were killed on site and several thousand more are feared to have died from the radiation fallout in one of the world’s worst man-made disasters, which forced a global rethink about the wisdom of relying on atomic fuel.
The exact number of dead remains a subject of intense debate because the Soviet authorities kept most of the information about Chernobyl under wraps. More than 200 tonnes of uranium remain inside the crippled reactor that spattered radiation across three quarters of Europe after a botched safety test that the communist authorities did their best to cover up.
Lingering fears of new leaks occurring should the ageing concrete structure covering the toxins collapse have prompted an international push to fund the construction of a giant new arch that could keep the site safe for at least a century.
International donors on Monday pledged an additional 87.5 million euros ($99 million) towards building a larger storage facility for spent nuclear fuel that could allay Ukrainian fears.
The plant’s reactor exploded on April 26 and burned for 10 days in a disaster that horrified the world but which locals only heard about through rumours and tidbits from jammed Western radio broadcasts.
The Communist Party kept to its steadfast tradition of saying nothing or even lying in order to keep the public from learning of a tragedy that could tarnish the image of the Cold War-era superpower.
And it took them a day-and-a-half to evacuate the 48,000 inhabitants from the nearby town of Pripyat.
International suspicions were only raised on April 28 after Sweden detected an unexplained rise in its own radiation levels.