Chernobyl
The topic I have chosen for this term paper is "Ex-Soviet Bloc's
Environmental Crisis, Issue C." #2 Upgrading nuclear reactors to meet international standards. I have chosen this topic because nuclear power is not only an environmental issue but also a severe health issue for the citizens around the nuclear site and also for the rest of the country and world because of food products that could be grown there and used as market items.
Nuclear radiation is in no way healthy to anyone. It is much more easier to develop a life threatening disease if you are currently being effected by the radiation or have already been effected. Becoming sick from high amounts of radiation does not only happen to people in the immediate area of the nuclear accident. Although these people are the most effected, they are by far not the only ones. Radiation can be carried in many products, including food which is the most common and easy way to become sick from radiation poisoning. Cattle in the area of radiation may appear to be healthy but the milk they produce and the meat they give should not be eaten. As you can see, radiation can very easily be transferred from one point to another and ingested by someone without even their knowledge that there is a problem. The government of the Soviet Union was the owner of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. When there was a problem, the government immediately sent soldiers to surround the plant and only two days later did they evacuate the surrounding town of Pripyat, but by then it was already much too late. The effects of radiation do not take a long time to occur.
In adults, it is severe but not a severe as it is in children. In children, radiation sickness can and will effect the thyroid glands. This can lead to many different kinds of cancer and most likely more than one will effect the body at once.
In adults, the effects of radiation can be cancerous, but the real issue is whether or not it will effect their DNA and thus effect the next generation.
This issue is highly debated. Scientists are not sure whether or not radiation effects a persons DNA and causes mutations in the sperm and egg cells, later on effecting their children and their generation. Before the nuclear reactor in
Chernobyl had a melt down, a joint US and Japanese research team set ...
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...bsp; All of the facts that I have listed above are very true. It is true that people still live and work in radioactive environments. It is true that children are dying because of unnecessary exposure to radiation. Food is grow and cattle is raised in these contaminated area's, only to be distributed for miles around. Why do these people live with these conditions? For only one reason, they are forced to live there. They cannot afford to live anywhere else, they cannot not just quit their jobs at the plant because they will have nowhere else to go. The government cannot help because it does not have the money to shut down these plants and clean up the surrounding area's, not without western help at least. If we do not help these people, it could be years, maybe even decades before anything is resolved. The people living in these areas today are not the only ones effected, but also their unborn children will be effected as well. Is that really fair to these children, to be brought into a world and die only a few months later from a simple illness as a cold.
Radiation will always be in the soil around Chernobyl, but we can prevent it from being in the people and children.
The engineers in Visit Sunny Chernobyl created a new frontier past the safety zone because they want to test the limits of the reactor. What the scientists didn’t account for is that fact that the reactors already had the potential of a dangerous chain reaction. (Blackwell 6) Consequently, their boundary destroying led to catastrophic consequences and the total annihilation of a land area because of massive radiation. Blackwell thought Chernobyl was so horrific he expressed that no one should visit without a “working understanding of radiation and how it’s measured” (Blackwell 7). These are some horrific consequences that followed from surpassing the
Imagine working with radioactive materials in a secret camp, and the government not telling you that this material is harmful to your body. In the book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown, she takes her readers on a journey to expose what happened in the first two cities that started producing plutonium. Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has won a handful of prizes, such as the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History, and was also a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Brown wrote this book by looking through hundreds of archives and interviews with people, the evidence she found brought light to how this important history of the Cold War left a nuclear imprint on the world today.
...r. Iodine 131, another radioactive element, can dilute very quickly in the air, but if it is deposited on grass eaten by cows, the cows then re-concentrate it in their milk. Absorbed into the body's thyroid gland in a concentrated dose, Iodine 131 can cause cancer. In the Chernobyl disaster, the biggest health effect has been cases of thyroid cancer especially in children living near the nuclear plant. Therefore, because of the Chernobyl disaster we know to test the grass, soil, and milk for radiation. Also, an evacuation of the Chernobyl area was not ordered until over 24 hours after the incident. Japanese authorities evacuated 200,000 people from the area of Fukushima within hours of the initial alert. From the mistakes and magnitude of the disaster at Chernobyl, the world learned how to better deal with the long and short term effect of a Nuclear Fallout.
Initially the Soviet Government kept the accident at Chernobyl a secret. Because radiation lacks smell or taste, and is invisible, people carried on with their daily lives, all the while inhaling radioactive particles. It took ten days for the Soviet government to evacuate the contaminated areas. Particles fell into the crops and plants of the people. Cows ate grass that had been contaminated by the nuclear particles causing the dairy produ...
Included in the release were radioactive elements with a half-life of 16 million years. Yet, we humans cannot defend ourselves from such radiation because we are biologically not fortified to do so.... ... middle of paper ... ...
...r more than a hundred thousand years. (Lindsay, 2002) The Chernobyl Accident in 1986 which has not taken the right safety measurement by the power plants operator caused the nuclear power plant to release radiation. There were more than 30 people found dead in this accident impute to radiation exposure. (WNA, 2012; U.S.NRC, 2011)
There are ways to better understand how radiation affects the body when compared to other every day activities. If an occupational worker receives 1 rem per year then is it possible that 51 days is expected to be lost. A person that smokes 20 cigarettes a day takes about 6 years off of their life. People that are overweight by 15% take about 2 years off of their life. In actuality radiation would seem as though it is not any more harmful than other everyday activities people decide to do such as smoke, chew tobacco, or sky dive. The risk of taking days, weeks, years off of ones lives will always be present depending on the activity they choose to be part of. However, radiation exposure in the healthcare field is used to extend the patient’s life by helping them find out what is going on in their body. A patient that comes in with RLQ pain, nausea, and vomiting then an abdomen x-r...
World Health Organization. (2006). Health Effects of the Chernobyl accident: an Overview. Retrieved November 1st, 2013 from http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/backgrounder/en/index.html
In the end we can conclude that radiation therapy has it’s benefits and it’s drawbacks. We can see the drawbacks of radiation therapy don’t outweigh
There is a range of safety concerns in regards to nuclear power with one of these being the effects of radiation resulting from a nuclear accident. Research shows that there is a link between exposure to radiation and the development of cancer (Zakaib 2011) whist Preston (2012) express’s concerns that people exposed to radiation may not be able to see the effects of radiation exposure for several years as was the case in Chernobyl. Furthermore, people are unable to move back into the vicinity of reactors that have been involved in an incident due to their fear of radiation as is the chase in Fukishima (Cyranoski & Brumfiel 2011) and in the areas surrounding Chernobyl (Berton 2006). Governments are increasingly becoming more stringent in the levels of radiation in which people are exposed to with this evident in Fukishma, where the Japanese government evacuated people living within a 30km radius of the plant (Evacuation Orders and Restricted Areas n.d.). As a result of nuclear accidents and the resulting radiation, support for nuclear power has diminished due to safety concerns.
Radiation exposure can affect children as well an children have the risk of being the most harmfully effected by radiation because their body absorbs substances differently also their bodies can or are more likely to get certain kinds of cancers from too much exposure, “they are also closer to the ground, where radioactive fallouts settle.”
Chernobyl was the greatest nuclear disaster of the 20th century. On April 26th, 1986, one of four nuclear reactors located in the Soviet Union melted down and contaminated a vast area of Eastern Europe. The meltdown, a result of human error, lapsed safety precautions, and lack of a containment vessel, was barely contained by dropping sand and releasing huge amounts of deadly radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. The resulting contamination killed or injured hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the environment. The affects of this accident are still being felt today and will be felt for generations to come.
One of the most significant environmentally damaging instances in history was the Chernobyl incident. In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in Ukraine exploded. It became one of the most significant disasters in the engineering community. There are different factors that contributed to the disaster. The personnel that were tasked with operating the plant were unqualified. The plant’s design was a complex one. The RBMK reactor was Soviet design, and the staff had not be acquainted with this particular design. As the operators performed tests on the reactor, they disabled the automatic shutdown mechanism. After the test, the attempt to shut down the reactor was unsuccessful as it was unstable. This is the immediate cause of the Chernobyl Accident. It later became the most significant nuclear disaster in the history of the
Radiation is one of the most dangerous and easiest way of having health effects. Radiation was first discovered by Roentgen. Hazards are the first things people need to know in order to understand what it can do to your body. It causes many health effects on everyone out in the world. It harms people in the dentistry and field and even in the medical field. Normal people out the world can also be exposed when coming into one of these offices and getting x-rays of some type.
The biggest damage is the radiation exposal to the people. 530,000 local recovery workers were exposed the radiation, the effective dose is same as fifty years of natural radiation exposure (IAEA, 1996). 31 nuclear power staffs and emergency workers were died by direct effect, and the Chernobyl Forum anticipates the total num...