Radiation Never Really Dies
**VIDEO**
Danny Cooke and Bob Simon
CBS News
Some tragedies never end. Just bury the horror and move on.
Ask people to name a nuclear disaster and most will probably point to Fukushima in Japan three years ago.
The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine was 30 years ago, but the crisis is still with us today. That’s because radiation virtually never dies.
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit Chernobyl while working for CBS News on a ’60 Minutes’ episode which aired on Nov. 23, 2014. Bob Simon was the correspondent and his video can be seen below.
Chernobyl is one of the most interesting and dangerous places I’ve been. The nuclear disaster, which happened in 1986 (the year after I was born), had an effect on so many people, including my family when we lived in Italy. The nuclear dust clouds swept westward towards us. The Italian police went round and threw away all the local produce and my mother rushed out to purchase as much tinned milk as possible to feed me, her infant son.
It caused so much distress hundreds of miles away. I can’t imagine how terrifying it would have been for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who were forced to evacuate.
During my stay, I met so many amazing people, one of whom was my guide Yevgen, also known as a ‘Stalker’. We spent the week together exploring Chernobyl and the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat. There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place. Time has stood still and there are memories of the past floating around us.
Armed with a camera and a dosimeter Geiger counter I explored the ruins and made the above film.
After the explosion in 1986, the Soviets built a primitive sarcophagus, a tomb to cover the stricken reactor. But it wasn’t meant to last very long and it hasn’t. Engineers say there is still enough radioactive material in there to cause widespread contamination.
For the last five years a massive project has been underway to seal the reactor permanently. But the undertaking is three quarters of a billion dollars short and the completion date has been delayed repeatedly. Thirty years later, Chernobyl’s crippled reactor still has the power to kill.
It’s called the Zone and getting into it is crossing a border into one of the most contaminated places on Earth. The 20-mile no man’s land was evacuated nearly 30 years ago.
Drive to the center of the Zone today and you’ll see a massive structure that appears to rise out of nowhere. It’s an engineering effort the likes of which the world has never seen.
And it’s a race against time.
With funds from over 40 different countries, 1,400 workers are building a giant arch to cover the damaged reactor like a casserole. It will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and wider than Yankee Stadium — the largest movable structure on Earth.
The radiation won’t die or go away. It will just be encapsulated, a sealed tomb inside a steel skeleton, a buried edifice of horrors to remember the future by.
~Via Danny Cooke/Bob Simon and CBS News
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