As Sylvia was off to Zürich with our friend and near-neighbor Laura from San Carlos, I was left to my own devices. A chance for some intensive technical work (since you asked: designing so-called spin-rotators for the LHeC study).
A few weeks ago when Robin was here we saw a moving photo exhibit by Guillaume Briquet in Geneva along the Quai Wilson, showing what the area near the Chernobyl accident looks like today. Stark pictures of decay; of lost dreams, of a different world (it was still the Soviet Union after all). This came to my mind again one evening and I got onto the Chernobyl Wikipedia page. It will be 25 years next year when one of the reactor unit near Chernobyl blew up spewing a still somewhat unknown amount of highly radioactive material into the air, contaminating quite a significant area making it unfit for human habitation for the foreseeable future. Looking at some of the pictures in more detail I ended up on the website of a Elena Filatova, a website which apparently has existed for quite some time but which I wasn’t aware of. Living in Kiev she purportedly has traveled the contaminated areas with her motorbike and put lots of pictures onto the site. In some of them I recognised the same scenes as in the exhibit in Geneva. Together with her comments the impact is quite intense.
While there appears to be a certain controversy around the site and people claim the motorbike trip is not real, the sobering fact remains that things can and do go horribly wrong. With the emphasis on global warming comes a new look at nuclear energy, at least in the US. Maybe the decision makers would be well advised to not forget what happened 24 years ago. Imagine a place like San Francisco (or even San Carlos) having to be evacuated and becoming a ghost town… well, I cannot. The Chernobyl accident does not qualify as an unavoidable disaster, it is quite well known what went wrong and why and how to avoid such a situation. But there may always be a new scenario that one hasn’t looked at and that can play out… this is tough business. We all want our energy and comfort; are we prepared to accept the risks?
The Guillaume Briquet exhibit along a part of Quai Wilson.
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