He often provides explanations for this ‘increase in crime’ that I, as a criminologist, know to be untrue. He discusses how he worries about the future of his family members because the United States is a dangerous place to live. This morning he discusses the violent times we are all living in and how murder is everywhere. ''Within a week of the first scattering of such 'meteorological bombs,' the considerable precipitation over the 30-kilometer zone practically came to a complete stop,'' Tass said.One morning, after checking email, which is a pretty standard task, my grandfather writes a daily email. Tass reported that a special detachment of weather aircraft had been assembled to sprinkle clouds over the 18-mile danger zone with compounds that prevent rainfall. One project under way is to drill 73 wells of up to 120 feet in depth to intercept ground water before it reaches the power plant, and to pump it into the Pripyat River. The papers have also described extensive efforts to preclude the spread of contaminated ground water or rainwater to rivers. Special remote-control bulldozers and cranes have been produced to move earth and pour concrete in areas still considered too dangerous for people. A first stage, tunneling under the reactor and laying a concrete ''cushion,'' has already been completed.īut the Soviet television said on Thursday that work on the actual concrete shell must await construction of a protective concrete barrier that would enable workers to approach closer to the highly radioactive reactor. Papers have reported round-the-clock work to entomb the ruptured fourth reactor in concrete and to decontaminate the station. But the third, sharing common generating facilities with the fourth, has been shut down for an indefinite period. The authorities have pledged to have the first and second reactors back in operation by Oct. The official press agency Tass has reported that factories have been ordered to take special measures to conserve power, including staggered shifts and days off, to compensate for electricity lost because of the disaster. The loss of electricity from Chernobyl has posed serious problems for the Ukraine. Some 310,000 children from the northern Ukraine and southern Byelorussia have been sent to summer camps, and the authorities have not yet indicated when they will start to return. Some 112,000 people were moved out of contaminated areas, and many remain in temporary housing and in temporary jobs. In Kiev, 7,500 apartments have been turned over to evacuees, as have 500 in Chernigov. Other papers have reported work on other, smaller new settlements. Wednesday's issue of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda reported work on a new town called Zeleny Mys for 10,000 Chernobyl workers, indirectly acknowledging for the first time that the settlement of Pripyat, adjacent to the power plant, has in effect been abandoned. But the indirect cost of the enormous struggle to seal the ruptured reactor, to safeguard water supplies, to build whole towns of new housing and to decontaminate more than 1,000 square miles of farmland and villages is incalculable. The scope of the disaster has been driven home by the almost daily accounts in the press of huge projects under way to undo the consequences of Chernobyl.Ī Politburo report published this week reported about two billion rubles in direct damage - about $2.7 billion. Ukrainian newspapers have written about farmers who try to avoid the radiation checks mandatory at markets, and have warned against eating currants or gooseberries in a broad area around Chernobyl.Īmong many Russians, that passage from Revelations - also known as the Apocalypse - has touched a strong penchant for superstition in the national character, giving Chernobyl the quality of an almost supernatural disaster. Produce at farmers' markets is treated with suspicion, and vendors with Ukrainian or Byelorussian accents are avoided. Most of the 28 who died are being buried in a special heroes' plot in a cemetery at Mitino, a village outside Moscow.Ĭountless vacation plans have been thrown askew by the fact that priority for rooms at resorts is given to those displaced by Chernobyl, or by fears of swimming in potentially contaminated waters. On July 17 the official youth league newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published a long and detailed article on the various radioactive elements and their characteristics, including the threat of cancers.Īt public gatherings, like the congress of the Union of Writers, it has become common to hear references to ''the grief of Chernobyl that has beset our land.'' Poems and even a novel have been published on the horror of the atom gone out of control and the heroism of those who battled the inferno through the early hours of April 26. The dangers of radiation, at first played down in the press, have finally become a topic of open discussion.
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