Today it the 20th anniversary of the explosion which destroyed the No. 4 reactor at The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Facility outside Prypat in the Ukraine (should we buy it a present or something?).

ANd as with all good aniversarys everyone has to get up and say something, and as with anything to do with nuclear energy most of it is full of crap. Nine (or WIN or NBN) featured a report on 60 minutes last week on Chernobyl (you can watch it or read the transcript at http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2006_04_16/story_1617.asp). This article appears to have been created using research that is about ten years old and either the situation has changed or it was incorrect in the first place, for example the reporter states that money for the New Containment Building is not forthcoming, and yet the money has already been given and construction is at the tender evaluation stage. I also like the way he oversimplified the accident and clean up, especially the way he seems to think that one individual plant operator pressed some sort of "Blow up the reactor" button.

Greenpeace has had to have their say as well, and have released a report which claims that ultimatley approximatley 270,000 deaths will be attributed to the incident. This is in direct opposition to a report issued just last year, which was a collaborative effort of the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency and a number of smaller parties, which stated that approximatley 4,000 deaths will be ultimatley attributable to the incident. Rather that trying to address the reason for this discrepancy, Greenpeace makes wide and unqualified claims that WHO/UN/IAEA report was biased and did not want to show a negative image of nuclear power.

The Chernobyl accident is by no means as simple as the media or agencies such as greenpeace would have you believe, I recently wrote a 30 page report on the incident for my Emergency Management subject and still had a substantial amount more to say (unfortunatkey I hot the word limit, then went over it, and continued to do so for like an extra 2 pages). I came to the conclusion that the Chernobyl incident, is not an effective model on which to base planning for potential future accidents. The accident itself had a number of different causes without whch the accident could never have taken place, many of these causes were related to design flaws in the 1st and 2nd generation RBMK1000 reactors that even at the time Chernobyl was built would never have been allowed in western reactors, the other major cause was a lack of concern for safety protocols on the behalf of the operating staff which was typical of workers throughout the entire Soviet Union. Finally the Chernobyl reactors did not have containment buildings, which are required throughout the rest of the world, which would have contained the release of radionuclides from the damaged reactor core.