Shanathalas
"When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around"

The Chernobyl Legacy

By Shanathalas
The Chernobyl Legacy by Paul Fusco could be one of the most moving and deeply disturbing photoessays I have ever seen. I must admit that with all the problems of global warming, I did for just one second start to ponder the rhetoric of politicians like John Howard putting forth nuclear energy as the solution to the world's energy crisis. But how can anyone even think of building reactors after viewing the horrific, widespread, and longterm consequences of just one reactor meltdown. The fact that Australia, which can't even get a 19th century invention like trains to run without accidents, is even considering it boggles the mind. There has just got be better options than this.

I remember when as a child I first came to understand what nuclear bombs and reactors were. I was eleven years old and it terrified me. I began to have "mushroom cloud" nightmares and would become paralyzed by fear of nuclear war. At age 13 I saw the news reports about Chernobyl, but did not come to realise the true consequences until many years later. In the nineties, with the easing of the cold war, the dismantling of apartheid, and increase of global awareness, I had a genuine feeling that the world moving to a better place and further from the threat of nuclear radiation. But now the world is entering scary territory. Politicians are putting nuclear energy back on the table, and people are eating it. Where is the outrage? Where is the fight against this? Is it because people in the 60s and 70s weren't worried about losing power for their iphone that they were in the streets about this? I would rather raise children in a world with no electricity (humans managed without for 4.6 million years) than to see these abominations on the earth.

Here is the Link : Make sure to listen with the sound on as the commentary is vital.
(warning: this has some pretty disturbing images).
 

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