![]() ![]() Meanwhile, research has linked more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer to radiation exposure in people who were children in the area in the late 1980s. Other estimates of additional deaths associated with the accident range up to 200,000 between 19, according to a Greenpeace report. While the immediate death toll was – officially at least – 31, the United Nations estimated in 2005 that up to 4,000 people might eventually die as a result of radiation exposure. This remains largely deserted.Ĭalculating the disaster’s direct – and lasting – human impact is notoriously difficult: a contested science that became political as part of a wider debate about the safety of nuclear energy. It hastened the fall of the Soviet Union, fuelled Ukrainian nationalism and led to the creation of an exclusion zone with an almost-20-mile radius around the plant, from which more than 100,000 people were evacuated. The disaster at Chernobyl occurred when a botched safety test caused an explosive meltdown of the plant’s fourth reactor. In the meantime, Vladimir Putin has raised the threat of nuclear war by vowing to use ‘all available means’ in his assault on Ukraine, reviving the existential angst that spread with that contamination more than 35 years ago. The plant, which still requires careful management, has since returned to Ukrainian control, but the potential effects of further attacks or power outages remain a grave concern. And now, during its assault on Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly threatened the country’s working nuclear power plants, as well as the Chernobyl exclusion zone.Įarly last year, tanks churned the contaminated soil as generals seized the site as a staging ground for an assault on Kyiv. The fallout from the nuclear disaster, on 26 April 1986, is still affecting people who were very young when a toxic cloud drifted over Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. ![]() It also comes out at a fraught time for the children of Chernobyl, thousands of whom are scattered across the world after being adopted. The book is by turns difficult to read and to put down ‘triumph over adversity’ barely covers it. In a decade, she has won 17 medals for the USA, seven of them gold. It’s a story she tells in her new memoir, The Hard Parts, an account of an improbable journey to the pinnacle of four Paralympic sports: rowing, cross-country skiing, cycling and biathlon. Twenty-six years later, after numerous operations, including the amputation of both legs, she has become one of the world’s most successful athletes. ![]() Oksana arrived in the United States so underweight that doctors diagnosed her with FTT – the medical term ‘failure to thrive’. Gay Masters, an American academic, adopted her when she was seven. Beaten and cut for perceived transgressions, her medical needs were ignored and she became dangerously malnourished. She was raped almost daily between the ages of five and seven. Her birth parents immediately handed her to the state, unwittingly dooming her to an early childhood of extreme cruelty and abuse.Īt the last of three orphanages Masters was sent to, an upstairs room operated as a brothel for paedophiles. She was born in 1989 with severe disabilities, including missing shinbones and thumbs, which are thought to have been caused by her mother’s exposure to radiation after the Chernobyl disaster three years earlier. ‘In the middle of chaos, they still point to the sun, to the positive, to the light. ‘It’s winter now so they’re really small but they make me so happy,’ says Masters, who wears a baggy Nike sweatshirt and fancy headphones. A vase of them overflows behind her as she speaks, via video call, from her home in Champaign, Illinois, a city south of Chicago. Their petals contain layers of meaning for Masters, an athlete who was born in Ukraine there, the flowers are a symbol of peace and pride. When Oksana Masters is having a bad day, her mother brings her sunflowers. ![]()
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