Posted on 04/28/2006 10:09:20 PM PDT by KOZ.
Chernobyl Legacy, by Paul Fusco.
(Excerpt) Read more at todayspictures.slate.com ...
btt.
Perfectly believable, more - perfectly predictable. What could be expected to happen when a mentally defecative idiot starts playing with matches?
I bookmarked your Chernobyl link KOZ, will watch it tomorrow. Thanks for posting it.
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/oped/24352/
The heroes, survivors of Chornobyl
First, it is worth examining the actual death toll of the Chornobyl liquidators. According to Dr. Mykola Omelyanets, a leading demographer with the Institute of Radiation Medicine in Kyiv, of the 344,000 Ukrainian liquidators who took part in the Chornobyl emergency clean-up, 10 percent, or 34,400 had died by 2004. Most of these were young men in their 20s and 30s at the time of the accident, and they are dying at a rate 2.7 times higher than working-age men across Ukraine. Even more noteworthy is the fact that 25 percent of these deaths were caused by cancer, while the rate of cancer deaths among the average Ukrainian males in the same age range is only 9.6 percent, an almost three-fold (2.7) difference. These excess cancer deaths would account for 8,600 liquidators – already twice the death toll estimated by the Forum. And this data does not include the cancer impact on liquidators from other ex-Soviet republics, evacuees, or people still living in contaminated territories. It also does not count liquidators who had died prior to 1989.
A parallel study by Israeli and Ukrainian scientists published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in Britain found that the children of Chornobyl liquidators suffer from a seven-fold increase in chromosome damage as compared to their siblings born prior to the accident.
.....
The latency period for many forms of cancer begins to toll after 20 years, and the half-life of radioactive cesium and strontium is 30 years, so we may witness the greatest surge in cancers in the next decade. More than 9,000 children and young adults have been diagnosed with pre-cancerous thyroid lesions. In any case, it is very premature to close the book on Chornobyl’s consequences at this stage." end quote
We all need to be greatful for the courage and sacrifice of those who fought the disaster at Chernobyl. They did not set the policies but they have sacrificed their lives to protect all of us. They deserve our gratitude, our support and our Prayers.
They are unsung heroes in the West.
W
As we start to talk about building more nuclear plants in this country expect to see more of this kind of thing from the media. Just as they blew Three Mile Island out of proportion so will they with this or anything else they can find.
This is BS.
I have been to Chrenobyl/Pripyat twice as a newsie.
Much of this is anti-nuc BS.
The deserted appartment blocks are in Pripyat. Chernobyl is more of a "county" name. The V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station is out in the farm country, about 2km from Pripyat.
The other pctures depict typical life in rural Ukraine and Belarus. There are mentally retarded children throughout the former Societ Bloc... and the US. Ours are much better treated. The radiation leakage at Chernobyl/Pripyat did not cause this.
Cancer hospital #11 in Kiev (the children's oncology hospital) is a Dante's Inferno, but so is every hospital there.
Seems we are a very adaptive race.
It appears to defuse many arguments of the environmental wackos that pollution will kill us all.
For example, in "Zone of Estrangement" all is polluted with radioactivity, but 700 people live off land there and are doing reasonably well.
The gloom and doom predictions have failed to materialize.
A Concept only the Communists could do - Lets build a cheap nuke
This is what artists are good at - they stir up our emotions. They make us think with our feelings. Sure these are heartbreaking stories, but are we sure they have anything to do with Chernobyl?
Many groups have tried to estimate the number of people directly harmed by Chernobyl - I have seen numbers anywhere from 40 to 40,000,000. All of them seem to be obscured with emotions and agendas.
They entire Belarus people disappearing because of this - give me a break.
There is one lesson to be learned from this. A people who can't give better treatment than this to their ill and mentally retarded shouldn't be operating nuclear reactors.
I support building Nuclear Power plants. Did you even read my post? That is a Ukrainian Newspaper accounting of the incident. It was a well written story of the sacrifice of many of their own people on behalf of all of us in the aftermath of Chernobyl. The Russian design was cra% and everybody knows it. It is nothing like ours. But recognizing there were significant costs and therefore significant responsibility must be taken to make it work safely is worthwhile.
To a certain extent this same type of problem is facing our Military.
There are significant differences of opinion on the structure, organization and future direction of the US Military. The left's antimilitary braying is being used by one faction (Sec Def Rumsfield's) to silence legitimate critics of their "Tofflerian Third Wave Light Fighter" program. The legitimate critics do not want to aid the lefts propaganda so they often are forced into muted critique in trying not to harm the military while trying to redirect it.
The lefts effect there is the same as here their hatred for all things Americans effectively blocking legitimate dialogue and debate.
W
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