The single greatest engineering disaster in the history of our planet. I am slightly more than halfway through Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbothan. The research for this book was referenced as a significant source for Craig Mazin's award winning miniseries on Chernobyl that first aired on HBO back in 2019.
That was an extraordinary series. The sheer courage of those men and women cleaning up the site was inspiring
Inspiring no doubt. I question the idea of "courage" as being universal in those days a bit, but I get your point.
Because of the time limitations, they could only show a tiny fraction of the selflessness and the callousness from those days and weeks to follow. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich is another incredible book that Mazin referenced often. It captures interviews with hundreds of citizens or Pripyat, firefighters, soldiers and liquidators providing first had the fear/terror uncertainty and horrific conditions that many were put through during the accident and subsequent clean up.
Well the workers - or enough of them - went into the power plant with some idea of the hazards awaiting instead of looking for the back door out of there. ncargat1 more correctly referred to it as selflessness.
Small Cermonyl worms are immune to radiation The Worms of Chernobyl Have Apparently Conquered Radiation
For 3 men to volunteer to walk nearly a mile, in pitch blackness because the radiation burned out their flashlights, waste deep in radioactive water underneath the burning core of an exploded and out of control nuclear reactor to release millions of more gallons of radioactive water, after just being told that they would absorb so much radiation that they would be dead within a few hours seems heroically brave to me.
Here is some weird, wild apple/pear fruit tree that has overgrown what used to be Lenin Prospekt in Pripyat. Mother nature is incredibly powerful, even in the face of our stupidity. Before the war, when this picture was taken, you still could not touch the fruit, but it was there.
Ironically it has been a net plus for wildlife. While the occasional 3 headed wolf can’t be ignored, the absence of humans is more beneficial than the risk of pesky DNA altering toxic radiation.
Are people still taking these black or dark tours of Chernobyl? That's crazy... There are people called stalkers roaming around that place too. Here is an oldish article on these people. See Photos Taken on Illegal Visits to Chernobyl's Dead Zone https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/dark-tourism-chernobyl/index.html
Doubt is since the war started and Russian forced seized the site. The pictures I posted were from a friend of mine who travelled over in 2019. A former US Navy special operations officer (assume SEAL, but he has never once used that term with me or any of our friends) who owns his own business working with nascent law enforcement organizations around the globe. He had travelled to Ukraine dozens of times since the fall of the Soviet Union. He sent me the fruit picture plus a few others on his last trip there.
The rust colored pine forests immediately surrounding the plant were freaky weird. I believe that most of those trees have since died off and some genetically diverse pines have grown in their place.
