April 21, 2016 by By Efrem Lukatsky
Efrem Lukatsky, a Kiev-based photographer for The Associated Press, recalls the confusion and anxiety of the1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, the world's worst nuclear accident.
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The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 100 kilometers (65 miles) from my home in Kiev, but I didn't learn about it until the next morning from neighbor Natalia Finkel, a policeman's wife.
There's radioactive dust, she said; close all the windows and plug all the cracks. Later, my anxiety grew when I saw her husband Andrei taking off his clothes and putting them in a plastic bag before entering his apartment.
It was two full days after the April 26, 1986, explosion when the Soviet Union's tightly controlled news media acknowledged that anything had happened—and the reports' dishonesty was as bad as no news at all. The Tass news agency called it an "unlucky accident" and said there was nothing to worry about.
Nobody canceled a May Day parade in Kiev that saw thousands of people walking in columns along the streets, with songs, flowers and Soviet leaders' portraits, covered with invisible clouds of fatal radiation. A thick cloud of smoke was carrying radioactive poisons over much of Europe.
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Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-years-chernobyl.html#jCp
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