CWI: This April 25/26 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the world’s worst nuclear accident. The explosion at the power plant, situated about 100 miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, sent a cloud of radioactive gas around the world. The cloud contained twenty times the amount of radiation released at Hiroshima.
Estimates made at the time in the New Scientist magazine, that 100,000 would eventually die as a direct and indirect result of the radiation release, may have been too high. But if the wind had been blowing in the opposite direction on the day, towards the densely populated city of Kiev instead of over relatively sparsely inhabited areas, the outcome would have been worse than even the New Scientist estimate. more