For as long as there are nuclear power plants, Chernobyl will stand as an appalling reminder of their potential for death and devastation. As "Chernobyl 20 years on", the recent three-part series in this newspaper by Kathy Sheridan with photographs by Bryan O'Brien, demonstrated so terrifyingly, the legacy of the explosion - 80 miles north of Kiev on April 26th, 1986 - is forever with the victims and is not abating with time.
The accident occurred in the midst of a safety exercise designed to establish how long one of the four plants could produce enough energy to keep the vital cooling pumps in operation in the event of electrical power being lost. It was a daft experiment carried out by ill-trained staff on a reactor which was badly designed. Nuclear power increased to uncontrollable levels and the fuel overheated. The resultant explosion blew the 1,000-tonne lid off the core. There was no disaster plan. A radioactive cloud flowed into the atmosphere reaching as far afield as North America. The radioactivity released was 200 times that caused by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the second World War.
Arguments continue about the real effect of the accident. The Chernobyl Forum report, issued six months ago by two UN bodies, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organisation, determined that only 50 deaths could be directly attributed to the disaster and that, at most, 4,000 would be the eventual toll. Other studies, however, suggest that 30,000 are expected to die of cancers linked directly to the radiation exposure. Furthermore, those studies rightly focus on the illnesses among those affected but not killed by the radiation, living on land where no water or food is safe.
Some good has come out of Chernobyl, however. The safety of nuclear plants has been improved significantly and the Soviet-era reactors have been upgraded to western safety standards. Chernobyl and the lesser accident at Three Mile Island seven years earlier in the United States combined to end construction of nuclear plants in western Europe and North America. But the mood is changing. Fossil fuels contribute to global warming and they are getting more scarce and expensive. The world's demand for energy is rising exponentially with new industrial giants demanding increasing amounts while much of the developed world stubbornly refuses to be more energy-efficient. Britain is determined to build new nuclear capacity, possibly at Sellafield.
It cannot be denied that the overall safety record of nuclear power stations is comparatively good; there are some 450 working reactors spread across 32 countries. Their financial cost, however, is enormous, especially on decommissioning and waste disposal. And the terrorist threat is frightening. Alternative energy possibilities such as wind, wave and biomass have their limitations but what cannot be disputed is that they are completely safe. That can never be said of radioactive material when it is deployed in such huge quantities.