Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which, in the catastrophe subgenre pantheon, was a rather strange one. The explosion of reaction #4 and resulting fallout provided few media-ready images that persist today.Not that the Soviet television would have broadcast it. As a child in the US I remember only news graphics of a vague ‘toxic cloud’ spreading across Eastern Europe. It was something to fear, but it was over there. Nuclear radiation is, of course, invisible, and its effects are not immediately evident. There will be no Hollywood version. So what we have instead are enduring legacies and hauntings.
It’s baffling why nuclear power continues to be touted as a safe energy alternative in the face of its history of accidents. Along with environmental and health risks, the technology is a political failure: it is difficult to establish democratic rule over an industry that so few understand and even less know how to manage. I do not know of any historical account that makes this argument, but it seems plausible that Chernobyl was a nail in the coffin, so to speak, to a USSR already disintegrating. Experts and authorities could claim to contain the radiation, but not the claims around this ongoing calamity.
Paul Fusco, "Chernobyl Legacies"
Ordinary people are left to put together claims from the evidence that emerges, or that is allowed to emerge. Photographer Paul Fusco put together this harrowing account of Belarussian children with an array of birth defects and mental disease, calling them, with grim irony, “a different race of people.” It’s just about the saddest thing you will ever see, yes. And it is still debated whether these kinds of cases are attributable directly to Chernobyl. It is depressing to consider that the same debate will emerge around Japan in the coming years.
The effects on future generations go beyond deformed bodies, however. In a startling book of interviews with survivors and “liquidator” volunteers, Svetlana Alexievich reports of firemen digging up the poisoned topsoil around Chernobyl in order to bury it deep in the earth: plants, animals (which were indiscriminately killed), everything had to be buried, sometimes in lead containers or rolled up in plastic sheets. ”We buried the forest… One of the poets says that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them, buried them” (p. 89).
Greenpeace, in its role as our better conscience, mentions 76 cities and villages were abandoned.
What has happened in the void? Tourism and hunting. Vice Magazine, in its gonzo reporting way, took cameras into Chernobyl in search of big game: as humans evacuated the region around the reactor, animals thrived. Nature has begun to reclaim this ruined land over the last 25 years, but it’s not the same as before. So hunters now enter the zone, looking to shoot mutant bear and dear.
It may be difficult to commemorate something like Chernobyl, it seems Chernobyl has its ways of reminding us.
I’d like to see a series of cartoons of the different ways teachers position themselves in relation to their students, their subject, and the rest of the world, and how we construct and lever authority.
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