#nuclear disaster

Personally, I can't go outside right now! because not only is there a wildfire (any wildfire smoke you can smell is smoke that can affect you, and fires spread a lot of toxins), BUT ALSO the places I live near that happen to be on fire right now me are the canyons that were used as a secret toxic nuclear waste dump for decades!!

In general, living near a nuclear reactor (or former mine, or former test site, or weapons manufacturing site, etc.) is a lot less safe than most governments would like you to believe, not necessarily because of failing safety procedures, but because the US military and defense companies spent decades secretly dumping and burning radioactive waste (from both nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons experiments), especially in the 1940s to 1970s

Here's the most extreme case I know about:

The former site of Boeing and NASA's Santa Susanna Field Laboratory, which is about two miles outside the north-west border of Los Angeles. Boeing is currently trying to get out of paying millions and millions of dollars for a true cleanup of the radiation and turn the contaminated sites into a radioactive public park instead. (source)

Do not come in the notes to yell at me or accuse me of lying about the dangers of nuclear. I lost my grandfather to this shit, and could have lost my mom as well.

The radiation made them too dangerous to return to service out of the zone, and so Soviet authorities set up vehicle graveyards for them, including the giant heavy-lift helicopters that had flown over reactor number four's fuming pyre. Two enormous sites were prepared in Rassokha and Buryakovka within the exclusion zone, and the vehicles were flown or driven there – and left to rust in the open air for at least 100 years until the radiation levels fell to normal levels.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY

01:23:45 AM

APRIL 26, 1986

CHERNOBYL, USSR

(CHORNOBYL, UKRAINE)

photo credits:

By IAEA Imagebank - 02790015, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63251598

By Images SPOT acquises dans le cadre du programme Spot World Heritage du CNES - https://regards.cnes.fr/user/swh/modules/58?d=URN%3AAIP%3ADATA%3Aswh%3A0dcd80ce-145b-3b0f-97e5-5da2b521c666%3AV1&eds=PARAMETERS&rt=DATA&t=DESCRIPTION, Licence Ouverte, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106847626

On 26 April 1986, the reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, causing the worst nuclear disaster in history.

The explosion occurred during a simulated test, killing 2 engineers and burning 2 others, and resulting in the hospitalization of 237 workers, including 134 with acute radiation poisoning (28 of them would die within the next 3 months). An estimated 9,000 deaths resulted from the radiation over the next decades.

Over 50,000 square miles around the power plant was significantly contaminated (extending into what is now Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine), with radioactivity traced back to the plant from Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and other European countries.

A concrete "sarcophogaus" was built over the plant to contain radiation in the short term, but no other structure was built, and in 2013, a section of the roof collapses, releasing more radiation. A new containment structure was completed in 2016.

The Chornobyl disaster was totally preventable and it took away countless lives of people living in the region, especially in Ukraine and Belarus - both the liquidators and the civillians. Despite the very air and dust being literal poison, the soviets had not only hid this information from the people, but forced everybody to partake in the May the 1st parade - because god forbid we lose our face before the international community as a working class paradise! If not for the nuclear scientists in Sweden who raised the alarm about the dangerous levels of nuclear particles coming from northern Ukraine, who knows what would have happened. It definitely would have been swepped under the rug and forgotten by the international community, together with its victims - just like Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan is barely known abroad.

With russia constantly threatening to turn Zaporhizhzha nuclear plant into second Chornobyl, the wound caused by this tragedy is cut open again.

We all love the HBO Chornobyl series, and I genuinely am grateful to Craig Mazin for the amount of empathy and respect he brought to the series; but for today I indulge you to watch something made by ukrainians, to try to understand what this tragedy means to us and how it influences our lives even today.

For the documentaries, my favourite series by this day remains the "Dragons live here" by Your Underground Humanitarian School Youtube channel, which, unfortunately, can only offer automated english subtitles - they should, however, be sufficient.

As for the feature films, I recommend "Gateway" (you can stream it online with english subtitles here). And here is the official english trailer:

Link to the Google Drive if you don't want to click the title: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kscKFciW6almJA8p-0sUQPO3c0A4AQYe

Note: It will be updated regularly - for as long as I'll be able to find/get new things =) So far I've compiled 41 books in three languages.

Just to repeat what I said in the first post: I'm open to any requests or suggestions or even PDFs themselves, if someone wants to share theirs from their collection. Message me, send me an ask, throw a rock through my window - whatever you prefer, just please, do it yourself because I'm too scared to message anyone, thanks. No fiction - that's the only rule. Any language is welcome - if you want me to look for a certain book in the language of your choice, I'll do that. If you have a book in language other than English, I'd love to add it to the Drive! If you have a better version of whatever PDF I've already got, then I'd be more than happy to do a swap.

Now, some of my reasoning, if anyone's interested: first of all, I think it's important for everyone to be able to access stuff like this. Think of it as a library, minus the "give these back" part. Secondly, I get soooo mad when people are like haha, found this super rare, basically impossible to find, very expensive book! ...I shall now keep it exclusively to myself. Ma'am, you're ruining the vibe and stalling everyone's hobby research but I guess you do you...

List of all the books (under the cut):