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"Put your face masks on!" yelled our guide. Everyone complied. He was a veteran who had been in charge of the land clean up campaign for 5 years after the accident, and knew danger when he saw it. As a former nuclear inspector used to assessing the risks of potential radioactive releases, I also knew the cloud would contain radioactive particles released from burning vegetation where they'd been deposited 10 years before.
An hour before we'd arrived outside the Chernobyl plant in our protective clothing, as visitors to the Exclusion Zone from a conference in Kiev on the lessons of the accident. One of those lessons was making its presence graphically felt. That cloud hanging over western sky seemed uncannily like that other one must have looked.
The cloud came no closer and we were not in significant danger, but for others that day it was more serious. A group of displaced villagers on their annual visit to their former dwellings inside the zone watched helplessly at the final conflagration of all that had been home to them was added to the injury of that earlier devastation. Later that day, we wandered around another village full of empty wooden houses, with trees sprouting from porches where once families had sat on just such a warm spring evening.
This fire was just another incident in the domesday zone, where living with daily risk is an occupational hazard. The precariously balanced reactor lid could dislodge, releasing a cloud of radioactive dust into the vicinity. The famous sarcophagus in which Reactor 4 is now entombed was not designed to last for ever. But some who know the dangers think further problems would only add local contamination. Their much greater concern lies in continuing to run the two remaining Chernobyl units of the same flawed design. A country that uses 6 times as much energy per capita as Germany could with patient work and the right sort of help from the West save the same amount of energy instead.
Standing amid the broken glass and old film reels of the Pripyat city hall, I looked at a typically Soviet mural portraying all the benefits of modern civilisation - science, medicine and technology. How very hollow those promised benefits looked now, in the silent rows of cloned apartment blocks and pavements where new birch trees were the only signs of life.
Is nuclear power all a great mistake? For some parts of the world, I suspect it is. Back in Scotland, with far safer reactor designs and a good safety culture established in the industry, I find myself reluctant to throw the baby out with the bath water. Far more urgent for me is to tackle the chronic problems left behind from a century and more of fossil fuel burning and its lasting effect on global climate. In the UK, I know that nuclear power can be well managed. But it must continue to be, or it has no future anywhere. Can we do it?
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