Opening Salvo // THE GHOST OF CHERNOBYL

The Ghost of Chernobyl

Fusion is near. But our nuclear past haunts us

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

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EXCERPT //

While I was too young to really remember the stress over the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, still regarded as the worst such accident on U.S. soil, which cost over a billion dollars to clean up, I know that it forever changed how Americans viewed the cost-benefit ratio of nuclear power. The completely preventable explosion in Chernobyl in 1986, however—that disaster was burned in my then sixth-grade mind.

In 1990, my father was tapped as part of an industry group to do an exchange with the Russian scientists who ran plants with similar design flaws as the Chernobyl station. The Russians then also came to visit us, and just being around real-live scientists from that part of the world—one that I’d been raised to be wary of, as the Cold War was alive and well in my childhood—was instructive. It turns out they were just like us, but our governments were very different. Attempts to correspond with their children as pen pals were thwarted by censors. A lot of empty envelopes arrived on both ends before we collectively stopped trying to stay in touch.

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