Tag: toxic

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Inside Chernobyl is a toxic world where frogs have turned black

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened 40 years ago today in what is now northern Ukraine. (Reuters: Vasily Fedosenko)

In northern Ukraine, about 100 kilometres from Kyiv, lies a strange and abandoned landscape. Villages and towns are almost empty; kindergartens, once alive with children's voices, are silent. Buildings are being reclaimed by vegetation. Wild animals roam empty streets.

But it is not war with Russia that has led to this.

At 1:23am on April 26, 1986 an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant outside the town of Pripyat became the worst nuclear disaster in history.

Dolls, which were placed by a visitor, lie on beds at a kindergarten in the abandoned city of Pripyat near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (Reuters: Gleb Garanich)

Chernobyl survivors recall battle against invisible foe

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Forty years after the Chernobyl disaster, those who helped contain its aftermath, known as liquidators, recall a silent, relentless battle against radiation, an enemy they could neither see nor fight.

"Today we can see the enemy. We can shoot at him, bomb him. Back then, we could only endure his blows in silence. There was no way to fight him," Oleksandr Ryabeka says, drawing a stark comparison between today's war in Ukraine and the invisible threat he faced in Chernobyl four decades ago.

Chornobyl at 40: Settlers and horses survive Russian drones, contamination

A radiation survivor and expert, an elderly returnee, and a wildlife researcher paint a picture of life 40 years after the worst nuclear disaster.

Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine – It’s a freezing January morning, and the sun is glistening across a placid, snowy, forested landscape. But the calm is deceptive.

An air raid siren suddenly blares across the crisp winter air.

Two soldiers scour the skies, hands firmly gripping anti-aircraft guns mounted on pick-up trucks parked on a small, dilapidated bridge on a tributary of the Pripyat River.

Danger is all around, both in the surrounding land, which still carries the legacy of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, with pockets of intense radioactive contamination, and above, where Russian drones and missiles launched from just across the border in Belarus, a short distance to the north, regularly pass overhead.

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