• Marking the Chernobyl disaster 26 years later

    Ivan Sekretarev / AP

    Russian veteran fire fighters lay flowers at Mitino Memorial to commemorate those who died after the Chernobyl 1986 nuclear disaster, in Moscow on April 26. Russians marked the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which was the world's worst ever nuclear accident.

    Gleb Garanich / Reuters

    Men walk near a containment shelter for the damaged fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26. Belarus, Ukraine and Russia mark the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the world's worst civil nuclear accident, on Thursday.

    Sergei Supinsky / AFP - Getty Images

    Victims of Chernobyl nuclear accident's widows hold pictures of their late husbands during a memorial ceremony at the Chernobyl victims memorial in Kiev on April 26.

    AP reports -- "The Chernobyl disaster underscored that mankind must be extra careful in using nuclear technologies," Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovych said during a ceremony Thursday inaugurating the initial assembly of a gigantic arch-shaped steel containment building to cover the remnants of the exploded reactor. "Nuclear accidents lead to global consequences. They are not a problem of just one country, they affect the life of entire regions."

    The April 26, 1986, explosion spewed a cloud of radiation over much of the northern hemisphere, forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes in heavily hit areas of Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia. The Soviet government initially tried to hush up the explosion and resisted immediately evacuating nearby residents. It also failed to tell the public what happened or instruct residents and cleanup workers on how to protect themselves against radiation, which significantly increased the health damage from the disaster.

    A shelter called the "sarcophagus" was hastily erected over the damaged reactor, but it has been crumbling and leaking radiation in recent years and a new confinement structure is necessary.

    Yanukovych said 2 million people have been hurt by the tragedy and it was the state's obligation to protect and treat them.

    But his reassurances fell flat with some Chernobyl cleanup workers and victims. About 2,000 protesters staged an angry rally Thursday outside parliament in Kiev, demanding an increase in compensations and pensions.

    Read the full story.

    Photojournalist documents Chernobyl aftermath for nearly two decades, then creates an iPad app to tell the story

    Sergei Supinsky / AFP - Getty Images

    A Chernobyl's handicapped person cries in front of the Chernobyl victims memorial in Kiev during a memorial ceremony on April 26. Ukraine launched today construction of a new shelter to permanently secure the stricken Chernobyl plant as it marked the 26th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear disaster.

    Andrew Kravchenko / EPA

    The widow of a victim holds a child during a ceremony, commemorating the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Kiev, Ukraine, on April 26. On April 26, 1986 reactor number 4 blew apart at the Chernobyl power station. Facing nuclear disaster on an unprecedented scale Soviet authority tried to contain the situation by sending thousands of men into a radioactive area.

  • Fewer female birds after Chernobyl, study finds; same true at Fukushima?

    A year after Fukushima, the government has asked residents to bury radiated soil in their own backyards. But how dangerous is the dirt and where should it go? NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel reports.

    By Miguel Llanos, NBC News

    Scientists are focusing on Japan's Fukushima area after a study published this week found an alarming development at another nuclear disaster site -- Chernobyl.


    The proportion of female birds has fallen off since the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl, the study found, and that appears to be causing male birds to increase their chirping in efforts to find a mate.

    "The Chernobyl zone is a population sink, or an ecological trap, that brings in new birds each year but these birds suffer lower survival," co-author Tim Mousseau, a University of South Carolina biologist, told msnbc.com.

    "In other words," he said, "the Chernobyl zone is not an eden for wildlife" as some have claimed.

    Mousseau, who's leading a team along with Anders Pape Moller of the University of Paris-Sud, is now in the Fukushima area preparing to test birds there for radioactivity from the nuclear reactors hit by the tsunami after the March 11, 2011, earthquake.

    NBC's Richard Engel visits the exclusion zone surrounding Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

    "We will be placing small dosimeters on birds and measuring body content of radionuclides," he said. That will also be done this summer around Ukraine's Chernobyl area, where earlier testing focused on counting birds.

    For the Chernobyl study "we collected 1,080 birds using mist nets in forested areas that were highly contaminated but also in areas that were effectively 'clean' and sites in between," Mousseau explained.

    "In the more contaminated areas, most birds were yearlings, suggesting that survival rates were significantly lower in these areas than in clean ones."

    "Sex ratios in the contaminated areas were significantly skewed towards males, reflecting higher mortality rates for females," he added. "In birds, females invest heavily in making large eggs, and these data suggest this investment comes at a cost of lower life span."

    Tim Mousseau

    A Geiger counter is used to test soil in the Fukushima area last year as part of a study on birds.

    As for the chirping, "males in contaminated areas tend to sing more than in clean areas," Mousseau said, "presumably reflecting the greater challenges of attracting and acquiring a mate when sex ratios are skewed."

    Courtesy of Tim Mousseau

    Biologist Tim Mousseau holds a bird caught around the Chernobyl area.

    He's expecting even worse results at Fukushima.

    A team did an initial survey last summer, counting 1,929 birds from among 45 species.

    "Our expectation was that it would take many years and many generations of exposure for the cumulative effects" to show as they have in Chernobyl, Mousseau said.

    "However, once we started our field work we realized that contamination levels were much higher than expected, even in July when we did our surveys," he said, "and it is likely that doses to these birds were very high in March and April when many of the birds were arriving to the area to initiate breeding."

  • Fukushima disaster response frighteningly similar to Chernobyl, Three Mile Island

    NBC's Robert Bazell visited Fukushima in May 2011, and witnessed the tragic the effects of the nuclear disaster firsthand. People were forced to leave their homes in the area surrounding the plant due to high radiation levels.    

    By Robert Bazell
    NBC News

    The terrifying atmosphere of crisis, confrontation and lack of communication in the days following the accident at Fukushima burns through the report on the crisis just released by an elite commission set up by the Japanese government. The document details anxious moments when officials even considered the evacuation of Tokyo.  One of the world’s largest cities, Tokyo is home to almost 9 million people.  How an evacuation could be accomplished can only be horrific guesswork.

    The government set up the panel run by the Rebuild Japan Initiative with full investigatory powers in response to the ever-increasing evidence that Tokyo Electric Power, owners of the plant, and the government, had been far from forthcoming in describing the unfolding disaster and its implications for the public.  The report, first obtained by the New York Times and slated for release later this week, is likely to be the best history of the accident for years.

    During my time at NBC I covered the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima almost a year ago.  Despite major differences, there are frightening similarities.  In each case due to both a lack of information and a desire to calm the public, authorities offered false reassurances.  Only Chernobyl led to immediate deaths and huge numbers of additional cancer cases in the years since.  There was almost no radiation release from Three Mile Island, but it took years to discover how close the meltdown had come to releasing a catastrophic amount.  The health effects from Fukushima have so far led to relatively few worker injuries at the site and a hypothetical but small risk of additional cancers in many parts of Japan in the future.

    When I began covering Fukushima, I tried to be reassuring.  Despite the confusion described in this latest report during the first few days after the accident, there was increasing verifiable evidence that radiation in significant amounts was not spreading beyond the immediate vicinity of the plant.  But when I later returned I had more of a sense of how tragic the effects were on the 80,000 people who were forced to leave their homes in the 12 mile area surrounding the plant.  I am including video reports from the months after the accident; one dealing with the immediate effects of the disaster and the other with the nature of the future cancer risk.

    No one in Fukushima has shown signs of illness from radiation exposure, but more than 80,000 people have been turned into radiation refugees. Robert Bazell's report from June 2011.

    What are the lessons?  Nuclear power is attractive because it releases no greenhouse gases to increase global warming.  But because of concerns about safety it has always been enormously more expensive than other sources of energy, and Fukushima will make it even more so.  Accidents by definition happen when unexpected events strike, whether through human error or natural events like the monstrous tsunami that struck Japan.  These three accidents show that severe nuclear accidents are thankfully rare.  But consequences often exceed our worst fears.