Reddit Reddit reviews The Legacy of Chernobyl

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The Legacy of Chernobyl
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2 Reddit comments about The Legacy of Chernobyl:

u/MiG31_Foxhound · 102 pointsr/CatastrophicFailure

This is an excellent question, and it has several answers.

 

First, Chernobyl was far enough west that the fallout fell on non-Soviet nations, where it was detected and constituted incontrovertible proof that there had been a very severe event. Also, Chernobyl necessitated the evacuation of an entire city of 50k inhabitants. And these aren't small, rural settlements like the 25k people relocated as a result of Kyshtym. These people all shared the experience and were aware of where they lived and the nature of the Chernobyl plant. Similarly, Fukushima was a power generation facility in broad view of the public, and it rose to national attention, partially because of the openness of Western media. This brings me to my next point.

 

Fukushima and Chernobyl were facilities for public energy production and Mayak was a closely (one might say fanatically) guarded, secret military facility. It's nearest analog is the US Hanford Works in Washington, which produced plutonium for the US nuclear weapon industry. These military installations and knowledge of their activities was highly compartmentalized. People near Mayak likely had some vague idea of what it was, but not any particular sense of what went on inside of it, and the acute danger posed to them by its continued operation.

Essentially, Mayak was VERY easy to keep quiet, and stayed that way until Zhores Medvedev leaked it to the CIA. They kept it quiet until the mid-to-late eighties. As the Soviet Union began its death spiral, information began to leak out in droves and Medvedev could speak and write more freely about the events he had heard about (he had no personal connection to them, if I'm remembering correctly). For instance, he explicitly mentions Kyshtym in his early 90s appraisal of the Chernobyl disaster.