TSCHERNOBYL FOREVER / ALLEMAND

Dear Alain-Gilles,
Youri Bandajevski - 05/09/2005 - Minsk
Je I meet Youri Bandajevski at his home in
Minsk. He has been out of prison for a few
weeks. He is under house arrest.
Yuri B. will be the first person to see the photo
«The atomic doll» I took a few days earlier at
Pripyat. He is moved. We talk about everything
and maybe nothing, judging by the way
the girl student who accompanies me as an
interpreter is impressed.
I take a few portrait shots of Yuri B. Very impatient
to resume his research, he shows me on
the balcony his secret stock of laboratory mice.
On leaving I tell him I would obviously be very
pleased if he sent me a letter, an article, a
contribution for my «Chernobyl Forever» project.
I received it three weeks later.
Voir: http://tchernobyl.verites.free.fr/
Photo: Alain-Gilles Bastide
For humanity, Chernobyl is a wound that doesn’t heal, even 20 years later. And it won’t heal
for a very long time. It is a permanent reminder of the dangers of atomic energy for every
living thing on Earth. Why is Chernobyl dangerous for humanity, still today?
First, because of the importance of its influence on everything alive in the epicenter of the
catastrophe. (...) One hundred and four thousand square kilometers of the surface of Belarus,
the Ukraine and Russia, with an extremely dangerous density of radioactive contamination.
More than 3.8 million people were living in these areas at the time of the accident. An
immense number of people, living far away from the site of the explosion of Reactor No. 4 of
the atomic power station in 1986, have been victims of the terrifying influence of the atomic
energy that escaped.
Second, because of the specifically negative influence on human organisms. A great many
radioactive substances were projected into the biosphere (...), with differing periods of disintegration,
from short-lived iodine whose half-life is eight days, to long-lived plutonium whose
half-life is 24 390 years. The most prevalent element in quantity, however, is Cesium-137,
whose half-life is 30 years. All these radioactive elements penetrate the human organism, not
only in the first days of the catastrophe but also over the past 20 years, either directly or by
radioactive irradiation as they disintegrate.
In the first months after the accident it was the liquidators who were exposed to the strongest
radiation, mainly because of external radioactive irradiation. Many of them were gravely ill
and some, a short while later, died from post-irradiation syndrome.
The population that lives in the areas affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe is permanently
exposed to the influence of radioactivity, through consumption of contaminated food products.
That is the main danger of the Chernobyl catastrophe.