CHERNOBYL: Nuclear Energy - the door to . . . what?

Abandoned classroom, Pryp’yat, Ukraine
(Source: Britannica.com)

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster occurred thirty years ago -- April 26, 1986.

A series of images in today's New York Times invite people to remember and think about that event. It is particularly important at a moment when we are realizing that we cannot continue to rely on fossil fuels, and some people are pushing for reliance on nuclear energy.

You only need to search "Chernobyl" on Google images to find hundreds of images of what's left of Chernobyl, like the one at left.

How bad? The memorial to Chernobyl liquidators
in Moscow hints at the degree of devastation.

Most people have no real sense of the scale of the Chernobyl disaster -- the deaths and illnesses, the degree of contamination, the size of the no-man's land left behind.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded for a book that provides first-hand accounts of the Chernobyl disaster.

Read this overview of Voices from Chernobyl to learn what happened, and why.