Chernobyl

[hmpf]

(expanding on a comment I posted in seti_drd's lj)

I was nine, going on ten. I don't remember what I did the exact day. I remember the oppressive fear of the following weeks and months - watching the progress of the fallout on the news; wondering if the air I was breathing or the rain that was falling would make me sick or kill me; using powdered milk and avoiding nuts, mushrooms, grapes. I was a little too young to really understand what radioactivity meant, which made it all the more eerie - a fairy-tale fear, a subtle thread of nightmare lending a sinister side to the most innocuous everyday activities - perhaps the single most potent source of my more general, and lasting, feeling that the world can't be trusted, or taken for granted.

These things come to mind in particular:

1.) A sleepover with friends: listening to them breathing, wondering if the air they were exhaling were poisonous, and if any of us would die of it before we were old.

2.) A class trip to a museum or something, and getting caught in the rain: a feeling of being helplessly exposed to something both entirely impersonal and utterly malignant.

3.) Desperately wanting to believe my father as he explained that, really, the danger to us wasn't all *that* great. (He was right, of course, and wrong at the same time, because the thing I had realised didn't have much to do with Chernobyl itself, but rather with the general unreliability of the world.)

4.) Lying awake for countless nights for years after, waiting for the sirens. (Anyone remember those? The ABC siren drills we used to have every now and again, back in the Cold War? Those sirens always sounded like the end of the world to me, even before Chernobyl.) I had heard of Biblis, heard that it wasn't the safest nuclear power plant around, and that, for all intents and purposes, it was just around the corner from where we lived. I waited for Biblis to blow up througout my childhood; part of me is still waiting for it.

Comments

[steelvictory.livejournal.com]

I know how you feel. My fear is the same, but different, because it's natural instead of manmade but still a good example of how the world can't be trusted.

I was seven and living in the Philippines with my mom at the US Air Force's Clark Air Base when Mt. Pinatubo erupted. I also experience a 6.8 earthquake when I lived out in Seattle, and I think I was only person who immediately looked to Mt. Ranier and fully expected to see smoke when my high school evacuated.

[amonitrate.livejournal.com]

as kids we used to swim in front of a nuclear power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan. We liked that the water was warm there. I'm sure it was perfectly safe???

Of course, you can't get near it now, post-9/11. Which is probably not a bad thing.

I remember similar feelings about that time, but it was more vague cold war fears. I don't have any specific memories of Chernobyl. But I remember feeling that nuclear apocalypse was just around the corner.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

For the first time, my icon is kind of appropriate!

I don't think of you as much older than me, but this is something I kind of missed. Growing up in the eighties and early nineties, the more I think about it, the more peaceful it seems. Perhaps it's just my inability to remember it. And I do remember things like the first Gulf war, but...nothing on the level of national unrest or fear that seems to exists either pre- or post-my-childhood.

My mother describes similar incidents in the decade following world war two, seeing pictures in the newspaper with rings around the New York City area, describing the levels of devastation that would occur if a nuke was dropped on the city; they were always in the area where some buildings would still be standing, but nothing else.

I hope Biblis never blows up.

Biblis

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Our previous government decided to have it, and all other German nuclear power plants, decommissioned within the near future. Let's hope the current government doesn't go back on that. Unfortunately, they love nuclear power.

[dune-drd.livejournal.com]

It's strange, isn't it? I was 2, soon to be 3 and my mother insists that I wasn't old enough to remember. But then I see the pictures of people running into their deaths to build the sarcophagous and I can practically remember watching it on the news with my parents.
Good thing my father has always been a geek among other geeks, he came home the same day the news got out about the incident, packed with canned goods and tons of milk, stating we'd need it.

For years afterwards it loomed in my mind, still does sometimes. because our generation will pay the price of it all.

[rasmizar.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah... I think we're roughly the same age. The one moment I still remember clearly is being at school that day; we had arts and crafts, and in the break after that had to cross the school yard to get to the next class; it had just started to rain very lightly, and I found it kind of strange and funny how our teacher was so ancious for us to hurry and get out of the rain as fast as possible. I mean, it was just light rain, and you're kind of used to that living in northern Germany? Either I hadn't yet heard the news then, or I hadn't understood what it meant.
That year we also stopped the family tradition of collecting mushrooms in the woods in autumn...
I don't remember if I was really frightened; everything was so... unreal, a danger you can't see or feel. I've always found radioactivity kind of creepy since then.

[ailanreanter.livejournal.com]

From 1986 I remember not so much restrictions, except that we weren't allowed to play outside after a rain for a while and avoid certain food like fresh mushrooms. But it didn't exactly become such a threat in the mind of the children at least. My parents will likely have worried more, but me and the other kids didn't quite grasp the extent of such a catastrophe back then.

The test alerts we used to have, too. And I always found them spooky and was used to it at the same time, growing up with that - I live well in the 30km radius around the AKW Krümmel.
But I canÄt help but wonder why they had to do these tests all the time back then and now not anymore. Did this worst-case training become unnecessary now? I can't quite believe that this is the case.

I think those were meant more for nuclear/biological/chemical warfare...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

not for accidents. They were part of the charade of keeping 'alert' in the Cold War - a kind of posturing, almost.

[tazey.livejournal.com]

Ah, you did not live in the land where the radioactive clouds stopped right at the border and nicely took the long road on the sides...

I've never had cold war related sirens but every first Wednesday of the month at precisely noon, a warning siren is being tested from a different place (it used to be factories). It repeats five minutes later. Just in case it is needed some day.