The Enduring Consequences and Lesons of the Chernobyl Accident

Speaker:Professor Najm Meshkati
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Viterbi School of Engineering
University of Southern CaliforniaAbstractIn the early morning hours of 26 April 1986, a testing error caused an explosion at the reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in northern Ukraine. The major consequences of Chernobyl fall into three categories: the physical impacts, in terms of health and environmental effects; the psychological and social impacts on the affected populations; and the influence of the accident on the nuclear industry worldwide. This accident caused a radioactive fire that burned for 10 days, releasing 190 tons of toxic materials into the atmosphere. The wind blew 70% of the radioactive material into the neighboring country of Belarus and the rest of the world, causing twenty-three percent (23%) of prime Belarusian farmland to become and to this day remains dangerously contaminated. At the time of the accident, about 7 million people lived in the surrounding area.According to a most recent speech on September 6, 2005, by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, "the first lesson that emerged from Chernobyl was the direct relevance of international cooperation to nuclear safety" and "nuclear and radiological risks transcend national borders -- that an accident anywhere is an accident everywhere." This presentation covers consequences and lessons of the Chernobyl accidents for the world's nuclear industry. Professor Meshkati, through an invitation from the United Nations, inspected and spent time in the control room of the only operating reactor (No. 3) of the Chernobyl in May 1997, studied the Sarcophagus and its environmental health hand safety problems for the EBRD, and visited the Exclusion Zone and the (deserted, ghost) town of Pripyat.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 156

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes