The Russian troops had expected their “special operation” to be brief. Soldiers had brought scant supplies: one admitted that he’d packed only a single uniform, because he thought he was on a training exercise. Some asked Semenov where they could buy cigarettes. “They said, ‘Why are there no shops near here?’ I said, ‘This is a restricted zone!’ They didn’t understand where they were.”
Great read about Chernobyl under Russian occupation during the recent invasion. Where senior staff had to keep up quite a balancing act in order to save lives and avoid disaster.
It's always been incredibly difficult for me to get a fair view of nuclear energy. Mostly due to the absurdly obvious amount of lobbying from the industry. This article on the consequences of Chernobyl and other incidents shows that lobbying to be even more insidious than I thought.
Another excerpt from the Underland book. This one tells the story of a tomb for radioactive waste being built in Finland. There's something really ominous about the whole concept of burying our radioactive slop and hoping a future civilisation doesn't get curious and dig it up.
This quote says it all:
In a way, the Chernobyl disaster reveals the true extent of our environmental impact on the planet. Harmful as it was, the nuclear accident was far less destructive to the local ecosystem than we were.
