Chernobyl

When this was first assigned, I had no clue what to write about. One day I was talking to my mother and she mentioned Chernobyl, and I remembered learning about it in one of my chemistry classes, when we went over nuclear power and atom bombs. 

Chernobyl power plant had an "accident", as they describe in the article, on April of 1986 in Ukraine, which was apart of the Soviet Union at the time.  This happened because the safety shutdown switches were designed wrong.  The accident that occurred, was a cloud of radioactive particles that was released into the atmosphere. About 36 people died in the plant, and over 200,000 people evacuated from the area surrounding the plant. As the days went on the radioactive cloud got bigger in the atmosphere and other countries could see it on their radar. This caused concern among the European countries because they didn't know how deadly or harmful the radiation was. It turns out that it was not harmful to any of the European countries, but it did destroy the land and the air that surrounded the plant in the Soviet Union. 

In this article they talk about how they studied people over time and treated them as those who have survived atomic bomb explosions. The article stated that about 134 people were diagnosed, who worked at the plant, with radiation sickness. The people who were in the towns that surrounded Chernobyl suffered minor radiation.

I picked this article because you can clearly see that the effects of radiation to the human body is, for lack of better words, extremely harmful. Which is why when there is a threat that a country has an atomic bomb or the "ingredients" to make one, it puts the whole world into a panic. This event actually reminds me of the movie, "The Hills have Eyes". It is about a town that suffered the after affects of an Atomic Bomb explosion, due to the testing of the US army. Anyone who was in the town that was exposed to the radiation, bred a population that had a lot of deformities and cannibalistic nature. Now that movie was to the extreme and meant to scare people, but a lot of deformities do come out of radiation, whether from an atomic bomb or a nuclear plant melt down.