More than two decades after the world’s worst nuclear accident, thousands of youngsters are still being brought to the UK each year.
Born up to 15 years after the event, they spend a month recuperating with volunteer families from the Chernobyl Children Life Line. Experts argue in landmark studies that, apart from the small contaminated zone around ground zero, the region today is safe. But for charity founder Victor Mizzi, who personally greets almost every flight, there is no question that Chernobyl is an ongoing tragedy. “The situation is just as bad now with cancer and leukemia as it was in 1986,” claims Mizzi, who has brought more than 46,000 children from affected areas to Britain. The mass of support for Mizzi’s charity, and others like it, says much about public perception of Chernobyl. All these years later the memory of the disaster has not dimmed, not even now as the world turns back to nuclear energy as part of efforts to tackle climate change.
It was exactly 23 years ago today that an explosion ripped through reactor No.4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, when it was a member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.