liquidators - martyrs of chernobyl

Video - Soviet martyrs who cleaned up Chernobyl after German robots failed in the intense radiation.

Wikipedia | Liquidators (Russian: ликвида́торы) is the name given in the former USSR to approximately 800,000 people who were in charge of the removal of the consequences of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl disaster on the site of the event

• Personnel of the reactors
  • Yuri Korneev, Boris Stolyarchuk and Alexander Yuvchenko are the last surviving members of the Reactor No. 4 shift that was on duty at the moment of the catastrophe. Anatoly Dyatlov, who was in charge of the safety experiment at Reactor No. 4, died in 1995 of a heart attack.
• The approximately 40 firefighters who were among the first to deal with the catastrophe
• A 300-person brigade of Civil Defense from Kiev who buried the contaminated soil
• Medical personnel
• Various workers and military who performed deactivation and clean-up of the area
• Construction workers who constructed the sarcophagus over the exploded reactor No. 4
• Internal Troops who ensured secure access to the complex
• Transport workers
• A team of coal miners, who used their expertise to pump out the contaminated water to prevent its entrance into groundwater
• Nikolai Melnik, Hero of the Soviet Union, a helicopter pilot who placed radiation sensors on the reactor^[1]

Between 1986 and 1992, it is thought between 600,000 and one million people participated in works around Chernobyl and their health was endangered due to radiation. Because of the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s, evaluations about liquidators' health are difficult, since they come from various countries (mostly Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, but also other former Soviet republics). Furthermore, the government of Russia has never been keen on giving the true figures for the disaster, or even on making serious estimates. However, according to a study by Belarusian physicians, rate of cancers among this population is about four times greater than the rest of the population. All the figures quoted by various agencies are controversial — see the main article, Chernobyl disaster for more on this.

• In April 1994, a commemoration text from the Ukrainian embassy in Belgium counted 25,000 dead among the liquidators since 1986.
• According to Georgy Lepnin, a Belarusian physician who worked on reactor #4, "approximately 100,000 liquidators are now dead", of a total number of one million workers.
• According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, the main organization of liquidators, "25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled", which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600 000, liquidators) and 165,000 disabled.

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Video - 50 exemplars give everything to protect their countrymen from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station

NYTimes | A small crew of technicians, braving radiation and fire, became the only people remaining at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on Tuesday — and perhaps Japan’s last chance of preventing a broader nuclear catastrophe.

They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.

They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.

They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots.

They struggled on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep hundreds of gallons of seawater a minute flowing through temporary fire pumps into the three stricken reactors, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Among the many problems they faced was what appeared to be yet another fire at the plant.

The workers are being asked to make escalating — and perhaps existential — sacrifices that so far are being only implicitly acknowledged: Japan’s Health Ministry said Tuesday it was raising the legal limit on the amount of radiation to which each worker could be exposed, to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts, five times the maximum exposure permitted for American nuclear plant workers.