Thirty years on, and the sons and daughters of the children who were victims of the Chernobyl disaster still need the lifeline of a ‘health recuperation holiday’ in places like Derbyshire. Local chairman of the charity behind those holidays, Chris Broome, explains.
AT PRECISELY 1.23am on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in the then Soviet Republic of Ukraine, two massive explosions blew the top off No. 4 reactor, allowing a stream of deadly radioactivity to be released into the atmosphere for ten days before the fires burning in the destroyed reactor were finally extinguished. The resultant fallout, which spread across all of Europe and beyond, was over ninety times greater than that of the atomic bombs dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined….