What Did Chernobyl Do, Really? (Video)

To quell the ongoing crisis at the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, the Japanese are flying in the world’s largest concrete pump from Augusta, Georgia—the same kind of remotely controlled cement-mover used to seal up the melted core at Chernobyl. What exactly will it be putting a lid on? For PBS, Miles O’Brien (CNN’s former space reporter) goes to the Chernobyl exclusion zone to see what’s gone on there in the past quarter-century.

But as we’ve seen, nuclear energy hardly gives up its secrets on a human time-scale. Early this century, a U.N. commission ascribed 4000 deaths to Chernobyl—amazingly, at least an order of magnitude smaller than the initial estimates.

As O’Brien’s somewhat panicky report tells us, official science is revisiting the health impacts of the disaster, with some grim but ambiguous findings. The biggest changes aren’t to be found on the irradiated Ukrainian steppe, however, so much as in the human psyche. Waylaid by terrorism and global warming, radiation is back as an insidious fear and limitless talking-point.

• From Chernobyl With Fear: Lessons for Japan About How We Terrify Ourselves
• A Is For Atom: A Documentary About the Risky Business of Nuclear Energy
• Teaching Kids About Nuclear Disasters With Fart Jokes
• The Atomic Trucker: How a Truck Driver “Rebuilt” the Atomic Bomb

Photo: Shizuo Kambayashi / AP Photo