Chapter 4: The Survivor (Уцелевшая)

Concept: CHERNOBYL DISASTER

1. Collins dictionary

 A town in Ukraine; site of the `world's worst nuclear power station accident (1986), caused by a reactor explosion resulting in radioactive contamination of the atmosphere across the western part of the Soviet Union and into Europe; an exclusion zone 2,600 sq km (1,000 sq mi) exists around the site although some tourism is allowed in the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat and its surroundings.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/chernobyl

2. Lexico dictionary

 A town near Kiev in Ukraine where, in April 1986, an accident at a nuclear power station resulted in a serious escape of radioactive material.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/chernobyl

3. Encyclopedia Britannica

 Chernobyl disaster - accident in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union, the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power generation. The Chernobyl power station was situated at the settlement of Prypyat, 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the city of Chernobyl (Ukrainian: Chornobyl) and 65 miles (104 km) north of Kiev, Ukraine. The station consisted of four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power; it had come online in 1977–83.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Chernobyl-disaster

Компонентно-дефиниционный анализ языковой единицы:

- The world`s worst nuclear accident

- Ukraine

- Chernobyl

- Bomb

- Nuclear catastrophe

- Big damage

- Reactor explosion

- Escape of radioactivity

CHERNOBYL DISASTER IN THE BOOK:

Examples: «She watched the television a lot after the first big accident. It wasn't a very serious accident, they said, not really, not like a bomb going off. And, anyway, it was a long way away, in Russia, and they didn't have proper modern power stations over there like we do, and even if they did their safety standards were obviously much lower so it couldn't happen here and there wasn't anything to worry about, was there? It might even teach the Russians a lesson, people said. Make them think twice about dropping the big one».

«There was a cloud of poison, and everyone tracked its course like they'd follow the drift of quite an interesting area of low pressure on the weather map. For a while people stopped buying milk, and asked the butcher where the meat came from. But soon they stopped worrying, and forgot about it all».

«Then cartoonists started making jokes, about how the reindeer were so gleaming with radioactivity that Father Christmas didn't need headlights on his sleigh, and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose because he came from Chernobyl; but she didn't think it was funny. Listen, she'd tell people. The way they measure the level of radioactivity is in something called becquerels. When the accident happened, the Norwegian government had to decide what amount of radiation in meat was safe, and they came up with a figure of 600 becquerels. But people didn't like the idea of their meat being poisoned, and the Norwegian butchers didn't do such good business, and the one sort of meat no-one would buy was reindeer, which was hardly surprising. So, this is what the government did».

Характеристики концепта CHERNOBYL ACCIDENT:

- Russia

- Bomb

- Get off

- Power stations

- Cloud of poison

- Radioactive meat

Article:

Chernobyl Is Still the Worst Nuclear Accident for Public Health

The 1986 Chernobyl and 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accidents both share the notorious distinction of attaining the highest accident rating on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) scale of nuclear accidents. No other reactor incident has ever received this Level 7 “major accident” designation in the history of nuclear power. Chernobyl and Fukushima earned it because both involved core meltdowns that released significant amounts of radioactivity to their surroundings.

Both of these accidents involved evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents. Both still have people waiting to return to their homes. And both left a legacy of large-scale radioactive contamination of the environment that will persist for years to come, despite ongoing cleanup efforts.

So the tendency is to think of these accidents as similar events that happened in different countries, 25 years apart.

But the IAEA scale isn’t designed to measure public health impact. While Fukushima involved radioactivity exposures to hundred of thousands of people, Chernobyl exposed hundreds of millions. And millions of those received substantially more exposure than the people of Fukushima.