Remembering Chernobyl 20 years later.

On April 26, 1986, reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, 100 km north from Kyiv, exploded during a routine daily operation.

In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, reactor No. 4 was operating at very low capacity (6 - 7 percent) during a planned shutdown. Plant personnel intended to monitor the performance of turbine generators, which supplied electric power for the plant's own operation, during a changeover from standard to a backup source of power.

The reactor's design made it unstable at low power, and the operators were careless about safety precautions during the test. After a sudden power surge, two explosions destroyed the reactor core and blasted a large hole in the roof of the reactor building. Radioactive debris moved up through this hole to heights of 1 km (0.6 mi), carried by a strong updraft. Fires caused by the explosion and the heat of the reactor core fed the updraft.

Nearly 9 tons of radioactive material - 90 times as much as the Hiroshima bomb - were hurled into the sky. Over the following days, winds that were blowing mostly north and west, carried the fallout into Belarus, as well as Russia, Poland and the Baltic region. The radioactive fallout affected 23% of Belarus, with 4.8% of Ukrainian territory and 0.5% of Russian land exposed. About 200,000 people were evacuated from a 30-km radius around the plant, with the peripheral areas remaining at a high risk of radioactive exposure. The reactor was enclosed in a concrete-and-steel sarcophagus. Over the following years about 600,000 people known as "the liquidators" worked on the clean-up operations inside the 30-km zone.Although scientists agree that there is no risk of the sarcophagus exploding, the status of the estimated 180 tons of radioactive material trapped inside the nuclear power plant is still unclear.There are many commemorative events scheduled during the month of April which I encourage all of you to participate in. If you have any information that you'd like to share with the group, please list your info here!

New director appointed!

As expected, a new director has just been appointed for the newly created SDA (State Department of Adoption and Defense of Children ' s rights):
Her name is Ludmila Volinets
Address of the SDA:Desiatinna street nr 14, 01025 Kyiv
The vice directors of SDA are : Mr Hritsenko Fedir Volodimirovitch Mrs Duchaeva Ludmila Gnativna (responsible for the Departement of Custody and family placement of children)

Here is some more information about Mrs Volinets, the newly appointed SDA director....
She has been working for the NGO "Hope and Home for Children", which has been trying to establish family type homes for abandoned children in Ukraine, with the help of British ONG.

Mrs Volinets is from Odessa and holds a PhD in Political Sciences and is coming from Odessa. Her PhD research was on the demographical crisis during the transition in Ukraine.

She is well known in Ukraine for her project with this ONG, and her efforts to try to build a Center that helps young mothers who are determined to abandon their children in Kherson. As you imagine, maternity wards in Ukraine don't even have a psychologist on the premises, so young mothers are really left alone with this decision and have no help. Also women have their first child much younger than in Western Countries so we are talking about young girls with often unwanted pregnancies.

In 2002 Mrs. Volinets coordinated an inquiry about the mothers who abandon their children in the Kherson region. This is the only such inquiry in Ukraine. Thereafter she planned this Center to help them.

She is known to be very professional and well informed about child abandonment in Ukraine. She wants to change things and certainly try to prevent children to be abandoned.

don't forget the new SDA is a State department for adoption but also for the Defense of children's Rights and she certainly will work on less children be abandoned in Ukraine. You can find material on her and the ONG on the internet and on Ukrainian media. This is a choice that is in favor of the children and against corruption. Let's welcome the decision of the government to nominate such a person as the head of SDA.