Ghost Town Bears Witness to Lasting Nuclear Scourge

Twenty-five years ago, the world’s worst nuclear accident literally erupted at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.

Yet when a heedless experiment with fuel rods caused the No. 4 reactor at Chernobyl to blow, there was no public echo. No cellphones or social networks relayed the news, as they would today.

It took the official news agency TASS three days to acknowledge, in terse sentences, that there had been an accident.

In the end, the impact of Chernobyl proved too great even for the Soviet state apparatus. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, then the leader, was trying to open up his country and eventually used the enormity of the accident to get the Soviet media to tell a bit more of the dreadful truth.

For six weeks now, the unfolding calamity at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, stricken in a record earthquake and tsunami, has stirred memories of Chernobyl. In particular, the stream of changing information, soaring or plunging radiation levels and doubts about the openness of the Japanese operator and government recall the questions posed in 1986 by that unseen plume of radiation that eventually traveled westward around the world.

Images of the ghost town of Pripyat, once home to 50,000 people, reinforce the lesson learned anew in Japan: Humans can fashion both wonder and horror with technology.

Japan is wealthier and more cohesive than the Soviet Union was then, or Ukraine is now. But, as Japanese scarred by the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki know, money and comfort do not dispel the lingering effects of nuclear disaster.

Only after the radiation spewing from Chernobyl set off alarms at the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden, 1,200 kilometers, or about 750 miles, to the northwest, did Soviet officials even acknowledge an accident. Today, the Ukrainian authorities are vocal in pleading, at an international meeting in Kiev last week, for hundreds of millions of dollars for the next stage of the unceasing containment of Chernobyl: a new sarcophagus to reinforce the now cracked one built by tens of thousands of workers in 1986.

Outside, twisted dolls on broken kindergarten cots remind us there was life here — once.