On the other hand, the Chernobyl accident had consequences on the mental health of thousands of people.
“The psychological effects are devastating. Many women feel that they will give birth to sick babies or children with no future,” physicist Mikhail Malko told National Geographic.
Economic and political consequences
The economic losses caused by Chernobyl —and include health costs, clean-up work, compensation for victims and the loss of productivity of forests and agricultural fields— are estimated at hundreds of billions of euros.
Chernobyl was of enormous political importance and was one of the triggers for the fall of the Soviet Union, just over five years after the accident.
In fact, Moscow was not the first to report the accident, but it was the Nordic countries that detected high levels of radioactivity. On April 28, two days after the accident, the official Soviet press reported the Chernobyl accident, but not its severity.
It was not until June 4, more than a month after the Victory parade that the USSR celebrated every May 1, that the official Pravda newspaper recognized high levels of contamination outside the 30-kilometer perimeter around the Chernobyl plant.
“Chernobyl is usually linked to strategic changes in the Soviet Union and the beginnings of open politics. The beginning of everything is in Chernobyl,” explains historian Serhii Plokhii in an interview with the BBC.
With information from EFE