Nuclear Accidents

On the morning of July 14, 1959, Sodium Reactor Experiment trainee John Pace received the bad news from a group of supervisors who had, he recalled, "terribly worried expressions on their faces." A reactor at the Atomics International field laboratory in the Santa Susana Mountains had experienced a power surge the night before and spewed radioactive gases into the atmosphere.

Radioactive fallout near the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in northern Ukraine has reduced populations of brightly colored birds more than those of their drab cousins, scientists reported this week. Growing those vividly colored feathers uses up a lot of antioxidants, which are also needed to fight radiation damage.

After decades of questioning over the long-term health effects of a nuclear accident at an energy research lab near Simi Valley, a team of scientists today will release the results of several studies that promise some answers. The report should provide unbiased proof of the dangers the lab's neighbors faced after a partial meltdown of a test reactor in 1959 released radioactive contaminants into the atmosphere, said Dan Hirsch, co-chairman of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Advisory Panel.

Mariya Shylan, a gregarious pensioner living alone in the wooden farmhouse where she grew up, is the robust picture of the simple pastoral life. She extols the virtues of the vegetables she grows, the local fish she gets from her neighbors, the wild animals that roam freely all around her home. "I live in beautiful countryside," she says. Doubts creep into her voice, however, when she talks about her younger son, who died last month of liver disease.

Kate Brown began thinking about visiting this high-rise ghost town in the mid-1990s, when she was researching a book about the region before it was evacuated after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Then she saw a website about a young woman's lone motorcycle rides through Chernobyl's exclusion zone. The site, www.kiddofspeed.com, attracted tens of millions of viewers and became the most-visited site on Angelfire.com, a Web page hosting service.

More than 800 people in northern Sweden might have cancer as a result of fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union, according to a new study by Swedish scientists. The figure is significantly higher than previous estimates.