Today's last of four program presents important information on the plight of the children of Chernobyl who - to this day - need vacations in uncontaminated areas to detoxify their bodies from some of the embedded radioactive substances that they absorb in every day life, substances such as cesium, cobalt, thorium, plutonium etc. Also explained is the danger of contaminated food, and how to set up ongoing measures, under control of local communities, to deal with the persisting radiation and find methods to measure the burden of internal radiation.
This chapter relies in large parts on the work of the late Vassily Nesterenko. He was one of the heros of the Chernobyl catastrophe and flew over the burning reactor to take the only radiation measurements and threw liquid nitrogen into the exploding reactor core. Nesterenko survived initially while three of the four passengers of his helicopter died from irradiation.Â
Nesterenko left the nuclear establishment and dedicated his life to helping children in the aftermath of the catastrophe. Since 1990, he had been the director of the Belarusian Independent Institute of "Belrad". The State Security Agency of Belarus threatened him with internment in a psychiatric asylum when he refused work on a new Belarus power station. Nesterenko died in August 2009 as a result of radiation received at Chernobyl.
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