Chernobyl holdouts

 

It has been 25 years since the Chernobyl disaster (1st image is a deserted kindergarten, slideshow here). A horror movie has just been released about it, although the Ukrainian government deemed it safe enough to begin offering official tours last year. But the Telegraph highlights a sampling of the 250 people - a majority of them babushkas - who moved back into the area after the meltdown and remain there to this day, among them 80-year-old  Nadejda Gorbachenko (2nd image). "No health studies have been done, but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the babushkas die of strokes rather than any obvious radiation-related illnesses, and they have dealt better with the psychological trauma. Toxic levels of strontium and cesium in the soil are real, but so are the tug of the ancestral home and the health benefits of determining one’s own destiny," writes Holly Morris, who is making a documentary about them.

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Radiation-related posts:

Fukushima dogs

Contaminated corpses