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T.S. Eliot’s poem "The Hollow Men" says, "This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper." The Japanese nuclear plant meltdowns may end the same way. How will the affected plants finally be closed? A look at what happened at Chernobyl can give us a clue: Several times a month, especially after it rains in that part of the Ukraine, the water that has seeped through the cracks in the reactor is removed so that radiated water does not escape into the atmosphere. The area endangered by the Chernobyl reactor is 15,000 square miles–about the size of Switzerland–and the danger will last for over 300 more years, even though the meltdown occurred 25 years ago.
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Drawing on research from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, scientists say that for most Japanese, the long term risk may lie in drinking milk and water or eating food, as well as direct exposure to contaminated soil. Environmentalist Donald Milton says, "Even in most of the Ukraine and in larger areas of Europe after Chernobyl, the major routes of exposure were not directly from the air, but rather through food, especially milk, produced from contaminated areas, and from fallout deposited on the ground."
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Russian scientists have announced plans to build a nuclear power station on Mars, and should have it up and running by 2030. These are the people who created the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power plant that blew up in 1986, releasing clouds of radioactive material that exposed Northern Europe to radioactivity 100 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

Artyom Liss writes for BBC News that the power plant is being designed to power a permanent Mars research station, which the Russians plan to build in a mountainous area of the planet. The problem is how to transport the heavy building blocks needed to build the plant. And which space shuttle is going to volunteer to transport the plutonium?
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English researcher John Urquhart says that deaths anddeformities caused by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyldisaster, the world worst nuclear accident, may extendbeyond the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The radioactivecloud it sent over Europe could have increased infant deathsand birth defects in England and Wales in the three yearsafter the accident. Urquhart thinks that at least 200 morechildren than normal died during those three years. “We’veprobably been too complacent about the health effects fromChernobyl in western Europe,” he says. He thinks the falloutmay have caused more than 600 extra cases of Down’sSyndrome, spina bifida, cleft palate and other abnormalities.
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