Chernobyl 30 Years Later: Those Who Live in Its Shadow Still Suffer

(abcnews) April 26 2016 - In the days before the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster today, workers hurriedly filled in pot holes and painted lines on the decrepit road to the destroyed nuclear station. They were getting ready for a visit by Ukraine’s president and memorial ceremonies at the site to mark the catastrophic incident on April 26, 1986.

Time has helped bury some of the most obvious effects of the catastrophe. Slowly the forest is breaking up the abandoned towns inside the exclusion zone; the famous “Red Forest,” of irradiated trees turned red by the reactor leak, has been cut down and replanted.

Radiation levels on the surface are often close to background norms, though highly contaminated patches still lurk everywhere. Next year, a giant new containment shell is due to be slid over the shattered reactor, sealing it safe for 100 years.

But as the workers spruced up the route to the world’s worst nuclear disaster zone, some affected by the accident said with the passing of time their plights were increasingly being downplayed and accused Ukraine’s government of trying to save money by cutting support to them.

The claims throw attention onto the fact that even 30 years on, the long-term health effects of Chernobyl remain intensely disputed.

The disaster, the worst nuclear accident in history, eventually affected 3 million people and forced the evacuation of over 300,000. The reactor was sealed inside an 18-mile exclusion zone, deemed too contaminated for people to live and known now just as the Zone.