The Problem of pollution in Ukraine

Pollution is the contamination of the environment, including air, water, and land, with undesirable amounts of material or energy. Such contamination originates from human activities that create waste products. An industrial and intensively farmed country, Ukraine contains some of the most polluted landscapes in Eastern Europe. Pollution became evident in Ukraine with industrial development in the 19^th century.

Air pollution is especially severe in many of the heavily industrialized cities and towns of south-eastern Ukraine, notably in Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia. Coal-using industries, such as metallurgical coke-chemical plants, steel mills, and thermal power plants are major sources of high levels of uncontrolled emissions of sulphur dioxide, dust, unburned hydrocarbons, and other harmful substances.

Over one-third of the emissions into the atmosphere originate from automobile transport.

Almost all surface waters of Ukraine belong to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov basins. The high population density, heavy industrial development, and relatively low freshwater endowment of those basins, and the low governmental priority placed upon environmental protection until very recently, have given rise to chronic and serious levels of water pollution throughout Ukraine. Widespread fear is growing in Ukraine that a substantial fraction of those water arteries are so polluted as to pose fatal health risks to the people who depend on them. About half of the chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides applied in the fields are washed off into rivers. Moreover, surface runoff from industrial territories is highly contaminated.

On 25 April 1986 the Number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station was being tested. The workers, however, didn’t follow the safety regulations. The emergency cooling system was shut down and almost all of the control rods were removed from the reactor. At 1.23 a.m. on April 26 the reactor exploded. The huge concrete and steel top of the reactor was blown off and radioactive material was released into the atmosphere.

All the people who lived within 30 kilometres of the power station had to be evacuated. Helicopters crews flew over the burning power station and dropped thousands of tones of concrete onto the burning reactor. It took nearly two weeks before the reactor was completely sealed. But by that time a huge cloud of radioactive material had been blown across almost the whole of Europe by the wind. As far away as Italy and Wales grass was polluted when the radioactive dust was washed down by rain. Milk and meat from animals that ate the grass could not be used.

Chernobyl was the world’s biggest nuclear accident. More than thirty people died, and another two hundred became seriously ill from radiation sickness. But we shall never know how many people will die as a result of the accident. Scientists say that anything between five and sixty thousand people could die of cancer from the radiation that they received. What Chernobyl showed most clearly was that one country’s nuclear power stations are everybody’s problem.