Written by Clare Ferguson,
Thirty years ago, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster released radioactive material over much of Europe. Following the accident, some 600 000 people took part in the containment operations and around 350 000 people were displaced.
Accidents like Chernobyl, and the more recent disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, have resulted in an increasingly nuclear risk-averse public. Many countries are phasing out nuclear power production altogether. In the EU, production fell 13 % from 2004 to 2014, and will fall further as countries like Germany decommission plants without replacing them. Conversely, as a share of energy production worldwide, however, the …read more