KIEV: The presidents of Ukraine and Belarus toured Wednesday the site of the Chernobyl plant to mark 31 years since the “unhealing wound” of the world’s worst civil nuclear accident spewed radiation across Europe. The station’s fourth reactor in the north of former Soviet Ukraine exploded in 1986 after a safety test went horribly wrong at 1:23 am on April 26. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the explosion and its dire aftermath “an unhealing wound with which we as a people live with”. “Perhaps more than anyone else, the Chernobyl tragedy affected our Belarussian brothers,” Poroshenko said at a joint appearance with his Belarussian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko. A 2005 United Nations report estimated that “up to 4,000” people could eventually perish from the invisible poison in Ukraine and neighboring Russia and Belarus.

Source: Manila Times April 26, 2017 10:52 UTC