Chernobyl disaster 25th anniversary - The Big Picture - Boston.com
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant sits crippled two to three days after the explosion in Chernobyl, Ukraine in April, 1986. In front of the chimney is the destroyed 4th reactor. (AP)
A child wears a mask in a hospital for leukemia patients in Donetsk, Ukraine on March 23. The blasts at the Soviet-era plant created a cloud of radioactive dust that drifted over a large swathe of Europe and still haunts millions of people in Ukraine and its neighbors. (Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty Images)
Seventy-two year old Natalia Makeenko (left) hugs eighty-two year old Galina Shcyuka in the abandoned village of Savichi on April 21, close to the 19-mile exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. (Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images)
Viktor and Lydia Gaidak in their apartment in the Desnyanskiy district at the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine on April 27, 2007. Viktor Gaidak worked for 24 years as an engineer at the Chernobyl plant, including nine years after the 1986 accident. In 2004 he had surgery for colon cancer. (Michael Forster Rothbart)
A geiger counter shows a reading of the radiation levels in the air by the 4th power block of Chernobyl's nuclear power plant, covered with a "sarcophagus" as it lies derelict on March 31. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)
Vehicles contaminated by radioactivity lay dormant on November 10, 2000 near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Some 1,350 Soviet military helicopters, buses, bulldozers, tankers, transporters, fire engines and ambulances were used while fighting the nuclear accident. All were irradiated during the clean-up operation. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)
Algunas imágenes de Fukushima
Fire could be seen in the sampling building near a water drain of TEPCO Fukushima No.1 (Dai-Ichi) nuclear power plant in the town of Okuma in Fukushima prefecture. The fire broke out at the stricken nuclear plant in the morning of April 12, 2011, but was soon extinguished. (TEPCO/AFP/Getty Images)
A man was tested for contamination in Koriyama, Fukushima prefecture, northern Japan, on April 12, 2011. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)
A deserted street in Futaba inside the exclusion zone around from Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. (Athit Perawongmetha/Getty Images)
Masataka Shimizu (center), president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. , flanked by vice presidents Takashi Fujimoto and Sakae Muto, bowed during a news conference at the company's headquarters in Tokyo on April 13. The president defended the utility's response to the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl and pledged pay cuts as workers struggle to control radiation leaks from a crippled atomic power station. (Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg)
¿ El Futuro ?
Schoolchildren wear gas masks during nuclear safety training lessons in Rudo, Ukraine near an isolated zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant April 3, 2006. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)
A Buddhist monk prayed for earthquake victims at a burial site in Higashimatsushima, Miyagi prefecture, one month after the earthquake and tsunami struck northern Japan. Across the country people stood in silence at 2:46 p.m. local time on April 11 to remember the thousands killed. (Athit Perawongmetha/Getty Images)
