Well, they tried but it about near bankrupted them. That’s what happens when you play with toys you can’t afford when they break. Fukushima hasn’t been kind to Japan’s economy either, and they’re rich.
There was no knowledge of the concept, so no need to describe it as something it isn’t, either.
Not really.
Which led to a blackly hilarious comment from Mark Russell - “The Soviet response has been, ‘This has been blown out of proportion.’ Yes - it’s been blown into Sweden!”
Actually, if you’re going to translate it literally, it should be something like “the name of the star is wormwood. A third of the waters turned to wormwood…”
The link from ‘wormwood’ to ‘Chernobyl’ is the result of two inexact translations. It’s only a striking match if you want it to be.
According to Google Translation, wormwood in Russian is ‘Gor’kaya polyn’’. So, I’m going to go with 'no…Chernobyl doesn’t mean wormwood in Russian. The only hits I get for Chernobyl=wormwood are from nutty religious web pages talking about Revelations.
I was thinking some more about this today. In a quite literal and truthful sense, a nuclear reactor is the opposite of a star. It’s doing the opposite of what a star does.
Well, the Ukrainian for “nuclear reactor” is not “star” and the city of Chernobyl was there before anyone thought to stick a nuclear reactor there.
And in the nitpickingest of nitpickingnous, fission can occur in a star. Rough neighborhood, that is.
Not if you have one of those fusion reactors!
Well, quite, but we haven’t built one named ‘wormwood’ yet.
Was that the inspiration for this song?
As this article shows, the Fukushima story will be a long one and I doubt a happy ending…