But no "radioactive catastrophe" has ever befallen Tarusa, a picturesque spot some 75 miles south of Moscow on the river Oka, or any towns nearby.
His father, he said, flew by helicopter to Chernobyl in the days after the disaster as emergency workers desperately tried to contain the radiation leak and clean up the radioactive catastrophe.
The Marshallese, meanwhile, say that a country with a population of 53,000 people and a GDP of $190m – most of it from US aid programs – is simply incapable of dealing with the potential radioactive catastrophe left behind by the Americans.
The bottom one said: "To the victims of radioactive catastrophes, their courage and devotion to duty".
Tens of thousands of people are believed to have died prematurely from the catastrophe which spread a radioactive cloud over Europe in 1986, but last year 17,000 people visited the so-called exclusion zone anyway.
"This will not be another Chernobyl," experts reassured us on the one hand, without explaining what it could be; news reports warned that a worst-case scenario would be a "catastrophic" release of radioactive material, without attempting to define the specific impact of such a catastrophe.
Engineers have been letting sea water into the reactors and letting off some radioactive steam, hoping they can keep a catastrophe from happening long enough for the reactors, slowly, to cool.
Ionizing radiation (IR) is a form of electromagnetic radiation produced by X-ray machines, fluoroscopy, radioactive isotopes, as well as nuclear environmental catastrophe.
The major cause of the high incidence of thyroid cancer in children under 15 years of age appears to be contamination resulting from that catastrophe, mainly with isotopes of radioactive iodine.
All are meant to be working by the end of the year.At each monitoring station, a small staff, mostly graduate students, will collect air samples twice a week and send them to Florida State University in Tallahassee to check whether they contain either atmospheric pollutants or radioactive iodine, which is released during nuclear catastrophes.
Among them are extreme conditions of work, sleep irregularity, radioactive fallouts, thrown during the first month of catastrophe, combustion products, toxic elements in decontamination agents and burning of different materials, and also exhalation of boron and lead (sand, containing lead and boron, was strewed into destroyed reactor).
