Alexandra Prokopenko is a Belarusian journalist living, working and studying in Sweden. She spoke with Rod Adams while on holiday in Kiev, Ukraine.
This show truly demonstrates the individual power and freedom provided to the world by the Internet. While we talked via Skype video conferencing (without additional charges above our internet connection fees) Alexandra was in Kiev, Ukraine celebrating the Orthodox Easter holiday while I was in Annapolis, Maryland on drizzly Sunday afternoon. Disregarding the two hard drops of our Skype connection, it sounds like we are in the same room or at least in the same town talking over a very clean phone line.
I recently “met” Alexandra online through the introduction of a mutual friend. She is a young woman who was a four year old in Belarus at the time that the operators of the Chernobyl power plant decided to perform an undocumented test procedure and ignored all warning signs to the point where they blew up the reactor.
Alexandra, like many of her contemporaries, has an enlarged thyroid and a few other medical problems that she attributes to the effects of the materials released during the subsequent fire, but instead of becoming a bitter victim, she chose to become an inquisitive journalist and fact seeker.
We talked about a number of different topics including the accident, energy supplies in Eastern Europe, the Ignalina reactor in Lithuania, Sweden’s current plans regarding its nuclear future, Russia’s recently announced plan to build a large power station in Kaliningrad for the electricity export market, and the business practices that she observed as a translator working for Gazprom.
Alexandra is a fascinating person, an experienced print, radio and television journalist, a linguist (she speaks excellent English, Russian, Swedish, Belarusian, and can get by in Polish, German, French and Japanese), and a world citizen with a questioning attitude.
Please listen carefully to this interview and share it with your friends. I am sure you will not be disappointed and may even be energized – like I am – to find out that there are people like Alexandra in the business of informing the world about what they know and what they can find out.
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Great podcast.
great show Rod… I was reading this today:
http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19826514.200-nuclear-superfuel-gets-too-hot-to-handle.html
would love to ear your thoughts on this… maybe a show with the host of this week in nuclear would be nice. Read the comments on this page they are quite good.
quotes:
They say that fuels with a burn-up above 45 GWd/tU cause previously unforeseen safety problems, and would break existing NRC safety rules unless changes are made to the way fuel elements are packaged.
The danger would come if there were a sudden loss of cooling water – as in the accident that led to the partial meltdown of a reactor core at Three Mile Island,
Simon