Relics of the meltdown: The ruins of the Chernobyl region, as captured by an airborne GoPro (2.57)
While on assignment in Chernobyl with Bob Simon’s 60 Minutes team, cameraman Danny Cooke captured striking, eerie footage of abandoned towns. Places where people once lived, played and worked are now rusted ruins — relics of a time before the meltdown and evacuation.
Chernobyl: The catastrophe that never ended (13.11)
Nearly 30 years after the explosion, Bob Simon travels to Ukraine and discovers the reactor still has the power to kill
ome tragedies never end. Ask people to name a nuclear disaster and most will probably point to Fukushima in Japan three years ago. The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine was 30 years ago, but the crisis is still with us today. That’s because radiation virtually never dies. After the explosion in 1986, the Soviets built a primitive sarcophagus, a tomb to cover the stricken reactor. But it wasn’t meant to last very long and it hasn’t. Engineers say there is still enough radioactive material in there to cause widespread contamination. For the last five years a massive project has been underway to seal the reactor permanently. But the undertaking is three quarters of a billion dollars short and the completion date has been delayed repeatedly. Thirty years later, Chernobyl’s crippled reactor still has the power to kill.