Radioactive Rochester?

Hope Burwell's "Jeremiad for Belarus" (pages 78-90) reminded me about how little I really know about the world.

Chernobyl is in Ukraine; that I knew. But I didn't know that Belarus is the country that has paid the biggest price for the 1986 accident.

I didn't know that the area in Belarus effected by fall-out is equal to 2/3's the size of Iowa.

Belarus is a poor country, and apparently no one in the international community cares about its people. Burwell documented that thousands, if not millions, of people are continuing to be slowly killed by Chernobyl as the world turns a blind eye. These are people that still live in the contaminated zones because they don't have anywhere else to go.

This is a country dying, and no one seems to care.

The only way the author can make us care, it seems, is to suggest that the same thing could happen here, in the United States. If the Duane Arnold facility in Iowa went Chernobyl, for example, the fallout would reach good old Rochester, Minnesota.

Sleep easy tonight. :)