”………… Kotin had just turned 22 when he was a summer intern at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1983, three years before the disaster.
“After [the explosion] happened, I recalled the situations I was in during my internship in 1983, and I had this feeling of utter horror,” he recalled.
The explosion was hundreds of times more powerful than the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contaminating an area the size of the United Kingdom in what is now Ukraine, Belarus and Russia………
Corrosive corruption
The 35 years that have passed since the Chernobyl explosion have also brought with them another problem the Soviet nuclear industry never faced: corruption. The nature of a planned economy and constant control of intelligence agencies under the Soviet Union made graft nearly impossible in the industry, but post-Soviet Ukraine became a hotbed of corruption.
Kyiv, Ukraine – The radioactive cloud that briefly hovered over most of Europe after the April 26, 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station had, after all, a silver lining, Petro Kotin says.
Thirty-five years after a botched security test caused the worst nuclear disaster in history, he is at the helm of Energoatom, a state-run consortium in charge of Ukraine’s four nuclear stations and their 15 reactors.
“We are unique because no other nation has the practical experience of overcoming such a disaster,” Kotin, who was appointed as Energoatom’s acting president in March 2020, told Al Jazeera in his office in central Kyiv.