Mind & body.

I had four great days in and around the Hanseatic League city, Visby, and its island of Gotland. As the new Gudrun Sjödén catalogue says: the island is a symphony of greys. Visby, though, is vivid, and brilliantly coloured. It has plenty of Farrow and Ball chic, but also bags of winter-defying gaudiness. (All in the best possible taste, of course.) Here's a brief guide... Read more...

I've been invited to the Greenbelt religious festival (27/08/11) to debate " The Poor are Poor because the Rich are Rich?" It is arranged round a Methodist document, Of Equal Value: Poverty and Inequality in the United Kingdom. Read more...

There are 10 mini-essays on this site which intend to do honour to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the extraordinary people who are associated with it. See the "Browse by tag" menu at left. Here's a v short YouTube video of an RDN visit to the surviving Chernobyl plant in 2005. You may be interested in Chernobyl's cancer death toll, and an account of that appears here. If you're kindly interested in my personal take on Chernobyl, read on below..... Read more...

What happened on 26 April 1986 Read more...

The reactors at Chernobyl were RBMKs, which moderate their fission processes with graphite and are cooled by water. Hence their common Western name: LWGR, or light-water graphite reactor... Read more...

In some sense all errors are human. Reactor 4's design made it fallible, but Soviet secrecy made it impossible for its designers to explain the weaknesses of their work. Soviet bureaucracy also made it likely that the reactor might not be well built and maintained... Read more...

What happened next? As news of the accident filtered out to the people who ran the Chernobyl plant and its satellite town, and – simultaneously – to Kiev and Moscow, the first problem was that the senior managers of the plant either did not grasp or could not bare to reveal the full extent of the disaster. Read more...

It is surprisingly hard to allocate blame for the Chernobyl accident. Within the soviet system, nuclear power stations could only have been designed by an ambitious and secretive scientific elite working with an ambitious and secretive technological elite to deliver the national ambitions they all shared and which were guided by a political elite who had complete power to advance a person to giddy heights, or consign them to outer darkness. Read more...

To a surprising degree, it suited many parties - governments, journalists, and campaigners - to exaggerate the consequences of Chernobyl, and then to blame them on the Soviet regime. Read more...