Below is the first story of 10 that Time Magazine wants you to compare to what is going on in the Gulf. It is hard to tell their intent here. Are they trying to say, “Look the Gulf spill ain’t so bad”? Are they trying to say, “Look mankind has a history of killing people off with toxics”? It is deeply troubling to me that they had to go all the way back to the 1950s to find 10 worse. That is kinda an uh oh moment for me.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1986457_1986501,00.html?cnn=yes&hpt=C2

Top 10 Environmental Disasters

As the Gulf of Mexico oil spill shows little sign of abating, TIME takes a look back at history’s greatest environmental tragedies

By Gilbert Cruz Monday May 3 2010

ZUFAROV / AFP / Getty Images

The worst nuclear-power-plant disaster in history. On April 26, 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine exploded, resulting in a nuclear meltdown that sent massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, reportedly more than the fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That radiation drifted westward, across what was then Soviet Russia, toward Europe. Since then, thousands of kids have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and an almost 20-mile area around the plant remains off-limits. Reactor No. 4 has been sealed off in a large, concrete sarcophagus that is slowly deteriorating. While the rest of the plant ceased operations in 2000, almost 4,000 workers still report there for various assignments.

See TIME’s 1986 Chernobyl cover.

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