(dpa) -
Twenty-two years after the atomic reactor disaster in Chernobyl, people in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus held memorials to the victims Saturday.
In many Ukrainian towns and cities, people laid flowers and wreaths at memorial
monuments and lit candles, Interfax news agency reported.
Several hundred protestors against nuclear energy also protested in Minsk against the planned construction of a nuclear power plant in Belarus.
"There must be no second Chernobyl," said Belarusian opposition
politician Alexander Milinkevich in the traditional protest march.
The authoritarian government of Belarus, led by President Alexander Lukashenko,
defended the plans, saying the country needed to limit its dependence on oil
and gas.
Hundreds of villages around the site of the Chernobyl accident are still
contaminated and uninhabitable as they are too dangerous for people's health,
Emergency Situations' Minister Vladimir Shandra said in Kiev.
In 500 still inhabited villages, levels of radioactive caesium in food were
over permitted limits, Shandra said.
There is still uncertainty over the exact extent of the damage caused by the
April 26, 1986 accident in the Chernobyl reactor in northern Ukraine.
While a central study by the World Health Organization (WHO) says that 4,000
people would die over the long term as a result of the accident, opponents of
nuclear energy say there will be up to 100,000 deaths.
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