#Chernobyl30: Ukraine Should Let Nuclear Energy Go - Rebecca Harms

What You Need To Know:

✓ “People have to live with the unlimited consequences of the radioactive fall-out, especially for Russians for Ukrainians and for people in Belarus;”

✓ Health consequences have been downplayed as a result of countries wanting to prolong their nuclear power programs;

✓ Germany's turn towards green energy as an alternative to high-risk nuclear technology was largely motivated by both Chornobyl and Fukoshima;

✓ Ukraine should rethink its energy strategy, “to come out high-risk technologies like nuclear, which fits to fight global warming and which in the end will also be less costly.”

“There was a time before Chernobyl, there will never be a time after, there will be a time since,” says Rebecca Harms, German MP of the European Parliament, thirty years after the nuclear disaster which caused the partial meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant . “People have to live with the unlimited consequences of the radioactive fall-out, especially for Russians for Ukrainians and for people in Belarus.”

While there are millions of people still living in the contaminated zone, and scientific evidence of an increasing number of cancers linked to the disaster, health consequences have been downplayed as a result of countries wanting to prolong their nuclear power programs.

According to the Harms, who is from the Green Party, Germany's turn towards green energy as an alternative to high-risk nuclear technology was largely motivated by both Chernobyl and Fukoshima: “Since 1986, there were better technical developments in Germany…When Fukoshima happened, the technology was already there. It took us two tremendous catastrophes to completely change our political approach on the energy sector.”

She believes that Ukraine, suffering the most from the Chernobyl disaster should now rethink its energy strategy, especially “to come out high-risk technologies like nuclear, which fits to fight global warming and which in the end will also be less costly.”

Hromadske’s Maxim Eristavi spoke to Rebecca Harms, German European Parliament member from the Green party on April 23rd, 2016 in Kyiv.