They get into the thyroid gland and gradually destroy the immune system," says Ivan Blokov, program director of Greenpeace Russia and an expert on nuclear accidents. "The human body absorbs these particles very easily. That is mainly because of the radioactive iodine that has already been detected around Fukushima after the explosions and fires it sustained in the past several days. So the risk to human health there is already serious." "Walking around Chernobyl is much more safe than being anywhere near the damaged plant in Japan right now. "Right now the situation around the power station is already much more serious than what we have today around Chernobyl," says Savin, the chief engineer of Project Uktrytiye, or Enclosure, the group of scientists charged with the continuing effort to seal off and clear out the radiation from Chernobyl. (See photos of the devastation in Japan.) He says the government in Tokyo is clearly underestimating the scale of the disaster, which will likely require years of work to cleanse the surrounding buildings, topsoil and vegetation of radioactive particles and that's only if the situation does not get any worse. In an interview with TIME, the engineer in charge of dealing with the fallout from Chernobyl, Andrei Savin, warns that history could indeed be repeating itself in Japan. Now the world is faced with another nuclear nightmare at Japan's Fukushima Dainichi power plant, which has been brought to the brink of a meltdown by the earthquake and tsumani that struck Japan on March 11. Thousands are thought to have died of cancer as a result of the fallout. A huge section of Europe was covered in a carcinogenic haze after the April 1986 explosion and the towns and villages around the power station are still practically uninhabitable. 4 exploded, causing the worst nuclear disaster in human history. It will be 25 years next month since Reactor No. Follow the infamous atomic power plant in northern Ukraine, is getting ready for an anniversary.
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