NINETY-YEAR-OLD Ivan Shamyanok says the secret to a long life is not leaving your birthplace, even when it is a Belarusian village poisoned with radioactive fallout from a nuclear disaster.

    On April 26, 1986, a botched test at a nuclear plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, sent clouds of smoldering nuclear material across swathes of Europe and forced more than 100,000 people to leave a permanently contaminated “exclusion zone” stretching across the Ukraine-Belarus border.

    Shamyanok’s village of Tulgovich is on the edge of the zone, which at 2,600 square kilometers is roughly the size of Luxembourg. But he and his wife turned down the offer to relocate and never felt any ill effects from the radiation.

    “So far, so good. The doctors came yesterday, put me on the bed and checked and measured me. They said ‘everything’s fine with you, granddad,’” Shamyanok said.

    “My sister lived here with her husband. They decided to leave and soon enough they were in the ground ... They died from anxiety. I’m not anxious. I sing a little, take a turn in the yard, take things slowly like this and I live,” he said.

    The 30th anniversary of the disaster has shone a new light on the long-term human impact of the worst nuclear meltdown in history.

    The official short-term death toll from the accident was 31 but many more people died of radiation-related illnesses such as cancer. The total death toll and long-term health effects remain a subject of intense debate.

    Shamyanok says life didn’t change much after the meltdown at Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear disaster. He and his family continued to eat vegetables and fruit grown in their own backyard and kept cows, pigs and chickens for the meat, milk and eggs.

    Now that his wife has died and children moved away, he and his nephew, who lives on the other side of the village, are the only people left. “Will people move back? No, they won’t come back. The ones who wanted to have died already.”(SD-Agencies)