BY THE time this issue

BY THE time this issue of Hot Press hits the newstands, Black Wind, White Land will have been screened by RTE. A documentary on the tragic aftermath of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, it offers a harrowing account of one of the world's forgotten disasters, cataloguing not just the immediate devastation which the fallout has caused throughout Belarus in particular but the terrible and as yet unknowable price which the people of this blighted region will ultimately pay for others' grotesque folly. Tens of thousands dead, disabled and sick with cancers, leukemia and other dreadful diseases; the land poisoned; people uprooted; families torn apart - and all the while the insidious spread of radiation continues in ways that we can scarcely even begin to comprehend. For the people of Belarus and indeed for other parts of the old Soviet Union, it is like a lethal time-bomb ticking away inside their collective blood and genes.

Watching Black Wind, White Land I was driven to tears. It is harrowing, and extremely moving, especially when it focuses on the profoundly beautiful faces of the children who have been sucked into this web of grief and terror. But it inspires horror and anger too, at the shocking way in which the State machine colluded, on so many levels, in the Chernobyl catastrophe. The history of the nuclear industry, and of the governments who have sponsored it, has been one of complete and utter contempt for people and a related obliviousness to the appalling destructive power of radiation that borders on the genocidal.

Whatever fudge might have been possible in the pre-Chernobyl era is no longer sustainable. The British nuclear industry has the capacity to deliver an even greater level of devastation on Britain itself, and indeed on Ireland, north and south, than has destroyed Belarus. In particular, the Sellafield Nuclear Reprocessing Plant is located just 70 miles off the Irish coast. The Irish Sea, as a result, is generally acknowledged to be the dirtiest in the world. And yet the British Government is allowing plans to increase activities in Sellafield to go ahead, with the imminent start-up of the Thorp facility there - a development which will result in a huge increase in the emission of radioactive materials, and multiply the dangers to Irish and British citizens alike frighteningly.

It is imperative that this process should be reversed, and that the movement towards the closure of Sellafield should be urgently set in motion. Every possible legal and diplomatic channel should be explored by the Irish Government, without further procrastination. And while they're getting on with those official moves, the people of these two islands should make their own voices heard.

If the inhabitants of Belarus had a second chance, they'd be screaming from the rooftops. But there are no second chances.

• Niall Stokes

Next issue: Gerry McGovern takes a detailed look at Thorp and examines Sellafield's appalling history of pollution.