By Vasily Fedosenko TULGOVICH, Belarus (Reuters) – 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 smouldering 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.
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A rural retirement in Chernobyl’s radioactive shadow