Mitja Gustinčič, Slovenia
Mr. Gustinčič is a civil technician and a journalist. He believes that people today are less prepared to cope with a nuclear accident than they were in 1986. All the shelters built in Yugoslavia have been turned into storage rooms when Slovenia became independent and storage rooms usually don’t have gas masks! This and other thoughts he shared in an interview with Irena Ipavec who works for him.
1. Familiar background of the time witness
Mitja Gustinčič is a journalist, specialised in motorcycles and motor racing. He was born in 1957 in Koper, a town on the Slovenian Coast, but for the majority of his life he has lived in Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia). His profession is a civil technician. He was born in the editorial family and has one brother.
When the accident in Chernobyl happened Gustinčič was 29 years old and he had a job in a small building company as a computational technician for the production charging. Already at that time his hobby was journalism connected with testing motorcycles and sports reports. He was also racing with motorbikes so he was travelling quite a lot.
Today, Gustinčič has a 31-year-old son, a 2-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old granddaughter. He is the owner of the successful motorcycle magazine called “MotoSI”. He is knowledgeable about many different topics and he claims that he is not concerned about the nuclear energy at all, because he is ready to accept the risk in the name of progress and he trusts that we have learnt from our mistakes. Nevertheless, in the map he marked the location of Chernobyl approximately 700 kilometres closer to Ljubljana than it actually is (its actual location is about 1700 kilometres from Ljubljana).
Read the full interview
