Donald Polfliet
Andrej Cebela is from Slovenia but studied in Belgium for a while. He talked to his fellow student Donald Polfliet about Chernobyl after their classes. In 1986, Donald was 16 and went to a technical high school in Gent.
Donald was born in 1970 and he lives in Gent, Belgium, outside the city center with a lot of gardens and the area is nice. He has two brothers, his father was a plumber and the mother was working in a school. He studied architecture and right now he is working in Public relations in Brussels.
In 1986 he was a technical high school student outside the Gent. He was 16, a teenager who was enjoying life and didn’t care about adult problems…
He knows that in Belgium exist at least 2 nuclear power plants, one in Wallonia (French speaking part), close to Dinant and the other in Flanders (Dutch speaking part). They were opened a long time before the Chernobyl accident.
He told me that they never discussed this problem about nuclear energy in school. The most information he got was from television. At that time also Outgate happened in Belgium and the first reaction was “It happened in Russia why not here”! But the government calmed him down saying that their NPPs have better installation, they are well protected.
When the accident happened he didn’t talk with his parents about that but he talked about general problems in Soviet Union. His parents were not so concerned because Belgium is small and more protected, controlled…
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