The knowledge of the population of the Czech Republic about the radiation risks resulting from accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The Chernobyl disaster is still considered to be one of the biggest catastrophic accidents in the history of nuclear energetics. After the explosion of the nuclear reactor, abundance of radioactive substance escaped to the atmosphere and in the shape of the radioactive cloud affected even the area of the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Political parties and state authorities reacted on this situation by setting up the state committee, which under political pressure intentionally concealed the information about the risks and consequences of the disaster for the Czechoslovak population. The collapse of the regime not only revealed the crisis of the mistrust to the official sources of information, but also improved the effort of getting information from unofficial and, according to regime, illegal sources. The Chernobyl disaster also caused the mistrust to nuclear energetics. Therefore construction and initiation of the Temelín nuclear power station elicited the interest to the information about The Chernobyl disaster. I have decided to authenticate in my thesis, how well the residents of the Czech Republic are familiar with the Chernobyl disaster and how objective their knowledge about the radiological risks arising from the Chernobyl disaster at present are. I found out the state of the foreknowledge of the residents of the Czech Republic about the radiological risks arising from the Chernobyl disaster by means of questionnaires, where 200 respondents were interviewed. For more detailed research, I divided the residents of the Czech Republic into two groups. The first one consisted of the inhabitants that live in the zone of the disaster preparedness of the Temelín nuclear power station and comprise one half of respondents. The second group consisted of the inhabitants that live of the zone of the disaster preparedness. I drew up questions in the questionnaire in order to include the given problems completely ? from the knowledge about the risks arising from the disaster and emission of the radioactive substances to their consequences for human?s health and the way of reduction their impacts on the population of the Czech Republic. I evaluated the answers from the respondents to the single answers and drew up the tables. I accomplished them by the percentage evaluation of the right and wrong answers, computation of total mean of the achieved points and the total percentage success rate. The evaluation of the knowledge of the respondents of the Czech Republic was accomplished on the basis of the value of total mean of the achieved points and percentage success rate. I did a statistical evaluation by testing normality using ?2 Pearson's chi-squared test. The mutual comparison of the knowledge I did by testing by means of the two-sample t-test on the basis of the guess of the empirical parameters from each group. On the basis of this evaluation of the results of the questionnaire I can declare that the knowledge of the residents of the Czech Republic about the radiological risks arising from the Chernobyl disaster are at a very good level. The results also proved that inhabitants of the zone of the disaster preparedness of the Temelín nuclear power station have greater knowledge about the radiological risks arising from the Chernobyl disaster than the rest of the Czech Republic. It can be observed in the conclusion that all predetermined aims were successfully achieved and the results of the questionnaire also proved the assigned hypothesis