Chernobyl is a nuclear power plant located in Ukraine, and it was the site of a catastrophic nuclear accident on April 26, 1986. The disaster occurred due to workers conducting a routine test incorrectly, resulting in two massive explosions that blew off the roof of one of the reactors and released radiation 400 times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. This made it the worst nuclear disaster in history. It began with the death of two workers in the initial explosions, and within months, at least 28 more people died from acute radiation exposure. Eventually, many more people living in the area began to show severe health symptoms, including cancer. The Chernobyl disaster left a massive environmental tragedy that prompted many countries to reconsider the use of nuclear power.
The disaster not only fueled fears about the risks of nuclear power but also exposed the Soviet government’s lack of transparency in addressing the Soviet people and the international community. The disaster and its aftermath drained the Soviet economy, which spent billions of dollars on cleanup efforts, in addition to losing one of its primary sources of energy and suffering a severe blow to Soviet national pride. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev later suggested that the Chernobyl disaster might have been a real cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse five years later, more than the launch of his perestroika policy.
The Chernobyl plant is located in northern Ukraine, about 129 kilometers north of the capital, Kyiv. A small town, Pripyat, was built a few kilometers from the nuclear plant to house the workers and their families. The construction of the Chernobyl plant began in 1977 when the country was still part of the Soviet Union. By 1983, four reactors were completed, with plans to add two more in the following years.
Investigations into the Chernobyl disaster revealed that at 1:23 AM on April 26, a routine exercise to test the efficiency of the emergency water cooling system during a power outage led to an uncontrollable reaction. This caused the pressure in Reactor 4 to build up as steam, leading to an explosion that blew off the reactor’s roof, releasing columns of radiation along with flaming, radioactive debris. A second explosion shortly after expelled additional fuel and ignited a fire on the roof of Reactor 3, breaching the facility since the automatic safety systems, which were supposed to activate, were inactive due to being shut off before the test.
Firefighters arrived at the scene within minutes and began fighting the fire without protective equipment from radiation (many of them soon became among the 28 who died from acute radiation exposure). Eyewitness accounts described firefighters experiencing a metallic taste in their mouths and feeling pain like pins and needles on their faces. Many of them died within days. Reactor 3 was not shut down until 5 AM the following day, about 24 hours after the Chernobyl disaster, and Reactors 1 and 2 were subsequently closed. By noon on April 26, the Soviet government mobilized troops to help fight the fire, with some being thrown onto the reactor roof to clear debris and spray water on the exposed reactor to keep it cool. They worked in shifts to reduce radiation exposure. It took almost two weeks to extinguish all fires using sand, boron, lead, and nitrogen. During this time, life continued as usual in Pripyat for about a day after the accident, except for the sight of trucks cleaning the streets with foam. It wasn’t until the next day, April 27, that the government began evacuating 50,000 residents of Pripyat, telling them they would be away for just a few days, but in reality, they never returned to their homes.
As for Soviet leadership, it took days for the international community to be informed of the Chernobyl disaster. The Soviet government did not issue an official statement about the global incident until Swedish leaders demanded an explanation when their nuclear plant operators in Stockholm detected unusually high radiation levels near their plant. On April 28, the Kremlin finally reported the Chernobyl accident and that authorities were handling it. The announcement was followed by a broadcast detailing an American nuclear accident on Three Mile Island and other nuclear incidents in Western countries. For three more days, Soviet May Day parades continued as usual in Moscow, Kyiv, and Minsk, even as dangerous levels of radiation continued to pour from the damaged power plant, with most people, even within Ukraine, still unaware of the accident, deaths, and the rapid evacuation of Pripyat.
During the Chernobyl disaster, the damaged reactor released large amounts of radioactive materials, including iodine-131, cesium-137, plutonium, and strontium-90, into the air for over 10 days. A radioactive cloud settled nearby as dust and debris but was carried by winds over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Scandinavian countries, and other parts of Europe. In an attempt to contain the aftermath, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ordered the deployment of hundreds of thousands of people, including firefighters, military reserves, and miners, to the site for cleanup on May 14. They worked, often with inadequate protective equipment, to remove debris and contain the disaster.
In a rapid construction period lasting 206 days, a steel and concrete cover was built to encase the damaged reactor and contain any further radiation release. Workers operated in three shifts but only for five to seven minutes at a time due to radiation hazards. After finishing, they discarded their clothes as waste. Starting in 2010, an international consortium organized the construction of a larger, safer cover for the site over the damaged reactor. This new shell, completed in November 2016, significantly reduced radiation levels near the plant to one-tenth of the previous levels. The new structure was designed to contain radioactive debris for 100 years.
In 1995, five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian government announced that 125,000 people had died from the effects of Chernobyl radiation. A 2005 report by the UN Chernobyl Forum estimated that while fewer than 50 people died in the months following the accident, up to 9,000 people might eventually die from excess cancer deaths linked to radiation exposure from Chernobyl. As of 2005, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, approximately 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 15 thyroid cancer deaths were attributed to the Chernobyl disaster. To this day, the health effects remain unclear, except for the 30 people whose deaths from explosions and acute radiation exposure were confirmed by the Soviet government. No official government studies have been conducted after the explosion to assess its effects on workers, responders, and nearby residents. A study by the National Institutes of Health in 2011 concluded that exposure to radioactive iodine-131 from Chernobyl’s fallout was likely responsible for the reported thyroid cancers among those who were children or adolescents at the time of the accident.
In addition to the human toll that continues to unfold, the Chernobyl disaster also left a vast expanse of contaminated land. The surrounding area, 1,240 kilometers in width, is not considered safe for human habitation and cannot be used for logging or farming due to contaminated plants and soil. In December 2017, a German-Ukrainian company announced the construction of a massive solar power plant in the abandoned area. The solar plant, with a capacity of 1 megawatt, was built a few hundred meters from the damaged Reactor 4 and equipped with 3,800 photovoltaic panels. The Ukrainian government stated that a group of companies plans to develop up to 99 megawatts of additional solar power on the site. However, despite being a significant amount, it is still not close to the previous output of the destroyed nuclear plant, which generated 1,000 megawatts per plant of the four reactors.
In conclusion, humans are not expected to repopulate the area anytime soon. Ukrainian authorities have stated that living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone will not be safe for over 24,000 years. However, tourists can visit the site today to see the remnants of the Chernobyl disaster and observe what nature has done to the areas that were evacuated.
