It was April 26, 1986when reactor 4 at its nuclear power plant Chernobyl was completely destroyed, by a terrifying explosion. In the early hours of that Saturday, workers at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power plant began scheduled work on an experiment to test the safety systems. No one could have predicted what happened next.
As part of the experiment, technicians shut down the station’s fourth unit’s automatic power regulation systems, as well as safety systems, but left the reactor operating at 7 percent of its power. At 01:23 in the morning, chain reaction in the fourth reactor it caused successive explosions, which blew up the thousand-ton steel cover of the reactor. Huge quantities of radioactive material were scattered into the air, through which it was transported to the surrounding areas at a rapid rate.
AP Photo/Volodymyr Repik, File
AP Photo/Igor Kostin
AP Photo/Rainer Klostermeier/str
The nuclear accident, considered the worst in history, contaminated huge areas mainly in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The consequences of the accident were also felt in much of western Europe. As a result of the accident, 2 of the employees of the station died on the spot. In the following days, 28 firefighters died from acute radiation syndrome.
On April 28, Swedish monitoring stations began recording high levels of radioactivity and demanded an explanation. Although the Soviet government initially tried to cover up the incident, it was forced to admit that there had been a “small accident”.
For ten days, burning nuclear fuel released millions of radioactive elements into the atmosphere, an amount equivalent to 200 bombs like Hiroshima. Radioactive dust spread over Europe and up to the North Pole.
The explosion and resulting fires released at least the 5% of the reactor’s radioactive core into the environment, spreading radioactive material into the atmosphere, affecting health hundreds of thousands of peoplewith thousands of deaths from cancer and leukemia.
The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded that, apart from approx. 5,000 thyroid cancers (resulting in 15 deaths), “there is no evidence of significant public health effects attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident.”
About 350,000 people they left their homes because of the accident.
AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky
The “secret” of the USSR
According to the BBC, the true number of deaths and illnesses caused by the nuclear accident was concealed by the Soviet Union.
A controversial report published by members of the Russian Academy of Sciences suggests that Chernobyl cleanup crews may have involved up to 830,000 people. They estimated that between 112,000 and 125,000 of them – about 15% – had died by 2005. Much of the report’s evidence, however, has been questioned by scientists in the West as to its scientific validity.
The Ukrainian authorities kept a register of their own citizens affected by the terrible accident. In 2015 there were 318,988 Ukrainian cleanup workers in the database, although according to a recent report by the National Research Center of Radiotherapeutic Medicine of Ukraine, 651,453 cleanup workers were screened for radiation exposure between 2003 and 2007. A similar registry in Belarus recorded 99,693 cleanup workers, while another registry included 157,086 Russian workers.
In Ukraine, death rates among them have increased from 3.5 to 17.5 deaths per 1,000 people between 1988 and 2012. Disability rates among those workers have also skyrocketed. In 1988, 68% of them were considered healthy, while 26 years later only 5.5% were still in good health. Most – 63% – suffered from cardiovascular and circulatory diseases, while 13% developed problems with the nervous system. In Belarus, 40,049 people were reported to have developed cancer by 2008, along with another 2,833 from Russia.
THE International Atomic Energy Agencyhowever, reports that studies of the health of people asked to clean up the station “failed to show any direct correlation between their exposure to radiation” and cancer or other diseases.
AP Photo/Andrew Kravchenko, Pool
War
On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2022Moscow troops entered the highly radioactive exclusion zone around Chernobyl from Belarus and occupied the plant, which has been inactive since 2000. They stayed there for a month before leaving, destroying, according to Kiev, scientific material.
Today, on the 38th anniversary of the disaster, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned of the risk of a nuclear accident at its station Zaporizhiawhich has been occupied by Russian forces.
The Russian military took control of this nuclear plant, located in southern Ukraine, almost immediately after its invasion of the country. Before its seizure, the Zaporizhia station produced 20% of Ukraine’s electricity.
“It has been 785 days since the Russian terrorists took the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant hostage,” Zelensky complained to Kh.
“It is up to the whole world to put pressure on Russia to release the Zaporizhia station and return it to the control of Ukraine,” he added, estimating that “this is the only way to avoid new disasters” like that of Chernobyl.
With information from BBC, World Nuclear Association, APE-MPE
