The Chernobyl nuclear disaster
In April 1986 the eyes of the whole world were on the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl just 2 miles from the city of Pripyat in the Ukraine, as engineers, scientists and Soviet soldiers (Ukraine was then part of the Soviet Union) struggled to bring Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor under control and prevent the further release of radioactive gases into the atmosphere above the plant following a number of explosions and subsequent fires which had seriously damaged the nuclear core. This was the worst nuclear accident that had occurred since the opening of the first nuclear power plant a little more than 30 years previously.
The man-made accident occurred as engineers were carrying out tests on emergency shutdown procedures. They had previously established that in the event of an electrical power failure emergency generators would not kick in quickly enough to allow cooling systems continue to do their work and were experimenting with a new electrical system to overcome this. They managed to cause a massive power spike with which the system could not cope leading to the emergency.
The biggest source of nuclear contamination was the result of fallout from the radioactive clouds of gas that escaped from the nuclear power plant. However, as was to happen 27 years later at Fukushima, attempting to cool the reactor by spraying on millions of gallons of water resulted in that water and steam made from it being radioactively contaminated and escaping in an uncontrolled fashion into the environment.
It took 10 days to bring the situation under control and dangerous radioactive material was being spewed into the air throughout those 10 days. Soviet military helicopters were used to dump tons of material from above into the exposed reactor until leaking radiation levels were low enough to allow emergency workers on the ground to get near the damaged reactor. The reactor was eventually sealed in a massive concrete ‘sarcophagus’ and the rest of the plant, which contained three other reactors, has been decommissioned.
Soviet scientists claim that 60% of the radioactive fallout fell within a relatively short distance of the plant. There is plenty of evidence from around Europe and as far away as Canada and Japan of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl plant. Weather forecasts at the time included charts of the progress of the radioactive gas clouds.
The Soviet authorities had to evacuate nearly 120,000 people from areas surrounding the plant up to a radius of almost 20 miles and a permanent exclusion zone was set up in the areas immediately around the plant. Many of those evacuated had already been exposed to critical radiation levels and there was a massive increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer following the event (caused by exposure to radioactive iodine).
There is considerable debate as to the death toll arising from the Chernobyl incident, the only consensus seeming to be that 2 workers died from the initial explosion. At the very minimum, a further 60 people died from acute radiation sickness in the immediate aftermath. It is likely that there were many more deaths further afield and in the months and years following the disaster.
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