Oh the 80s… the gool old 80s! Great hairstyles, wonderful music, iconic fashion trends, amazing celebrities, a golden decade, right? Hmmmmm…. Maybe not. What do I mean, you’re wondering… well, the truth is that the 80s were also made of tragedy, misery, death and disaster. Let me tell you about… Chernobyl.
Saturday April 1986. The day was calm, and it looked as if everything was under control. No one could imagine that, before the day came to an end, the worst nuclear disaster in history both in terms of cost and casualties would come into being.
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident which occurred at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in Ukraine, which at the time was a Socialist Soviet Republic, on 25th and 26th April 1986.
This disaster is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven, the maximum severity, on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The other one is the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 people and cost an estimated 68 billion dollars in 2019.
The accident started during a safety test on a nuclear reactor, which was commonly used throughout the Soviet Union. Apparently, this accident was the conjunction of more than one aspect, more precisely the result of a flawed Soviet reactor design along with serious mistakes made by the plant operators. All in all, it was a direct effect of Cold War isolation and the lack of safety precautions, because it wasn’t part of the culture of the population and country.
So, what happened? Well, during the test, workers violated safety protocols, putting the reactor in a potentially unstable condition, which caused power to start rising inside the plant. Despite attempts to shut down the reactor entirely, another power surge caused a series of explosions inside until finally the nuclear core was exposed, and a gushing radioactive material was released into the atmosphere, vaporising superheated cooling water. Consequently, the reactor core was destroyed in a highly destructive steam explosion.
For about nine days, there was an open-air reactor core fire that released considerable airborne radioactive material, contaminating parts of the USSR and western Europe, especially Belarus, 16 km away. The fired ended up being active for a long time until it was finally contained on May 4th 1986 and it gradually released about the same amount of contamination as the initial explosion. The reactor explosion immediately killed two of the reactor operating staff and sadly, in the emergency response that followed, 134 station staff and firemen were hospitalized with severe radiation syndrome, 28 of which died in weeks that followed to incident.
On April 27th the 30,000 inhabitants of Pryp’yat began to be evacuated. However, the USSR was never honest about the situation and a cover-up was attempted, but on April 28th Swedish monitoring stations reported abnormally high levels of wind-transported radioactivity and the authorities pressed for an explanation. The Soviet government admitted there had been an accident at Chernobyl, thus setting off an international outcry over the dangers posed by the radioactive emissions. This explosion forced about 49,000 people to leave the area, primarily from Pripyat. Some days later, a further 68,000 people had to be evacuated.
The total damage of this terrible accident cannot be stressed enough. Even now the Ukrainian government is paying benefits to 36,525 women who are considered to be widows of men who suffered as a result of the Chernobyl accident and as of January 2018, over 40 years after it happened, 1.8 million people in Ukraine, including 377,589 children, had the status of victims of the disaster. A figure that should makes us think is the number of people with disabilities among this population, which has risen from 40,106 in 1995 to 107,115 in 2018.
Another consequence of this disaster, although not as serious, was the one that occurred in Nature. In fact, after the radiation was released, the trees surrounding the plant were killed by it. This region came to be known as the "Red Forest", since the dead trees turned a bright ginger color.
In conclusion, some moments in History should not be repeated and this is one of them. A tragedy as serious as this one is something we definitely do not want to experience again.
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