On April 26, 1986, a series of events led to the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident at the Chernobyl station, located in Pripyat, about 65 miles north of Kyiv in present-day Ukraine.
The disaster began during what was supposed to be a safety test. Engineers wanted to see if the reactor’s turbine could still power emergency water pumps using only its own momentum (inertia) if the power went out. To conduct this test, they disconnected the reactor’s emergency safety systems.
The engineers had little knowledge of reactor physics and made several critical mistakes, and the overall experiment was poorly managed. They ran the reactor at a dangerously low power level, making it unstable. When they tried to increase the power again, they removed too many control rods, which is the tools used to slow down nuclear reactions.
At 1:23 a.m., the test proceeded. Without enough cooling water, the power level inside Reactor No. 4 surged out of control. Operators tried to stop the reaction by reinserting all 200 control rods at once. However, a design flaw in the rods’ graphite tips actually caused the reaction to spike even further before it could be slowed down.
The result was a massive steam explosion that blew the 1,100-ton concrete lid off the reactor. A second explosion followed, releasing 50 tons of radioactive material into the air. This radioactive dust was carried by wind currents across Northern and Eastern Europe.
In the initial days, 32 people died from the blast and radiation burns. However, the Soviet government did not immediately admit there was a problem. It wasn’t until radiation monitoring stations in Sweden, over 800 miles away, detected levels 40% higher than normal, that the Soviet Union acknowledged the accident.
The evacuation of nearby Pripyat didn’t begin until 36 hours after the explosion. Residents were told they would return in a few days and were instructed to bring only their ID and a few personal items. Most of them never saw their homes again.
The original Chernobyl sarcophagus, or the shelter object, is a massive steel and concrete structure from 1986 that covered the destroyed Unit 4 reactor to contain radioactivity. Due to degradation, it was replaced by the massive New Safe Confinement (NSC) in 2019. The NSC is designed to last over 100 years and allows for the future dismantling of the old structure.
The structure was built on rails and moved into place in 2016, but final sealing, commissioning of systems, and testing were finalized in early 2019.
About 220,000 people were eventually resettled. The area around the plant, known as the Exclusion Zone, remains largely closed to human living because radiation levels are still ten times higher than normal. An estimated 5,000 Soviet citizens died from radiation-induced illnesses like cancer, and millions more suffered long-term health effects.
Image Credit: Olga355/iStockPhoto
While the area remains contaminated, nature has begun to take over the ghost town of Pripyat. Trees grow through cracked pavement, and animals have returned to the abandoned streets. Interestingly, parts of the village have become a tourist destination since 2011, allowing people to see firsthand the frozen-in-time remains of a Soviet city and the site of history’s most devastating nuclear failure.
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