CIRCA 1986

In 1986, one of the worst man-made disasters known to mankind occurred. The incident that happened on the 25th to 26th of April 1986 was a nuclear power plant catastrophe that we came to know as the Chernobyl disaster. Scientists claim that the zone around the former power plant would not be inhabitable for approximately 20.000 years. So, how was such a thing able to happen? Was the power plant not equipped with sufficient safety measures? The answer to such questions is in a series of sequences.  

Let us start from the beginning. The supposed crisis happened in what was known as the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant (Chernobyl Power Plant) near the city of Pripyat, Ukraine. The power plant itself has been running tests for quite some time, and on the 25th of April 1986, further testing was on the schedule. The test itself was simple. It was to test whether the core could still be cooled in a blackout scenario. However, safety protocols were ignored to push the testing to the limits. The workers pulled most of the power plant’s control rods from its core while running the power at minimum capacity. Without the control rods and an efficient cooling system that were supposed to keep the chain reaction inside the core in check, the power plant experienced a power surge as the happening chain reaction became uncontrollable. During this panic, the workers pressed the emergency button to insert all the control rods back into the core and stop the chain reaction. They pressed the button at 1:23:40 AM 26 April 1986. Despite that, rather than the nuclear core going into shutdown, it exploded and hurled radioactive materials into the air and areas around it. All were too late, it seems.  

The disaster was so cataclysmic the radioactivity present in the nearby atmosphere was several times stronger than that of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War 2. Radioactive particles brought by the wind were even detected in the country’s neighboring states. Residents of Pripyat, which was near the power plant, had to evacuate permanently from the city. The incident not only took a toll on the lives of the people but also cost the Soviet Union around $235 billion to fix the problem. Today, the site of the Chernobyl Power Plant is sealed using a shelter structure to prevent radiation from further spreading. 

References

Blakemore, E. (2019, May 18). The Chernobyl Disaster: What Happened, and the Long-term Impacts. Retrieved January 23, 2022, from National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/chernobyl-disaster

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2021, November 30). Chernobyl Disaster. Retrieved January 23, 2022, from Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/event/Chernobyl-disaster