© Sputnik / Igor Kostin
10:34 26.04.2018(updated 11:31
26.04.2018)Get short URL
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MOSCOW (Sputnik) -
Thursday, April 26, marks the 32nd anniversary of one of the worst man-made
disasters in history, the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in
northern Ukraine, where the once-busy city of Pripyat has now been reduced to a
ghost town.
The Chernobyl plant, called
the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station in the Soviet era, was the first ever
nuclear power plant built on Ukrainian soil.
The construction of the
station kicked off in 1970. Seven years later, the first reactor came
online and by 1983 the plant’s four reactors were producing about 10
percent of Ukraine’s electricity.
While the plant was
under construction, the Soviet government began the construction
of the first Ukrainian and ninth Soviet atomic-town to house workers
and their families. Before the nuclear disaster, the city of Pripyat had a
population of about 50,000 people.
Pripyat is now an eerie
lifeless shadow of the ghastly nuclear catastrophe, one of only two
rated at a 7 on the International Atomic Energy Agency scale
of nuclear disasters.
© SPUTNIK / ALEXEI FURMAN
Exclusion zone on eve of
27th anniversary of Chernobyl disaster
On the night of April 25,
1986, a group of engineers at Chernobyl’s number four reactor began an
experiment to test new equipment. The operators needed to reduce the
reactor’s power capacity, but as the result of a miscalculation, the
output dropped to a critical level, triggering an almost complete
shutdown.
A decision was taken
immediately to increase the power level. The reactor started
to overheat, and a few seconds later two large explosions occurred.
The explosions partly
destroyed the reactor core, igniting a fire that continued to burn
for nine days.
© SPUTNIK / GRIGORIY VASILENKO
Pripyat, Chernobyl
exclusion zone
Radioactive gases, aerosols
and dust immediately shot into the air above the reactor. A giant
radioactive cloud moved toward European countries.One hundred ninety tons
of highly radioactive material were expelled into the atmosphere,
exposing people to radioactivity 90 times greater than that
from the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Vast areas estimated
at 50,000 square kilometers, mainly in the three then-Soviet
republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, were contaminated by the
fallout from the critical nuclear meltdown.
Evacuation measures began
on April 27 and lasted for about 3 hours. About 45,000 people were
relocated and some 116,000 were forced to leave the area and neighboring
regions. About 600,000 people from all of the former Soviet republics
assisted in the evacuation.
PRESIDENT OF THE UKRAINE
PRESS-SERVICE
Thirty-one people were
reported dead in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear disaster and
the 600,000 "liquidators" received high doses of radiation,
averaging around 100 millisieverts. The highest doses were received by about
a thousand emergency workers during the first day of the catastrophe.
In total, about 8.4
million citizens of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine were exposed
to radiation.
According to the Union
Chernobyl of Ukraine, about 9,000 Russian liquidators died and
over 55,000 were disabled as a result of the Chernobyl tragedy.
On July 7, 1987, six former
officials and technicians at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant went
on trial on charges of negligence and violation of safety
regulations. Three of them – Viktor Bruyihov, the former Chernobyl power station
director, Nikolai Fomin, the former chief engineer and Anatoly Dyatlov, the
former deputy chief engineer – were sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Soon after the explosion,
an exclusion zone with a radius of 30 kilometers (17 miles) was
established.
In the immediate aftermath
of the disaster, workers built a temporary shield over the damaged
reactor, called a sarcophagus. Over time, the sarcophagus has deteriorated and
in 2010 construction of a new shied started to prevent further
leakage at the crippled reactor.
Recently work on the
shield has been suspended amid the crisis in Ukraine.
The last reactor
at Chernobyl was permanently shut down by a decree of the
Ukrainian government in 2000. It is expected that the damaged power
station will be totally decommissioned by 2065.
In December 2003, the UN
General Assembly declared April 26 an international day of remembrance
to mark the memory of victims of radiation accidents and
disasters.
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