The Chernobyl Nuclear
Accident.
In northern Ukraine, sixteen kilometers from the border with
Belarus, there is a town that used to be home to fourteen
thousand people and became a ghost town. And it will have been
thousands of years before it becomes habitable again. The town
of Pripyat was the chosen settlement for hundreds of workers of
the Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin nuclear power
plant near
Chernobyl.
On April 26, 1986, the most serious nuclear accident in history
occurred, due to the explosion of one of its reactors after a chain
of failures in the safety systems. It was one of the most important
plants of its kind at the time.
The objective was to observe the activity of one of the reactors
with limited power flow. However, what was originally intended to
be a routine task, a safety test, became the beginning of a real
nightmare. The drill proceeded normally until a power outage
occurred at one of the plants, forcing it to be postponed until the
evening. Even so, the night shift staff had not received specific
information and they were not prepared. One of the reactors
suffered a reduction in its power and was temporarily
deactivated.
Although the workers managed to stabilize it, at 1:24 p.m. the
reactor suffered an accumulation of hydrogen inside, causing two
explosions. The steam generated by the first explosion destroyed
the concrete roof and the second only aggravated the
circumstances. Two people died instantly and radiation was
released very quickly.
When emergency services arrived, a 30-kilometer security
perimeter, known as the "Alienation Zone" or "Dead Zone," was
cordoned off. State media did not report the event in great detail.
Because of this, an international alarm was raised after
radioactivity was detected in at least thirteen European countries.
Even under these serious conditions, the 130,000 inhabitants of
nearby towns were not evacuated until thirty-six hours after the
accident. More than a thousand people received strong doses of
radiation, causing the direct death of twenty-nine of them.
The Ukrainian authorities initiated an emergency plan: they
dumped a mixture of materials over the core to contain the
radiation. They also dug a tunnel under the reactor, which was
filled with concrete to prevent melting, meltdown and
contamination of the groundwater.
Finally, a structure was ordered to be erected to enclose the
reactor and isolate it from the outside, called a "sarcophagus",
which would contain the radiation for thirty years. Then, In
November 2016, thirty years after the tragedy, a new
sarcophagus was inaugurated, that should stop the radiation for
at least one
hundred
years.
However, the environmental consequences were disastrous. The
radioactivity spread across much of Europe, contaminating an
area of five million people. Two days after the accident,
radioactivity levels in Berlin, the German capital, were twice as
high as normal.
Nevertheless, there are long-term consequences on health and
the environment that are very difficult to account for. Some
estimates claim that the blast was 500 times greater than that
caused by the Hiroshima atomic bomb in 1945. By The
International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) the
Chernobyl accident was classified as level 7, that is, a major
accident.
For the moment, only a few families have dared to return to its
vicinity, despite government warnings. Only tourism seems to
benefit from Chernobyl, a place where time seems to have frozen
forever.
To draw a
conclusion, one
can say that on that day not only did a nuclear reactor explode,
but it also changed the history of mankind forever. From my point
of view, it was the worst nuclear accident the world has ever
known. It expelled more than 300,000 people from their homes
and caused the release of large amounts of radioactive material,
causing much contamination. ‘Let the pictures speak for
themselves’.
By Valeria Navarro.