LOMBOK NEWS – On April 26, 1986, Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, exploded and changed the history of nuclear energy forever. This wasn’t just an ordinary industrial accident — it was the worst nuclear disaster humanity has ever experienced.
That day was supposed to be just a simple test: checking whether the facility could survive 40 to 45 seconds without electrical power. The problem was, the technicians turned off almost all the safety features before running the test. That decision led to a series of irrevocable mistakes.
Without a functioning cooling system, a power surge triggered a steam explosion that destroyed the reactor core. Graphite fires followed and burned for days without stopping. The radioactive contamination released was a hundred times greater than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined.
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Inspectors concluded that the accident was caused by “an extraordinary series of human errors and violations of operating procedures.” But Vince Zabielski, a former nuclear engineer, stressed that the Soviet RBMK-type reactor design was just as culpable. There are no containment structures like in Western reactors to limit radiation leaks.
As a condition of entering the European Union, all countries using the RBMK design are required to permanently cease operations. The decision speaks volumes about how fatally flawed the reactor design was. Chernobyl was not only a tragedy, but also an engineering lesson that cost lives.
Two workers died within hours of the explosion, and 28 others followed from radiation poisoning. Anatoli Zakharov, the surviving firefighter, had joked to his colleagues that night that they would be lucky to be alive the next day. It turns out that many people are not lucky.
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Radiation kills slowly and mercilessly. Petro Hurin, one of the “liquidators” tasked with cleaning up the reactor, revealed that of the 40 people on his team, only five were still alive. “None of the Chernobyl people were healthy,” he told Reuters.
Ionizing radiation can damage living tissue and tear strands of human DNA. Even low doses can trigger cancer and other long-term health problems. It is estimated that around four to six thousand cases of thyroid cancer, mostly in children, can be directly linked to this disaster.
Dr. Thom Davies from the University of Nottingham thinks we will probably never know the true number of victims. Radioactive material spread silently and invisibly throughout Europe, including England. Davies calls the area around the reactors “toxic geography” — a landscape that is still contaminated decades later.
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It took 36 hours before the city of Pripyat, which has a population of nearly 50,000, was finally evacuated. Soviet officials did not inform citizens about the true scale of the destruction, simply cramming them into buses. Doctors were even forbidden to diagnose radiation sickness and were asked to call it a nervous breakdown.
It wasn’t until a monitoring station in Sweden, 800 miles away, detected high levels of radiation that the Kremlin admitted something terrible had happened. In the following years, the government expelled 350 thousand local residents, turning them into “nuclear refugees.” Dr. Davies likens that number to the entire population of Iceland uprooted from their homes.
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone now stretches across a thousand square miles and remains largely empty. About 150 survivors live on the outskirts of the zone, mostly elderly women who call themselves samosely or “self-settlers.” One of them, Yevhen, returns after a decade and insists he only wants to live in Chernobyl.
A makeshift cover called a sarcophagus was built over the reactor to contain the radioactive dust. Since 2016, the structure has been enclosed by a 40,000-ton steel shell called the New Safe Confinement. A monumental technical solution to an equally monumental problem.
After being declared safe for limited visits, Chernobyl actually became a popular tourist attraction. In 2019, 120 thousand tourists came, driven by the HBO miniseries Chernobyl which aired the same year. The Russo-Ukrainian war did reduce visitation numbers, but tours are still offered from £25.
Without human presence, the exclusion zone turns into an unfathomable natural paradise. Wolves, horses and the offspring of abandoned domesticated dogs wander among the crumbling apartment buildings. Scientists have made this zone a living laboratory to study the effects of chronic radiation on living things.
The most surprising finding came from wolves which actually developed genetic resistance to cancer due to high radiation exposure. Frogs in this zone have darker skin as a form of protection from invisible radiation. Nature, it turns out, finds its own way to survive even though humans have long left. ***
