On August 27, 1977, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was put into operation. Nine years later, the plant wrote one of the darkest pages in the history of peaceful nuclear power.
The accident that occurred on April 26, 1986 in the Fourth Reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant “Lenin” in the then Soviet Republic of Ukraine, is the worst accident in the history of nuclear power.
It caused a cloud of radioactive waste that passed over parts of the USSR, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Vast areas in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were contaminated, and about 200 thousand people were evacuated from their homes. Nearly 60% of the radioactive waste fell on the territory of Belarus.
The accident raised questions about the safety of Soviet nuclear power, temporarily slowing its development. The now divided countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are bearing significant costs for decontamination and healthcare as a result of the Chernobyl accident.
According to a 2006 report by "Greenpeace", the Chernobyl disaster led to over a quarter of a million cases of cancer, of which almost 100,000 were fatal. Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-governmental organization, estimated that the number of deaths from Chernobyl would be around 25,000 - six times higher than the UN estimate. And according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the incident will take the lives of 16,000 Europeans by 2065.
The accident in northern Ukraine was a combination of faulty design and operational error that created a deadly radioactive cloud. The reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were shut down and later decommissioned. A fourth reactor was enclosed in an unstable concrete cocoon.
The battle to contain the accident, and prevent a second explosion with a power of over 5 megatons, which would have flooded all of Europe with radioactive dust, as Pripyat is now flooded, cost the USSR 18 billion then US dollars (approximately 50 billion today) poured out in less than 6 months. This, combined with the subsequent collapse of oil prices on the international market (the price fell by 1/3), created a serious hole in the budget and the beginning of a severe economic crisis in the USSR.