Exactly at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986 an explosion occurred in the fourth power unit of the “Lenin“ nuclear power plant.
This is the worst accident in the history of nuclear energy.
It causes a cloud of radioactive waste that passes over parts of the USSR, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Vast areas in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are contaminated, and about 200,000 people have been evacuated from their hometowns. Nearly 60% of radioactive waste falls on the territory of Belarus.
The incident raises the question of the safety of Soviet nuclear power, delaying its development for some time.
Wrong decisions and unfortunate confluence of circumstances lead to a fatal explosion, summarizes "Deutsche Welle".
The Chernobyl NPP reactors were shut down and later decommissioned. A fourth reactor was enclosed with an unstable concrete cocoon.
The battle to contain the accident, and prevent the occurrence of a second explosion with a power of more than 5 megatons, which would have flooded all of Europe with radioactive dust, as Pripyat is now flooded, cost the USSR approximately $50 billion poured into -less than 6 months. This, combined with the subsequent collapse of oil prices on the international market (the price drops by 1/3), created a serious hole in the budget and the beginning of a severe economic crisis in the USSR.
According to a report by "Greenpeace" since 2006, the Chernobyl disaster has resulted in over a quarter of a million cases of cancer, of which nearly 100,000 have been fatal. The Union of Concerned Scientists – non-governmental organization, assumed that the number of deaths due to Chernobyl will vary around 25 thousand – six times the UN forecast. And according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the accident will take the lives of 16 thousand Europeans by 2065.
Because despite the catastrophe, Ukraine is still betting on nuclear energy today? The available 15 nuclear reactors provide nearly 60 percent of the energy supply. “We are a poor country, we need atomic energy”, says the Ukrainian Minister of Ecology, Hana Vronska. The former nuclear disaster is hardly discussed in today's Ukraine.
“People have other concerns – the conflict with Russia, the corruption, the vacillating government, the poverty,”, an employee at the German embassy who grew up in Chernobyl told Deutsche Welle.
Officially in Ukraine alone, 2.3 million people, including 220,000 "liquidators", are considered "victims of the disaster". in Chernobyl.
About 300 people still live in a 30 km radioactive zone. These are people who for nothing in the world want to leave their homes, even if they are contaminated with radiation. They live according to the rules of natural economy. They start returning to their homes a few weeks after the accident...