Some were dropped at the rooftop of the reactor to furiously shovel debris off the facility and spray water on the exposed reactor to keep it cool. 1 and 2 were also shut down.īy the afternoon of April 26, the Soviet government had mobilized troops to help fight the blaze. Days later, many of those firefighters would be dead. Many of them would soon number among the 28 killed by acute radiation exposure.Įyewitness accounts of the firefighters who had helped battle the fires described the radiation as “tasting like metal,” and feeling pain like pins and needles on their faces, according to the CBC documentary series, Witness. (Credit: Igor Kostin/Sygma/Getty Images)įirefighters arrived at the scene within minutes and began to fight the blaze without gear to protect them from radiation. READ MORE: Chernobyl Disaster: The Meltdown by the Minuteĭebris after the nuclear plant explosion. Automatic safety systems that would normally have kicked into action did not because they had been shut down prior to the test. A fire started at the roof of Reactor No. The steam blasted the roof off the reactor, releasing plumes of radiation and chunks of burning, radioactive debris.Ībout two to three seconds later, a second explosion hurled out additional fuel. Within seconds, an uncontrolled reaction caused pressure to build up in Reactor No. What Happened at Chernobyl?Ī routine exercise to test whether an emergency water cooling system would work during a power loss started at 1:23 a.m. By 1983, four reactors had been completed, and the addition of two more reactors was planned in subsequent years. A small town, Pripyat, was constructed a few miles from the site of the nuclear plant to accommodate workers and their families.Ĭonstruction of the Chernobyl power plant began in 1977, when the country was still part of the Soviet Union. Then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would later say that he thought the Chernobyl meltdown, “even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”Ĭhernobyl is located in northern Ukraine, about 80 miles north of Kiev. The meltdown and its aftermath drained the Soviet Union of billions in clean-up costs, led to the loss of a primary energy source and dealt a serious blow to national pride. The Chernobyl disaster not only stoked fears over the dangers of nuclear power, it also exposed the Soviet government’s lack of openness to the Soviet people and the international community. Eventually, thousands of people would show signs of health effects-including cancer-from the fallout. The worst nuclear disaster in history killed two workers in the explosions and, within months, at least 28 more would be dead by acute radiation exposure. A routine test at the power plant went horribly wrong, and two massive explosions blew the 1,000-ton roof off one of the plant’s reactors, releasing 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Chernobyl is a nuclear power plant in Ukraine that was the site of a disastrous nuclear accident on April 26, 1986.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |