B1-38 · Chernobyl: The Night That Changed Everything

Chernobyl: The Night That Changed Everything

On the night of April 26, 1986, an explosion at a power plant near the small Ukrainian town of Prypiat caused the worst nuclear accident in history. The name of the plant, Chernobyl, is still known all over the world.

A test that went wrong. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had four reactors. That night, the workers were testing what would happen to Reactor 4 during a power cut. While they were running the test, the power in the reactor suddenly jumped. At 1:23 a.m., there were two explosions. The heavy roof of the reactor was thrown into the air, and a fire started. Later, experts said that the reactor had a dangerous design and that safety rules were broken during the test.

The heroes. Firefighters arrived within minutes. Nobody told them how dangerous the radiation was, and they were wearing ordinary uniforms. By early morning, they had put out the fires on the roof, but many of them had received a deadly dose of radiation. Twenty-eight firefighters and workers died within a few months. Later, three men dived into the dark, flooded rooms under the reactor to open the valves, and hundreds of thousands of workers, called "liquidators", came to clean the area.

Silence and secrets. The people of Prypiat, a town of almost 50,000, were not told the truth. On April 26, children were playing outside and couples were getting married. The town was evacuated only the next afternoon. People were told to take their documents and food for three days. They never came back. The Soviet government said nothing to the world until April 28, when radiation was detected at a nuclear power plant in Sweden. In Kyiv, about 100 kilometers away, the May Day parade went ahead as usual.

The cloud. Radioactive dust was carried by the wind across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and then over much of Europe. The area of about 30 kilometers around the plant, the Exclusion Zone, was closed, and more than 300,000 people had to leave their homes. Nobody knows exactly how many people died later because of the radiation. Estimates range from a few thousand to many more.

Chernobyl today. The last reactor at the plant was shut down in 2000. In 2016, a huge steel arch was moved over the old reactor to keep the radiation inside. Wolves, wild horses and even bears now live in the empty zone. In 2022, Russian troops occupied the plant for more than a month. Many Ukrainians believe that the disaster, and the lies about it, showed people that the Soviet system could not be trusted.