Chernobyl Accident

On april 26, 1986, the worst accident in history at a nuclear power plant occurred at the Chernobyl power station near the town of Pripyat, about 70 miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine. Reactor 4 of the complex exploded, creating an inferno that spewed massive amounts of radioactive particulate matter into the atmosphere. The Soviet authorities responded by dumping boron and sand onto the [Page 241]inferno by helicopter. After the fire had been contained, the ruins of the reactor were encased in a thick shell of concrete. The destroyed reactor was a Soviet RBMK model, which was notorious for its design flaws. Worst of all, because the power plants with RBMK reactors were designed to permit reprocessing of fuel rods for military applications, it was not possible to provide them with the containment shells that are standard in Western plants. In addition, the staff at the Chernobyl complex was not sufficiently familiar with the intricacies of the RBMK reactors, or even with nuclear power plants. On the night of the accident, the staff attempted to power down Reactor 4 in order to conduct a safety test. However, prior to conducting the test, they disabled many safety features and proceeded despite clear indications of accelerating irregularities within the reactor, precipitating the meltdown in the core that was the source of the explosion.

Official Soviet accounts differ significantly from other sources in calculating the manifold effects of the disaster. Between 31 and 70 people died, either in the explosion or because of their exposure to massive amounts of radiation in the efforts to extinguish the fire. Some 800,000 workers, about half of them military personnel, were involved in the effort to seal the ruined reactor in concrete. Because half of these workers were from the Ukraine and the rest were from all corners of the former Soviet Union, it has been almost impossible to trace the health effects of their exposure to the Chernobyl complex. Investigators have estimated that about 15,000 of these 800,000 workers died in the decade following the disaster.