Chernobyl Disaster Overview and Impact

"I only knew that something very bad was happening beyond our eastern border. When I arrived at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw in the morning that day, a nervous assistant was waiting for me in front of the building. I will never forget her words for the rest of my life: Listen, a telex came from the measurement station in Mikołajki. The radioactivity in the air there is 550,000 times higher than yesterday. Our parking lot is also heavily contaminated. This is the first time I have heard about the Chernobyl accident I heard on April 28, 1986. Late in the afternoon, in my office at CLOR, I was listening to BBC radio. In 2019 , the English reported that there had been a serious accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. In this episode, we invite you to 1986 and a history that - even after several decades - still influences the mass imagination, and reminds us about it on an ongoing basis the Russian army, which, during the ongoing war in Ukraine, irresponsibly attacks the place where it happened. Chernobyl - a city in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, which shared its name, derived from the plant growing in the area - mugwort, which is medicinal and magical according to the Slavs - with the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant built nearby (about 18 km from the city). The decision to build the power plant was made in 1966. And before the first machines entered the construction of the first unit in 1972 , on February 4, 1970, a housing estate for its employees was established near the power plant (about 4 km) , which expanded over the years and gained the status of a city - Pripyat. Pripyat was created as a so-called nuclear city - "atomgrad", i.e. a type of closed city, serving strategic facilities for the country, often secret and subject to restrictions on movement and residence. The world learned about this remote place, closed to strangers, as a result of many uninteresting circumstances in which, as is often the case in such stories, we find a mixture of bad decisions, incompetence and ordinary human mistakes accumulated at one time, but also a lot of courage, sacrifice and heroism of those who had to correct these mistakes. Today's story is the story of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a good place to live in the USSR, which was the modern city of Pripyat serving it, and a massive disaster that in an instant changed the future of this place, terrified the world, and, as some say, also contributed to the fall of the then-tottering colossus that was the Soviet Union. We invite you to watch the latest episode. As always, thank you for your support, for all your comments, thumbs up and, of course, subscriptions. Your commitment and curiosity about the world have contributed to the fact that there are over 10,000 of us here. Thank you very much for this next joint success and let's get started. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was built in stages. The plan was to launch 12 power units on its premises, which would make it the largest facility of this type in the world. Ultimately, by the time of the disaster, in the years 1977-1982, four RBMK-1000 reactors were put into operation successively, each of which could produce 1,000 MW of electricity (3,200 MW of thermal power), and together they provided about 10% of the energy of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Chernobyl, like the power plants in Leningrad and Kursk, was based on light water, boiling graphite-moderated nuclear reactors called RBMK, i.e. High Power Channel Reactor. RBMK was originally designed as part of the Soviet program to build reactors to produce plutonium for military purposes. Its prototype, producing energy for the city, called AM-1, or Atom Mirnyj (Polish - peaceful atom), was created in 1954 in Obinsk. and the first RBMK-1000, developed in the 1960s by the team of prof. Nikolai Dolleżal, was put into operation in 1973 as part of the Sosnovy Bór power plant near Leningrad. The technical solutions of this reactor, on the one hand, enable it to be converted at any time to produce plutonium for military purposes, on the other hand, Under normal conditions, they enabled the use of natural uranium as fuel, without enrichment, which made it one of the most economical nuclear blocks. It sounds quite pleasant, especially to the ears of the decisive notables, but, as was often the case in the USSR, economics did not go hand in hand with responsibility and safety principles, and possible threats were often treated as purely theoretical. This can be confirmed, for example, by the numerous cases of employing incompetent people at the Chernobyl power plant, as well as turning a blind eye or even covering up minor or major accident errors. And the RBKM, with all the mentioned advantages of its technical solutions, also had one fundamental drawback, which, unfortunately, ultimately exceeded the limits of theory and decided to test Soviet reality. Namely, an increase (instead of a decrease) in reactivity as the amount of steam in the reactor core increased , which automatically made its control more difficult and, as a consequence, could lead to a loss of stability and, as we now know, not very interesting end results. Today, when we think of Chernobyl, in our imagination we see the remains of the power plant covered with a concrete sarcophagus and the abandoned infrastructure of the city of Pripyat, which is increasingly consumed by nature every year. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, both working at a power plant and the opportunity to live in Pripyat for a Soviet citizen were almost like hitting six in the lottery. The city accompanying the nuclear power plant, built from scratch, was intended to ensure the most comfortable life possible for its employees - engineering staff and workers - specialists in various fields. In principle, for the young, talented minds of the nation. The average age in the city was 26, and 1/3 of the inhabitants were children. Good infrastructure, permanent work and free apartments - it captured the imagination. Therefore, the city grew rapidly. Although, over time, more and more of these lucky people received jobs and housing due to their merits or acquaintance, and not necessarily due to their unique competences or abilities. The city was designed according to the best concepts developed at that time in the USSR, as a show city. A model for the development of cities at that time, which was still dominated by large, gray and cramped housing estates with narrow streets. The best Soviet architects, including Gennady Ivanovich Oleszko, who was appointed the city's chief designer , exemplarily implemented the concept of the so-called "micro-rayons", used in later years in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc countries. These repetitive micro-districts, which were the basic elements of the newly designed housing development, dividing the city into smaller functional parts, were intended to provide residents with comfort and the best possible access to basic services, while reducing the costs of their construction. A typical microdistrict, covering an area of 10 to 60 hectares, consisted of multi-story residential buildings and public buildings. The natural boundaries separating individual micro-areas were most often main roads, green areas and natural obstacles. The established standards regulated issues such as entrances to microdistricts, which were to be located at a maximum distance of 300 m from each other, and the availability of public buildings (excluding schools and kindergartens), where the limit was set at a maximum of 500 m from any residential building. We can still see similar solutions today in large Polish housing estates built at that time. Typical services that were supposed to make life easier for residents were high schools, kindergartens and nurseries, grocery stores, personal services, cafes, clubs, playgrounds , administration and specialized stores. In Pripyat, which, in addition to ensuring comfort for employees of a strategic facility such as the power plant, was also planned to become a large transshipment point located on key transport routes in the future, it was ensured that all these assumptions were fully implemented. It was also experimentally used, developed by a team of Moscow Architects led by Nikolai Ostozhenka and the principle of triangular development approved by Oleszko's team, in which loosely arranged - in a triangular arrangement - five-story blocks were interspersed with tall 10-story buildings overlooking the open space. This arrangement ensured comfort for residents, and together with wide and parallel streets, it was supposed to eliminate traffic jams in the city in the future. Cultural and visual issues were also taken care of . In the central point of the city, a large square was built with a community center, a shopping center, a cinema, a comfortable hotel for visiting guests, offices and two sports complexes with, among others, a swimming pool and playing fields. Looking at photos from the 1970s, we see a clean, spacious city with many places for rest and recreation, and lots and lots of roses planted along the streets and sidewalks. According to the project, which, in addition to providing residents with a sense of space, was to take care of the rich colors of the city, the facades of the buildings were decorated with decorative ceramics and propaganda paintings, and many colorful and illuminated panels and advertisements were placed. Supply in Pripyat was also at a high level, definitely higher than in an average Soviet city. In the local department store you could buy many luxury goods, rarely seen even in the capital of the republic - Kiev. The city was developing rapidly and had every reason to become a vibrant, important point on the map of the Soviet Union for years to come. Everything changed in the spring of 1986, when, not for the first time in the USSR, incorrect design solutions of the technology used came into contact with Soviet nonchalance, shallow imagination and exuberant human ego. "We knew, with certainty, with arrogant certainty, that we controlled the power with which we were playing," Sergiy Parashyn (an engineer at the plant since 1977) later said . "We could force the forces of nature to submit to our will. There was nothing we couldn't do." “That was obviously the day we found out we were wrong.” Soviet scientists learned about this quite clearly on the night of April 25-26, 1986. For this spring night, the crew of reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant planned a test of the unit to check the corrections made to the reactor's emergency control system. The reactor used part of the energy generated for its own needs, including powering cooling water pumps and control systems. Previous tests have shown that after the main electrical power was lost and the steam supply to the generator turbines was cut off, they stopped rotating too quickly due to momentum alone, thus not providing power to the control and safety systems long enough until the emergency generators were turned on. Tests showed that the reactor could be deprived of power and therefore no control over it for as long as 45 seconds. The procedure for testing the introduced modifications and new design solutions is scheduled for April 25. The day shift assigned to conduct the experiment prepared , familiarized itself with the procedures, and began reducing reactor power as planned. A team of experts led by Anatoly Dyatlov, chief specialist in nuclear reactors and deputy chief engineer of the power plant, was also on standby to supervise the entire operation. Meanwhile, as a result of unforeseen circumstances and an unexpected power outage at one of the nearby power plants, dispatchers from Kiev ordered the reactor to remain in operation until the evening in order to ensure electricity supply in the region during the afternoon peak . Therefore, when the experiment was resumed, another night shift, previously prepared for other tasks, began its activities, and the supervisory team, somewhat irritated by the whole day's waiting, was simply tired. Anatoly Dyatlov himself was an experienced nuclear physicist. However , in his career, in the 1960s, while working at the Komsomolsk Shipyard on nuclear submarines, he had already fought one unsuccessful battle with similar technology. As a result of a series of wrong decisions, it led to... dangerous incident during which he received a radiation dose of 200 Rem. He survived, but this experience and the subsequent death of his son from leukemia left an impact on him, and he began to treat his work as a competition with technology and an attempt to harness this powerful force at all costs. He also had a rather brusque approach to his subordinates, from whom he expected blind obedience, not having the habit of explaining his decisions to them. Now, during the delayed test at the Chernobyl power plant, deaf to the observations and doubts of some of the staff, he made subsequent wrong decisions and authoritatively gave risky instructions, being aware that the operator responsible for operating the reactor during this shift was a young and inexperienced engineer with just over two months of experience. On that fateful night, several of these bad decisions and commands, including the unnecessary disabling of the automatic shutdown mechanisms, led to a situation in which the reactor subjected to the test procedure reduced its power very significantly (to only 30 MW, when the initial assumptions were for a maximum reduction in the range of 0.7 to 1 GW), became severely destabilized and... started its own procedure, less and less controlled by humans with every second. The reactor, designed for the military production of plutonium, leaked easily and at a small power was starting to become unstable. Dyatlov's subsequent risky decisions, intended to lead to a temporary increase in the too much reduced power of the reactor by extending more and more control rods, with their specific design causing them to be lowered again quite slowly, led to even greater destabilization of the unit when the reactor's madness began, and as a result, loss of control over the ongoing reaction. Inserting control rods too slowly and improperly constructed, instead of shutting down the reactor, caused a sharp increase in its power, overheating of the core, cracking of some fuel rods, and finally deformation of their own columns and blockage after only partial insertion. The reactor was boiling. In a few seconds, its thermal power, exceeding its norm ten times, reached 30 GW, and huge amounts of steam, instantly emerging from the water cooling it, caused a sharp increase in pressure. The fuel channels and water pipes couldn't handle it. They cracked. And the melting, ultra-hot fuel began to fall into the arms of the cooling water. The first powerful explosion occurred, completely destroying the reactor core, which at that moment came into contact with the coolant and began the last chord of this nuclear symphony. The zirconium that lined the destroyed fuel channels reacted with water, releasing hydrogen, which in turn created a highly explosive mixture with oxygen, two or three seconds later, in a second, even more powerful explosion, it blew off the 1,200-ton protective cover of the reactor, destroyed the building and ended this lightning-fast and uncontrolled chain reaction, spewing the remains from the fuel channels and several hundred tons of burning graphite into the atmosphere. clouds of radioactive dust and steam. These two large explosions, destroying reactor number 4 in a dozen or so seconds, also killed two employees and resulted in a series of fires that began to release further tons of radioactive particles into the environment. It was 1:24 a.m. on April 26, 1986. For the city and its sleeping, unaware inhabitants, the drama of life has just begun. "The fire - as described by one of the men who woke from sleep to the wail of the main siren - was burning directly on top of Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It broke out at exactly 1:23:48 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when the plant's fourth reactor exploded. And, as a subsequent investigation proved, there was no shortage of warnings... but they were either ignored or deliberately concealed." - Mohamed Makhzangi It was extinguished only after a few hours, and burying the burning reactor core took as long as 10 days. To extinguish it and limit the release of radioactive particles, approximately 5,000 tons of boron, dolomite, sand, clay and lead were dropped into the fire by helicopter. The previously mentioned Sergiy Parashyn, who later became the director of this plant, said that since the dials indicated problems, the safe approach would be to stop the test. "If we did that, everything would be fine." "This is not what we chose." The disaster itself, as well as the circumstances before and after it, were described quite colorfully and graphically by Mohamed Makhzangi, a writer and doctor who worked in a Kiev hospital in 1986 . Here's an excerpt: "The nuclear fuel was now exposed and emitting deadly radiation through a hole in the roof. A new kind of volcano had erupted and the first person it destroyed was the one who had caused it. It had completely vaporized. No trace of this reckless scientist remained. The atomic genie had escaped from the bottle, unsealed by human carelessness in the face of advanced technology. Sheer stupidity had managed to bypass over 100 security systems - to the point where that the reporter who reported on the incident suggested the need to establish a new system, which was to be called "protection against stupidity." On that dark night of mystery and confusion, even those closest to the plant did not know the extent of the disaster, deliberately lied to downplay the danger involved, and that the inhabitants of Pripyat, the families of the plant's workers, slept deeply with their windows wide open, exposed to the evening gusts of spring wind. An evening of nuclear horror, carefully concealed by local bureaucrats who hoped to extinguish the fire without alerting the nearby city of Kiev - the capital of the district, in the northern part of which, on the so-called "Kiev Sea", 85 km away, Chernobyl was located. And we in Kiev also slept deeply, although we closed the windows against the rain." The initial reports sent by the plant's management to Kiev and Moscow were very reassuring. They suggested an explosion of water tanks, not to mention any damage to the reactor. The director of the plant, Viktor Bryukhanov, as we can read in the documentation made available in 2021 by the Security Service of Ukraine, wrote in his first report to his superiors that there were 200 people on the premises of the plant at the time of the disaster. employees, and nine people suffered burns to varying degrees and that: "one person died at 6 a.m. in the medical unit. The condition of three people is serious. 34 people involved in extinguishing the fire were brought to the medical unit for examination ." The report concluded: "The situation in Pripyat and nearby towns is normal and the radiation level is controlled." For many hours, the radioactive cloud vanished carelessly into the air, and the inhabitants of Pripyat began a normal day and sent their children to school. Even before monitoring stations in other countries, including the Polish facility of the Radioactive Contamination Measurement Service in Nicholas, began to receive alarming data from their regions, in Chernobyl, on April 26, the investigative commission to investigate the causes of the Chernobyl accident began its mission. One of its members, assigned as an expert by the Institute of Atomic Energy, was Valery Legasov, who specializes in the safety of nuclear power plants . a factory that lights up the night sky with its glow. I remember this road to this day. I must say that at that time it did not occur to me that we were heading towards a world event, an event that would probably be remembered forever in the history of mankind, like the eruptions of the famous volcanoes, the deaths of people in Pompeii or something of this scale." Legasov, unlike many others, was concerned about the situation and his task. He was active on the spot, compiled a report analyzing the causes of the disaster, and instead of the permissible 2-3 weeks, he stayed in the contaminated area for about 4 months. Ultimately, his involvement harmed him more than anything else. helped. From then on, his scientific career faced many obstacles, and higher authorities prevented him from even receiving his degree hero of the Soviet Union. However, in the spring of 1986, he was one of the first to understand the scale of this catastrophic failure and made many important decisions that helped limit the effects of the disaster in those first days, when everyone was blind or downplayed the situation . Among other things, he invented a mixture of loose materials that helicopters dropped on the hot reactor core, but, equally importantly, he pushed for the quick evacuation of the inhabitants of Pripyat. Years later, one of the employees of the emergency services in Pripyat recalled that day: "It was evening. I was at home, reading. I was called to work. I did my job. I came home in the morning. I heard about an evacuation on the radio, that there would be buses to take things, food, documents. They said it would be for three days. It turned out to be for 35 years. (...) I took the documents, one or two shirts." About 50,000 people fled their homes in a long caravan, leaving behind virtually all their belongings. Another tens of thousands, pursuant to a government regulation, were evacuated and resettled in the following weeks, and Pripyat - a joyful, colorful and modern city for the USSR, instantly became the so-called "exclusion zone", and in the following years, bit by bit, absorbed by nature and time, it turned into a ruin and earned the term "ghost town". At the same time, all the services involved, including the guards and the army, were running around, not fully aware of what they were involved in and what the further consequences might be. In a hurry and suddenly called to remove the effects of the explosion, employees and officers, exposed to air contaminated with radioactive steam and smoke and contact with irradiated materials, were initially not even equipped with any protective equipment. In the general organizational chaos and in the absence of complete data, it was still necessary to monitor and coordinate the activities of many people and rescue services on an ongoing basis. Every good and quick decision was worth its weight in gold and helped to limit further disastrous effects that could still occur. One of such pressing issues turned out to be the strength of the reactor substrate, on which tons of sand and boron were dropped to extinguish its core. There was concern that its collapse under the weight would cause the remnants of ignited fuel to flow directly into the water tank located under the reactor, leading to another powerful explosion and endangering the remaining three reactors. This in itself increased the scale of the disaster, but it could also lead to the concrete foundation burning through and radioactive soup leaking into groundwater and poisoning rivers. This is where three brave firefighters stepped into action. In a highly risky, almost suicidal mission known from the movie, regardless of the need to pass through highly irradiated water and their own safety, they reached the valves that required manual unscrewing, unscrewed them and allowed the tank to be pumped out. At that time, representatives of another industry taking part in the rescue operation - miners - dug a 150 m tunnel to supply nitrogen coolant under the reactor, which was to prevent the melting of the concrete base. Eventually, the reactor began to cool and the tunnel was filled with high-temperature concrete. In the following weeks, months and years, many people still had a lot of work to do, both in removing the effects and securing the area and the damaged reactor itself, which over time was encased in a tight concrete sarcophagus. The remaining reactors were shut down one by one, and the last one - unit number 3 - was finally shut down in 2000. In the previously mentioned documents, made public by the SBU years later , we can find information that accidents at the power plant had also occurred earlier. In a 1978 memo prepared for the head of the KGB in Kiev, it was reported that agents and trusted persons continued to receive data proving gross violations of construction, fire and health and safety standards during construction and installation works of the Chernobyl power plant, which led to accidents. But such evil stories did not officially occur in the Soviet reality, so instead of eliminating the actual problems, consequences were more often brought against the alarming agents who were considered saboteurs. We can read further: "For example, in 1982 there was a significant release of radioactive substances in reactor number 1, but the KGB report on this matter ends with the traditional phrase: Measures were taken to prevent panic and provocative rumors." A year later, further disturbing information also reached comrades in Moscow. They were able to read reports that classified the Chernobyl power plant as one of the most dangerous nuclear power plants in the USSR due to the lack of safety measures in reactors number 1 and 2, and its radioactivity in the event of an accident was estimated at "60 times higher than during the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan." Looking at these examples and the entire contemporary history of Russia and the USSR, it seems that the perfect description of the Russian approach to reality could be the famous sentence once uttered by the German philosopher Georg Hegel: "If the facts contradict the theory, so much the worse for the facts." And the facts were that on the seven-level international nuclear and radiological emergency scale INES, the Chernobyl accident was classified as the highest level, seventh. The radioactive cloud contaminated over 125,000 km2 on the border of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, forcing the evacuation and displacement of almost 350,000 people in the following weeks. Then she headed towards the unaware Europe. The communist Soviet authorities remained silent and even in Moscow many notables had no idea about anything. It was only on April 27 that Swedish stations measuring radiation levels began to record increasingly alarming readings. In Poland, the indicators started going crazy on April 28 in the morning, two days after the disaster. With the information embargo in the final years of the Cold War, many suspected the worst. Prof. In an interview for "Polityka", Zbigniew Jaworowski answered "Atomic war" when asked by Marcin Rotkiewicz about his first thought. Only later in the day did BBC radio suggest that the cause of the ominous cloud hovering over Europe might be a power plant failure in the Soviet Union. Polish specialists in the field of nuclear technology were aware of the seriousness of the situation and tried to influence decision-makers from Warsaw to take a number of actions. It was recommended to close schools, limit leaving home to a minimum, prohibit cattle grazing, and test the radioactivity of meat and dairy plants. Although some actions were abandoned both for propaganda reasons and to avoid causing panic, as was rare in the Polish People's Republic, at least in the first days, the authorities, regardless of the initial denials of their comrades from Moscow, began to act in the interest of their own citizens. In the following days, the Government Commission for the assessment of nuclear radiation and preventive activities was established , and one of the effects of its activities, in consultation with CLOR, was the decision to undertake iodine prophylaxis. Thanks to a dose of stable iodine, it was intended to block the access of radioactive iodine to the thyroid gland. Single doses of stable iodine in the form of the so-called Lugol's solution, which our country prepared as a preventive measure in the 1970s for civil defense purposes, were administered to 18.5 million Poles, which had not occurred on such a scale in any other country and made this operation the largest preventive action in the history of medicine, performed within a few days. At the same time, in the communist reality, both in Poland and the USSR, there were things that were more important and important. Some of the most important were the appropriate image of the authorities and propaganda messages that calmed the public mood. Therefore, contrary to the advice of experts, the upcoming May Day parades were not canceled and crowds were even encouraged to participate in them. Today we know that the threat posed by the radioactive cloud was much lower than was believed at the time, even though almost 600,000 people around the world were exposed to an increased dose of radiation equivalent to two photos X-ray. However, we must remember that, according to various reports, as a result of the described disaster, 31 people died directly, including 28 immediately after the accident as a result of strong radiation, at least 16,000 people who were under 18 years old at the time of the disaster were diagnosed with thyroid cancer, 10,000 fetal deformations and 5,000 infant deaths occurred. Psychological issues related to both the accident and resettlement, such as depression, alcoholism, trauma, mental illnesses and radiophobia, are also a big problem that has been timidly making its way into public awareness for years. In addition to health issues, there are also huge economic costs. Over several decades, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on activities related to the closure of the power plant, decontamination and the construction of a sarcophagus over the reactor, and subsequent losses were generated by hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and forests excluded from production. Finally, it is worth mentioning the political consequences of the disaster, which perhaps at least somewhat compensated for this enormous human and economic tragedy. Politically, the Chernobyl drama was of great importance for the implementation of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform activities and helped normalize relations with the USA at the end of the Cold War. But above all, it became one of the key factors in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the final end of the functioning of the so-called Eastern Bloc

"I only knew that something very bad was happening beyond our eastern border. When I arrived at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw in the morning that day, a nervous assistant was waiting for me in front of the building. I will never forget her words for the rest of my life: Listen, a telex came from the measurement station in Mikołajki. The radioactivity in the air there is 550,000 times higher than yesterday. Our parking lot is also heavily contaminated. This is the first time I have heard about the Chernobyl accident I heard on April 28, 1986. Late in the afternoon, in my office at CLOR, I was listening to BBC radio. In 2019 , the English reported that there had been a serious accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. In this episode, we invite you to 1986 and a history that - even after several decades - still influences the mass imagination, and reminds us about it on an ongoing basis the Russian army, which, during the ongoing war in Ukraine, irresponsibly attacks the place where it happened. Chernobyl - a city in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, which shared its name, derived from the plant growing in the area - mugwort, which is medicinal and magical according to the Slavs - with the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant built nearby (about 18 km from the city). The decision to build the power plant was made in 1966. And before the first machines entered the construction of the first unit in 1972 , on February 4, 1970, a housing estate for its employees was established near the power plant (about 4 km) , which expanded over the years and gained the status of a city - Pripyat. Pripyat was created as a so-called nuclear city - "atomgrad", i.e. a type of closed city, serving strategic facilities for the country, often secret and subject to restrictions on movement and residence. The world learned about this remote place, closed to strangers, as a result of many uninteresting circumstances in which, as is often the case in such stories, we find a mixture of bad decisions, incompetence and ordinary human mistakes accumulated at one time, but also a lot of courage, sacrifice and heroism of those who had to correct these mistakes. Today's story is the story of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a good place to live in the USSR, which was the modern city of Pripyat serving it, and a massive disaster that in an instant changed the future of this place, terrified the world, and, as some say, also contributed to the fall of the then-tottering colossus that was the Soviet Union. We invite you to watch the latest episode. As always, thank you for your support, for all your comments, thumbs up and, of course, subscriptions. Your commitment and curiosity about the world have contributed to the fact that there are over 10,000 of us here. Thank you very much for this next joint success and let's get started. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was built in stages. The plan was to launch 12 power units on its premises, which would make it the largest facility of this type in the world. Ultimately, by the time of the disaster, in the years 1977-1982, four RBMK-1000 reactors were put into operation successively, each of which could produce 1,000 MW of electricity (3,200 MW of thermal power), and together they provided about 10% of the energy of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Chernobyl, like the power plants in Leningrad and Kursk, was based on light water, boiling graphite-moderated nuclear reactors called RBMK, i.e. High Power Channel Reactor. RBMK was originally designed as part of the Soviet program to build reactors to produce plutonium for military purposes. Its prototype, producing energy for the city, called AM-1, or Atom Mirnyj (Polish - peaceful atom), was created in 1954 in Obinsk. and the first RBMK-1000, developed in the 1960s by the team of prof. Nikolai Dolleżal, was put into operation in 1973 as part of the Sosnovy Bór power plant near Leningrad. The technical solutions of this reactor, on the one hand, enable it to be converted at any time to produce plutonium for military purposes, on the other hand, Under normal conditions, they enabled the use of natural uranium as fuel, without enrichment, which made it one of the most economical nuclear blocks. It sounds quite pleasant, especially to the ears of the decisive notables, but, as was often the case in the USSR, economics did not go hand in hand with responsibility and safety principles, and possible threats were often treated as purely theoretical. This can be confirmed, for example, by the numerous cases of employing incompetent people at the Chernobyl power plant, as well as turning a blind eye or even covering up minor or major accident errors. And the RBKM, with all the mentioned advantages of its technical solutions, also had one fundamental drawback, which, unfortunately, ultimately exceeded the limits of theory and decided to test Soviet reality. Namely, an increase (instead of a decrease) in reactivity as the amount of steam in the reactor core increased , which automatically made its control more difficult and, as a consequence, could lead to a loss of stability and, as we now know, not very interesting end results. Today, when we think of Chernobyl, in our imagination we see the remains of the power plant covered with a concrete sarcophagus and the abandoned infrastructure of the city of Pripyat, which is increasingly consumed by nature every year. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, both working at a power plant and the opportunity to live in Pripyat for a Soviet citizen were almost like hitting six in the lottery. The city accompanying the nuclear power plant, built from scratch, was intended to ensure the most comfortable life possible for its employees - engineering staff and workers - specialists in various fields. In principle, for the young, talented minds of the nation. The average age in the city was 26, and 1/3 of the inhabitants were children. Good infrastructure, permanent work and free apartments - it captured the imagination. Therefore, the city grew rapidly. Although, over time, more and more of these lucky people received jobs and housing due to their merits or acquaintance, and not necessarily due to their unique competences or abilities. The city was designed according to the best concepts developed at that time in the USSR, as a show city. A model for the development of cities at that time, which was still dominated by large, gray and cramped housing estates with narrow streets. The best Soviet architects, including Gennady Ivanovich Oleszko, who was appointed the city's chief designer , exemplarily implemented the concept of the so-called "micro-rayons", used in later years in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc countries. These repetitive micro-districts, which were the basic elements of the newly designed housing development, dividing the city into smaller functional parts, were intended to provide residents with comfort and the best possible access to basic services, while reducing the costs of their construction. A typical microdistrict, covering an area of 10 to 60 hectares, consisted of multi-story residential buildings and public buildings. The natural boundaries separating individual micro-areas were most often main roads, green areas and natural obstacles. The established standards regulated issues such as entrances to microdistricts, which were to be located at a maximum distance of 300 m from each other, and the availability of public buildings (excluding schools and kindergartens), where the limit was set at a maximum of 500 m from any residential building. We can still see similar solutions today in large Polish housing estates built at that time. Typical services that were supposed to make life easier for residents were high schools, kindergartens and nurseries, grocery stores, personal services, cafes, clubs, playgrounds , administration and specialized stores. In Pripyat, which, in addition to ensuring comfort for employees of a strategic facility such as the power plant, was also planned to become a large transshipment point located on key transport routes in the future, it was ensured that all these assumptions were fully implemented. It was also experimentally used, developed by a team of Moscow Architects led by Nikolai Ostozhenka and the principle of triangular development approved by Oleszko's team, in which loosely arranged - in a triangular arrangement - five-story blocks were interspersed with tall 10-story buildings overlooking the open space. This arrangement ensured comfort for residents, and together with wide and parallel streets, it was supposed to eliminate traffic jams in the city in the future. Cultural and visual issues were also taken care of . In the central point of the city, a large square was built with a community center, a shopping center, a cinema, a comfortable hotel for visiting guests, offices and two sports complexes with, among others, a swimming pool and playing fields. Looking at photos from the 1970s, we see a clean, spacious city with many places for rest and recreation, and lots and lots of roses planted along the streets and sidewalks. According to the project, which, in addition to providing residents with a sense of space, was to take care of the rich colors of the city, the facades of the buildings were decorated with decorative ceramics and propaganda paintings, and many colorful and illuminated panels and advertisements were placed. Supply in Pripyat was also at a high level, definitely higher than in an average Soviet city. In the local department store you could buy many luxury goods, rarely seen even in the capital of the republic - Kiev. The city was developing rapidly and had every reason to become a vibrant, important point on the map of the Soviet Union for years to come. Everything changed in the spring of 1986, when, not for the first time in the USSR, incorrect design solutions of the technology used came into contact with Soviet nonchalance, shallow imagination and exuberant human ego. "We knew, with certainty, with arrogant certainty, that we controlled the power with which we were playing," Sergiy Parashyn (an engineer at the plant since 1977) later said . "We could force the forces of nature to submit to our will. There was nothing we couldn't do." “That was obviously the day we found out we were wrong.” Soviet scientists learned about this quite clearly on the night of April 25-26, 1986. For this spring night, the crew of reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant planned a test of the unit to check the corrections made to the reactor's emergency control system. The reactor used part of the energy generated for its own needs, including powering cooling water pumps and control systems. Previous tests have shown that after the main electrical power was lost and the steam supply to the generator turbines was cut off, they stopped rotating too quickly due to momentum alone, thus not providing power to the control and safety systems long enough until the emergency generators were turned on. Tests showed that the reactor could be deprived of power and therefore no control over it for as long as 45 seconds. The procedure for testing the introduced modifications and new design solutions is scheduled for April 25. The day shift assigned to conduct the experiment prepared , familiarized itself with the procedures, and began reducing reactor power as planned. A team of experts led by Anatoly Dyatlov, chief specialist in nuclear reactors and deputy chief engineer of the power plant, was also on standby to supervise the entire operation. Meanwhile, as a result of unforeseen circumstances and an unexpected power outage at one of the nearby power plants, dispatchers from Kiev ordered the reactor to remain in operation until the evening in order to ensure electricity supply in the region during the afternoon peak . Therefore, when the experiment was resumed, another night shift, previously prepared for other tasks, began its activities, and the supervisory team, somewhat irritated by the whole day's waiting, was simply tired. Anatoly Dyatlov himself was an experienced nuclear physicist. However , in his career, in the 1960s, while working at the Komsomolsk Shipyard on nuclear submarines, he had already fought one unsuccessful battle with similar technology. As a result of a series of wrong decisions, it led to... dangerous incident during which he received a radiation dose of 200 Rem. He survived, but this experience and the subsequent death of his son from leukemia left an impact on him, and he began to treat his work as a competition with technology and an attempt to harness this powerful force at all costs. He also had a rather brusque approach to his subordinates, from whom he expected blind obedience, not having the habit of explaining his decisions to them. Now, during the delayed test at the Chernobyl power plant, deaf to the observations and doubts of some of the staff, he made subsequent wrong decisions and authoritatively gave risky instructions, being aware that the operator responsible for operating the reactor during this shift was a young and inexperienced engineer with just over two months of experience. On that fateful night, several of these bad decisions and commands, including the unnecessary disabling of the automatic shutdown mechanisms, led to a situation in which the reactor subjected to the test procedure reduced its power very significantly (to only 30 MW, when the initial assumptions were for a maximum reduction in the range of 0.7 to 1 GW), became severely destabilized and... started its own procedure, less and less controlled by humans with every second. The reactor, designed for the military production of plutonium, leaked easily and at a small power was starting to become unstable. Dyatlov's subsequent risky decisions, intended to lead to a temporary increase in the too much reduced power of the reactor by extending more and more control rods, with their specific design causing them to be lowered again quite slowly, led to even greater destabilization of the unit when the reactor's madness began, and as a result, loss of control over the ongoing reaction. Inserting control rods too slowly and improperly constructed, instead of shutting down the reactor, caused a sharp increase in its power, overheating of the core, cracking of some fuel rods, and finally deformation of their own columns and blockage after only partial insertion. The reactor was boiling. In a few seconds, its thermal power, exceeding its norm ten times, reached 30 GW, and huge amounts of steam, instantly emerging from the water cooling it, caused a sharp increase in pressure. The fuel channels and water pipes couldn't handle it. They cracked. And the melting, ultra-hot fuel began to fall into the arms of the cooling water. The first powerful explosion occurred, completely destroying the reactor core, which at that moment came into contact with the coolant and began the last chord of this nuclear symphony. The zirconium that lined the destroyed fuel channels reacted with water, releasing hydrogen, which in turn created a highly explosive mixture with oxygen, two or three seconds later, in a second, even more powerful explosion, it blew off the 1,200-ton protective cover of the reactor, destroyed the building and ended this lightning-fast and uncontrolled chain reaction, spewing the remains from the fuel channels and several hundred tons of burning graphite into the atmosphere. clouds of radioactive dust and steam. These two large explosions, destroying reactor number 4 in a dozen or so seconds, also killed two employees and resulted in a series of fires that began to release further tons of radioactive particles into the environment. It was 1:24 a.m. on April 26, 1986. For the city and its sleeping, unaware inhabitants, the drama of life has just begun. "The fire - as described by one of the men who woke from sleep to the wail of the main siren - was burning directly on top of Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It broke out at exactly 1:23:48 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when the plant's fourth reactor exploded. And, as a subsequent investigation proved, there was no shortage of warnings... but they were either ignored or deliberately concealed." - Mohamed Makhzangi It was extinguished only after a few hours, and burying the burning reactor core took as long as 10 days. To extinguish it and limit the release of radioactive particles, approximately 5,000 tons of boron, dolomite, sand, clay and lead were dropped into the fire by helicopter. The previously mentioned Sergiy Parashyn, who later became the director of this plant, said that since the dials indicated problems, the safe approach would be to stop the test. "If we did that, everything would be fine." "This is not what we chose." The disaster itself, as well as the circumstances before and after it, were described quite colorfully and graphically by Mohamed Makhzangi, a writer and doctor who worked in a Kiev hospital in 1986 . Here's an excerpt: "The nuclear fuel was now exposed and emitting deadly radiation through a hole in the roof. A new kind of volcano had erupted and the first person it destroyed was the one who had caused it. It had completely vaporized. No trace of this reckless scientist remained. The atomic genie had escaped from the bottle, unsealed by human carelessness in the face of advanced technology. Sheer stupidity had managed to bypass over 100 security systems - to the point where that the reporter who reported on the incident suggested the need to establish a new system, which was to be called "protection against stupidity." On that dark night of mystery and confusion, even those closest to the plant did not know the extent of the disaster, deliberately lied to downplay the danger involved, and that the inhabitants of Pripyat, the families of the plant's workers, slept deeply with their windows wide open, exposed to the evening gusts of spring wind. An evening of nuclear horror, carefully concealed by local bureaucrats who hoped to extinguish the fire without alerting the nearby city of Kiev - the capital of the district, in the northern part of which, on the so-called "Kiev Sea", 85 km away, Chernobyl was located. And we in Kiev also slept deeply, although we closed the windows against the rain." The initial reports sent by the plant's management to Kiev and Moscow were very reassuring. They suggested an explosion of water tanks, not to mention any damage to the reactor. The director of the plant, Viktor Bryukhanov, as we can read in the documentation made available in 2021 by the Security Service of Ukraine, wrote in his first report to his superiors that there were 200 people on the premises of the plant at the time of the disaster. employees, and nine people suffered burns to varying degrees and that: "one person died at 6 a.m. in the medical unit. The condition of three people is serious. 34 people involved in extinguishing the fire were brought to the medical unit for examination ." The report concluded: "The situation in Pripyat and nearby towns is normal and the radiation level is controlled." For many hours, the radioactive cloud vanished carelessly into the air, and the inhabitants of Pripyat began a normal day and sent their children to school. Even before monitoring stations in other countries, including the Polish facility of the Radioactive Contamination Measurement Service in Nicholas, began to receive alarming data from their regions, in Chernobyl, on April 26, the investigative commission to investigate the causes of the Chernobyl accident began its mission. One of its members, assigned as an expert by the Institute of Atomic Energy, was Valery Legasov, who specializes in the safety of nuclear power plants . a factory that lights up the night sky with its glow. I remember this road to this day. I must say that at that time it did not occur to me that we were heading towards a world event, an event that would probably be remembered forever in the history of mankind, like the eruptions of the famous volcanoes, the deaths of people in Pompeii or something of this scale." Legasov, unlike many others, was concerned about the situation and his task. He was active on the spot, compiled a report analyzing the causes of the disaster, and instead of the permissible 2-3 weeks, he stayed in the contaminated area for about 4 months. Ultimately, his involvement harmed him more than anything else. helped. From then on, his scientific career faced many obstacles, and higher authorities prevented him from even receiving his degree hero of the Soviet Union. However, in the spring of 1986, he was one of the first to understand the scale of this catastrophic failure and made many important decisions that helped limit the effects of the disaster in those first days, when everyone was blind or downplayed the situation . Among other things, he invented a mixture of loose materials that helicopters dropped on the hot reactor core, but, equally importantly, he pushed for the quick evacuation of the inhabitants of Pripyat.    Years later, one of the employees of the emergency services in Pripyat recalled that day: "It was evening. I was at home, reading. I was called to work. I did my job. I came home in the morning. I heard about an evacuation on the radio, that there would be buses to take things, food, documents. They said it would be for three days. It turned out to be for 35 years. (...) I took the documents, one or two shirts." About 50,000 people fled their homes in a long caravan, leaving behind virtually all their belongings. Another tens of thousands, pursuant to a government regulation, were evacuated and resettled in the following weeks, and Pripyat - a joyful, colorful and modern city for the USSR, instantly became the so-called "exclusion zone", and in the following years, bit by bit, absorbed by nature and time, it turned into a ruin and earned the term "ghost town". At the same time, all the services involved, including the guards and the army, were running around, not fully aware of what they were involved in and what the further consequences might be. In a hurry and suddenly called to remove the effects of the explosion, employees and officers, exposed to air contaminated with radioactive steam and smoke and contact with irradiated materials, were initially not even equipped with any protective equipment. In the general organizational chaos and in the absence of complete data, it was still necessary to monitor and coordinate the activities of many people and rescue services on an ongoing basis. Every good and quick decision was worth its weight in gold and helped to limit further disastrous effects that could still occur. One of such pressing issues turned out to be the strength of the reactor substrate, on which tons of sand and boron were dropped to extinguish its core. There was concern that its collapse under the weight would cause the remnants of ignited fuel to flow directly into the water tank located under the reactor, leading to another powerful explosion and endangering the remaining three reactors. This in itself increased the scale of the disaster, but it could also lead to the concrete foundation burning through and radioactive soup leaking into groundwater and poisoning rivers. This is where three brave firefighters stepped into action. In a highly risky, almost suicidal mission known from the movie, regardless of the need to pass through highly irradiated water and their own safety, they reached the valves that required manual unscrewing, unscrewed them and allowed the tank to be pumped out. At that time, representatives of another industry taking part in the rescue operation - miners - dug a 150 m tunnel to supply nitrogen coolant under the reactor, which was to prevent the melting of the concrete base. Eventually, the reactor began to cool and the tunnel was filled with high-temperature concrete. In the following weeks, months and years, many people still had a lot of work to do, both in removing the effects and securing the area and the damaged reactor itself, which over time was encased in a tight concrete sarcophagus. The remaining reactors were shut down one by one, and the last one - unit number 3 - was finally shut down in 2000. In the previously mentioned documents, made public by the SBU years later , we can find information that accidents at the power plant had also occurred earlier. In a 1978 memo prepared for the head of the KGB in Kiev, it was reported that agents and trusted persons continued to receive data proving gross violations of construction, fire and health and safety standards during construction and installation works of the Chernobyl power plant, which led to accidents. But such evil stories did not officially occur in the Soviet reality, so instead of eliminating the actual problems, consequences were more often brought against the alarming agents who were considered saboteurs. We can read further: "For example, in 1982 there was a significant release of radioactive substances in reactor number 1, but the KGB report on this matter ends with the traditional phrase: Measures were taken to prevent panic and provocative rumors." A year later, further disturbing information also reached comrades in Moscow. They were able to read reports that classified the Chernobyl power plant as one of the most dangerous nuclear power plants in the USSR due to the lack of safety measures in reactors number 1 and 2, and its radioactivity in the event of an accident was estimated at "60 times higher than during the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan." Looking at these examples and the entire contemporary history of Russia and the USSR, it seems that the perfect description of the Russian approach to reality could be the famous sentence once uttered by the German philosopher Georg Hegel: "If the facts contradict the theory, so much the worse for the facts." And the facts were that on the seven-level international nuclear and radiological emergency scale INES, the Chernobyl accident was classified as the highest level, seventh. The radioactive cloud contaminated over 125,000 km2 on the border of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, forcing the evacuation and displacement of almost 350,000 people in the following weeks. Then she headed towards the unaware Europe. The communist Soviet authorities remained silent and even in Moscow many notables had no idea about anything. It was only on April 27 that Swedish stations measuring radiation levels began to record increasingly alarming readings. In Poland, the indicators started going crazy on April 28 in the morning, two days after the disaster. With the information embargo in the final years of the Cold War, many suspected the worst. Prof. In an interview for "Polityka", Zbigniew Jaworowski answered "Atomic war" when asked by Marcin Rotkiewicz about his first thought. Only later in the day did BBC radio suggest that the cause of the ominous cloud hovering over Europe might be a power plant failure in the Soviet Union. Polish specialists in the field of nuclear technology were aware of the seriousness of the situation and tried to influence decision-makers from Warsaw to take a number of actions. It was recommended to close schools, limit leaving home to a minimum, prohibit cattle grazing, and test the radioactivity of meat and dairy plants. Although some actions were abandoned both for propaganda reasons and to avoid causing panic, as was rare in the Polish People's Republic, at least in the first days, the authorities, regardless of the initial denials of their comrades from Moscow, began to act in the interest of their own citizens. In the following days, the Government Commission for the assessment of nuclear radiation and preventive activities was established , and one of the effects of its activities, in consultation with CLOR, was the decision to undertake iodine prophylaxis. Thanks to a dose of stable iodine, it was intended to block the access of radioactive iodine to the thyroid gland. Single doses of stable iodine in the form of the so-called Lugol's solution, which our country prepared as a preventive measure in the 1970s for civil defense purposes, were administered to 18.5 million Poles, which had not occurred on such a scale in any other country and made this operation the largest preventive action in the history of medicine, performed within a few days. At the same time, in the communist reality, both in Poland and the USSR, there were things that were more important and important. Some of the most important were the appropriate image of the authorities and propaganda messages that calmed the public mood. Therefore, contrary to the advice of experts, the upcoming May Day parades were not canceled and crowds were even encouraged to participate in them. Today we know that the threat posed by the radioactive cloud was much lower than was believed at the time, even though almost 600,000 people around the world were exposed to an increased dose of radiation equivalent to two photos X-ray. However, we must remember that, according to various reports, as a result of the described disaster, 31 people died directly, including 28 immediately after the accident as a result of strong radiation, at least 16,000 people who were under 18 years old at the time of the disaster were diagnosed with thyroid cancer, 10,000 fetal deformations and 5,000 infant deaths occurred. Psychological issues related to both the accident and resettlement, such as depression, alcoholism, trauma, mental illnesses and radiophobia, are also a big problem that has been timidly making its way into public awareness for years. In addition to health issues, there are also huge economic costs. Over several decades, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on activities related to the closure of the power plant, decontamination and the construction of a sarcophagus over the reactor, and subsequent losses were generated by hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and forests excluded from production. Finally, it is worth mentioning the political consequences of the disaster, which perhaps at least somewhat compensated for this enormous human and economic tragedy. Politically, the Chernobyl drama was of great importance for the implementation of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform activities and helped normalize relations with the USA at the end of the Cold War. But above all, it became one of the key factors in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the final end of the functioning of the so-called Eastern Bloc

Transcript for:Chernobyl Disaster Overview and Impact

Transcript for:
Chernobyl Disaster Overview and Impact