Chernobyl – The Aftermath

You’ll have noticed a fairly regular theme in our blogs. We tend to steer clear of all talk of a nuclear apocalypse and, instead, concentrate on the less dramatic – almost mundane – emergencies and crises that plague our lives. Prepping for these is a way of helping us cope when the inevitable occurs.

But we cannot let slip the fact that 35 years ago this April a nuclear disaster did occur and – while not perhaps the apocalypse – reminded us how a catastrophic event of this nature forced the evacuation of 350,000 from their homes, a whole town to be abandoned, and an event that forever changed the way people everywhere would think about nuclear energy.

The devasting accident at Chernobyl was the very worst nuclear accident the world has experienced so far – it is unlikely to be the last.

Nuclear accident

What happened on the 26^th of April 1986 resulted from a test that was being conducted by the Russian plant operators. The particular type of reactor – an RMBK reactor – was unique to the Soviet Union. Other countries had already rejected its design as fundamentally unsafe, explained an article in ZME Science on the anniversary of the disaster.

So, the testing in the early hours of the 26^th of April was designed to resolve issues surrounding an overheating of the reactor when its fuel levels fell to an unsafe level. Although the initial overheating was expected to be temporary, a long chain of human errors, poor training, inexperience, and delay, led to catastrophic attempts to shut down the restarted reactor.

That lead to a series of explosions within the plant, a meltdown at its core, and the ultimate explosion of the reactor’s core.

The aftermath

The explosion immediately began the release of toxic radiation. Yet it was 36 hours before the evacuation of the inhabitants of the neighbouring town, Pripyat, were started – because the Soviet authorities initially tried to deny that the accident had happened at all. This was 1986, remember, when not just the town of Pripyat but the whole of the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.

Whatever the Soviet authorities had hoped to achieve, of course, it is impossible to sweep the effects of such a massive nuclear accident under the carpet. Alarm and concern soon swept across Europe and the rest of the world.

Radioactive fallout has been estimated at 400 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The cloud spread far and wide. 2,000 miles away, in North Wales, for example, nearly 10,000 farms and four million sheep were put under government restrictions because of the fallout, according to a story by Wales Online on the 3^rd of June 2019.

For at least the next decade tests on sheep from that part of the UK continued to reveal traces of radioactive poisoning.

Back in Pripyat, in the Ukraine, the initial evacuation of the town’s 50,000 residents had become clearly inadequate and eventually the total number evacuated from the surrounding area – a 19-mile (30 km) exclusion zone – climbed to 350,000.

The total number of deaths that can be attributed to the nuclear disaster range quite widely – because they need to take into account direct fatalities at the

nuclear plant itself, deaths in the surrounding area as the immediate result of radiation exposure, and deaths resulting from longer-term lower levels of exposure to radiation. Subject to these variances, the estimated total deaths range between 60,000 and 9,000.

Living through a nuclear disaster

A recent BBC Newsround story recounted first-hand experiences of a child living through the greatest nuclear disaster the world has yet known.

It is the graphic account of a child living through a catastrophe against the background of a life in which everyday life of schools and home seems as normal as those that preceded it. With evacuation and a growing sense of local alarm, however, the scale of the events that had taken place began to sink in.

Indeed, the child’s father was conscripted as one of the workers sent back into the plant to clear up the mess. He died just six years later from radiation sickness.

The effects were also felt around the world and none more so than in the Soviet Union itself. Less than six years were to pass between the meltdown at Chernobyl and the break-up of the USSR in 1991. The disaster helped to expose the failings of that Soviet regime, according to the first-hand witness of the events: “in lies, in distortion of facts and truth. It’s impossible to live like that. The world has to know the truth”, says the woman who was that child.

Lessons

Manmade disasters can happen anywhere in the world as the result of human error, incompetence, lack of knowledge, or by accident.

The effects, shock, horror, and nervousness, generated by the meltdown at Chernobyl were felt in the neighbouring town, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and the rest of the work. No one, nowhere, was immune.

Prepping for whatever emergency or disaster lies just over the horizon not only makes good sense but can be a life-saver for you, your family, and those you love.