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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    The destroyed reactor at Chernobyl

    The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear disaster that began on the 26th of April 1986 when the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine north of Kyiv exploded. The accident occurred during a test of the cooling system in the reactor. Owing to mismanagement and an inadequate safety response the incident escalated in the hours and days that followed. As a fire raged through the reactor and destroyed the building it released huge amounts of radioactive contaminants into the surrounding region. Once the scale of the incident became evident the Soviet administration began evacuating tens of thousands of people out of an exclusion zone of ten kilometers around the site. This was subsequently expanded to thirty kilometers. Large parts of the exclusion zone have remained empty for most of the four decades since the incident. The disaster led to dozens of deaths in the short term and contributed to hundreds of other deaths in the long term. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. It remains the largest nuclear disaster in history and also the most expensive nuclear disaster in history.[1]

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    Chernobyl disaster chronology of events

    The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was built during the 1970s. It lies about 100 kilometers north of the city of Kyiv next to the Pripyat River, a tribute of the Dnieper River. It is very near the border between Ukraine and Belarus. The power plant was built here to take advantage of the river to act as coolant for the nuclear reactor and to supply the energy needs of Kyiv. Worked was substantially completed by 1977 and it began operating the next year. Construction at the site continued into the 1980s and it was envisaged that it would eventually become the world’s largest nuclear power plant, with twelve reactors in all, though this ambition was never realized before the disaster in 1986.[2]

    The town of Pripyat

    The Chernobyl disaster came about as a result of several errors than occurred on the 26th of April 1986. During a routine operation to test the cooling system in reactor No. 4 the reactor exploded as steam and pressure built up inside of it. This was caused by both design issues in terms of how the reactor had been built and human error. The initial disaster was compounded by an inadequate response. Ineffective measures were taken to control the release of radioactive material from the reactor, while the Soviet administration was extremely slow in evacuating the nearby town of Pripyat and the other settlements in the vicinity. Eventually an exclusion zone of ten kilometers was established and the government began evacuating all civilians lying within this zone. By then several operatives and firefighters had died or were seriously unwell from exposure to radioactive material.[3]

    In May 1986 the response to the disaster escalated. The exclusion zone was extended to thirty kilometers and the number of people being evacuated now stretched into the hundreds of thousands. Some 200,000 ‘liquidators’ were also employed by the government to assist in the clean-up operation. Large numbers of these people were exposed to radiation. Many would become ill over time, though often this manifested as cancers and other illnesses years after the Chernobyl disaster. By the time the reactor was stabilized and the initial clean-up operation was completed, 30 people had died.[4] However, the number of excess deaths due to the disaster is believed to have run into the thousands in the long term, though it is hard to place exact figures on this, as some of the deaths tied to the Chernobyl disaster would have been multi-factorial.[5] Millions of people were exposed to small amounts of radiation in Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe. The disaster was the largest nuclear accident in history and cost upwards of one trillion dollars in today’s money to contain and deal with.[6]

    Extent of migration caused by the Chernobyl disaster

    Abandoned buildings in the Chernobyl exclusion zone

    The disaster led to the removal of tens of thousands of people from the towns of Chernobyl and Pripyat and surrounding regions in the days that followed the disaster. As the full scale of the disaster became clear, the exclusion zone was further expanded to the entire region within thirty kilometers of the nuclear power plant. As this happened, the number of people who were being removed from the region increased to upwards of 200,000 people. Because of the strength of the nuclear half-life, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone would be maintained for decades and hundreds of thousands of people ended up relocating to elsewhere in Ukraine or abroad. For instance, it is understood that the considerable Jewish Ukrainian community of northern Ukraine relocated to Israel in the years that followed, a migration that was spurred on by the Chernobyl disaster.[7]

    Demographic impact of the Chernobyl disaster

    The demographic impact of the Chernobyl disaster was felt most keenly in northern Ukraine along the border with Belarus. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has been uninhabited for decades since the disaster and will remain so for many years to come as the nuclear half-life continues to pose a hazard to human safety. Some of the outer parts of the Exclusion Zone that were least affected have become habitable again in recent years. Therefore the greatest demographic impact was in creating a wilderness in this region north of Kyiv. Contrastingly, communities of individuals who used to live in Chernobyl and its environs have developed elsewhere.[8] Some are in Kyiv, some are in other parts of Ukraine and some are even further afield, notably the substantial number of Jewish Ukrainians who moved to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Thus, there are many people in Ukraine, Israel and elsewhere today who will have a parent, grandparent or some other relative who moved out of the Chernobyl region as a result of the disaster here in 1986.[9]

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    See also

    Explore more about the Chernobyl disaster

    References

    1. ↑ https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident
    2. ↑ https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28271/chernobyl-chapter-i-the-site-and-accident-sequence
    3. ↑ https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident
    4. ↑ https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident
    5. ↑ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-know-chernobyls-true-death-toll
    6. ↑ https://press.un.org/en/2005/dev2539.doc.htm
    7. ↑ L. I. Remennick, ‘Immigrants from Chernobyl-affected areas in Israel: the link between health and social adjustment’, in Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 54, No. 2 (January, 2002), pp. 309–317.
    8. ↑ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-49920-4_2
    9. ↑ https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs


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