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Chernobyl the accident On the 26 of April 1986 at 01:23:44 am, Unit 4 of the nuclear plant in the Soviet Union city Chernobyl (now Northern Ukraine) exploded after a fatal human and technical failure. The Soviet Union tried to dampen down the accident and didn’t want the western countries to know what happened because it would have weakened the image and power of the Soviet Union. On the 27 of April (one day later) a Swedish nuclear plant measured higher radiation on the clothes of the workers. After unavailingly looking for a leak in the Swedish plant, it was clear that something must have happened in the Soviet Union. During the night of the accident 2 people died and around 30 were hospitalized, therefore the soviets had to make the case public to evacuate the people living in the surrounding areas. The radioactive material release by the accident was four hundred times more than in the fallout’s of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. The nuclear plant continued its energy production with the reactor one, two and three, but western countries pushed the Ukraine to shut down the 3 remaining reactors. After a fire in reactor 2 (1991) and the fact that the old technical standard of the reactor 1 was no longer stable to be used, all the reactors were shut down. The last reactor, Unit 3 was operated until the year 2000. Pripyat The workers town Pripyat which is situated 3 kilometers away from Chernobyl was very famous for modernity during the Soviet Unionand was called “the city of the future”. Most of the workers from the nuclear plant lived with their families in Pripyat, the average age was twenty-seven, one-thousand babies were born every year. The town was only evacuated 48 hours after the accident. Therefore one-thousand busses from all the over the Soviet Union came to transport most of the 50’000 inhabitants within 4 hours out of the zone. The people had to leave everything in their homes and were only allowed to carry one suitcase with them. They were told that they would come back after a week, this never happened and never will. Because of the radioactive fallout in Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine a total of 350’000 people were evacuated and resettled in different areas. Red Forest The Red Forest originally Worm Wood Forest is a 10 km2 large area and surrounds the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It is in the area which has received the highest dose of contamination by the accident and is highly radioactive. It has been named Red Forest after the side-effect that the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl had on the leavesof the trees. Because of the high levels of radioactivity the leaves turned red and many trees died. The red forest has partly been bulldozed because of its high level of radiation. It is one of the most contaminated places on earth, and very dangerous. Scientists have discovered that some plants and trees have started to strangely mutate and for instance branches of trees have twisted weirdly and don’t grow in the direction of the sky anymore. Also many plants and mushrooms have had effects of gigantism in which the shape doesn’t change but the actual size has become larger than usual. Chernobyl today The Chernobyl nuclear power plant is not in work anymore and the reactor number 4 was quickly after the accident, enclosed with a sarcophagus. This sarcophagus was build to allow people to work again in the other reactors that werenot affected by the accident. *About 95 percent of the fuel in the time of the accident remains inside the shelter and has a total radioactivity of nearly 18 million curies which is 670 PBq. The radioactive material consists of core fragments, dust and lava-like fuel containing material that flowed through the wrecked reactor building before hardening into a ceramic form. Tourism Since the closedown of the last reactor in 2001, Chernobyl and its environment have become attractive to tourism.
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