On the morning of Saturday April 26th 1986, at 01:23:58 am the world changed, and a very large nail was hammered into the coffin of the USSR. At unit 4 of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear power plant, 3 KM from the city of Pripyat, a safety test was being carried out to see if the power station generators could provide electricity long enough during a power outage to bridge the 60 second gap between the loss of power, and the backup diesel generators getting up to speed to power the critical reactor cooling pumps. The reactor went into a feedback loop due to its unusual design, and the power surged.
Leonid Toptunov, a 26 year old senior reactor control engineer pressed the AZ-5 button to scram the reactor, and as a result of the design of the graphite tipped control rods, a massive power surge occurred. This caused a steam explosion blowing the 1000 ton lid off and expelling radioactive material into the atmosphere, and the worst Nuclear accident in history had just happened, the only nuclear incident in history to be classified as a level 7 incident on the INES scale.
3 days later, the Soviet government finally evacuated around 350,000 people from a 30 KM exclusion zone of Ukraine and Belarus surrounding the power station as the clean up began. 600,000 people, known as liquidators, were drafted in to clean up the disaster, putting out the fire within the reactor, building a sarcophagus around the exposed reactor using 6,000 tons of steal and 300,000 tons of concrete, removing several feet of top soil, and cleaning down or bulldozing buildings. The Sarcophagus was replaced in 2016 with the New Safe Confinement, the largest moving structure ever built, to encase the old crumbling sarcophagus to prevent another catastrophe should it collapse, and to allow decommissioning to take place and is designed to last for 100 years.
I have been fascinated by this disaster since I was a child, and was finally able to visit in November 2019, unfortunately my memory card from my new camera failed and I lost all the photos I took on it so all the photos below are from an iPhone 8, so not the best quality! We weren't able to get a tour of the plant, but the exclusion zone was well worth the visit, we planned to go back but I can't see that happening now
The first stop our guides took us to in the zone, last full size statue of Lenin in Ukraine, located in Chernobyl Village
An abandoned barge in the Pripyat river
The Duga radar, a top secret 'over the horizon' radar
A model of the Duga radar and surrounding area at the fire station nearby
The unfinished reactor 5 and 6 building, work stopped after the unit 4 accident
the New Safe Confinement at Unit 4
The memorial to all the victims of the disaster
The highest radiation level we saw was 26.59 MicroSieverts per hour, equivalant to 3 chest x-rays or 30 days natural background radiation
The hospital at Pripyat, where the early victims were taken and the firefighters uniforms are still in the basement and lethally radioactive
Drive mechanism of the Ferris Wheel
Leonid Toptunov, a 26 year old senior reactor control engineer pressed the AZ-5 button to scram the reactor, and as a result of the design of the graphite tipped control rods, a massive power surge occurred. This caused a steam explosion blowing the 1000 ton lid off and expelling radioactive material into the atmosphere, and the worst Nuclear accident in history had just happened, the only nuclear incident in history to be classified as a level 7 incident on the INES scale.
3 days later, the Soviet government finally evacuated around 350,000 people from a 30 KM exclusion zone of Ukraine and Belarus surrounding the power station as the clean up began. 600,000 people, known as liquidators, were drafted in to clean up the disaster, putting out the fire within the reactor, building a sarcophagus around the exposed reactor using 6,000 tons of steal and 300,000 tons of concrete, removing several feet of top soil, and cleaning down or bulldozing buildings. The Sarcophagus was replaced in 2016 with the New Safe Confinement, the largest moving structure ever built, to encase the old crumbling sarcophagus to prevent another catastrophe should it collapse, and to allow decommissioning to take place and is designed to last for 100 years.
I have been fascinated by this disaster since I was a child, and was finally able to visit in November 2019, unfortunately my memory card from my new camera failed and I lost all the photos I took on it so all the photos below are from an iPhone 8, so not the best quality! We weren't able to get a tour of the plant, but the exclusion zone was well worth the visit, we planned to go back but I can't see that happening now
The first stop our guides took us to in the zone, last full size statue of Lenin in Ukraine, located in Chernobyl Village
An abandoned barge in the Pripyat river
The Duga radar, a top secret 'over the horizon' radar
A model of the Duga radar and surrounding area at the fire station nearby
The unfinished reactor 5 and 6 building, work stopped after the unit 4 accident
the New Safe Confinement at Unit 4
The memorial to all the victims of the disaster
The highest radiation level we saw was 26.59 MicroSieverts per hour, equivalant to 3 chest x-rays or 30 days natural background radiation
The hospital at Pripyat, where the early victims were taken and the firefighters uniforms are still in the basement and lethally radioactive
Drive mechanism of the Ferris Wheel
