Chernobyl Disaster

The disaster started as a simple safety test. The operators wanted to see if the reactor’s turbines could provide enough emergency power to run the cooling water pumps during a blackout, but a fatal combination of design flaws and human error triggered the massive explosion.

It released way more radiation than a nuclear bomb. The explosion shot a radioactive cloud into the atmosphere that contained hundreds of times more radiation than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The neighboring city was not evacuated immediately. The nearly fifty thousand residents of Pripyat went about their normal weekend activities for over a day before the Soviet government finally brought in buses to rush them out of the danger zone.

Sweden actually sounded the global alarm. The Soviet Union tried to keep the massive explosion a secret, but a Swedish nuclear power plant over six hundred miles away detected radioactive particles on the shoes of its workers, forcing the Soviets to finally admit what happened.

There is a deadly blob called the Elephant’s Foot. Deep inside the ruined reactor lies a massive, hardened mass of melted nuclear fuel, concrete, and metal that looks exactly like an elephant’s foot and was once so radioactive it could kill a person in just a few minutes.

A massive steel dome covers the ruins today. To stop radiation from leaking out of the hastily built original concrete sarcophagus, an international team spent over a billion dollars building the New Safe Confinement, an absolutely gigantic steel arch that was carefully slid over the entire reactor building in 2016.

The Red Forest got its name from dying pine trees. The forest right next to the power plant absorbed so much intense radiation immediately after the blast that the green pine needles completely died and turned a bright, rusty red color before the trees were eventually bulldozed.

The exclusion zone is unexpectedly teeming with wildlife. Because humans completely abandoned the area, endangered animals like European bison, Przewalski’s horses, brown bears, and gray wolves have moved in and are surprisingly thriving in the radioactive wilderness.

Some animals actually adapted to the radiation. Scientists have discovered that certain species of frogs living inside the exclusion zone have evolved to develop much darker skin, which acts as a protective shield against the lingering radioactive contamination.

You can actually visit the area as a tourist. Before recent geopolitical conflicts shut down access, thousands of tourists safely visited the exclusion zone every year, carrying dosimeters to measure radiation while walking through the eerily abandoned schools and amusement parks of Pripyat.

The other reactors kept running for years. Unbelievably, the Chernobyl power plant did not shut down completely after the explosion at reactor four. Thousands of engineers continued showing up to work at the other three reactors, and the final one was not permanently shut down until the year 2000.

The cleanup required hundreds of thousands of workers. The Soviet Union sent roughly six hundred thousand military and civilian workers, known as liquidators, to clean up the incredibly dangerous radioactive debris, often with nothing more than basic cloth masks and shovels.

An amusement park was open for just a few hours. The iconic yellow Ferris wheel in Pripyat was scheduled to open for the upcoming May Day celebrations, but city officials supposedly opened the park for a few hours on the day after the explosion just to keep the residents distracted before the evacuation order came through.

Radioactive wild boars roam around Germany today. The radioactive cloud from Chernobyl drifted across Europe and rained down over German forests, where wild boars ate contaminated truffles and mushrooms, meaning some boars there are still too radioactive to eat decades later.

The area will not be safe for human living for a very long time. While brief visits are considered safe in certain areas, scientists estimate that the most highly contaminated parts of the exclusion zone will not be entirely safe for permanent human habitation for at least another twenty thousand years.