Cover photo from HBO
Ever wondered what the world would look like after nuclear armageddon? The effects of the Chernobyl disaster comes close to that stark possibility. The botched safety-test for a nuclear power plant threatened to contaminate all of Europe with radiation and caused the town of Pripyat to remain uninhabitable for twenty millenia.
In the early morning of April 26, 1986, a reactor in the Chernobyl power plant exploded. Millions of radioactive particles were suddenly released into the atmosphere. After a series of chemical reactions, the graphite core of the reactor then began to melt, posing extremely dangerous health risks to the people within the vicinity of radioactivity.
In an effort to keep the explosion a secret, Soviet authorities were hesitant in informing the general public about just how serious the accident was. The evacuation of people in the area was eventually carried out, but it was delayed.
The scientific and economic cause of the accident would be the unstable equipment the reactor operated on. The catastrophic result of the failed safety-test was something no one had anticipated, and at first, scientists were baffled by the accident. While the staff at the reactor did what was presumed correct to shut the reactor down, it ended up accelerating the series of reactions for the explosion. It was later revealed that the graphite tipped control rods posed the problem in design.
The radiation continued to spread as far as Germany and Sweden. The Soviets however continued to diminish the contamination with misleading propaganda. As they slowly but finally admitted the severity of the explosion, Soviet authorities initiated an immense clean up effort to take care of nuclear fallout. Radioactive material was painstakingly cleared from the reactor and put in a huge concrete sarcophagus to prevent further contamination.
In many ways, Chernobyl is probably the most significant reason why the Soviet Union collapsed and disintegrated. The failed safety-test for this nuclear power plant not only exposed the risk of operating on cheap goods from a crumbling economy, but also demonstrated quite clearly the harms of widespread misinformation. The disaster was a key factor that motivated Gorbachev to declare his policies of glasnost and perestroika, policies that essentially signified the collapse of core Soviet ideals.
As for the area around the Chernobyl power plant and the town of Pripyat, the exclusion zone there remains uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.