CHERNOBYL INCIDENT

 

Chernobyl is known around the globe as the site of the world’s most serious nuclear power plant accident. On April 26, 1986, two simultaneous explosions in one of the four operating reactors in this nuclear power plant in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) blew the massive roof off the reactor building. The reactor partially melted down and its graphite components caught fire and burned for 10 days. The initial explosion and the prolonged fires released a radioactive cloud that spread over much of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Europe, and it eventually encircled the planet. According to UN studies, the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a poor reactor design (not the type used in the United States or in most other parts of the world) and by human error, and it had serious consequences. By 2005, some 56 people had died prematurely from exposure to radiation released by the accident. The number of long-term premature deaths from the accident, primarily from exposure to radiation, range from 9,000 by World Health Organization estimates, to 212,000 as estimated by the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, to nearly 1 million according to a 2010 study by Alexey Yablokov and two other Russian scientists, published by the New York Academy of Sciences. After the accident, some 350,000 people had to abandon their homes because of contamination by radioactive fallout. In addition to fear about long-term health effects such as cancers, many of these victims continue to suffer from stress and depression. In parts of Ukraine, people still cannot drink the water or eat locally produced food. There are also higher rates of thyroid cancer, leukemia, and immune system abnormalities in children exposed to Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout. Chernobyl taught us that a major nuclear accident anywhere can have harmful effects that reverberate throughout much of the world.