Chernobyl disaster, accident in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union, the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power generation. The Chernobyl power station was situated at the settlement of Pryp’yat, 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the city of Chernobyl (Ukrainian: Chornobyl) and 65 miles (104 km) north of Kiev, Ukraine. The station consisted of four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power; it had come online in 1977–83.
A visit to the site of the Chernobyl disaster.
Overview of the Chernobyl disaster.
A visit to the site of the Chernobyl disaster.
Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz
Learn about the Chernobyl disaster and its wide-ranging repercussions in this video.
Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz
The disaster occurred on April 25–26, 1986, when technicians at reactor Unit 4 attempted a poorly designed experiment. Workers shut down the reactor’s power-regulating system and its emergency safety systems, and they withdrew most of the control rods from its core while allowing the reactor to continue running at 7 percent power. These mistakes were compounded by others, and at 1:23 am on April 26 the chain reaction in the core went out of control. Several explosions triggered a large fireball and blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. This and the ensuing fire in the graphite reactor core released large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, where it was carried great distances by air currents. A partial meltdown of the core also occurred.
Helicopter inspecting the Chernobyl nuclear power station, Ukraine, U.S.S.R., April 26, 1986.
The destroyed reactor Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, Ukraine, U.S.S.R., April 26, 1986.
Helicopter inspecting the Chernobyl nuclear power station, Ukraine, U.S.S.R., April 26, 1986.
Ukrainian Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, courtesy IAEA
The destroyed reactor Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, Ukraine, U.S.S.R., April 26, …
Ukrainian Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, courtesy IAEA
SIMILAR TOPICS
September 11 attacks
Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappearance
Challenger disaster
Bhopal disaster
Fukushima accident
Columbia disaster
Halifax explosion of 1917
Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010
“Hindenburg” disaster
Great Fire of London
On April 27 the 30,000 inhabitants of Pryp’yat began to be evacuated. A cover-up was attempted, but on April 28 Swedish monitoring stations reported abnormally high levels of wind-transported radioactivity and pressed for an explanation. The Soviet government admitted there had been an accident at Chernobyl, thus setting off an international outcry over the dangers posed by the radioactive emissions. By May 4 both the heat and the radioactivity leaking from the reactor core were being contained, albeit at great risk to workers. Radioactive debris was buried at some 800 temporary sites, and later in the year the highly radioactive reactor core was enclosed in a concrete-and-steel sarcophagus (which was later deemed structurally unsound).
A classroom in Pryp’yat, Ukraine, abandoned after the Chernobyl accident (1986); photograph taken in 2006.
Workers measuring radiation levels near the Chernobyl nuclear power station, Ukraine, U.S.S.R., following the 1986 accident.
A classroom in Pryp’yat, Ukraine, abandoned after the Chernobyl accident (1986); photograph taken …
Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
Workers measuring radiation levels near the Chernobyl nuclear power station, Ukraine, U.S.S.R., …
Steve Morgan/Alamy
Initially the Chernobyl disaster caused the deaths of 32 people. Dozens more contracted serious radiation sickness; some of these people later died. Between 50 and 185 million curies of radionuclides escaped into the atmosphere—several times more radioactivity than that created by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. This radioactivity was spread by the wind over Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine and soon reached as far west as France and Italy. Millions of acres of forest and farmland were contaminated, and, although many thousands of people were evacuated, hundreds of thousands more remained in contaminated areas. In addition, in subsequent years many livestock were born deformed, and among humans several thousand radiation-induced illnesses and cancer deaths were expected in the long term. The Chernobyl disaster sparked criticism of unsafe procedures and design flaws in Soviet reactors, and it heightened resistance to the building of more such plants. Chernobyl Unit 2 was shut down after a 1991 fire, and Unit 1 remained on-line until 1996. Chernobyl Unit 3 continued to operate until 2000, when the nuclear power station was officially decommissioned.
The Soviet Union,[8] officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics[9] (USSR, Russian: СССР), was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple equal national Soviet republics,[a] its government and economy were highly centralized. The country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The Russian nation had constitutionally equal status among the many nations of the union but exerted de facto dominance in various respects.[10] Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Alma-Ata and Novosibirsk. The Soviet Union was one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possessed the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.[11] It was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, as well as a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and the Warsaw Pact.
The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government which had replaced Tsar Nicholas II during World War I. In 1922, the Soviet Union was formed with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. Following Lenin's death in 1924 and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin committed the state's ideology to Marxism–Leninism (which he created) and initiated a centrally planned economy which led to a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization. During this period of totalitarian rule, political paranoia fermented; the late-1930s Great Purge removed Stalin's opponents within and outside of the party via arbitrary arrests and persecutions of many people, resulting in an estimated 600,000 deaths. Suppression of political critics, forced labor and famines were carried out by Stalin's government; in 1933, a major famine struck Soviet Ukraine, causing the deaths of some 3[12] to 7 million people.
Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, after which the two countries invaded Poland in September 1939. In June 1941, the pact collapsed as Germany turned to attack to the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theatre of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk. The territories overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the USSR; the postwar division of Europe into capitalist and communist halves would lead to increased tensions with the West, led by the United States.
The Cold War emerged by 1947, as the Eastern Bloc, united under the Warsaw Pact in 1955, confronted the Western Bloc, united under NATO in 1949. On 5 March 1953, Stalin died and was quickly succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin and began the De-Stalinization of Soviet society through the Khrushchev Thaw. The Soviet Union took an early lead in the Space Race, with the first artificial satellite and the first human spaceflight. Khrushchev was removed from power by his colleagues in 1964 and was succeeded as head of state by Leonid Brezhnev. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed with the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost and perestroika. Under Gorbachev, the role of the Communist Party in governing the state was removed from the constitution, causing a surge of severe political instability to set in. The Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989, Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist governments.
With the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR's republics, Gorbachev tried to avert a dissolution of the Soviet Union in the post-Cold War era. A March 1991 referendum, boycotted by some republics, resulted in a majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the union as a renewed federation. Gorbachev's power was greatly diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin played a high-profile role in facing down an abortive August 1991 coup d'état attempted by Communist Party hardliners. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the remaining twelve constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation—formerly the Russian SFSR—assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and is recognized as the primary legal successor of the Soviet Union.[13][14][15] In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: "The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological and economic significance
This coin is 24Kt Gold Plated