Chernobyl disaster - April 26, 1986

On this day in 1986, a chemical explosion in a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine triggered one of the worst nuclear disasters ever. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey guys, welcome to this Day in History class,
where we bring you a new tidbit from history every day.
Today is April. The day was April nine. At the

(00:29):
Chernobyl Nuclear power Station and Soviet Ukraine, a chemical explosion
cost an enormous fire. Large quantities of radioactive material were
released into the atmosphere for nearly two weeks because of
the accident. Even though people in the nearby area were evacuated,
the wind spread the radiation, which contaminated land and caused

(00:52):
thousands of people to get radiation related illnesses. The Chernobyl
Power Station was in the town of Pripyat to us
northwest of the city of Chernobyl. The station was built
in the late nineteen seventies. It had four reactors, or
devices where nuclear fission is initiated and controlled in a
self sustaining chain reaction to create energy or radiation. Each

(01:17):
of the reactors could produce one thousand megawatts of electric power.
On the evening of April six, engineers began a test
on reactor Unit four. They wanted to figure out whether
the reactors turbine could run emergency water pumps during a
power loss, but the test and reactor were not designed will.

(01:40):
The engineers shut down the reactors, power regulating system and
emergency safety systems. Then they let the reactor run at
a low power and removed most of the control rods
from its core. Control rods maintained the fission rate in
a nuclear reactor. The reactor's output went up to two
hundred megawats, and at one am on April, the engineers

(02:04):
shut down the turbine engine to see if it's inertial
spinning would power the reactor's water pumps. It did not
because there was no cooling water. The reactor's power levels surged,
so the engineers put all the control rods back into
the reactor at once. That was supposed to prevent a meltdown.

(02:25):
The problem was the control rods had graphite tips. Those
graphite tips made the chain reaction in the core go
out of control, and steam building up in the reactor
blasted the steel and concrete lid off of it. Radioactive
debris went flying everywhere, and there was a partial meltdown
in the reactor core. Another explosion went off seconds later,

(02:48):
and the fire went off at reactor number three because
engineers had shut down emergency systems. Safeties were not triggered,
though this was not a violation of regulations. The explosion
released four hundred times more radiation than the atomic bomb
the US dropped on Hiroshima. About thirty one people died

(03:09):
in the first few months after the explosion from the blast,
acute radiation, sickness, and cardiac arrest. Firefighters arrived minutes after
the fire started, but they were not wearing any gear
that would protect them from the radiation, and many of
them soon died from exposure. At five in the morning.
The next day, reactor three was shut down. The day

(03:32):
after that, Reactors one and two were shut down. The
fire was put out with sand, lead and nitrogen, which
took about two weeks, but the accident had released extremely
dangerous levels of radioactive substances like I had died went
thirty one, plutonium and caesium one thirty seven. The plumes

(03:52):
of radioactive material released into the air were carried for
miles by currents of air lethal rain fail throughout Ukraine, Russia, Belarus,
Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. Many more people were
exposed to high doses of radiation on the twenty seventh
of April, the Soviet government began evacuating Pripyots tens of

(04:16):
thousands of residents. At the time, evacuates did not know
how serious the accident had been. At first, the Soviet
Union tried to keep the accident a secret, not announcing
the scale of the disaster. But a few days after
the explosion, Swedish officials realized that high radiation levels in
Europe were the result of a nuclear accident in the

(04:38):
Soviet Union. So in April, the Soviet Union announced that
there was an accident at Chernobyl. In May, hundreds of
thousands of people called liquidators were sent to Chernobyl to
help clean up. They worked in short shifts as they
did not have adequate protective gear. Over several months, a

(04:58):
huge steel in i meant sarcophagus was built to encase
reactor for and prevent the further spread of radiation. Still,
thousands of people remained in contaminated areas. People got sick
from the radiation, which increased the incidence of thyroid cancer.
Animals and forests were also affected. The Chernobyl power station

(05:22):
wasn't decommissioned until two thousand. In two thousand and sixteen,
a new confinement was placed over the old sarcophagus, which
had been deemed unsound. Today, there is a Chernobyl exclusion
zone that's about one thousand square miles where people cannot
live in. Agriculture is not allowed, but there are animals

(05:42):
like wolves and bison living at the site. There are
plans for a solar power plant to be constructed at
the site, and people can visit the abandoned territory as tourists,
but the radio activity is still affecting people and likely
will for decades. For example, cows miles away from the
site still produce milk with high levels of radiation. The

(06:05):
number of deaths caused by the radio activity is controversial,
as the long term health effects of radiation are hard
to pinpoint and statistics can be unreliable. Many fears of
radiation induced health issues are unsubstantiated, but estimates of the
death toll have ranged from a few thousand to an
improbable million. I'm Eve jeffco and hopefully you know a

(06:31):
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(06:54):
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