Why did the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explode? Chernobyl Disaster: Horrible Facts You Didn't Know. What exactly happened

On April 26, 1986, during a completely planned procedure at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, everything began to develop in a completely different way, as described by the regulations and as common sense suggests ...

Matvey Vologzhanin

Any event in the world consists of so many factors that we can safely say that the whole universe takes part in it in one way or another. The human ability to perceive and comprehend reality ... well, what can we say about it? It is possible that we have already almost overtaken some plants in terms of success in this area. While we are just living, you can not pay much attention to what is actually happening around you. Sounds of varying volumes are heard on the street, more or less cars seem to be moving in different directions, either a mosquito flew past the nose, or the remnants of yesterday's hallucination, and around the corner they hurriedly bring an elephant, which you did not even notice.

Workers of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. 1984

But we are calm. We know that there are Rules. The multiplication table, hygienic norms, the Military Regulations, the Criminal Code and Euclidean geometry - all that helps us to believe in the regularity, orderliness and, most importantly, the predictability of what is happening. How was it with Lewis Carroll - "If you hold a red-hot poker in your hands for a very long time, then in the end you can get slightly burned"?

Troubles begin when disasters occur. Whatever order they may be, they almost always remain inexplicable and incomprehensible. Why did the sole of this still completely new left sandal fall off, while the right one is full of strength and health? Why, out of a thousand cars that drove through a frozen puddle that day, only one flew into a ditch? Why on April 26, 1986, during a completely planned procedure at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, everything began to develop in a completely different way than usual, not in the way described by the regulations and as common sense suggests? However, let's give the floor to a direct participant in the events.

What happened?

Anatoly Dyatlov

“On April 26, 1986, at one hour twenty-three minutes forty seconds, Alexander Akimov, the shift supervisor of Chernobyl Unit 4, ordered the reactor to be shut down at the end of the work carried out before the shutdown of the power unit for the planned repairs. The reactor operator Leonid Toptunov removed the cap from the AZ button, which prevents accidental erroneous pressing, and pressed the button. At this signal, 187 control rods of the reactor began to move down into the core. The backlight lamps on the mnemonic panel lit up, and the arrows of the rod position indicators began to move. Alexander Akimov, standing half-turned to the reactor control panel, watched this, he also saw that the “bunnies” of the AR imbalance indicators darted to the left, as it should be, which meant a decrease in the reactor power, turned to the safety panel, which he was observing from the ongoing experiment.

But then something happened that even the most unbridled fantasy could not predict. After a slight decrease, the reactor power suddenly began to increase at an ever-increasing rate, alarms appeared. L. Toptunov shouted about an emergency increase in power. But there was nothing he could do. He did everything he could - he held the AZ button, the CPS rods went into the active zone. There are no other resources at his disposal. Yes, and everyone else too. A. Akimov sharply shouted: "Turn off the reactor!" He jumped to the console and de-energized the electromagnetic clutches of the CPS rod drives. The action is correct, but useless. After all, the CPS logic, that is, all its elements of logical circuits, worked correctly, the rods went into the zone. Now it is clear: after pressing the AZ button, there were no correct actions, there were no means of salvation ... Two powerful explosions followed with a short interval. The AZ rods stopped moving before going half way. They had nowhere else to go. In one hour, twenty-three minutes, forty-seven seconds, the reactor was destroyed by a power boost on prompt neutrons. This is a collapse, the ultimate catastrophe that can happen in a power reactor. They didn’t comprehend it, they didn’t prepare for it.”

This is an excerpt from Anatoly Dyatlov's book Chernobyl. How it was". The author is the deputy chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for operation, who was present that day at the fourth unit, who became one of the liquidators, recognized as one of the perpetrators of the tragedy and sentenced to ten years in prison, from where he was released two years later to die from radiation, where he and managed to write his memoirs before he died in 1995.

If someone taught physics very badly at school and vaguely imagines what is happening inside the reactor, he probably did not understand what was described above. In principle, this can be conditionally explained in this way.

Imagine that we have tea in a glass, which is trying to boil non-stop on its own. Well, here's the tea. So that he does not smash the glass to smithereens and fill the kitchen with hot steam, we regularly lower metal spoons into the glass - in order to cool it down. The colder we need tea, the more spoons we shove. And vice versa: to make the tea hotter, we pull out the spoons. Of course, the carbide-boron and graphite rods that are placed in the reactor work according to a slightly different principle, but the essence of this does not change much.

Now let's remember what is the main problem facing all power plants in the world. Most of all, power engineers have no trouble with fuel prices, not with drinking electricians, and not with crowds of “greens” picketing their checkpoints. The biggest trouble in the life of any power engineer is the uneven power consumption by the station's customers. The unpleasant habit of mankind to work during the day, sleep at night, and even wash in chorus, shave and watch TV shows leads to the fact that the energy produced and consumed, instead of flowing in a smooth uniform stream, is forced to jump like a mad goat, which causes blackouts and other troubles. After all, instability in the operation of any system leads to failures, and getting rid of excess energy is harder than producing it. This is especially difficult at nuclear power plants, since it is rather difficult to explain a chain reaction when it should be more active, and when it can be slowed down.

Engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. 1980

In the early 1980s, the USSR began to slowly explore the possibility of rapidly increasing and decreasing the power of reactors. This method of controlling energy loads was, in theory, much simpler and more profitable than all the others.

This program, of course, was not discussed openly, the station personnel could only guess why these “scheduled repairs” became so frequent and the regulations for working with reactors changed. But, on the other hand, they didn’t do anything so extraordinarily vile with the reactors. And if this world was regulated only by the laws of physics and logic, then the fourth power unit would still behave like an angel and regularly serve the peaceful atom.

For so far, no one has been able to properly answer the main question of the Chernobyl disaster: why did the reactor power not fall after the introduction of the rods at that time, but, on the contrary, inexplicably increased sharply?

The two most authoritative bodies - the USSR Gosatomnadzor Commission and the IAEA Special Committee, after several years of work, gave birth to documents, each of which is crammed with facts about how the accident proceeded, but one cannot find an answer to the question “why?” on a single page in these detailed studies. There you can find wishes, regrets, fears, indications of shortcomings and forecasts for the future, but there is no clear explanation for what happened. By and large, both of these reports could be reduced to the phrase "Someone boomed there"*.

* Note Phacochoerus "a Funtik: « No, well, that's slander! The IAEA staff, however, expressed themselves more cultured. In fact, they wrote: “It is not known for certain how the power surge began, which led to the destruction of the reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. »

Less official researchers, on the contrary, put forward their versions with might and main - one more beautiful and more convincing than the other. And if there were not so many of them, one of them would probably be worth believing.

Various institutions, organizations and simply world-famous scientists in turn declared the perpetrators of the incident:

incorrect design of the rods; incorrect design of the reactor itself;
the error of personnel who reduced the power of the reactor for too long; a local unnoticed earthquake that occurred exactly under the Chernobyl nuclear power plant; ball lightning; still unknown to science particle, which sometimes occurs in a chain reaction.

The alphabet is not enough to list all the authoritative versions (non-authoritative ones, of course, as always, look more beautiful and contain such wonderful things as evil Martians, cunning cereushniks and an angry Jehovah. It is a pity that such a respected scientific publication as MAXIM cannot go on about the low tastes of the crowd and with gusto to describe all this in more detail.

These strange methods of dealing with radiation

The list of items that are usually required to be distributed to the public in the event of a radiation hazard seems incomplete to the uninitiated. And where is the button accordion, boa and net? But in fact, the things on this list are not so useless.

Mask Someone seriously believes that gamma rays, instantly penetrating steel, will save in front of five layers of gauze? Gamma rays are not. But radioactive dust, on which the heaviest, but no less dangerous substances have already settled, will enter the respiratory tract less intensively.

Iodine The isotope of iodine - one of the shortest living elements of a radioactive release - has the unpleasant property of settling in the thyroid gland for a long time and making it completely unusable. Tablets with iodine are recommended to be taken so that your thyroid gland of this iodine is filled up and it no longer grabs it from the air. True, an overdose of iodine is a dangerous thing in itself, so it is not recommended to swallow it in vials.

canned food Milk and vegetables would be the most useful foods when exposed to radiation, but alas, they are the first to become infected. And then comes the meat, which ate vegetables and gave milk. So it is better not to collect pasture in the infected region. Especially mushrooms: they contain a concentration of radioactive chemical elements uppermost.

liquidation

Recording of rescue dispatchers' conversations immediately after the disaster:

The explosion itself claimed the lives of two people: one died immediately, the second was taken to the hospital. Firefighters were the first to arrive at the scene of the disaster and set to work - extinguishing the fire. They extinguished it in canvas overalls and helmets. They had no other means of protection, and they did not know about the radiation threat - only after a couple of hours information began to spread that this fire was somehow different from the usual one.

By morning, firefighters put out the flames and began to faint - radiation damage began to affect. 136 employees and rescuers who found themselves at the station that day received a huge dose of radiation, and one in four died in the first months after the accident.

In the next three years, a total of about half a million people were engaged in the liquidation of the consequences of the explosion (almost half of them were conscripts, many of whom were sent to Chernobyl, in fact, by force). The very site of the disaster was covered with a mixture of lead, boron and dolomites, after which a concrete sarcophagus was erected over the reactor. Nevertheless, the amount of radioactive substances released into the air immediately after the accident and in the first weeks after it was enormous. Neither before nor after have such numbers been found in densely populated areas.

The deafening silence of the Soviet authorities about the accident did not then seem as strange as it is now. Hiding bad or exciting news from the population was so common practice at that time that even information about a sex maniac operating in the area could not reach the ears of a serene public for years; and only when the next "Fischer" or "Mosgaz" began to count their victims by tens, or even hundreds, the district police officers were given the task to quietly bring to the attention of parents and teachers the fact that it would probably be better for the kids not to run alone along the street.

Therefore, the city of Pripyat was evacuated the next day after the accident hastily, but quietly. People were told that they were being taken out for a day, a maximum of two, and they were asked not to take any things with them so as not to overload the transport. The authorities did not say a word about radiation.

Rumors, of course, spread, but the vast majority of the inhabitants of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia have never heard of any Chernobyl. Some of the members of the Central Committee of the CPSU had the conscience to raise the issue of canceling the May Day demonstrations, at least in cities located directly in the path of polluted clouds, but it was considered that such a violation of the eternal order would cause unhealthy unrest in society. So the residents of Kiev, Minsk and other cities managed to run around with balloons and carnations under the radioactive rain.

But a radioactive release of this magnitude was impossible to hide. The Poles and Scandinavians were the first to raise the cry, to which those same magical clouds flew in from the east and brought with them a lot of interesting things.

Indirect evidence confirming that scientists gave the government the green light to keep silent about Chernobyl can be the fact that scientist Valery Legasov, a member of the government commission investigating the accident, organized the liquidation for four months and voiced the official (very smoothed) version of what was happening to the foreign press, in 1988 hanged himself, leaving in his office a dictaphone record telling about the details of the accident, and that part of the record, which chronologically should have been a story about the reaction of the authorities to the events in the first days, was erased by unidentified persons.

Another indirect evidence of this is that scientists still radiate optimism. And now the officials of the Federal Agency for Atomic Energy stand on the fact that only those several hundred people who took part in the liquidation in the first days of the explosion, and even then with banknotes, can be considered really victims of the explosion. For example, the article “Who Helped Create the Chernobyl Myth”, written by experts from the FAAE and IBRAE RAS in 2005, analyzes statistics on the health status of residents of contaminated areas and, recognizing that, in general, the population there gets sick a little more often, sees the reason only in the fact that, succumbing to alarmist moods, people, firstly, run to the doctors with every pimple, and secondly, for many years they have been living in unhealthy stress caused by hysteria in the yellow press. They explain the huge number of disabled people among the liquidators of the first wave by the fact that “being disabled is beneficial”, and hint that the main cause of catastrophic mortality among the liquidators is not the consequences of exposure, but alcoholism, caused by the same irrational fear of radiation. Even the phrase "radiation danger" is written by our peaceful nuclear scientists exclusively in quotation marks.

But this is one side of the coin. For every nuclear worker who is convinced that there is no cleaner and safer energy in the world than atomic energy, there is a member of an environmental or human rights organization who is ready to sow that same panic in generous handfuls.

Greenpeace, for example, estimates the number of victims of the Chernobyl accident at 10 million, adding to them, however, representatives of the next generations who will fall ill or be born sick within the next 50 years.

Between these two poles there are dozens and hundreds of international organizations, statistical studies which contradict each other so much that in 2003 the IAEA was forced to create the Chernobyl Forum organization, whose task would be to analyze these statistics in order to create at least some reliable picture of what is happening.

And so far, there is nothing clear with estimates of the consequences of the disaster. The increase in mortality of the population from areas close to Chernobyl can be explained by the mass migration of young people from there. A slight "rejuvenation" of oncological diseases - by checking local residents for oncology much more intensively than in other places, so many cases of cancer are caught at very early stages. Even the condition of burdocks and ladybugs in the closed zone around Chernobyl is the subject of fierce disputes. It seems like the burdocks grow amazingly juicy, and the cows are well-fed, and the number of mutations in the local flora and fauna is within the natural norm. But what is the harmlessness of radiation here, and what is the beneficial effect of the absence of people for many kilometers around, it is difficult to answer.

Swedish scientists have come to the conclusion that during the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant there was a weak nuclear explosion. The specialists analyzed the most probable course of nuclear reactions in the reactor and modeled the meteorological conditions for the spread of decay products. talks about an article by researchers published in the journal Nuclear Technology.

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant occurred on April 26, 1986. The catastrophe jeopardized the development of nuclear energy throughout the world. A 30-kilometer exclusion zone was created around the station. Radioactive fallout even fell in the Leningrad region, and cesium isotopes were found in elevated concentrations in lichen and deer meat in the Arctic regions of Russia.

There are different versions of the causes of the disaster. Most often, they point to the wrong actions of the Chernobyl personnel, which led to the ignition of hydrogen and the destruction of the reactor. However, some scientists believe that there was a real nuclear explosion.

boiling hell

A nuclear chain reaction is maintained in a nuclear reactor. The nucleus of a heavy atom, such as uranium, collides with a neutron, becomes unstable and decays into two smaller nuclei - decay products. The fission process releases energy and two or three fast free neutrons, which in turn cause the decay of other uranium nuclei in the nuclear fuel. The number of decays thus increases exponentially, but the chain reaction inside the reactor is under control, which prevents a nuclear explosion.

In thermal nuclear reactors, fast neutrons are not suitable for excitation of heavy atoms, so their kinetic energy is reduced with the help of a moderator. Slow neutrons, called thermal neutrons, are more likely to cause the decay of uranium-235 atoms used as fuel. In such cases, one speaks of a high cross section for the interaction of uranium nuclei with neutrons. Thermal neutrons themselves are called so because they are in thermodynamic equilibrium with the environment.

The heart of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was the RBMK-1000 reactor (a large-capacity channel reactor with a capacity of 1000 megawatts). In fact, this is a graphite cylinder with many holes (channels). Graphite plays the role of a moderator, and nuclear fuel is loaded through technological channels in fuel elements (TVELs). The fuel elements are made of zirconium, a metal with a very small neutron capture cross section. They pass neutrons and heat, which heats the coolant, preventing the leakage of decay products. Fuel rods can be combined into fuel assemblies (FA). Fuel elements are characteristic of heterogeneous nuclear reactors in which the moderator is separated from the fuel.

RBMK is a single-loop reactor. Water is used as a heat carrier, which is partially converted into steam. The steam-water mixture enters the separators, where the steam is separated from the water and sent to the turbogenerators. The exhaust steam condenses and re-enters the reactor.

There was a flaw in the design of the RBMK, which played a fatal role in the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The fact is that the distance between the channels was too large and too many fast neutrons were slowed down by graphite, turning into thermal neutrons. They are well absorbed by water, but steam bubbles are constantly formed there, which reduces the absorption characteristics of the coolant. As a result, reactivity increases, the water heats up even more. That is, RBMK is distinguished by a rather high vapor reactivity coefficient, which complicates the control over the course of a nuclear reaction. The reactor must be equipped with additional safety systems, and only highly qualified personnel should work on it.

Broken firewood

April 25, 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was scheduled to stop the fourth power unit for scheduled maintenance and experiment. Specialists of the Research Institute "Gidroproekt" proposed a method for emergency power supply of the pumps of the station due to the kinetic energy of a turbine generator rotating by inertia. This would make it possible, even in the event of a power outage, to maintain the circulation of the coolant in the circuit until the backup power is turned on.

According to the plan, the experiment was to begin when the thermal power of the reactor dropped to 700 megawatts. The power was reduced by 50 percent (1,600 megawatts), and the process of shutting down the reactor was delayed by about nine hours at the request from Kiev. As soon as the decrease in power resumed, it unexpectedly dropped to almost zero due to erroneous actions of the nuclear power plant personnel and xenon poisoning of the reactor - the accumulation of the xenon-135 isotope, which reduces reactivity. To cope with the sudden problem, neutron-absorbing emergency rods were removed from the RBMK, but the power did not rise above 200 megawatts. Despite the unstable operation of the reactor, the experiment began at 01:23:04.

The introduction of additional pumps increased the load on the run-out turbine generator, which reduced the volume of water entering the reactor core. Together with a high vapor reactivity coefficient, this quickly increased the power of the reactor. The attempt to introduce absorber rods, due to their poor design, only exacerbated the situation. Just 43 seconds after the start of the experiment, the reactor collapsed as a result of one or two powerful explosions.

Ends in the water

Eyewitnesses claim that the fourth power unit of the nuclear power plant was destroyed by two explosions: the second, the most powerful, happened a few seconds after the first. It is believed that the emergency arose due to rupture of pipes in the cooling system caused by the rapid evaporation of water. The water or steam reacted with the zirconium in the fuel elements, which led to the formation of a large amount of hydrogen and its explosion.

Swedish scientists believe that two different mechanisms led to the explosions, one of which was nuclear. First, the high steam reactivity coefficient contributed to an increase in the volume of superheated steam inside the reactor. As a result, the reactor burst, and its 2000-ton top cover flew up several tens of meters. Since fuel elements were attached to it, there was a primary leak of nuclear fuel.

Secondly, the emergency lowering of absorber rods led to the so-called "end effect". At the Chernobyl RBMK-1000, the rods consisted of two parts - a neutron absorber and a graphite water displacer. When the rod is introduced into the reactor core, graphite replaces the neutron-absorbing water in the lower part of the channels, which only enhances the vapor reactivity coefficient. The number of thermal neutrons increases and the chain reaction becomes uncontrollable. There is a small nuclear explosion. Even before the destruction of the reactor, the flows of nuclear fission products entered the hall, and then - through the thin roof of the power unit - entered the atmosphere.

For the first time, specialists started talking about the nuclear nature of the explosion back in 1986. Then scientists from the Khlopin Radium Institute analyzed the fractions of noble gases obtained at the Cherepovets factory, where liquid nitrogen and oxygen were produced. Cherepovets is a thousand kilometers north of Chernobyl, and a radioactive cloud passed over the city on April 29. Soviet researchers found that the ratio of the activities of the isotopes 133 Xe and 133m Xe was 44.5 ± 5.5. These isotopes are short-lived nuclear decay products, indicating a weak nuclear explosion.

Swedish scientists calculated how much xenon was formed in the reactor before the explosion, during the explosion, and how the ratios of radioactive isotopes changed until they fell out in Cherepovets. It turned out that the reactivity ratio observed at the plant could arise in the case of nuclear explosion with a capacity of 75 tons of TNT. According to the analysis of meteorological conditions for the period April 25 - May 5, 1986, xenon isotopes rose to a height of up to three kilometers, which prevented its mixing with the xenon that was formed in the reactor before the accident.

The Chernobyl accident is, without exaggeration, the largest such disaster in the history of mankind. Almost everyone knows the approximate history of this terrible event:

On the night of April 25-26, 1986, an explosion occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant put into operation in 1977, a few kilometers from Pripyat, which destroyed the reactor of the fourth power unit.

The Chernobyl accident claimed a huge number of lives, and its consequences were terrible not only for Ukraine, but for almost the whole world. All of you must have heard about some interesting facts related to this. At least about the fact that terrible mutants are now found in the exclusion zone, and directly at the 4th power unit it is even worse. But most of these stories are nothing more than legends that are written for the sake of clickability of the material.

Very soon there will be an anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. To call it some kind of holiday, or a solemn event, of course, will not work. But, despite this, we decided to sort out all the interesting facts that we managed to find and write the most plausible for you, but this does not make them any less terrible.

Chernobyl disaster: interesting facts

Let's try to understand a little the chronology of all events. At a minimum, we will not start with the consequences of the Chernobyl accident, but we will find out interesting facts that overshadowed the catastrophe itself. And it turns out there are a lot of them.

Firstly, even before the accident, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which was being built at an accelerated pace, raised many questions from safety engineers.

And now a little more specific. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant, like most similar structures during the USSR, was built very quickly and then worked "for wear and tear". Volodymyr Viatrovycha was the director of the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine during the operation of the AS. He said that already two years after the launch of one power unit, complaints began to come to the KGB (for a second, this is 7 years before the accident itself).

"In some sections of the structure of the second block of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, facts of abandonment of projects and violations of the technology of construction and installation work were recorded, which can lead to accidents and accidents," - Vyatrovich quoted the KGB report of January 17, 1979.

In 2006, data from the archives of the SBU were declassified, which during the Soviet era were inaccessible even to many officials. It was said there that over the past two years of operation of the station due to poor-quality installation work, non-compliance with safety measures during construction, violations of technological discipline, radiation safety rules, five accidents and 63 equipment failures occurred at the station. The fact is not interesting, but terrible - the last such message was dated April 25, 1986.

As we can see, the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant could not only be foreseen, but also prevented.

Chernobyl disaster: how it was

1:23 On April 26, 1986, the first explosion occurred. This happened during an experiment to study the possibility of using the inertia of the turbine generator rotor to generate any amount of electricity in case the reactor stops in the future.

To conduct this experiment, a power of 700 MW was needed, but before it began, its level dropped to 30 MW. The operator tried to restore power and started the experiment at 1:23:04 at a lower than planned rate of 200 MW. A few seconds later, the reactor power began to increase and at 1:23:40 the operator pressed the emergency protection button.

After this button was pressed, two more explosions occurred, which almost completely destroyed the entire power unit.

It was the operators, who at that time were at the control panel in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, who were found guilty of this disaster and later convicted. Anatoly Dyatlov was one of them. According to him, the engineers followed all the instructions that were prescribed in the safety rules.

Only 20 years later, all operators were justified. In the report that was then made, it was said, that most of the actions of the operators, which the Soviet authorities had previously called violations, actually corresponded to the rules adopted at that time.

Chernobyl disaster: the amount of radiation

We can say with confidence that not everyone knows how terrible the consequences of the Chernobyl accident were. 50 million curies - that is the amount of radiation that then entered the atmosphere. To get a sense of the scale of this, here's a little comparison:

This sum is equal to the consequences of the explosion of 500 atomic bombs, which the Americans dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Chernobyl disaster: heroes

Of course, as in any other similar case, this story has its heroes. These are the firefighters who received the largest dose of radiation. There were more than 100 of them. According to publicly available data, 31 of them died in a very short time.

Firefighters worked right up to May 9. Interesting fact that from helicopters they extinguished the flames with sand and clay. And it is likely that this only kindled a radioactive flame.

And the affected area, which was formed immediately after the accident, stretched over 50,000 square kilometers - 12 regions. 150 thousand square kilometers around the station became uninhabitable.

Chernobyl disaster: victims

It is impossible to calculate the exact number of victims from such a disaster. Of the numbers that can shed at least a little light on this terrible statistics, the following can be distinguished:

1. 250 thousand people were evacuated
2. 134 people who were present in the block at the time of the accident received radiation sickness
3. 28 of them died within a month
4. 2 people died directly from the explosion
5. According to various sources, the number of victims from the Chernobyl accident can reach 100 thousand people.

Is it possible to repeat Chernobyl

It is worth noting that quite a lot of nuclear power plants operate on the territory of the former USSR, which are built according to the Chernobyl type. Only in Russia there are more than 10 of them. But after the Chernobyl accident, a number of changes were made to all such stations, which exclude such a development of events.

Chernobyl now: what is happening in the exclusion zone

Over the past few years, Chernobyl has become quite a popular destination for tourists. Look at the ghost town of Pripyat, walk around abandoned houses, admire the incredible nature and the like. Yes, all this is now quite possible there.

But to go to the sarcophagus and look at a huge amount military equipment that remained there is prohibited. And not only by law, but also by common sense. After all, the amount of radiation there is still at a dangerous level for humans.

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Lenin Avenue in Pripyat, today

Black smoke spreads in a thick veil over wide fields, along the city district. He broadcasts about an event that forever changed life in the quiet, young Pripyat, the majestic Chernobyl and Ukrainian villages nearby. The Chernobyl disaster was to blame for everything. April, which was supposed to bring sun, joy and spring freshness, instead swept into the radiation whirlwind of the Chernobyl disaster and its consequences.

Pripyatchan takes a photo for memory

The end of April was marked for the city of Pripyat by preparations for May Day holidays and demonstrations. The carousels were about to start working. The Ferris wheel was about to embark on an exciting journey over the picturesque atomograd. The perky kids were looking forward to the opening of the amusement park. After all, cotton candy, snow-white ice cream and the melody of a brass band especially cheered up.

No signs of trouble. People, as usual, returned home from work and spent time in a quiet family circle. However, Saturday evening, April 25, 1986, was on the eve of a fateful turn. In a matter of hours, it will become known about the catastrophe that happened in Chernobyl.

The consequences of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant

The Chernobyl disaster happened as a result of an experiment conducted in the fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Perhaps the Chernobyl disaster could have been avoided if not for a stupid set of circumstances.

It turns out that the experimental work on the study of the rundown of the turbogenerator had to be carried out by a completely different shift of workers specially trained for this task. However, life has made its own adjustments. The workers of the ill-fated shift decided that they must carry out the tasks set. So, starting the testing of the RBMK-1000 reactor, the personnel of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant who took over the shift began to reduce power.

Graffiti made by a stalker in an abandoned house

What exactly happened?

The disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 was inevitable. This was clear already after the first jumps in the power of the new type of reactor. As is known, the work could be considered successful at a power of 700 mW, however, a decrease in power to 30 mW did not cause any concerns among the personnel. Having increased the power to 200 MW, the employees of the nuclear power plant began the decisive stage of the experiment of the fourth power unit. He became the cause of the Chernobyl disaster at the nuclear power plant.

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant happened 30 years ago. For three decades, thousands of articles have been written on the topic of the “largest man-made disaster”, hundreds of studies have been carried out, dozens of scientific reports have been written. But how much do we really know about what happened on April 26, 1986? Especially for those "living in the era of the development of the catastrophe", that is, all of us, the portal site has collected 30 well-known and little-known facts about the Chernobyl disaster.

Fact #1

As a result of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, the fourth nuclear reactor of the station was completely destroyed, 97% of radioactive nuclear fuel was released into the atmosphere. 12

The destroyed fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. Photo: Wikipedia.org.

Fact #2

The first information message about what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for the general public was made by TASS on April 28, 1986 at 21.00 and sounded like this:

“There was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. One of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the incident. The victims received the necessary assistance. A government commission has been set up to investigate the incident.”. 1

Fact #3

An array of trees, located two kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, was called the “Red Forest” due to the brown-red color of the trees, acquired as a result of the absorption of a high dose of radiation by the trees in the first days after the accident. one

Aerial photography of the Red Forest in 1986. Source: chaes.com.ua.

Fact #4

The evacuation of the city of Pripyat, located three kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, began 36 hours after the disaster. one

Fact #5

The average age of the inhabitants of the city of Pripyat at the time of the evacuation was 26 years. one

Schoolchildren of the city of Pripyat in 1985. Photo: pripyat.com.

Fact #6

On the first day after the accident, unusual food stalls appeared in the city of Pripyat, where you could buy products that were in short supply at that time: fresh cucumbers, dry sausage. 7

Fact #7

The total number of people evacuated from contaminated areas was 200,000. one

Fact #8

More than 600 thousand people took part directly in the liquidation of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident, of which 60 thousand died, 165 thousand were disabled. one

Fact #9

As a result of the explosion of the reactor, among other things, a huge amount of hot particles fell into the atmosphere, the distribution area of ​​\u200b\u200bwhich reached Germany. Once in the body, such particles create microzones of intense radiation, causing tissue destruction. 2

Fact #10

The first country to officially register the first evidence of the Chernobyl disaster was Sweden: it was there that the content of radioactive neptunium-239 in the atmosphere was first recorded. 2

Fact #11

According to the IAEA, the design of the reactor that exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was initially "explosive": it did not meet international safety standards and had dangerous design features. one

Fact #12

On May 23, 1986, a fire broke out at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It took up to 8 hours to extinguish the fire, 268 firefighters took part, some of whom received significant doses of radiation. The fire was strictly classified by order of Mikhail Gorbachev. one

Fact #13

According to one version, the explosion of the reactor was triggered by a local earthquake, which caused a strong vibration that preceded the disaster. one

Fact #14

In addition to radioactive substances, as a result of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in environment 250,000 tons of heavy metal, toxic to living organisms, lead. 2

Fact #15

The spread of radioactive iodine of high concentration throughout Belarus in the first days after the disaster was so great that the exposure of millions of people caused by it was called the “iodine strike”. 6

Reconstruction of the distribution of iodine-131 on the territory of Belarus as of May 10, 1986. Source: chernobyl.by.

Fact #16

23% of the territory of Belarus turned out to be contaminated with radioactive cesium-137 at a level that is above the permissible norm. 3

Fact #17

Compared to the pre-accident period, by 1990 the number of cases of thyroid cancer among children in Belarus had increased by 33.6 times. 3

Fact #18

During the period 1990-2000, the incidence of all cancers in the country increased by 40%. eight

Fact #19

In January 1987, an unusual big number cases Down syndrome. one

Number of children with Down syndrome, born in Belarus in the 1980-1990s. Source: wikipedia.org

Fact #20

Post-Chernobyl radiation exposure can affect a specific cell mutation (chromosome aberrations) of offspring affected up to the fourth generation. 2

Fact #21

The total damage caused to Belarus by the Chernobyl disaster is estimated at 235 billion US dollars, which is equal to 19 Belarusian budgets for 2015. 3

Fact #22

According to the scientific journal Oecologia, colored birds were more sensitive to radiation - their numbers in the exclusion zone are declining faster than the number of monochrome species. 4

Fact #23

Plants grown in contaminated areas are subject to serious generative mutations. one

This is how a 20-year-old Scotch pine grown in the Red Forest looks like. Photo: chernobyl.in.ua.

Fact #24

Mushrooms, cumin, some wild berries (for example, blueberries) absorb radiation to the greatest extent. You should be especially careful with these foods. 2

Fact #25

Over time, radioactive substances are able to turn into new elements. So, radioactive plutonium-241, which has a half-life of 14 years, gradually turns into another, more mobile, and, accordingly, more dangerous element for living organisms - americium. one

Fact #26

Fact #27

The last block of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant finally stopped its work on December 15, 2000 at 13:17. one

Fact #28

This is how the map of the radiation background at the Chernobyl NPP looks like at 00:02 on April 26, 2015 (in µSv/h). A level above 1.2 µSv/h is considered dangerous for humans. eight