On April 26th, 1986, there was a catastrophic accident at the USSR's nuclear power plant
near Chernobyl.
Despite the couple of immediate deaths caused by the explosion, other effects of the disaster
were arguably much worse.
Here are some less-discussed, terrible things about the Chernobyl disaster.
The meltdown at Chernobyl never should have happened.
There was plenty of warning that something could go wrong long before the power plant
there had even been built.
Chernobyl's reactors were the same kind as those at a nuclear facility in Leningrad,
and when those had powered up in 1973, at least three major problems with the Soviets'
new design quickly became obvious.
There were major differences between how the inventors predicted the design would function
and how it actually worked, but no one bothered to look into those issues.
That meant there was no information on how this new type of reactor would behave in an
accident.
On November 30th, 1975, over a decade before the Chernobyl disaster, the Leningrad reactors
suffered a partial meltdown as the plant was brought back online after scheduled maintenance.
Nothing could be done to stop the chain reaction, and radiation poured into the atmosphere.
“It means the fire we're watching with our own eyes is giving off nearly twice the radiation
released by the bombing of Hiroshima, and that’s at least every single hour."
The official line from the commission set up to investigate the Leningrad accident was
that a small manufacturing defect was to blame.
What they really found were massive problems with the design of the reactor itself, but
those findings were suppressed.
The commission did make recommendations on various changes to that kind of reactor, including
new safety regulations and a faster emergency protection system.
They were completely ignored, and Chernobyl was built with the same fundamentally flawed
reactor as Leningrad.
From the outside, the Chernobyl meltdown initially appeared to be a relatively small, manageable
fire, and the Soviet government was in no hurry to reveal how dangerous it was, even
to their own people.
Scientists in Sweden were actually the first to notice something was up and alerted the
outside world to the radioactive fallout emitting from around Kiev.
The USSR still stayed silent, even as international news covered Chernobyl as a major disaster.
When their state TV finally had to admit there'd been an accident, it assured Soviet citizens
that the West was spreading exaggerated reports as propaganda, and that while there had been
a bit of an issue, everything was already taken care of.
This was, of course, a lie, and it had deadly consequences.
The people living close to the biggest nuclear accident in history initially had no idea
the danger they were facing.
With radiation pouring out over the nearby town, the government repeatedly refused to
order an evacuation, and plant workers were forbidden from telling anyone about the accident.
Finally, after two days, the order came and officials gave residents less than an hour
to evacuate.
Being told you have 50 minutes to pack, grab your family, leave your pets and valuables,
and get out of town, is unbelievably stressful in the best circumstances, and the circumstances
of the Chernobyl disaster were far from the best.
According to the World Health Organization, 116,000 people were evacuated immediately,
with an additional 230,000 following over the next few years.
The stress brought on by losing their homes is one of the often-overlooked tolls on those
affected.
Families were even split up during the evacuation, making things even more traumatic for children
and their parents.
The trauma of Chernobyl didn't end quickly, either.
In 2013, a study at the University of Southern California found millions of people were still
suffering from mental problems related to the accident.
There was even a resulting mistrust in doctors.
Both relocated people and those who got to stay put still showed a diminished quality
of life, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
"And now you want us to swim underneath a burning reactor?
Do you even know how contaminated it is?"
The brave people who cleaned up Chernobyl for three years after the accident were taken
advantage of from the beginning.
The government suppressed information on how dangerous the job was, and almost all liquidators
were sent in with inadequate protection against radiation.
When machines broke under the pressure, they moved the radioactive debris with their hands.
At least 28 died horribly within weeks, and thousands more died from the effects of radiation
or became disabled from exposure.
You'd think the governments involved would be grateful, but the liquidators are still
fighting for support today, after years of seeking compensation and protesting against
benefit cuts.
The most pronounced long-term physical health effect among survivors of Chernobyl is thyroid
cancer, and according to the United Nations, it wasn't just radiation emanating from the
reactor that caused it.
Thousands of children appear to have gotten cancer from drinking radioactive milk.
By 2005, 6,000 people who were children and adolescents at the time of the disaster developed
thyroid cancer, and were left with a grim reminder of what they'd been through.
Removal of the thyroid resulted in a distinctive scar on the neck that became known as the
"Chernobyl necklace" and carried a stigma with it.
The good news is that virtually all the individuals who got thyroid cancer survived.
Amazingly, the issue still isn't over today.
In 2016, a journalist in what is now Belarus saw cows grazing near signs warning radiation
was higher than normal.
He sent a sample of milk to a lab to see if it was still dangerous all these years on,
and it was, with a radioactive isotope level that was 10 times higher than the safe level.
The government also wanted to suppress the findings, since exporting milk is a big business
for the country and pointing out it's still affected by Chernobyl wouldn't be good for
the economy.
The company sued the journalist and won, so plenty of people in the area are still drinking
contaminated, potentially cancer-causing milk.
While the people around the Chernobyl plant were eventually warned and evacuated, the
animals in the surrounding areas weren't so lucky.
Sadly, dogs, cats, and farm animals were the victims of some of the disaster's most devastating
effects.
Ranchers noticed a dramatic increase of genetic abnormalities in farm animals born after the
accident, and unfortunately, the same goes for wild animals living near Chernobyl.
Grazing animals like elk may look fine, but they have high rates of radiation in their
bodies.
And then there's the Chernobyl dog population.
"Yeah, they're radioactive, so they have to go.
But it’s not hard, they’re mostly pets.”
When people were evacuated, they were told to leave their pets behind, and while an effort
was made by the Soviet army to eliminate the animal population, many of them survived.
The result was what appears to be a large and apparently thriving population of stray
dogs in the Exclusion Zone, numbering in the hundreds.
In a minor but still pretty depressing development, the dogs may have high levels of radiation
and possible exposure to rabies, meaning that they're very dangerous for visitors to pet.
The good news, however, is that a nonprofit called the Clean Futures Fund has launched
a program called Dogs of Chernobyl.
For the past few years, they've been working with the support of international veterinary
volunteers to help manage the canine population in a way that's far more humane than the Soviet
Union's initial strategy of containment by extermination.
With the advancement of technology over the past 30 years and the worldwide attention
that's been given to the Chernobyl disaster since 1986, it might seem like the area would
be cleaned up by now.
Sadly, it's not even close.
By some estimates, much of the area won't be safe for human habitation for 3,000 years,
and one geologist thinks it's more like a million.
When the reactor blew, it only lost 5 percent of its enriched uranium.
That means 190 tons are still in Chernobyl's shell, combined into a massive mess with concrete,
steel, and other debris from the explosion that clocks in at around 2,000 tons.
Unfortunately, the technology to safely take that fused mass apart and dispose of it doesn't
exist yet, and even in the best-case scenario, it won't for at least a few decades.
The only option currently available is containing the site underneath a new concrete and steel
"sarcophagus" built in 2017, but even that will only last 100 years.
One Ukrainian energy policy expert's actual solution is to just hope that the next century
brings a new generation made up of people who are a whole lot smarter than we are so
that they can figure out how to solve this radioactive puzzle.
The logistics of containing what is effectively an unplanned nuclear waste dump until the
year 4986, assuming humans are still around, are almost beyond comprehension.
Still, some people aren't willing to wait and have moved back to just outside or even
into the exclusion zone.
Even the "good" area is still radioactive, though, and some residents go about their
daily lives with Geiger counters around their necks.
By the time of the Chernobyl disaster, people knew fossil fuels were terrible for the environment.
Nuclear meltdowns are also very bad, though, and having the planet die slowly is a lot
less scary than a nuclear plant that could kill you tomorrow.
In the 1970s, nuclear power was thought to be the next big thing.
Compared to coal, it was cheap and much better for the planet.
Then, the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters happened in the span of seven years.
After that, most everyone accepted fossil fuels as the better route.
Partially due to fears of another Chernobyl, the U.S. didn't open a single nuclear power
plant between 1996 and 2016.
Meanwhile, it, and almost all other countries, has been burning fossil fuels like there's
no tomorrow.
In terms of sheer body count, nuclear power may have been the better choice from the beginning.
In the end, Chernobyl could kill an estimated 4,000 people, but deadly meltdowns are fortunately
very rare.
Meanwhile, Wired reports that about 7,500 people die from problems related to coal-burning
power plants every single year.
A switch to nuclear, which Chernobyl's preventable disaster helped delay, could have saved some
of those lives, plus slowed down the destruction of the environment, assuming that we learned
something from the disaster and made things a little safer.
Chernobyl gave Earth a major dose of radiation in 1986, and global climate change, which
the disaster helped to speed up, is going to make sure it's a gift that keeps on giving.
In 2019, scientists studied glaciers in 17 sites across the world.
They found the levels of radioactive material were much, much higher than what you'd see
anywhere outside of an exclusion zone like the one around Chernobyl - in some cases,
10 times higher.
Every single site had nuclear fallout present, and not deep down, but on the rapidly melting
surface ice, which may have a disastrous impact.
"Impact means completely uninhabitable for a minimum of 100 years."
To be fair, it's not all Chernobyl's fault.
Any time radioactive material is released into the atmosphere, whether from nuclear
tests, or the atomic bombs used in World War II, or other meltdowns, it ends up mixing
with clouds.
If it falls as snow onto the ice, the heavy sediment results in concentrated levels of
nuclear residue.
To be less fair to Chernobyl, it released so much radioactive stuff into the atmosphere
that when researchers took core samples of the glaciers, they could see that the disaster
caused a massive spike in the nuclear material they found.
The radioactive material is soluble in water, which means it will probably end up in the
food chain as global warming melts the glaciers.
Even more worryingly, there isn't enough data to know how much of this "particularly dangerous"
substance could make it back to humans.