My name is Sasha Yuvchenko, and I would like to tell you the story of how I survived one
of the worst man-made disasters the world has ever seen.
On April 25th, 1986, I was working at the heart of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
when the No. 4 nuclear reactor exploded.
The blast was huge in itself, and one of my colleagues was pretty much vaporized instantly.
What happened after that has become one of the world’s worst real-life horror stories.
But let me start from the beginning.
It was evening at the plant where I worked, which was located near the town of Pripyat
in Northern Ukraine.
The sky was a radiant blue, it was warm, and when my colleagues and I clocked-in for our
night shift at the plant we were in good spirits.
I remember the conversation was all about what we were going to do for the May-day holidays,
and little did we know the near future would be very different from how we imagined it
would be.
My wife, Natasha, was at home with my two-year old.
I was 24 at the time, with a new family, and everything to look forward to.
That night we were told we were going to have to run a test on reactor number four.
This didn’t go down well with a lot of the guys because we weren’t really sure how
to do it.
We had no choice, though, a command is a command.
We argued about the right power level we should start the test at, and little did we know
that there was a design flaw in that reactor.
This would prove to be what you might call a fatal design flaw.
What we were basically testing was a simulation of an electrical power outage.
You can probably guess that such a thing, if it were to happen, would be very dangerous.
But if there was an outage the generators would kick in.
The problem was this would take about a minute to gain full power, and you just don’t have
a minute because the water that is pumped in the reactor to keep it cool would not get
pumped and too much heat would be generated.
So, the theory was that the electricity could be taken from the rotational energy of the
steam turbine.
This would in theory power the cooling pumps for that minute.
So, to do the test we had to simulate this power loss and see if this theory worked.
We’d tried this twice before, but both times the tests failed.
Third time lucky is not exactly how things turned out.
So, we dropped the power levels.
That didn’t go well, and suddenly the reactor became dangerously unstable.
We also ignored, and were told to ignore, some of the vital safety mechanisms.
We knew something was wrong, but we were told to go ahead and keep testing.
We removed something called control rods so that we could get back the power, but that
didn’t turn out well either.
It was also against safety procedures.
Those rods are like a fail-safe, they prevent the reactor from generating too much power.
Power then began to rise, and then rise dramatically.
We weren’t sure what was happening.
In the reactor steam was building up.
You could say what we then had was a pressure cooker of enormous proportions.
We knew then we had an emergency on our hands.
We pushed the SCRAM button, which is the emergency shutdown.
We then reinserted the control rods, but they jammed.
What we didn’t know is that the graphite tips on those rods caused more power to surge.
At 1:23:45 a.m this pressure cooker then blew.
The 1,000-ton roof was blown right off and a fireball blasted into the sky.
The air was filled with dust, pieces of graphite were flung everywhere, radiation spilled into
the atmosphere.
It was hell on Earth, in the literal sense.
We were all shocked in the room, the boom was so big we thought a war had happened.
The walls shuddered; the whole place felt so unstable.
Trust me, I am a huge man, and I am not afraid of much, but at that point I felt tiny, at
the mercy of something terrible.
I then went looking for my buddy, because he must have been closest to the explosion.
It was dark in the corridors, dust was everywhere, all I could hear was a hissing sound.
He had been too near the pumps.
He was dead.
I saw the roof had been blown off, and in the night sky I could see the stars.
And then I saw something that looked quite wonderful, ethereal, like God shining down
on us.
It was a beam of light.
That beam was something more malign than I was aware of.
It was radiation, and that radiation would kill a lot of people.
I then went with some colleagues to the reactor hall, but the heavy door was jammed.
As I said, I am a big man, some people say a bear of a man.
I managed to get the door open while my friends went inside the hall to try and understand
just how much damage had been caused.
Those guys would all die in the coming days and weeks from radiation poisoning.
At the time we knew radiation levels were high because the device used to tell us the
level, the dosimeter, was showing a needle that was off the scale.
Still, at the time all we thought was there goes our job in the nuclear energy business.
We had no idea of just how catastrophic that explosion was.
After about an hour, though, I knew something was wrong, and I mean wrong with me.
I started to throw up, and then I got a sore throat.
Outside firefighters were already on the scene.
They didn’t know either about the dangerous levels of radiation, and many of those brave
guys would die slow horrible deaths.
In the town nearby people stood outside, mesmerized by this great big beam of light.
Some of those people would also die from radiation poisoning, but as I said, no one really knew
about the danger they were in.
I had a good idea as time went on, because at about 6 am I couldn’t even walk.
I felt deathly ill.
The grim reaper of radiation was inside me, slowly trying to relieve me of my life, my
kid, my loving wife.
I was taken to the hospital and there a few of us talked about what was happening to us.
Just how much radiation had we been exposed to?
One guy seemed to know what he was talking about, and he said if you throw up like that
so quickly, well, it’s a lot.
We might even die.
In fact, I later learned that vomiting after radiation poisoning means death for most people.
I found out I’d been exposed to 4.1Sv of radiation.
You don’t know what that means of course, but let me tell you that it was about 650
times above the level that workers at a nuclear plant should get exposed not in an hour, but
a year.
It’s 5,000 times more than the average person should be exposed to in a whole year.
I knew I was in trouble.
Some of those guys I talked to at the hospital died horribly.
In a way you could say they melted from the inside.
Then things got even more surreal when the KGB came to the hospital and started to talk
to me.
I was then told I had to go to Moscow, and that’s where they took me without even informing
my wife.
128 of us made that trip, and I believe five people in this group died.
I mean died soon, of course.
God knows who died as a result of being poisoned in the years to come.
I got to Moscow and one of the first things they did to me was shave my head.
This was no time to care about appearances, and anyway, in a week all my body hair just
fell out.
Most of us were having trouble breathing.
Our eyes hurt, our noses hurt, everything seemed to hurt.
Then we were given bone-marrow transplants.
I had many in fact.
What’s really weird, and chilling, is the fact that me and a lot of guys suddenly felt
a lot better.
What we didn’t know was with radiation poisoning at such high levels there is a kind of rest
period, a hiatus in the chaos happening inside.
You think you’re getting better, but then the worst stuff starts to happen.
For me a low point was pulling back my bed sheets one day and seeing my ulcerous skin
dead.
The worst parts of me were my shoulder, my hip, my calf.
That’s because when I held that door those parts were exposed to really high levels of
radiation.
Had I gone inside, well, that would have been game over for me.
Parts of my body just seemed to be eaten alive.
Bits of me just turned black.
It was awful to see.
I was turning into a monster, a kind of radioactive mutant.
But I was lucky.
I went through many operations and had lots of skin grafts.
I wasn’t dead, but when I was told I might lose my arm I was a bit upset.
They saved it, but it stayed covered in bandages for the next seven years of my life.
Even these days I might occasionally see ulcerations on the parts of my skin that were most exposed
to the radiation.
One of the things that saved me was the fact they sent me to Berlin to have microsurgery,
where blood vessels were transferred from my leg to my arm.
Like I said, I was lucky.
I am a fortunate man.
One of the guys that worked close to me had similar surgeries.
He went blind, and then within a month of his exposure he died.
What had happened to him and to the rest of us is bone marrow cells had been destroyed
from the radiation, and this causes a drop in white blood cells.
When that happens you can’t fight off infection, and that’s when you slowly start to be eaten
alive from within.
I spent in total one year inside hospitals, and then for years after I had to regularly
go back for rehab.
They told me I shouldn’t have another child, because the chances of that child developing
leukemia were very high.
Now and again I get morbid and think when will the worst happen, but so far my good
old body has been excellent at repairing itself.
My wife has stood by me, and it wasn’t easy at times.
People knew about what had happened to me and thought I was a walking time bomb.
They’d cross the street when they saw me because they thought I’d pass the poison
on to them.
I was one of the monsters of Chernobyl to them, walking around with a radiation hazard
sign on my back.
But I am here and I am happy.
I think I can now safely say that I survived Chernobyl.
My name is Sasha Yuvchenko, and that’s my story.
Tell us what you think about this story in the comments.
Also, check out our other video Chernobyl Suicide Squad - 3 Men Who Prevented Even Worse
Nuclear Disaster.
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