A man with his six senses, unfortunately, is not able to notice, see, hear, smell the mortal danger of the 20th century - radiation that penetrates everywhere. It is really invisible, soundless, odorless, colorless, tasteless and only makes itself known by irreversible changes in the body, incurable diseases. The only device that is capable of determining a dangerous dose of radiation today is a Geiger counter. But not everyone has such sensitive meters, and they are not cheap.
When, in 1945, two American atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and tens of thousands of people were killed, it became a common human tragedy. The bombing death was understandable. However, after some time (and even years), outwardly not affected by the bombing, thousands of people began to complain of incomprehensible ailments, weakness and excessive sleepiness. Japanese doctors were helpless in the face of an unfamiliar disease. They could not understand why people who had no visible foci of the disease died.
Children who had leukemia, leukemia, and an enlarged thyroid gland especially suffered. No medication helped, and all treatment was limited to clinical procedures. Nobody guessed then that the black ash falling from above was radioactive (hence, deadly), that the water in the rivers became "poisoned" by radiation, that all living and dead, which ended up in the radiation zone, carried radiation sickness and death with it.
It is quite understandable that in those war years, when there was a raid of American aircraft, which decided to avenge the defeat at Pearl Harbor, there were inevitable casualties. The pilots dropped atomic bombs, explosions of enormous destructive power were heard, there were thousands of deaths from the explosion and later thousands from radiation.
And how should radiation, hidden in the steel shells of peaceful reactors, behave if it burst out? Nobody knew that. Radiation has not yet escaped anywhere, and doctors have not yet encountered such problems. Therefore, they did not particularly think about the consequences of a possible radiation leak.
The "experiment" began on Friday, April 25, 1986: at the fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, located about 100 kilometers north of Kiev. It was decided to suspend it in order to carry out a number of technical operations. However, unexpectedly for the engineers and technicians themselves who served the fourth reactor, he behaved outside the box, literally broke out of obedience. The temperature rose sharply on it, attempts to lower it did not lead to anything. A fire started. Already on Saturday, April 26, 1986, two explosions occurred, the dense metal shell of the reactor broke through, and the concrete protection did not survive. Approximately 180 tons of flaming uranium burst out. The radioactive power of the nuclear reactor at that time was 1,500 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. However, the real scale of the catastrophe became clear much later.
For three days the Soviet leadership did not want to make any official statements, hoping that nothing terrible had happened. For three days the world was in complete ignorance. And only on April 30, when the workers of the Swedish nuclear power plant Forsmark, located on the shores of the Baltic Sea, registered powerful nuclear radiation emanating not from their station, but from a cloud that came from the east, an alarm was given. Where did the infected cloud come from? There was only one answer - from the east, from the Soviet Union, which has nuclear reactors of enormous power. Increased radiation was also recorded in Japan and the United States. It was then that physicists determined that an explosion at a nuclear reactor near Kiev was the center of an unknown nuclear radiation.
And all this time, 180 tons of white incandescent uranium were burning in the reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. They burned in the open air, and no one really knew what to do in the first place - to extinguish the fire, fill up the damaged power unit or take out people.
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Panic began in Kiev. People were eager to leave the flourishing spring city. Windows and doors were closed in all houses, they tried not to go out into the street without special need. And only then did the government begin to act: it began to collect councils of scientists, specialists, doctors, who began to jointly seek a way out of the situation.
The whole country was stirred up. They were ready to provide all kinds of assistance from abroad. During the first days of extinguishing the fire at the power unit, thirty-two people died, two hundred people received nuclear irradiation and were essentially doomed. It also became clear that from the territory of 200 thousand square kilometers adjacent to Chernobyl, where about one hundred and thirty thousand people lived, it was necessary to evacuate everyone, because everyone was in danger of radioactive contamination. But besides people, there were also domestic animals and birds on this earth. This entire territory was declared an infection zone, uninhabitable for several decades.
This is how one of the residents of the village adjacent to the station described the accident, who directly observed the explosion and fire at a nuclear power plant. “April 26 was Saturday, the day was sunny and warm. And our housemate climbed to the roof to sunbathe. But not even a few minutes had passed before he returned and said that this morning something was baking strongly. And his body really quickly became covered with a red coating, and then blisters, as from a burn. We were very surprised. What a strange sun! Then we decided to climb onto the roof together and check. It was then that we noticed that a bright glow appeared over the Chernobyl station. As if another sun had flashed. Something was burning there. But what? Power unit? In the evening of the same day, my neighbor became ill. He started vomiting and had a fever. And he was immediately sent to the clinic. And only on April 27 on the radio announced a fire at the station and everyone was advised not to leave their homes."
A wide variety of equipment arrived at the crash site, mainly military - self-propelled guns, bulldozers. It was required to fill up the burning reactor, but the problem was that a person could not be near it for more than one minute and ten seconds. An extra sixty seconds meant certain death. To avoid casualties, the engineers proposed to mount controlled robotic bulldozers right on the spot, which, on command, would move to the reactor and create a parapet of concrete, sand, and stones. At the same time, thirty of the most powerful helicopters were dumping tons of cement and crushed lead from above. Day and night they dug an underground tunnel that led to the base of the reactor. It was decided to walled up the fourth power unit in a concrete shell, to create an eternal sarcophagus around it.
At the same time, the decontamination of residential buildings and entire streets began. Hundreds of sprinklers poured water, washing away the dirt. Thousands of people were forced to leave their places and move to unfamiliar cities and towns. The genie that escaped from Chernobyl brought innumerable troubles not only to the Soviet Union.
A radioactive cloud that passed over Europe poisoned the earth, plants and animals in some places. In the Scandinavian countries, forty thousand domestic animals were slaughtered, 30,000 sheep in the north-west of England were irradiated and also destroyed. Thousands of tons of milk in Germany were considered poisoned and poured into the ground.
Foreign doctors and specialists who visited the crash site believed that the number of people suffering from cancer in Europe would significantly increase in the coming decades. And at least 75,000 people will be killed. Two American professors, John Hoffman and Karl Morgan, predicted that in the next 70 years, about half a million people will suffer from cancer.
As it became known later, the main cause of fire explosions was mistakes made during the experiment carried out at the fourth reactor, when its productivity was reduced by 7 percent of the established norm. It turned out that the control devices themselves at the nuclear power plant were not ready for a deviation in the operation of the reactor.
And only on May 6, the temperature of the nuclear reactor stabilized relatively, but only by November 30, the sarcophagus was almost ready. Three hundred thousand tons of concrete and six thousand tons of metals were spent on its construction.
In April 1991, Soviet scientist Vladimir Chernyshenko reported that as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, not thirty-two people died (as officially reported), but at least seven to ten thousand. And they were mostly miners and military personnel who fought with the consequences of the disaster. Unfortunately, no one kept accurate statistics, no one counted the number of people currently suffering from the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. V. Chernyshenko noted that at that time the Soviet authorities provided the IAEA with incorrect data, stating that the release into the atmosphere amounted to only 3 percent of the radioactive substance in the reactor, while in fact the release was from sixty to eighty percent. V. Chernyshenko meant that not only adults, but also children became victims of this release and radioactive radiation,who have had their thyroid gland affected. At the end of the 20th century, children from Chernobyl, who received a large share of radiation, are being treated in different European countries. The visible catastrophe ended long ago, and its invisible consequences are still making themselves felt.
From the book: "HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS" by N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev