When that reactor exploded in the wee hours of April 26, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev — the Soviet Union’s last General Secretary — had been in office for a year.
According to the official Soviet reports, a safety experiment gone awry led to a steam explosion in the #4 Reactor.
With the force of up to 40tons of TNT, the explosion ignited an extremely hot graphite fire thatburned for six days, lifting the radiation high into the atmospherewhere it drifted around the globe, leaving patches of radioactivity that contaminate sheep in Wales and wild boars in Germany to thisday.
Then the core melted for four more days, belching radiation closer to the ground.
When comparing Chernobyl to Fukushima, the explosion and graphitefire are cited as big differences that make Chernobyl worse. But by lifting the radiation into the air, the graphite fire did much to spare the local population — much the same way that the winds are blowingradiation out to sea at Fukushima.
As for explosions, Fukushima has had three: two hydrogen explosions in Reactors #1 and #4 and a third at #3 that the NuclearRegulatory Commission reported came from thespent fuel ponds and shot radioactive debris at least a mile away. Strangely, this event is not receiving much media attention.
When nuclear fuel — be it in a reactor core or spent fuel cooling pond — explodes or burns, some of the radioactive atoms or radionuclidesvaporize and get carried by the wind. At Chernobyl, radionuclides alsogot carried by dust and in bits of the core called "hot particles".
Here,hot particles coat pine needles in the first year after the disaster. Suchsurface contamination is the main problem in the lands aroundFukushima now. I can be pretty blase about radioactive zones aftergoing toChernobyl 25 times, but I would not go to Fukushima without a respirator.
In this map of cesium contamination during Chernobyl’s first year, thedarkest color shows the highest levels. These are from reactor debrisexpelled in the initial explosion. Note the two lobes extending north andwest. They contain much of the plutonium contamination as well.
The Chernobyl clean-up required 800,000 "liquidators" who wereordered and in many cases forced to work in the zone on short tours ofduty to limit radiation exposure.
All of these vehicles were used in the Chernobyl clean-up and are too radioactively contaminated to ever leave the zone.
In the early years, workers had to change into progressivelycontaminated vehicles as they approached the power station.
It took 90,000 liquidators to build the Sarcophagus to house the ruined 4th reactor. It is not hermetically sealed and was never meant to be. Parts of the structure are held together only by friction and it is riddledwith cracks and gaps. Birds nest in it and carry bits of radioactivity outside.
My dosimeter shows background radiation levels 90 times normal.
The visitor’s center has a model of what they think is inside. The brownsphere in the middle is the reactor core. The so-called Cascade Wall on the left is filled with radioactive debris from bulldozing the plant’s grounds.
This bleak photo was taken by Richard Wilson in the winter of 1987 and it is it is how I imaginedthe zone when I moved to still-Soviet Ukraine in 1991 — like a giant radioactive parking lot north of Kiev; dead, like a moonscape.
When I finally did go in 1996, I was shocked to find that the lifelessradioactive desert I imagined had actually become a wildlife sanctuary the size ofRhode Island. Nature proved more resilient than anyone had thought.
Today, more than 95% of the radionuclides are no longer on surfacesbut a few inches deep in the ground. Radiation is no longer "on" the zonebut "of" the zone. It is part of the food chain.
Note the radiation symbol at the bottom. This is a nuclear waste dump.
The Pripyat swamps are Europe’s largest wetlands, though the Sovietsdrained them for agriculture. But when 135,000 people werepermanently evacuated from the 18 mile zone around the reactor –almost exactly the same number that had been living within 18 milesof Fukushima before the disaster — the lands started returning to theirprimordial state.
After many years, the vast majority ofradionuclides are fixed inches deep in the waterways’ sediments.
This pine is displaying radiomorphism, a change of shape due to radiation. Instead of growing straight up with branches perpendicular to the trunk,the radiation disorients the plant, which grows more like a bush.
Radiomorphism was common in plants in the early years, when radiation levelswere higher all around the zone. Now, you’ll only find it in the so-calledRed Forest, which sits atop the western lobe of very radioactive debrisfrom the initial explosion, and also atop radioactive waste that was just bulldozed into the ground, without any containment.
Some plants especially concentrate radionuclides, such as moss, which takes its nutrients from the air, so it collects radioactive dust that kicks up on windy days. Mushrooms are also very radioactive because their myceliaare like sponges in the most contaminated layers of soil.
Pripyat, the Chernobyl plant’s company town, was located less than twomiles away. It was billed as the "youngest city on the planet" but it wassurely its shortest lived.
Pripyat’s 45,000 residents were evacuated on April 28. They were told it was for three days. It turnedout to be forever. Prypiat.com is a website that brings together the city’s former residents.
In the abandoned and completely looted apartments, you can find Communist junk and old Izvestia newspapers proclaiming the tiredSoviet propaganda of pre-perestroika. By 1986, Mikhail Gorbachevhad already called for reforming the USSR and opening it with glasnost,but neither concept was any more than just words before Chernobyl.
After the disaster, Moscow revealed more to Western governments — and nuclear industries — than to the affectedpeople. Such secrecy hasbeen endemicto the international nuclear industry from its very originsandis currently being dramatically displayed in the dosing of the bad news from Japan.
There is a myth that Pripyat is a time capsule of Soviet times, with uncollected mail in mailboxes and other touching signs of lives hurriedly left behind. But it isn’t true. Yes, the detritus is Soviet, but very little of it is left after 25 years. There is no mail left in mailboxes, except by people who want to stage a scene.
What is left of the library.
Another commonly staged scene. The objects in this kindergarten were not left like this after the evacuation. Photos from soon afterwards show neatly made beds, with toys and books lined up on shelves.Anything you find in the Zone these days is very unlikely to be in thepositionor place it was left in.
Nature is smashing through the concrete and steel of Pripyat.
The first building collapsed in 2006.
Experts predict the rest will be rubble in 100 years.
In the autumn of 2005, a group of German vandals slipped away from their Zone guide to cover Pripyat with graffiti. It was a huge scandal in the Zone, where most people viewed it as something close to sacrilege.
Outside of Pripyat and the town of Chernobyl, where the zone’s administration is based, a common scene is what looks like a hole in the forest.
It is actually an abandoned country road, overgrown with the forest. Though Pripyat was evacuated within two days, the rural areas took much longer. As more and more contaminated areas were identified over the following decade, a total of 350,000 people were resettled in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
Some people returned, despite the prohibitions, especially the elderly. In 1987, there were 1200 so-called "self settlers". Some left, but most diedfrom natural causes. These days, there are only about 300– and two thirds of them are women.
Some are gregarious, and enjoy having visitors. But I have seen somevery isolated and sad people on my zone travels. Most people don’t live in radioactive zones because they have happy stories.
One of the strangest international borders must be the one betweenBelarus and Ukraine that runs through the middle of the evacuated region. Crossing the border is illegal, though, because there are no bordercheckpoints in the zone. It is amazing how isolated the two zones are from each other. There is virtually no communication between them. My travel from Chernobyl to the Belarus side of the zone involved quite a bit of derring-do.
These swamps in Belarus were drained for farmland in Soviet times but have been re-flooded, becoming a magnet for aquatic birds. Thousands ofducks, swans, egrets and rare black storks took off right before I took the picture.The white speck in the middle is the last egret.
It is a veryradioactive area. The roadside readings were 20 times norma. Birds can be very sensitive to strontium-90 because it imitates calcium, concentrating in eggshells and bone. Reports of strontium around Fukushima are very worrisome.
This moose watched us from the other side of the road. Large animalshave rebounded in the zone. I have seen more wild boars, elk, moose, roe deer, wolves and other animals around Chernobyl than anywhere else inmy life. Radiation is affecting them. Small creatures are especiallyvulnerable.
Butbecause the health of wild animal populations is measured by their numbers, Chernobyl’s large animals are healthy — even if the health of individual members suffers from the effects ofradiation. If they live long enough to reproduce, they are biologically successful. No one has yet confirmed a mutant. If they are born, mutant animals die in the wild and get eaten by scavengers before they are found.
Przewalski’s Horses went extinct in the wild in the 1960s but they havebeen a captive breeding success story. There are now so many of them worldwide that breeders have decided to try releasing them in the wild,but few populated places are safe for wild horse herds.
Ukraine’s Askania Nova is one of the world’s largest captive breeding centers. In acontroversial program 21 horses were released into the wilds of Chernobyl in 1999. By 2003, the herds had expanded to 65. Today they numberover 90 and young stallions and mares have started forming new herds.
The Elephants Foot is at the very center of Chernobyl but belongs tono creature known before. It is the nickname for a mass of melted fuel that melded andsolidified in room 217 in the reactor’s bowels.
Instead of the 180 tons offuel you would find in an intact reactor, the Sarcophagus holds 3000 tons of fuel meldedwith building materials too lethally radioactive to approach. Scientists had to shoot the Elephants Foot with an AK-47 to knock off a piece thatthey could study remotely. It will be radioactive for what may as well be forever.
One of the radiation resistant robots developed by Sarcophagus engineersto trundle through the ruin’s interior. Reportedly, Ukraine offered itsnuclear emergency assistance to Japan very early on, but the Japanese declined because they didn’t want associations with Chernobyl.
For such a robotically excellent country, it seems odd that there are no radiationresistant robots being used in the Fukushima emergency. But that is evidently because the Japanese nuclear industry didn’t want to pay forthem so they never got developed. Battery operated robots for measuring high radiation levels when control systems are out should be mandatory at every nuclear reactor.
After 25 years, the Sarcophagus itself is radioactive waste. Withfinancing from 26 donor countries, the New Safe Confinement to cover it wassupposed to have been completed by 2008. But the date keeps getting pushed back. Now it is 2015.
It is likely that similar tombs await the four crippled reactor buildings at Fukushima, which just doubled theodds of similar worst cases disasters happening at one of the worlds 443nuclear reactors in the coming decades. When visiting Chernobyl on April 20, UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon publicly admitted what has only been whispered by experts until now. “The unfortunate truth is that we are likely to see more such disasters in the future.”
That is an astonishing admission after years of assertions about nuclear safety and assurances about the vanishingly low probability of severe accidents.
While time will tell of the many lessons Fukushima has to teach, surely the most important is that (probably) rare but regular nuclear disasters will be the new normal from now on.
Mary Mycio is the author of Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl and president of Kipling Global Media, providing international media development consulting services.. Her blogs can be found at Open Salon.
