Ukraine on April 26 marked the 31st anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster, the world’s worst nuclear accident.
People from Kyiv attended a memorial ceremony and laid flowers below a bust at “The Heroes Alley” in Kyiv in memory of victims of the disaster.
Thirty-one people are known to have died as a direct result of the explosion and fire at reactor No. 4 at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, and thousands more are thought to have died due to cancers caused by exposure to radiation released by the destroyed reactor.
The radioactive contamination from the disaster has rendered a large part of Ukraine, the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the plant, effectively uninhabitable. Ukrainian officials estimate that it will be perhaps 20,000 years before it is safe for humans to live there again.
