About 49,000 people were evacuated from the area, primarily from Pripyat. As a result of rising ambient radiation levels off-site, a 10-kilometre (6.2 mi) radius exclusion zone was created 36 hours after the accident. The fire released about the same amount of contamination as the initial explosion. Some 70% of fallout landed in Belarus, 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) away. It released considerable airborne radioactive contamination for about nine days that precipitated onto other parts of the USSR and Western Europe, before finally ending on. This was immediately followed by an open-air reactor core fire. The core melted down and two or more explosions ruptured the reactor core and destroyed the reactor building. Instead of shutting down, an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction began, releasing enormous amounts of energy. But a combination of operator negligence and critical design flaws had made the reactor primed to explode. Upon test completion, the operators triggered a reactor shutdown. This risk was not made evident in the operating instructions, so the operators proceeded with the test. The operators were unable to restore the power level specified by the test program, which put the reactor in an unstable condition. During a planned decrease of reactor power in preparation for the test, the power output unexpectedly dropped to near-zero. The accident occurred during a safety test on the steam turbine of an RBMK-type nuclear reactor. The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion Soviet rubles-roughly US$68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation. It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven-the maximum severity-on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

It is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history both in cost and casualties. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the No. Varying estimates of increased mortality over subsequent decades (see Deaths due to the disaster) INES Level 7 (major accident) see Chernobyl disaster effectsįewer than 100 deaths directly attributed to the accident. (now Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine (Under Russian Occupation) Reactor 3 can be seen behind the ventilation stackĬhernobyl nuclear power plant, Pripyat, Chernobyl Raion, Kiev Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union Reactor 4 several months after the disaster.

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