Disaster

Chernobyl Accident 1986

        On the month of April 1986 a disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine a flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes made by the plant operators.  It was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture. The accident destroyed the Chernobyl 4 reactor. It killed 30 operators and firemen within three months and several further deaths later. One person was killed immediately and a second died in hospital soon after as a result of injuries received. Another person is reported to have died at the time from a coronary thrombosis which is when the blood stops flowing to the heart. Acute radiation syndrome (ARS) was originally diagnosed in 237 people onsite and involved with the cleanup and it was later confirmed in 134 cases. In which 28 people died as a result of ARS within a few weeks of the accident. Nineteen more died between 1987 and 2004 but their deaths cannot necessarily be caused to radiation exposure. Nobody offsite suffered from acute radiation effects although many of the childhood thyroid cancers diagnosed since the accident is likely to be due to intake of radioactive iodine fallout. Large areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia were contaminated in many ways.

 The Chernobyl disaster was a unique event and the only accident in the history of commercial nuclear power where radiation related occurred. However it led to major changes in safety culture and in industry cooperation between East and West before the end of the Soviet Union. Former President Gorbachev said that the Chernobyl accident was a more important factor in the fall of the Soviet Union than Perestroika his program of liberal reform. 

     On April 25 a routine shutdown the reactor crew at Chernobyl 4 began preparing for a test to determine how long turbines would spin and supply power to the main circulating pumps following a loss of main electrical power supply. This test had been carried out at Chernobyl the previous year. But the power from the turbine ran down too quick. So new voltage regulator designs were to be tested. Several organizations have reported on the impacts of the Chernobyl accident. But all have had problems assessing the significance of their observations because of the lack of reliable public health information before 1986 studies in the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus were based on national registers of over one million people possibly affected by radiation. By 2000 about 4000 cases of thyroid cancer had been diagnosed in exposed children. However the increase in thyroid cancers detected suggests that some of it at least is an artifact of the screening process. Thyroid cancer is usually not fatal if diagnosed and treated early. It was a really bad and dangerous disaster.

Sources

• http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety-of-Plants/Chernobyl-Accident/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfKm0XXfiis