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[alarm blaring]
[speaking foreign language over speaker]
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] On April 26, 1986,
the catastrophe shook the whole of Europe
and the world would experience a fatal day
that became engraved in its history.
A catastrophe that would turn an entire city
into a post apocalyptic ghost town.
[dramatic music]
A disaster that revealed the true devastating nature
of nuclear energy in the wrong hands.
[dramatic music]
This is the tragedy of Chernobyl
and the damages that left behind after a deadly fight
against an invisible enemy.
[calm music]
This appears to be pristine wilderness,
a world full of life,
a quiet area where nature and wildlife is thriving.
[dramatic music]
This could be paradise on earth
but it has a dreadful secret.
[orchestral music]
Ukraine, 1986.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant
was one of the Soviet Union's largest nuclear power plants.
Located 60 miles North of Ukraine's capital city of Kiev
and near the border of Belarus.
Chernobyl was about nine miles away
and home to about 12,000 residents.
[orchestral music]
Closer to the plant,
only two miles away from the reactors,
the city of Pripyat was built in 1970
as a home for the plant workers.
This new city had high quality
and modern high-rise buildings.
Pripyat housed almost 50,000 people.
It was lively and rich, full of talents,
and goods were more available there
than in any other parts of the Union.
[lively upbeat music]
Pripyat was the perfect execution
of Soviet planning in ideology.
It seemed to be promising,
but its future wouldn't be the bright one
that had been predicted.
In the spring of 1986, its fate was sealed.
[dramatic music]
Inside the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,
there were RBMK-1000 type reactors.
They would be proven to be highly dangerous
due to having a design flaw.
According to the workers,
reactor number four was the best of all.
It turned out they couldn't have been more wrong.
[dramatic music]
On 26th of April, 1986, at 1:23 AM,
a catastrophe shook the whole of Europe.
And the world would experience a fatal day
that became engraved in its history;
a major nuclear accident.
One of the worst manmade disasters of all time.
The largest nuclear catastrophe to this day.
[speaking foreign language over speaker]
The amount of radiation was 400 times higher
than what was released by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs
in 1945.
A radioactive cloud
spread over the entire European continent.
On that night,
a routine safety check went horribly wrong.
The reactor four exploded,
ripping the 1000 ton roof off in the process.
The power plant was shaken by two enormous explosions.
During the test,
inadequately trained personnel made fatal mistakes
and violated safety protocols.
Despite attempts to shut down the reactor entirely,
a power surge caused a chain reaction of explosions inside.
Finally,
the nuclear core itself was exposed
causing a nuclear meltdown,
spewing radioactive dust into the atmosphere.
In the springtime of 1986,
where flowers were supposed to bloom
and nature come back to life,
a whole ecosystem was disturbed, broken.
[dramatic music]
From then on,
a relentless fight against an invisible enemy began
putting thousands of lives on the line.
The incident would turn out to be a milestone
in the history of nuclear power,
and the catalyst of the collapse of the Soviet Union
as they tried to cover it up.
The people became disillusioned with the Soviet ideology.
[dramatic music]
The station immediately became unsuitable for human life,
and this disaster will haunt its inhabitants,
and have repercussions on the country
for thousands of years.
[dramatic music]
[alarm blaring]
The explosions immediately killed two workers.
They were the first to die within hours of the accident.
More than 100 were injured.
[dramatic music]
The first firemen to arrive at the scene
battled the fire heroically
and without any adequate protective equipment
unaware of the radiation seeping into the atmosphere.
They poured tons of water on this strange fire,
but nothing seemed to be putting it out.
Some began to lose consciousness. Others started vomiting.
At least 5% of the radioactive reactor core
was released into the atmosphere.
People were urgently rushed to the nearby hospitals
and all the contaminated clothes, footwear and bed linen
were thrown away.
Over the next coming weeks,
on a total of 134 servicemen that were injured,
28 firefighters and plant workers would die
from Acute Radiation Syndrome.
Many more contracted serious illness.
They were the first victims of Chernobyl.
For the next several days,
emergency crews desperately tried to contain the fire
and radiation leaks.
The death toll kept climbing. The fire was still burning.
On the third day,
80 helicopters were sent from Moscow to put the fire out.
When they arrived,
the temperature made it impossible to get close.
From the air,
soldiers threw out 80 kilograms of sandbags
into the blaze with their bare hands
to fill up the reactors and smother the fire.
In two days,
2,400 tons of lead would also be dropped into the reactor.
After a few missions, soldiers would start throwing up.
It was heroism.
It had to be done. There was no better solution.
During this operation,
600 pilots were contaminated with radiation.
There was despair and hopelessness
as the situation seemed impossible to deal with.
Flying around in helicopters wasn't enough.
They needed to get closer and down into the core.
But how?
Something had to be done
to keep the magma from melting down.
[dramatic music]
They came up with a solution,
but it would cause the loss of more lives.
They built a 550 foot long tunnel below the reactor.
The fire took 10 days and 250 firefighters to extinguish it.
However,
toxic emissions continued to escape into the atmosphere.
Later on, the crews discovered something horrific;
the most toxic mass on earth.
A solid large radioactive mass of melted nuclear fuel,
metal and concrete,
located beneath the destroyed reactor four.
The radiation readers made it clear
that what was inside was something to be avoided.
They called it 'the Elephant's Foot'.
Scientists believe that it is going to emit radiation
for many centuries to come.
In a month,
10,000 miners would be sent to work there
facing extremely dangerous conditions.
[dramatic music]
A total of 600,000 rescuers, including firefighters,
pilots, miners, and local volunteers,
were sent from all over the union
to fight against this terrifying invisible enemy
and to clean up the disaster.
These people would be called 'the liquidators'.
[dramatic music]
These men and women who fought a ruthless battle
have now become almost forgotten heroes
yet it is thanks to them that the worst was avoided.
[dramatic music]
[lively upbeat music]
At the Kremlin in Moscow,
eight hours after the disaster,
Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union,
received very limited information on the situation.
The first information consisted of accident and fire,
but no word about an explosion.
The reaction of Soviet government was controversial.
For years,
the secretive state tried to cover up what really happened.
At first they ordered a complete media blackout
only to avoid panic, they claimed.
The less knowledge and the more silence, the better.
But frightening gossips were already going around the city.
The situation was underestimated.
No one really knew the scope of the accident.
Even doctors were strictly instructed
not to tell the patients that something was wrong,
and that they would lose their jobs
if they said anything opposite.
A few days after the accident,
and despite alarming radiation levels,
authorities still encouraged people
to participate in May Day celebrations,
even in areas they knew to be seriously contaminated.
Disturbingly,
all footage of May 1st, 1986,
has now disappeared from the Ukrainian National Archives.
In Pripyat, by early afternoon the next day,
the radiation readings were already 15,000 times
higher than usual.
By the evening, it had increased even more
creating a lethal dose for the inhabitants.
They would die in only four days if they stayed.
Even on photographs radiation was visible,
but the city's communication was cut
and all roads were blocked
to make sure no information left the municipality.
Unaware of the disaster happening
only three kilometers away,
people continued to live their normal lives.
Children continued to play in the radioactive sand
of the amusement parks
while radioactive particles were falling on the grounds.
[dramatic music]
By the evening of April 26th,
windows and doors should have been sealed
and iodide tablets swallowed.
But such order had not been given.
The government only started distributing iodide
10 days after the explosion.
Wrong doses were also administered to children.
By that point, it was useless.
Iodide can protect from thyroid cancer
only if it's given in the right time;
a maximum of 18 hours after exposure.
- [Andrew] In Chernobyl, the population was not moved.
The contaminated food stuffswere kept within the food chain
for critical period
and iodine tablets weren't handed out
to protect the thyroid from thyroid cancer.
- [Narrator] It was chaos.
Nobody had any training in radiation.
At Chios National Medical Library,
the librarians even received an order
to take all the books from the shelves
that contained the word radiation.
The disaster was expanding.
No one in the surrounding areas was evacuated
until about 36 hours after the disaster began.
By that time,
many residents were already complaining about headaches,
vomiting, and other early signs of radiation sickness.
It was terrifying.
But the situation turned critical.
The evacuations of Pripyat commenced on the next day
on April 27th.
[dramatic music]
The people living around Chernobyl
were finally notified about the accident.
But authorities falsely stated
that they had it under control.
And that the evacuation was only temporary.
Only the most necessary belongings were needed.
Personal documents and some food, they were told.
In a matter of a few hours,
people had to leave their homes,
their entire lives behind.
[calm upbeat music]
They were told that they were leaving for three days only.
They would never come back.
The evacuation was a massive operation.
49,000 people were forced to flee in under four hours.
[dramatic music]
Officials finally closed off the area by May 14th,
establishing an exclusion zone around the reactor
and evacuating another 116,000 residents.
But it was too late. The damage was done.
- Somebody at the top has to decide
what's going to happen.
But what I don't think will happen
is that they will suddenly, as it were,
come clean and become very open,
allow international inspection itself.
What is much more likely to happen is that
in the course of time,
new information will be released in dribs and drabs.
But this will come out as they see fit.
They're not going to suddenly open the doors
to people to go in to see what's happened.
And I don't think that they're going to accept
international aid either.
- [Narrator] People were moved to other regions in Ukraine,
and most of the power plant workers were sent to Kiev.
In total, some 350,000 people were evacuated.
[dramatic music]
No news about Chernobyl surfaced until the next days
in the rest of the Soviet Union.
In fact,
the citizens only found out about the catastrophe
via foreign communication channels.
The Soviet media channels kept quiet
until Sweden was the first country
to detect that something disastrous had happened.
This forced the Soviet government to come out.
Such a massive disaster was impossible to hide for long.
Radiation spread quickly around Europe,
immediately affecting Scandinavian countries.
It was only on the 14th of May,
after the 1st of May celebrations,
and three weeks after the accident,
that Gorbachev decided to make a public announcement on TV.
- Today on Soviet television,
Mr. Gorbachev said the accident
has deeply affected the Soviet people.
And as he put it, disturbed world opinion.
He told his fellow countrymen
that the worst is now behind them.
It has certainly taken Mr. Gorbachev a long time
to go public.
- [Translator] We were recently stricken by a disaster;
the Chernobyl nuclear power accident.
It deeply affected the Soviet people
and disturbed world opinion.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] The news finally reached the entire country.
- [Reporter] The white house says Mr. Reagan's attempt
to discuss the situation with Mr. Gorbachev personally
have been ignored by the Kremlin for four days.
- They're usually a little close mouthed.
[speaking inaudibly]
- We don't think that they have provided
as full and prompt information as they should have.
Our own pictures give us information
that suggests the casualty rates are higher
than those that have been announced by the Soviet Union
so far, by a good measure.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] As the crisis continued,
more economic, technical, and scientific forces
were mobilized.
It was a frontline emergency situation.
The radioactive cloud continued to drift over Europe.
It soon reached the United Kingdom, France and Italy.
The French authorities denied its presence.
In Chernobyl,
the radioactivity continued to climb.
Millions of acres of forest and farm land were contaminated.
And although many people were evacuated,
hundreds of thousands more remained.
Animals were also highly contaminated and left abandoned.
Nobody took care of them. Their owners wouldn't return.
Special hunting squads were formed,
killing cats, dogs and all other animals because of the fear
that they would keep spreading the radiation.
Soon, but unfortunately not soon enough,
the entire world realized
that it was witnessing a historic event.
[calm music]
34 years after the disaster,
the area of Chernobyl remains uninhabitable and abandoned.
Although Pripyat is safe enough for a brief visit,
the cleanup was a massive operation.
It took years and involved hundreds of thousands of people.
Today, surprisingly,
there are still about 120 people who self settled
and are still living in the exclusion zone.
Around 8 million people live in the contaminated areas
of the Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.
For all these years,
they've been living on contaminated land
and radioactive food.
This is an issue that has been systematically ignored.
- [Joseph] In takes after
was a very long time to decontaminate.
You know that the one test in the beginning
must have been many years ago, over 30 years ago.
It took years
before the people could go back there
and even then it was not allowed
to eat the food growing there.
It may take years and years before it goes back to normal.
- [Narrator] The consequences are still felt nowadays.
Among humans,
radiation induced illnesses and cancer deaths
were expected in the longterm,
including thyroid cancer, birth defects, mutations,
and deformations, intellectual and physical disabilities,
and overall pain and suffering.
[machine beeping]
[lively upbeat music]
Livestock and wildlife were also highly affected.
[dramatic music]
In West Germany,
down syndrome peaked for nine months in 87.
The United Nations Scientific Committee
reported that more than 6,000 children
developed thyroid cancer after being exposed to radiation.
[people laughing]
Although some experts have recently claimed
that there is no evidence of a major public health impact
attributable to radiation exposure
20 years after the accident.
- [Woman] The Princess of Wales
had asked to visit these children.
They're all suffering from diseases
which can't be treated effectively in the Soviet Union.
Three like four year old myself,
have cancers which appear to be connected
with the Chernobyl disaster.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] The liquidators were incapable
of going back to a normal life.
They were all victims of the Chernobyl syndrome.
The ones who survived were disabled or unable to work.
- [Translator] Even robots couldn't work
on top of those buildings because of the radiation.
And so they sent people.
It was so dangerous the men never stayed
more than 20 to 40 seconds up there.
Otherwise they'd get completely irradiated.
- [Woman] Anatoly Vinucor used to work
as a hospital attendant in the area.
He was sent to the site just minutes after the explosion.
- [Translator] The doctors found radiation burns on my face,
in my thoracic cage, and in my throat.
I could hardly eat.
I looked through my window all day long.
I saw a car that drove big black bags
straight to the cemetery.
- [Woman] Today,
Anatoly suffers from a dozen illnesses,
all as a result of the exposure to the radiation.
And with a small pension to live on,
he struggles to cope with the medication expenses.
The Association Sawyers Chernobyl
offers financial support to victims like Anatoly.
Its president says that many of them have the impression
they have been forgotten.
- [Translator] Medical help to the people of Chernobyl
has shrunk eight fold.
Today it's only 6 million pruveners.
That's equivalent to 20 Euro cents per person per year.
The Ukrainian government has no respect.
- [Narrator] According to the military,
out of the 600,000 liquidators,
10% have died
and 200,000 are disabled.
[dramatic music]
The real amount of radiation these people are exposed to
has never been revealed to them.
There were a lot of lies
and only a few realized the scope of these lies.
On the second anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster,
on the 27th of April, 1988, Valery Legasov,
the chief of the commission investigating it,
and who had worked so hard to unveil the truth,
decided to end his life.
He had recorded and hidden the tapes
blaming engineer Anatoly Dyatlov,
who was in charge of the safety test
that resulted in the disaster,
and other superiors for the incident.
- [Mike] We are going to talk this afternoon
about the impact of Chernobyl
something of the order of 40 or 45 deaths might be expected
in all subsequent years, as a result of this accident.
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] To this day,
only 59 deaths have been officially recorded
and attributed to the disaster.
The exact actual human cost of Chernobyl
will never really be known.
There is little reliable data.
The full consequences of the accident,
including impacts on health,
remain highly debated and understudied.
Most estimates range from 4,000 to 93,000 deaths.
In the first few months following the catastrophe,
Pripyat became a conservation reserve.
Flowers were planted along the pavements.
Goods were still in the shops.
And even the traffic lights continued to work.
But there was no cars and no sign of human life.
As time passed,
the city became more and more empty, and silent.
Some old inhabitants illegally climbed back
into their own homes to see if they could find
the belongings that they'd left behind,
only to realize that nothing was there,
and that it was all over.
People came to rob the shops and stole what was left.
People still take things from the dead city as souvenir.
Pripyat may well be the last place on earth
to conserve a little Soviet Union in its 1980s state.
Now, trees and plants have grown in the middle of the roads
and are reclaiming the whole town.
The flowers are gone.
The Soviet apartments are crumbling.
The 1st of May parades' posters
still decorate the buildings.
The amusement park with the bumper cars were never used.
And the Ferris wheel that never turned
has become an iconic symbol of the disaster.
In the areas just outside the exclusion zone,
people are beginning to resettle.
The deadly disaster of Chernobyl and the ghost town
had left behind fascinated many people.
Surprisingly, it even became a tourism hotspot.
In 2011, Ukraine opened up the area to tourists.
The town gives us a glimpse
of what a real post-apocalyptic world looks like.
Deserted towns, abandoned buildings,
overgrown streets, high grass, rusty vehicles.
Everything crumbling, breaking,
and among these, wild animals.
It attracts numerous tourists
who are interested in its history,
in its danger, and in immersing themselves in the past.
In fact,
the exclusion zone was ranked the most exotic place
for tourism in the world by Forbes in 2009.
The zone is visited by more than 70,000 people
from all around the world every year.
This place of tragedy became a legend.
It is popular among photographers and authors.
It is also featured in movies and video games.
Even the illegal visitors
began to sneak into the no-go zone.
Hunters and explorers
who were looking for an adrenaline rush
or hoping to find scary scenes and objects
still enter the sites that are strictly prohibited.
It is said that the town will fall
completely into ruin on its own in the next 20 years.
The city that was once so full of life,
only left eerie memories.
The city that once represented hope and triumph
represents today, destruction and defeat.
Pripyat was removed from the maps. It became a dead city.
However today,
it seems that nature has started to come back to life again.
[lively upbeat music]
The impact on the surrounding forest and wildlife
also remains an area of active research.
In the immediate aftermath of the accident,
an area became known as the 'red forest'.
The high levels of radiation
colored the pine trees reddish brown
after absorbing such deadly high levels of radiation.
It had to be cut down.
The area's still believed to be the most contaminated land
on the planet.
Land that will take thousands of years
to become healthy again.
Today, the exclusion zone is eerily quiet.
But it also appears full of life.
Mother nature began to reclaim this place.
The region is filled with a variety of wildlife and forest
that have thrived and creeped in
without interference from humans.
Other wild creatures
that the people were so determined to keep out
started reappearing.
Brown bears were seen for the first time
after being absent for over a century.
Wolves, deers, lynx, beavers, boars, and elks
have been seen to run free in the dense woodlands
that now surround the silent power plant.
The man-made disaster that ruined this place
turned it into a unique sanctuary for wildlife.
But despite the dense vegetation,
and even though this could appear as pristine wilderness,
it is not.
It is still a contaminated deserted wasteland.
The area has recovered to some extent,
but is far from returning to normal.
The animals are still radioactive.
Yet due to the exclusion of human activity,
there are a lot more of them now,
and they are ruling the place.
This is the bittersweet paradox of this place.
Three decades later,
it is not certain how radiation still is and will be
affecting wildlife in the years to come.
But it seems that nature can triumph;
even when man has done its best to destroy it.
The Chernobyl power plant continued operating
after the accident.
More than 10,000 people work there
and appropriate conditions had to be provided
somewhere near the reactors.
It took the government about a month to decide
what to do with the damaged reactor.
On May 20th, 1986,
they finally decided to conduct a unique project.
It was going to be hidden and sealed.
An enormous reinforced concrete and metal structure
was built around the damaged Unit Four.
The sarcophagus intended to act as a shield
to contain the radiation.
The giant structures' construction took seven months.
This was an enormous challenge
where humans could work for only a few minutes at a time
without receiving a fatal dose of radiation.
In 1988,
Soviet scientist revealed
that it had only been designed to last for 20 to 30 years.
The Chernobyl power plant
finally shut down completely in 2000.
However, the sarcophagus condition was deteriorating.
It began crumbling down
and at a high probability of collapsing.
The magma at the reactors core was still a threat.
The government had to come up with a replacement.
What remains of the reactor is now inside
a massive 32,000 ton steel containment structure
deployed in 2016.
The new safe confinement began being built in 2010
to cover the first sarcophagus.
At that point it became the largest land-based object
ever moved by humans, costing $2.3 billion.
The area is safer, but still highly radioactive
and will likely remain as such for up to 20,000 years.
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima
were level seven nuclear accidents,
but the health consequences in Japan
were much less severe.
In part,
because there was far more radiation released at Chernobyl.
And because the Soviet plant's reactor
was not surrounded by any containment structure
so radiation escaped freely.
The disaster sparked criticism of the Soviet government.
It also fueled a global anti-nuclear movement.
Countries combined their efforts
to fight against such deadly consequences.
Yet today,
the disaster and its lessons seem to be fading from memory
but it is still a global problem and it isn't over yet.
11 RBMK nuclear reactors
are still in use in the world today.
All of them in Russia.
Although they were all modified for safety,
experts are still researching ways
to prevent further nuclear disasters.
On contrary to public belief,
nuclear energy is still considered
the safest energy source in comparison to other fossil fuels
like coal, which is by far the most dangerous.
But it doesn't come without a risk.
Renewable energies are still not talked about enough
in Ukraine.
Chernobyl also led to an economic fallout.
It has been estimated to cost
around $235 billion in damages.
The politicians were unprepared
and unable to effectively handle the aftermath.
It undermined faith in the whole system.
Gorbachev himself claimed that the accident
was perhaps the real cause of the Soviet Union collapse.
Chernobyl revealed the potential dangers
and the true devastating nature of nuclear energy.
Chernobyl is a lesson for the present.
It warns us about the challenges and high consequence risks
of our ever evolving modern society.
As technology keeps progressing,
it is important that we assess and manage the risks
that are big in scale and complexity.
We need to be able to anticipate a global catastrophe.
Chernobyl was one of the worst
manmade and terrifying disasters in history.
Tens of thousands of lives were ruined
and too many people lost loved ones because of it.
But Chernobyl taught us more importantly
about the cost of lies
by highlighting the flaws of the system
that revealed how they can lead to disaster.
And how the way we tell information
about what really happened, can cause harm.
If anything has been learned,
it is that response to such a disaster
needs to be based on clear facts, on science, and not fear.
Being transparent in today's society is a necessity
because the truth may be elusive,
but consequences certainly won't.
We're all part of the same planet.
And when a world disaster happens,
it's countries and their populations
deserve to know what is happening
in order to avoid what happened at Chernobyl.
Proper knowledge, protocol and equipment is necessary.
It is also a great reminder
that we must steer future generations from any risk
of another nuclear apocalypse.
The past cannot be undone, but we can learn from it.
Chernobyl is a grave reminder
of the power of nuclear energy in the wrong hands
and the consequences of lies.
[dramatic music]