Hello everybody!
The other
day in our English lesson we were watching a documentary of the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster.
Basically
what it says is that 30 years ago in Chernobyl on the 26th April in
1986 the most serious nuclear accident ever has taken place.
The employees
from the reactor block 4 have been ordered to carry out a test on the reactor
to safe energy. But something went wrong and the reactor exploded. Two man officially
died in that night and 28 men in the following month but the unofficial death
rate is way higher. The first few days nobody knew about this accident, no one was
informed. Not even Michail Gorbatschow, who was the President of the Soviet Union
at that time.
Prypat, a
city with about 43 000 inhabitants, is located 3 kilometres away from the
reactor. A few hours after the accident the radioactivity was 600 000 times
higher than normal. It took 48 hours for them to evacuate the city, about 1000
buses were sent to Prypat to pick up all the people.
Besides that
the accident contaminated the land nearby, clouds were contaminated with
radioactivity particles and were blown north by the wind. They drifted over
1000 kilometres from Russia, over Belarus up to Sweden, where the radioactive
dust rained down.
Until now
there is no statistic which shows the number of people who were contaminated.
One week after the accident 130 000 people were evacuated and 300 000
hectare land isolated from the rest of the world.
Today 30
years after this nuclear accident, the city Chernobyl is a ghost town. No one
ever returned.
Regards
Jakob
